Speaking of endings, it’s hard to top the ending of this Ann Beattie story. I was assigned this story in an undergraduate literature course by Shannon Derby, and it has remained with me in all of the years that have passed since then, which are a great many years. This is Beattie at her absolute finest. A story overrun with people who are both desperate to be known and horrified by that very same prospect. The characters engage in masking — both figurative and literal — throughout the course of a boozy, smoky evening, and the story ends with the narrator, Amy, in bed with her husband. It’s from this bed that the narrator’s husband delivers a speech that ends the story, and, effectively, his marriage. Beattie leaves us there in that unforgiving wreckage. It’s a speech that Beattie, in an interview with The Paris Review, says readers approach her about more than anything else in her work. The temptation is to reproduce the speech here, but I will refrain from doing so, in the hopes that you’ll seek out the story for yourself.

First published in The New Yorker, and subsequently in Beattie’s collection The Burning House, Random House, 1982