Taking Care: Short Stories

by Joy Williams

A collection of "uncommonly good stories" (The Chicago Tribune) from a true American master of the short story—disturbing, comic, and moving takes that find deeper meanings in ordinary domestic life. With unforgettable characters, places, and events—a young divorcee, a shared summer home, a troubled family, a wedding, the death of a pet—Williams takes her readers on journey after journey, as only she can.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Literary Fiction, 20th Century, American, Womens, Literature

258 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1982

About the author

Williams is the author of four novels. Her first, State of Grace (1973), was nominated for a National Book Award for Fiction. Her most recent novel, The Quick and the Dead (2000), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Her first collection of short stories was Taking Care, published in 1982. A second collection, Escapes, followed in 1990. A 2001 essay collection, Ill Nature: Rants and Reflections on Humanity and Other Animals, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. Honored Guest, a collection of short stories, was published in 2004. A 30th anniversary reprint of The Changeling was issued in 2008 with an introduction by the American novelist Rick Moody.

Her stories and essays are frequently anthologized, and she has received many awards and honors, including the Harold and Mildred Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Rea Award for the Short Story.

Reviews

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stunning. Simply stunning. Like small, clouded pearls dropped perfectly at the corner of my vision.

These stories glitter in fragments, they whisper, hint, suggest, gesture towards...There is the touch of the Fable in them, and a touch of madness. Sometimes I found I was holding my breath, whether through tension or for fear of startling them silent, I don't know.

The words in this book do what short stories are suppose to do. Each one is a finger held against a pressure point, a touch that echoes through bone and skin.

They are truly Great.

[Mariel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Joy Williams beloved dog turned on her. She had to put him down. I used to have a doberman named Sanchez a la Mancha. My brother rescued him from a dire situation. Sanchez was understandably crazy. A lot of other people's pets have passed into my company over the years and that's what happened there. I had Sanchez from the age of fourteen until I was twenty-four. He always had separation anxiety. Over the years something inside his doggy skull turned that anxiety into an Ike Turner variety of love. He later got sick, not of rage, and had to be mercy killed. I wouldn't ever want to go on living like that, anyway, and I base everyone, even dogs, on myself. I wasn't ever mauled like Williams was. It was more like a "When you say it all together like that he sounds crazier than a shit house rat" thing. (I would joke about that 1970s doberman fear mongering film "They Only Kill Their Masters".) He used to attack the door when I would leave my apartment. I never decided if it was a "Now don't come back!" or "You had better not leave me, baby!" (One time he bit a hole in my trousers.) Probably the latter because damn was one clingy dog. Big dogs of friends would justifiably attack him when they couldn't take another moment of his incessant whining. I wanted to kill him so many times. There's a story in Taking Care called "Shepherd" that's about that I'm going to kill you and then they are dead and you would do anything to pretend it was never like that. Williams wrote an essay about killing her violent dog in her "Ill Nature" book. I haven't read it. I have already read Honored Guest (another short story collection and another favorite) and there's a story in there (dogs are chasing squirrels in dreams just like people do in almost every Joy Williams story and novel) that has this exchange about dead dogs:
They'd die and you'd get another?"
"That's a queer way of putting it." Not to overlap my Joy Williams short stories reviews. Taking care (that is its own story) and then your throat is ripped out. I knee jerked (more like asshole) killed a bug in my car today (it twitched after smashing and twitched after more smashing) and then I felt like the worst person in existence (I probably wouldn't pretend I didn't say I'm going to kill you. I would relive it over and over). I spent the whole drive home from work after that thinking the only difference between not feeling bad about it and feeling bad is that maybe the person who didn't feel bad would think the feeling bad could be absolved and they'd see some glowing lines of separation between the two things. There's no difference. You take care, the leash pulls back on the hand and you run in your sleep together. How about picking it back up, or avoiding looking into the bottom of the food bowl as you eat. I try to resume good dreams when they are interrupted. Never works out.

When I read this just the other day I was kind of happy. Happy in the full filled life way. Yeah, from reading a book. Like all of the people in the stories and the things that happened to them were a moving weight inside me. Light in the heart, not too heavy in the head, warm in the hands. I am thinking too much about dead dogs now. Or leashes. This is what happens to me when I... One of my two dogs I have now, Seamus, just ripped the biggest fart ever. That's just nasty. Well, he just saved me from doing that shit again when I squirm in church about the putting into the words part. I would really rather just be there for somebody. If only you could crawl into that dog bed for a while and nobody has to die alone.

