All the Days and Nights

"I absolutely love him. He’s one of our great short story writers. He’s very delicate, very mid-Western. He’s a predecessor and a great inspiration for Alice Munro . In this book there’s an interesting family story called “My Father’s Friends”. I don’t know whether his work is completely autobiographical or how much of it is fiction, but there seem to be a lot of dead mothers in his stories. I think his own mother died when he was young. And this is a great story, about how the narrator’s mother dies a few years apart from her sister. Both these women die and it’s about what happens to the two families afterwards. The narrator’s father gets a housekeeper. She is there for about a year and a half, and then he remarries and another order is established. The household remains running and cheerful and has some sense of normalcy. In the other family, the mother dies and the family never recovers. Years later, the narrator goes over one Christmas and it’s dark and a little depressing. It explores the sense that we have these broad ideas about marriage, or a mother and a father – and yet those positions, the job titles so to speak, are completely different in different families. In the one case, the absence of a mother was just calamitous and catastrophic. We would say that’s unhealthy, but it also means she was more necessary and, in some ways, more loved. It’s a very provocative and interesting story. Did he remarry? In my daughter’s pre-school there was a family who I remember vividly. They hosted the welcome-to-the-school lunch. They had an older daughter who was at my son’s school and I said to the father, “Oh, what grade is she in?” He gave me this sheepish, charming smile and said, “You’ll have to ask my wife.” He didn’t know what grade his eldest child was in! Later his wife died in a car accident, and this man was left with three young children. He didn’t even know what grade they were in, and he was suddenly without a mother for them. It was so sad but also kind of fascinating. He had a babysitter who was there for the summer or perhaps the year. She was a college student, probably 19. And she stayed. She just stayed, and has been raising these children. I also wonder what it means for her life. She’s probably 29 years old now, has lived with this family and is often the class mom. She’s very involved in the school, but I think she has no romantic life whatsoever. It’s not true at all. All families are completely different. What I love about Anna Karenina is the secondary characters – not the Anna and Vronsky romance but her brother’s affair, that starts out the whole novel. Her brother Stiva is having an affair with a dancer and his wife catches him. He completely loves his wife, but he feels that she’s an old woman now – she’s had children, that can’t be helped, it’s not her fault, but he’s full of virility and how could he not be having an affair? It’s kind of wonderful."