Darling?

by Heidi Jon Schmidt

“Love is… I am… absurd,” declares the narrator of the first story in this smart and fearlessly insightful collection, cataloguing her own disastrous romances in an attempt to dissuade her sister from making a foolish marriage. She does not succeed: like most of the characters in Darling? she is doomed to struggle with love, both romantic and filial. Their triumphs are small and hard won, their failures often painfully funny: A psychotherapy patient, violently in love with her mild-mannered shrinking violet of a shrink, finds she has driven him nearly crazy, but that by means of her ridiculous passion she’s been cured. A gaggle of would-be writers are so bedazzled by fame, fortune, and the “marketing strategies” that would gain these ends that they never put pen to paper. A young man gives in to despair and commits suicide, but life sweeps his devastated family forward into its rushing stream again, almost against their will.

Heidi Jon Schmidt sees everything fresh; her wit cuts straight to the hearts of her characters and finds those hearts fully—beautifully—alive. Darling> marks the return of a powerfully original writer.

304 pages, Hardcover

First published September 8, 2001

About the author

HEIDI JON SCHMIDT is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop and author of five books, THE HARBORMASTER'S DAUGHTER,THE HOUSE ON OYSTER CREEK, THE BRIDE OF CATASTROPHE, DARLING? and THE ROSE THIEVES

Her essays and stories have been published in The New York Times,The Atlantic, Grand Street, Yankee, The Boston Globe etc., and heard on National Public Radio. Her stories have been included in The O'Henry Awards, Best American Nonrequired Reading, Twenty under Thirty and others.

She is married to the writer RD Skillings, and has lived in Provincetown Massachusetts for 30 years.

The Washington Post Book World has said "It is impossible to disentangle the comic from the tragic in Schmidt's writing. She is incapable of cliche."

Goodreads is telling me my influence list is too long (and I was being very minimalist!) so I will put it here instead! George Eliot, John Cheever, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Philip Roth, Oscar Wilde, Veronica Geng, Alice Munro, Katharine Mansfield, John Steinbeck