There's one story 'Preparation for a Wedding' that made me happy. The people are divorced from other people and the little girl belonging to the woman doesn't like fairy tales. Especially not the frog prince. You don't have to kiss anyone into someone you want them to be. Elizabeth is nervous that she's not married, you know that thing that would make her the one note bad guy in some other story, trapping someone into a song that gets caught in your head and never replaced with another one. Sam has been married four times. It's not about the burning knot on the sailing boat in this story. It's like the expected ending of life. "They died". "They got married." Not a fight for the love alive, the spark, the new positions. I didn't care if they got married or not one way or the other. That's why I liked it. It's wearying to do the fight and not the letting be. He happened to ask and she said yes, like a not worrying about it. Simple things like smelling the flower patterns. The boat wouldn't say "Just Married" on the back. It would say "Just be" or something way less cheesey on its sticks and leaves construction. The little girl would like the primitiveness of it.

The yard boy was a spiritual materialist. He lived in the Now. He was free from the karmic chain. Being enlightened wasn't easy. It was very hard work. It was manual labor actually."
I freaking loved 'The Yard Boy'. I want a rabbit-foot's fern to see everything that I'm seeing, with me in it, and think shit about it. That would be full filling. Someone would give a shit about that stuff, then.

'Train' reminded me of Alice and Corvis from Williams's The Quick and the Dead if Alice didn't revere Corvis's sad air like if her tear drops could really melt polar ice caps or something. Or maybe they'd freeze and add another hard layer to them. Alice's Corvis love was what I found the most moving about 'Quick', really. Jane's own father says that she'll never have friends, only enemies, husbands and lawyers. My favorite part was what had broke Danica's back. Jane tells her about her older self visiting her and saying "You never lifted a finger to help me" (wouldn't a future self say that?). I can see a series of conversations like that in their past whizzing by like the countryside on their train ride to Florida. There's no fixed bill board (another story has it right on about FL road signs. Pecans, pecans, pecans). It's JANE'S grandmother and she doesn't want Danica dreaming or crying about her. Vacationing with someone else, post cards about someone else, them, them, them. The space for someone else inside you and the space of you inside them and without it you're staring at blurred windows.

I love reading short story collections and don't really like reviewing them because decisions have to be made or the thing is too damned long. Read this next part really, really fast! Traveling to Pridesup is like that episode of The Golden Girls when Rose wanted to keep the baby and Dorothy had to be the sensible one. Remember when she sang "Mr. Sandman" and did the deep man voice for the part of the sandman? 'Pridesup' is better than that episode. Mariel, you are a total liar! This isn't reading fast and no way is it better than that episode. It is so! 'Winter Chemistry' thirteen year old girls with the chemistry teacher who alights the sides of the eyes of the girls who dare not look at him full on unless they are stealing it from the snow outside his naked bedroom window. Sleep when he's dead. "Taking Care". You must take care. Habitual words at the ends of exchanges. Take care care of yourself. Hospital hotel rooms and Christmas and greeting cards that could be like those post cards or primitive fairy tale ending. My family name means to care. I must say it more than anyone else. To care. Jones's trying to live his life like that sentence with his wife coming home from an extended death bed for Christmas. It makes me not want to say it any more. I could give rabbit-foot ferns.

My favorite story was 'Breakfast' and I already wrote about that one in my review for the novel version of it Breaking and Entering. I liked all of the stories, really I did. Most I loved. I love giving a damn, laughing, being surprised at the same rabbit chasing dreams (MOST of the stories mention rabbits). I wish I could do some review hug that embraces all of them like in a life flashes before your eyes moment and you never regretted a single moment. I felt too much. What if I went door to door? I've mentioned before that Joy Williams lives in the same state as me. I wouldn't ever do one of those J.d. Salinger scenarios of the brilliant yet precocious young person who shows up on the door step and eagerly professes admiration to Seymour Glass with an air of potential self same success. I mean to you guys who might be reading this I might. I'll go door to door, like a sex offender. I'll have to wear one of those loggerhead Florida t-shirts. Shaped like a penis in nod to my offenses on many a goodreads thread ruined from a turtle penis comment by me. You'll be eating breakfast cereal out of your dog bowl and there I'll be. Much, much worse than the popcorn trick. Let me tell you about how much I care about this! I'll say it badly and oh so roundabout and get around to all of those things I give a shit about, eventually, that were touched on in these short stories. First, there's a lot of dogs and I remember all of them. I've got time, though. I'm going to read all of these, you know.

P.s. Did I get around to saying that I love Joy Williams short stories best of all? There's no damned student on the door step promising brilliance. It's freedom poetry with every word in it's right tribal place. She schools me.

