/ VIVIR ES LO MEJOR
Boyle was part of that pioneering group of modernists forging the “revolution of the word.” Her stories from that period, thirteen of which are collected in Life Being the Best & Other Stories, are masterful in their complex, innovative use of language and their ironic acknowledgment of the subversive realities of life.
From the quivering expectancy of the three sisters awaiting “The First Lover” to the dashed hopes of the architect’s daughter in “The Meeting of the Stones” to the desperate remedy a small boy finds for life’s dissatisfactions in the title story, Boyle provides a catalog of the ways in which love can fail. The missed (or nearly missed) chances for human connection as each individual mounts his or her solitary quest for identity provide Boyle’s characters with moments of personal intensity and her readers with an ache of recognition.
Boyle strove (as she once said of Harry Crosby) to write “with an alertness sharp as a blade and as relentless.”
She succeeded.
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/ DESPUÉS DE CLAUDE
Harriet has just been left by her boyfriend Claude — or at least that’s how she sees it, even if he’s the one who asked her to move out of his Greenwich Village apartment. One way or another, she has no intention of leaving. Her friends patronize her with advice, but Harriet, unfiltered and sharp, refuses to settle for polite clichés. She becomes a fearless, biting voice on women’s lives, both unsettling and hilariously funny. An unexpected twist leads her to find a home in New York’s Chelsea Hotel.
More than dark comedy, the novel stands out for its disturbing ending and its reflection on the challenges of feminism. Harriet recalls Philip Roth’s Portnoy or the Ignatius of A Confederacy of Dunces, while Owens seems to conjure a pre-Sontag Sontag.
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I wrote A Working Mother because I wanted to portray a woman in difficult, even sordid, circumstances who, in her flawed way, sought freedom. Betty ultimately fails, not out of lack of desire but because she is fundamentally fragile — a theme closer to my interest in failure than success. I hoped her story might awaken empathy in readers, especially women who, at some stage in life, look back with guilt or regret.
The novel was less inspiration than hard work: I drafted several versions and even three different endings before settling on this one. As for inspiration, yes — I’ve known many women like Betty, myself included.
Available SOON.