This is a deeply satisfying story about a deeply frustrating, and frustrated, central character. Dina has arrived at Yale University from a background of some privation and with something of a chip on her shoulder. In an early class, she and her classmates are asked to nominate an inanimate object they relate to and Dina, in the kind of fully conscious, fully self-destructive moment that will characterise her behaviour in this story, chooses a revolver. Dina’s problem is that she is unable to work out what story to tell about herself, and bitterly opposed to the stories anybody else tries to tell about her, particularly a gender questioning student she grows close to yet remains aloof from, for reasons she (characteristically) can’t articulate, though the reader will have their suspicions. It’s sometimes said that good stories are timeless, but this story unmistakably originates in the America of the early 2000s, both in its depiction of an academic world on the brink of a fall, and in the language the students use to talk about themselves and one another (“Her name was Heidi, although she said she wanted people to call her Henrik. ‘That’s a guy’s name,’ I said. ‘What do you want? A sex change?’”). Yet Dina’s situation is familiar and universal: she’s the outsider who yearns to belong but fearing this might mean losing her sense of self, cleaves to – maybe even invents – what sets her apart.
First published in The New Yorker, June 11 2000, and available to read here. Collected in Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, Riverhead Books, 2003
A Personal Anthology 