P.s.s. I love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love Joy Williams. Pervert.

[Jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

Uh so no offense, but I'm pretty irritated with you guys. Why didn't you tell me about Joy Williams? You're supposed to be my FRIENDS.

I don't know why I never heard of this lady before. Given all the millions of hours I've spent on this BOOK REPORT website, you'd think someone would've been nice enough to have clued me in. It seems like she's pretty famous, but I never came across her until I read "Train" a week or two ago in an anthology and was like, "Who is this Florida writer who is so hilarious and great?"

Who, indeed, is she? Ann Beattie, James Salter, and Raymond Carver are among the writers blurbing on the back of this book, and those are pretty decent reference points, except she's funny, so maybe shades of Lorrie Moore too? This collection was published in 1982, and some of these stories seem like something you'd have come across in your mom's New Yorker back in the eighties, way before New Yorker stories took place in Lagos and Bulawayo and were all still about waspy divorcées having too many drinks in a Cape Cod beach house.

Elizabeth loved the way he kissed. He put his hand on her throat. He lay his tongue deep and quiet inside her mouth. He filled her mouth with the decadent Scotch and cigarette flavor of the tragic middle class. On the other hand, when Sam saw Elizabeth's brightly flowered scanty panties, he thought he'd faint with happiness. He was a sentimentalist.

But these stories are different from any other stories I've read before. Maybe the most noticeable thing here is the children, and their caretakers. To me, Williams writes like no one else about the underremarked upon insanity that any of us are entrusted with children at all. Her characters often have kids they have no business raising. They're blowing it, but not in a way you should judge, just blowing it inevitably because who is equipped to do something like that? Or at least, that's how it seemed to me. I felt like her characters had true things about them that are the bad spots in all of us, but they were interestingly selected ones, and not the usual short-story shit I've read ten billions times before. I felt surprised consistently, thinking "I've never thought/read about exactly that before," while also experiencing a real sense of recognition: "Yeah, true. That's really what people are like." To me, that surprise/recognition thing is what separates top-shelf fiction from well.

I love the way Joy Williams writes about women, and girls, and dogs, and houses and plants and men and drinking and Florida and everything else. I love the way she writes!

The cold slouched and pressed against the people. Their blood was full of it. And their eyes and the food that they ate. The people walked the streets wearing woolen masks as though they were gangsters, or as though they were deformed. Old ladies died of breaks and foolish wounds in houses where no one came, and fish froze in the quiet of their rivers.

I feel like that could only have been written by a Florida writer, because only a Floridian could convey the bizarre senselessness of winter. But that's probably not true.

Anyway, I really love Joy Williams and I'm definitely going to read more of her soon. She has new things, and tons of novels, but actually I really enjoy this dated seventies-to-early-eighties stuff, and while I usually don't like reading a whole collection at once, I loved having her tell me story after story. I think it's Escapes in the on-deck circle now, unless one of you holding-out-thus-far Joyce Wms fans wants to jump in now and recommend something else.

[Melki · Rating 5 out of 5]

In my quest to read one short story a day, I have finally pulled this book from the shelf where it's been patiently waiting for over 25 years. And, WOW! There are some amazing stories in this collection!

Most of them deal with the seemingly mundane aspects of life - people raising children and trying to keep a marriage together. Others take a decidedly darker turn. All of them consist of beautiful words, strung together by an undeniably talented writer.

Sam and Elizabeth met as people usually meet. Suddenly, there was a deceptive light in the darkness. A light that reminded the lonely blackly of the darkness.

Here are stories as happy as newfound love and as sad as a drowned dog.
Many are insightful examinations of how we deal with the unexpected.

-A tragic car accident has surprising consequences.

-A baby is left with a quartet of elderly women .

-A teenage crush ends in sudden and startling violence.

-A minister, concerned about his seriously ill wife, uncomplainingly cares for a baby and dog dumped on him by his unstable daughter.

Lots of good stuff here, and I'm happy I still have two more unread books by this author just waiting there on the shelf.

[Nate D · Rating 4 out of 5]

Joy Williams, better than anyone else, is capable of finely capturing the complex and arbitrary, if largely mundane, situations life works itself into. Her manner is precise and unforced, her ear highly refined. Not much needs to happen in most of these, Williams just circulates around a few characters, their surroundings, the people who may appear around them, and perfectly articulates through a thousand incidental and semi-random instants, the feelings of loss and limbo that lurk at the peripheries of every experience. And then there are the stories where she does all of this and also manages to instigate a plot, not needed by her pure craft, but adding that extra layer of momentum. This is a bleakly perfect collection of incidents and intimations.

