Darling?

by Heidi Jon Schmidt

Pert, tart, often perfect stories from the eastern seaboard of the USA.Every one of these stories is knowing, wry, sad, funny, engaging, full of unexpected detail, perceptive in the extreme. Heidi Jon Schmidt has an ear for dialogue, but more so for what is unsaid, for the huge chasms of unspoken communication in everyday life. Her heroes are the ever-so-slightly left-of-centre misfits, who are certain there is something missing from their lives but cant quite work out what. Whether her subject is an eleven-year-old girl grieving for her dog, a middle-aged man whose wife has left him and must return to live with his mother, an elderly lady whose husband has Alzheimers, a ninety-year-old revered poet, a group of talentless but wildly enthusiastic would-be novelists, she invests them with a credibility that makes one care passionately for them.

256 pages, Paperback

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