Larry Brown writing about writing. But here, the narrator isn’t the writer in this story, it’s his wife. It cracks me up. The narrator says things about his wife’s writing that I bet Brown heard when he got the bug. It’s, for lack of a better word, a nice look at things from the other side. The narrator says, “She was always writing, and always wanting me to read it.” It’s a funny and sweet story. The wife’s love of writing can affect their sex life. The narrator tries to be honest. Good in theory and practice. He allows himself his own little jokes, but he takes his wife’s obsession with writing and trying to publish seriously. He says when he told her didn’t like a piece of her writing she got pissed. When he said something was good she’d get him to point out everything he liked and if he didn’t she got bummed out. I do this type of thing to my wife but I’m the wife in the story and she’s the narrator. I love Brown’s narrator. I think Brown is asking for grace through him. The narrator took a higher paying job working inside a nuclear reactor so his wife could write full time, roll with the momentum she’s got. He has to eat his TV dinners by himself sometimes. They didn’t hang out with friends as much as they used to. The narrator says it’s a little goofy to say you can’t hang out because your wife is writing. You get where this is going, the parallels.

First published in Big Bad Love, an Algonquin Books Hardcover in 1990; also in the paperback edition, Vintage, 1991