[El · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading short stories (for me, anyway) is something I have to do when I'm in the mood, generally. Some favorite American short story writers have been Margaret Atwood (Canadian, but shut up), Deborah Eisenberg, Flannery O'Connor, and John Cheever (even though I still haven't finished his collection). I could easily count Joy Williams among them.

This was my book club's selection this month; I was open to it, but then the library took its sweet-ass time getting it to me, and then it showed up last weekend and it was bad timing all around. I worried that would color my impression of the stories.

The good news is Williams is stellar at drawing her readers in by not throwing down one wasted word or punctuation mark. She is the sort of writer (much like the others I mentioned above) who makes writing short stories look effortless, simple. These are biting stories, the characters are raw, and the collection delicious all the way through.

[Lucas Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

These are the best short stories I have read in a long while.

If I were to make a short story mixed tape, "Breakfast" would be on it twice.

[Serena · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Many things that human words have harmed are restored again by the silence of animals."

[Raul · Rating 5 out of 5]

She's so good, it's frightening. I'll try to write up a wordier review later, but in case I don't, Joy Williams is so so so good.

[Lauren · Rating 5 out of 5]

Taking Care is a short story collection of different sorts of love. The all-consuming love that you have no sense of self, the loss of love, the devotion, love towards the four-legged friends, just love.
The Lover and The Excursion are different stories about love but alike in the complete absorption in love. The Excursion weaves Jenny’s life between that of a lover and a five year old child. Jenny is not like the other children. From the perspective of her teacher, she tells lies to give structure. The strange thing about Jenny is her past and her present are happening at the same time. It was almost depressing, in a way, to read about Jenny having no time for innocence or learn about herself. She’s always dreaming about being kissed or made love to her lover. The lover with the stern face, who holds her throat with his hands as he kisses her. The lover was described laughing only once when she was receiving unwanted attention from another man. Jenny’s parents allow her to do whatever she wants as long as it doesn’t bother anyone else. They worry that she doesn’t play with anyone. Jenny knows she originated with him, his sexuality is her source of life. Jenny writes on her hotel stationary in Mexico ”The claims of love and self-preservation are opposed.” Jenny realises ”What does time matter to the inevitability of relations? It is inevitability that matters to lives, not love. For had she not always remembered him? And seen him rising from a kiss? Always.” I let go of the troubling aspect of her loving him since childhood and compared this to Cortazar’s “62: A Model Kity” which I’d read just before this collection of stories. That time is always existing side-by-side. It wasn’t about a girl who loved a man since she was a child, but one who’d always existed to love. The five year old aspect was to showcase that side of a person who never existed as their own person. Jenny never played games or had friends. Jenny was always in love.

Not the love of the Pastor from Taking Care whom we’re told has been in love all his life. His love is, from my perspective, the best kind to reciprocate. He may be suffering from the illness of his wife but he loves his daughter and grandchild. The way Williams describes this passage ”In the hospital, his wife waits to be translated, no longer a woman, the woman he loves, but a situation.” Jones recalls a tale about the house he shares with his wife. It used to be a doctor’s office, but the doctor had been falsely accused of fathering a child with a teenager. He kept the child, despite it not being his without any fight. He returned the child with no fight. Jones realizes he has changed, will no longer surrender to his wife’s illness. This story was so deeply unselfish and all-encompassing love.

In The Lover, the girl is waiting for her lover during his visits. She has a small child she spends the time waiting with or she listens to the radio station Action Line. I imagine her fascination with the show is similar to my interest in the Straight Dope columns. The Answer Man seemingly knows everything. The Girl wants to be in love more than anything. I have a feeling that her want of love might chase love away. The girl is like Jenny in [u]The Excursion but not so much in that she does have a sense of self, even if she doesn’t remember much of her ex-husband. ”It is so difficult! Love is concentration, she feels, but she can remember nothing.” There must be some reason her ex-husband said to her during their childs delivery ”Now you are going to have to learn how to love something, you wicked woman.” My take is the girl clearly loves her child, but the idea of love she has isn’t that of a mother’s love but the ideal of a couple of lovers. She doesn’t know what she really wants so she hasn’t found love. Love is caught up with the want of love.

