Where was Julie Orringer when I was “coming of age” like most of the characters in her stories? It’s not that I’d have been able to relate to all their predicaments – I still don’t know what the ‘Devvies and Sallies’ are that Tessa is trying not to take while babysitting her little niece in ‘Care’ – but it might have been enough knowing those characters were out there. Again, it was hard to narrow my choice – writing this I’m worrying I cheated this entire exercise, picking collections rather than stories – but perhaps it doesn’t matter when each story is so good. ‘The Isabel Fish’ is the title story in How to Breathe Underwater in all but name: a teenage girl needs to learn how to breathe underwater in preparation for a family holiday to St Maarten in the Dutch Virgin Islands so her parents sign her and her brother up for scuba lessons in the local Y pool. But if that sounds rosy, the set up is anything but. The girl is the “canker of her brother Sage’s life”. He hates her because of what happened “last November”, which we quickly learnt involved his girlfriend, Isabel, drowning after a car crash. His sister survived. There is revenge, guilt and, unexpectedly, hope, all woven together with dexterity and panache. I cried. 

Collected in How to Breathe Underwater, Viking, 2004. First published in The Yale Review, July 2003