Winter Chemistry and Train are stories about friendships. Poor Dan, the child in The Train is spending the summer with her friend Jane for the summer. Dan’s mother remarried and they needed her out of the way. Jane is one of those awful bullies people only end up as friends due to childhood circumstances, when they don’t know any better, or are stuck with them because they never learn how to get rid of them. Jane is clever and she knows it. My favourite part is Jane’s fighting parents. Her mother is constantly shrieking and yelling at poor Mr. Muirhead. Mr. Muirhead spends his time on the train talking to various young men because his wife won’t allow him to speak to young women. He absolutely killed me. He eats a note [we can presume it was nasty] but he eats it. At the end of the story, he asks Dan “What do you think was on that note Mrs. Muirhead had you give me? Do you think there’s something I’ve missed.” Their marriage is the sort where two people who prefer terror and drama to love.

Winter Chemistry is about two friends Judy and Julep who are obsessed with their handsome teacher and take to spying on them. Judy is a bully, like Jane, but the sort who may grow out of it. The origins of their friendship reminded me of that urban myth about Phil Collins. Word on the street, he watched someone watch another guy drown and didn’t do anything about it. Thus a rock classic In The Air Tonight was born. The problem, besides spying on the teacher, is that two girls are spying outside in the dead of winter. This is a story about obsession, written very disturbing with violence and undertones of sexual assault. Was Julep raped the teacher or was this her fevered reaction of becoming sick from the cold? Judy had cried “The way you’re sitting there and the way you’re looking, you look for all the world as though you’d just gotten raped.” Julep’s eyes fell open, blurred and out of focus for several seconds as though they’d been somewhere other than her head for the last few years. “You could ruin the heavenly city itself,” she finally said. I was uncertain whether the rape happened until the end. These two remind me of the girls from Heavenly Creatures who got caught up in their own shared mania. The teacher comes out and assaults Judy, rather frightening in the depiction, until Julep smashes his head in. This was quite a story, twisted, violent far away from a love story, but about a school girl crush gone wrong.

Preparation for a Collie, Shepard, and Breakfast are stories that feature the truest love of all: our four legged friends, dogs. Except that it wasn’t so much love for Preparation for a Collie at all. This one was an anti-love story. I felt sad for both the collie and for David, the couple’s son. Jane is waiting for her real life to begin, thus she never settles in to the life she actually has. She isn’t cruel but she doesn’t love her son David. Jackson has put an advert up for the collie, but he enjoys the process too much to actually give the dog up. I felt this was how Jane felt towards her life. She wanted something else, but never put the effort up. Jane finds a poem excerpt ”The dead must fall silent when one sits down to a meal.” that she cannot recall why she put it there. She decides it was to help her diet. Hah! I found that hilarious. The ending, where Jane just decides to kill the poor dog was not out of mercy for the dog but putting an end to her husband’s prolonging giving the dog up.

Shepard was a true love story about a relationship with your dog. Williams captured that loss of losing your dog, constantly playing back happier times, with this story. The girl’s German Shepard would leap up into her arms whenever she cried “Do you love me?” reminded me of whenever I’d say “Hug time!” and the family dalmation would run over and put his paws up. My sister had her own thing with him, “Look! He’s smiling!” and he’d bare his teeth that was equally special. Dogs are the best. I usually refuse to read a story if I know the dog dies. This story is beautiful but it made me cry and remember all of the dogs I’d loved over the years.

Breakfast is about the ending of a marriage because the husband, Willie, feels he is too good for his wife. Willie saved three by chance, but he’s moved on. This is ridiculous, but marriages end over less. It’s how she knows he is going to leave her before it happens that made this story so sad. Liberty has a gorgeous Alastation, Clem, who is described as “coming into the night air and settled on her head as she slept” among other tales Willie told his friend, whose in love with Liberty but a drunk. I’d read it as heart until I’d just reread the line now. I like the idea of Clem just finding Liberty. He was supportive, listening to her discussion with her mom on the phone, or coming up to the restaurant window after her husband had left her. Dogs always seem to sense when you need them most.

The Farm and Building are also about the dissolution of marriages. In the case of Building, Katherine is remembering her first marriage. I loved the vision of the character hiding in the tree so her husband will think she’d gone somewhere or seen someone else. When she asks her friend about doing this, her friend misunderstands and thinks this was something she’d done as a child. The things people do in break-ups are childish. This was perfect, not the nastiness of Willie, bringing up fake relationships or other personalities Liberty might have with another man in Breakfast but In not knowing what else to do. Her ex-husband died four months after their divorce. She realises they’d been divorced anyway. This complicates the memory of the relationship, or the grieving perhaps, because they’d divorce? But then relationships are complicated, who says who you have a right to mourn or anything else. She still writes the ex-mother in-law. This story was great, that your old life and memories are often tangled up in other relationships. You can’t forget the past or those relationships.

The Farm was a tragic tale of another relationship doomed to end. Much like Breakfast, but Sarah is more jealous and bitter about it. She wonders if he is having an affair, they discuss splitting up, the teenager she catches him sitting on the bed with blushes at her when caught. She drinks a lot and ends up killing someone as a result. The husband Tommy covers it-up, says he was driving, the kid was on drugs himself, no one goes to jail. She begins her own sordid affair, gets back at Tommy, but not in the conventional sense. She meets with the kids mom behind his back.

The Wedding is another anti-love story to me while The Summer spoke to me of love how I understand it. I did buy that these two were perfectly matched. The two characters, Elizabeth and Sam are dating despite that he’s already married. He’s been married three times, which tells you he is the sort to always be married while Elizabeth is uncomfortable not being married. A lot of marriages seem to work on these principles. I liked that he gave up trying to please her and just love her. But, things didn't have to end with them together. Another facet of love and relationships where things just happen.

Summer is about the fear of losing a spouse, but because Ben had almost died of a heart attack. Constance hasn’t gotten over the fear of almost losing him. She is the sort of person who only likes her husband, and the two kids they share between them. They are spending a month with a house they share with the ever popular Steven. Steven has a different woman over each weekend. Some of the women are more obnoxious than others. This story was more about relationships and love than the unstable marriages of the other stories [excepting Taking Care], or the possession without personality and quirks. This was a marriage about two people, equals, not sex like The Excursion. This story was easier to connect with on an emotional level one should want love to be, that relationship aspect, where two people actually share their lives. They weren’t married for the sake of being married.

In Shorelines , Jace thinks she only lived to love him. This story had a similar feel of The Lover of spending time with a kid, lazy heat and waiting. “Spending time, Spinninng time” to quote Buffalo 66. She definitely seems to lives for the relationship. The ending she is imagining Jace calling to her. I don’t get the sense of Jace as a person involved in the relationship so much as Ben was. Is he more like the cheating Tommy, only in the relationship during the weekends?

The Yard Boy seems to have all the answers until he is dumped. He was coasting on life before then. He considered himself to be a Spiritual Materialist, whatever that means. He is completely blind-sided by the break-up as the kid seems always in the zone, caught up in himself. The rabbits-foot fern sympathises with his plight when things are no longer easy for the boy. He’s left a baby in the shop when a girl is going to be bathroom, but this doesn’t seem to affect the boy much.

Traveling to Pridesup also involves a baby being left on the mailbox. Otilla, the fourth sister whose not very bright and uneducated, a sad combination, wants to keep the child. Her sister Lavinia, who always deeply loathed Otilla and wanted to tear her down refuses to keep the kid. They drive with the intention of her leaving the kid in another town. Liberty’s mother in Breakfast confesses to doing something similar to her first daughter. These stories make me think of how some people don’t love the kids of their first marriages. I’m only assuming the reason for the other babies, but that is precisely why Liberty’s mom gave her kid up. I suppose it could be worse. I was traumautised as a child by the TV movie starring Farrah Fawcett as Dianne Downs. Lavinia is the most hateful character in this collection. She isn’t capable of loving anyone.

Woods might be the most haunting story of the collection, after Winter Chemistry but less violent and more that crazy paranoia and horror we bring to ourselves. Lola is constantly afraid of everything did she set herself up for that end? She never leaves their trailer in the woods. Everything is a horror to her. I’d be scared if two guys walked into my home like that, but for someone like Lola spent her life being afraid? It seemed she was sort of home at the end, justified for once, in her fear.

[Tao · Rating 5 out of 5]

I like this book.

This book is funny, detached, sarcastic, calm, and other things.

[James Horn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ok 2023, let’s do this! I’m starting my year with Joy Williams’ The Visiting Privilege. “Harrow” knocked my socks off around this time last year, and I said to myself “I’m gonna read everything she’s got!” Well, cut to a year later (no idea why it took that long but thems the breaks) and as I’m diving into the aforementioned collection, I start wondering what stories are missing from that collection from this and I come to realize not much! So I went ahead and just read through the missing ones, and voila! Here we are!

Taking Care is fucking great. It’s raw and real, and extremely well crafted. It doesn’t quite measure up to the master strokes of Harrow, but there’s like 40 years separating them, so it’s to be expected. A few of these are a hair underwhelming leaving them maybe not so memorable, but maybe it’s just me. Others are excellent and I can absolutely see why she garnered such praise from Raymond Carver and Anne Beattie (who I also need to dove headfirst into) so early in her career.

What was interesting for me was the stories here that were left out of TVP. “Building” was maybe a tiny bit of its time (neither protagonist is particularly dynamic, and at one point a character is described as “a cripple” but I felt the meaning of the story transcended these minute transgressions. “Breakfast” was excellent, and I understand becomes her novel “Breaking and Entering” which explains its exclusion. But the real oddball of the entire bunch was “Traveling to Pridesup” which was clearly a play at a Shirley Jackson pastiche. I can understand leaving this exercise out of career summary collection, but it’s spot on, and absolutely worth reading even if it’s not her usual fair.

This is a Joy Williams I am excited to see grow and become the american treasure she is today. On to Escapes!

[Simon A. Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Joy Williams has quickly become one of my favorite writers and this has become one of my favorite collections of all time. It is pretty hard to explain the magic that is contained in each of these stories. Each story takes a million different turns and each outstanding/off-beat character moves the stories along with their own unique brand of humor, angst and language. Williams has what Carver had in his short stories, a surpise at every turn, the most frighteningly realistic dialogue, and the most unsettling scenarios. The thing is, in the hands of Williams, these characteristics are a very very good thing. Reading her is always a special treat. I love just sitting back and waiting for what happens next.

[Kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

Joy Williams’ writing obliquely lights up circuits in my thought patterns that make me feel exposed to myself. Calmly. Darkly. With swift shifts of gravity and humor. There’s just a little, little flavor of a Michael Haneke movie. Sometimes. Without such heavy dread, perhaps.

The Excursion was creepy and disorienting. The girl accessing the woman and/or the woman accessing the girl.
Train was fun, vicious.
Winter Chemistry! Elemental, disturbing.

I mean, whatever, I loved them all!

Next I’ll read Breaking & Entering which I just learned grew out of Breakfast, one of my favorites from the bunch. It featured characters i wanted to hang out longer with.

[Steven · Rating 5 out of 5]

god, I fucking love her....breaking and entering is better but I mean it's a fucking masterpiece of a novel....as far as shorts: this is second only to carver and Chekhov and by second, I mean barely....she got style for miles and miles so much styyyyyle that it's wasted...


Reread, 11/2023: I think she is as good of an American writer as there is. And these stories are absolutely brilliant. I like them nearly as much as those of Carver’s.

[michal k-c · Rating 5 out of 5]

Joy Williams rocks. very funny stories about domestic detachment and middle class bourgeois good behaviour that, when combined with someone like Ann Beattie, forms the road map for a lot of ~cool~ current literary trends

[andré crombie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sam swore that he heard Elizabeth say, “Life is an eccentric privilege.” This worried him but not in time.

notes: elegant writing and lovely stories, though a few lost me. when they’re great, they’re truly great.

like raymond carver for the florida keys:

When the girl and the shepherd had first begun their life together, they had lived around Mile 47 in the Florida Keys. The girl worked in a small marine laboratory there. Her life was purely her own and the dog’s. Life seemed slow and joyous and remembering those days, the girl felt that she had been on the brink of something extraordinary. She remembered the shepherd, his exuberance, energy, dignity. She remembered the shepherd and remembered being, herself, good. She had been capable of living another life then. She lived aware of happiness. The girl pushed her hands through her hair. The Gulf seemed to stick in her throat. There had been an abundance of holy things then. Once the world had been promising. But there had been a disappearance of holy things.

notably sublime on the interiority of girls and the women they become:

They slept a great deal and talked about the same things always and made brownies and popcorn and drank Coca-Cola. Julep always made a great show of drinking Coca-Cola because she claimed that her father had given her three shares of stock in it the day she was born. Judy would laugh about this whenever she thought to. “On the day, I was born,” she’d say, “I received the gifts of beauty and luck.”

[Michelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Heart.Break.Ing. 10/10 would recommend.

[Gideonleek · Rating 3 out of 5]

Love the minimalism—but a lot of these stories are ruined by silly spiritual endings.

[Melting Uncle · Rating 5 out of 5]

stories infused w subtly troubling ambiguity
not making false promises or pretending to have answers
a writer who brings our animal side into the light
without any trace of judgment or self-righteousness
showing the danger and beauty of the world intertwined
similar in style to Raymond Carver or James Salter
with a muffled maniacal chuckle in the background
I will read Joy Williams again

[Eva Shellabarger · Rating 4 out of 5]

Joy writes with such deft precision about things. Listen to this excerpt about winter:

There was nothing left of Christmas but the cold. The cold slouched and pressed against the people. Their blood was full of it. And their eyes and the food that they ate. The people walked the streets wearing woolen masks as though they were gangsters, or as though they were deformed. Old ladies died of breaks and foolish wounds in their houses where no one came, and fish froze in the quiet of their rivers.

Her keen eye clearly sets the background of the story and every detail makes the picture sharper.
I really enjoyed her writing from a child’s perspective, particularly in “Winter Chemistry” and “Train”.

Also really loved the cast of characters in “Summer”, all the different bohemian women passing through the summer house.

I am still in awe of the way she can write about anxieties and paranoia, making it feel so present and pressing, make it into the real world. Excited to read more of her earlier stories.

[Vincent Scarpa · Rating 4 out of 5]

In so many ways, Joy Williams is a peerless short story writer. There's just nobody doing it like she does it. Which is not a comment on quality so much as it is on ingenuity and style: you can recognize a Joy Williams story from the first graf, sometimes the first line. That being said, and having finished all three of her collections now, there are a few stories here and there that are more or less forgettable. But the majority stick with you long after having finished them. The best ones here are "Winter Chemistry," "Breakfast," "Building," and "Taking Care."

[Julia · Rating 3 out of 5]

A mordant, anthological look at contemporary, middle-class life. Can confirm that Williams' prose is incisive, a little too painstaking at times tbh, and she clearly has an aptitude for short stories; a real shame she's so underrated. My only grievance is that I didn't appreciate it to the fullest...I have to be in a certain mood for short stories. 😪I don't know how I came across Joy Williams, but I'm glad I did and am looking forward to diving into more of her work otherwise. Maybe even revisit this title if the occasion arises.

[Antha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Joy Williams is amazing. I can't wait to read her novel "The Quick and the Dead." The story "Breakfast" in this book is one of the best I've read. And she does spooky and ominous so well!

[Misha · Rating 4 out of 5]

"We are all asleep and dreaming, you know. If we could ever comprehend our true position, we would not be able to bear it, we would have to find a way out."

So this is sort of Flannery O'Connor meets Richard Yates with hints of Iris Murdoch. Until now, I could not have imagined this combination to work. Dysfunctional families and relationships, insane characters who say the most insane things and probably need to be psycho-analysed, suburbia, middle-class and bad parenting. Each story is a journey in itself. Each starts off with the most seemingly mundane scene, with each word you feel this inexplicable sense of dread even when this apparent mundane-ness continues, then bam! you are in the middle of something unexpected and disturbing. Often there is no ending as such or there is so much ambiguity that you are left wondering. Then when you look back to the story, you are amazed to find that Williams manages to communicate so many layers of complexity through the sparest of sentences, not one wasted detail. And finally there is this trace of viciousness about Williams' writing (you can almost imagine her laughing at her delusional, lost characters) which reminds me of my beloved Murdoch.

[Ryan Berger · Rating 5 out of 5]

"It's not a lucky thing, you know, to be in love."

I generally take pride in my reviews. I believe every review is a piece that can inform and entertain like any genre of essay. I have a masters degree in English Education, so the thoroughness is often part of the fun for me.

And yet I find myself completely at a loss for how to describe Joy Williams's work. On rereads, this book compels immediately upon finishing a story, more neurons start to fire but the first time through nearly every story in this collection leaves me in such a sense of bewilderment and awe. Empty out all the cliches about being hypnotized by the writing, but it's the only thing I can cling to.

This isn't one of those times where I say it's hard to find the words and then oops I found em here's 600 more. I'm really struggling here.

The phrase "an incredible talent for non-sequitur" keeps bubbling up. Whatever the hell that means.

S'all I got.

A new favorite.

[Jacob · Rating 4 out of 5]

While I read Honored Guestn in a week, I took this collection in over the course of a year and a half. I wonder if I would have enjoyed it as much as the former if I had read it as quickly. It's still Joy Williams, the greatest living writer, so it's still essential; I'm grading on a curve here. The last/titular story has the only real hiint of grace I've found in her work and might be the best thing I've read from her yet.

[Pamela Ribon · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Many things that human words have harmed are restored again by the silence of animals.”

“Women suffer from the loss of a secret once known.”

“It was in the third month I could feel the child best. They move, you know, to face their stars.”

She knocks me out, the way she concludes in the middle of explaining. I know I’ll read this collection again.

[Eric Cartier · Rating 4 out of 5]

Six of these stories are perfect, and all of them are unmistakably hers. Williams writes especially well about children, not an element of storytelling I seek out or often encounter. I'm excited to have so much more of her work before me, having only read her astonishing novel State of Grace last year.

[Lena · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's hard to rate a collection of short stories, much like collections of poems. Some of these are incredible, some feel so fully opaque. But reading the final story "Taking Care," you can feel the full weight of Williams' genius.