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The virtual bitch slap
A new game, Sissyfight 2000, lets me be the playground bully I never was.
By Amy Silverman
[04/27/00]

The other side of the closet
After 10 years and two children, my husband told me he is gay.
By Janet Nicolazzo
[04/26/00]

Sleeping with the enemy
While I'm planning security for the IMF demonstrations, my husband is getting thrown in jail. He better not ask me for bail.
By Lisa Guide
[04/24/00]

Born to pop pills
I have a well-chosen capsule for every occasion.
By Elissa Schappell
[04/20/00]

Our town
The place I share with Timothy McVeigh.
By Mark Phillips
[04/19/00]

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Her mother pulled the afghan closer. "I've been thinking of your father," she said. "It's not that I'd have wanted him to suffer. But if he had to die, sometimes I wish he'd done it more gently. That heart attack, so finished; never a warning. I wish I'd had some time to nurse him. In a way, it's a chance to settle things."

MotherKind By Jayne Anne Phillips Knopf, 295 pages Fiction Also Today The flower of cities all In Zadie Smith's remarkable debut novel, London is a merry capital of mismatched lovers. By Maria Russo Also This Week Spring Fiction Fever Salon celebrates a season of exceptional books with a weeklong series. By the critics and editors of Salon Books Salon recommends The pick of recent fiction, from the critics and editors of Salon Books.

"Did things need settling?"

"They always do, don't they?" She sat looking out the window, then said softly, "I wonder where I'm headed."

"You're not headed anywhere," Kate said. "I want you right here to see me settle down into normal American womanhood."

Her mother smiled reassuringly. "Where are my grandchildren?" she said. "That's what I'd like to know."

"You stick around," said Kate, "and I promise to start working on it."

In the wake of enormous commercial and critical success for "Black Tickets" ("a crooked beauty," Raymond Carver said; the signs of "early genius," opined Tillie Olsen), Phillips did not yield to the common diseases of early fame -- arrogance, paralysis.

Within five years, she had produced her first novel, "Machine Dreams." Nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, chosen as one of the best 10 books of the year by the New York Times Book Review, Phillips' first novel begins with a chapter titled "Reminisce to a Daughter" and goes on to explore an ordinary family against the backdrop of war. Once again, a mother and a daughter are central to the story. Their bond is both fractured and necessary; loss is threatening, adulthood is closing in.

In 1994, following a long period during which Phillips gave birth to two children and suffered the death of both her parents from cancer-related illnesses, she published "Shelter," a novel steeped in darkness and twisted lure. The book begins, "Concede the heat of noon in summer camps," and then asks even more of its readers, above all a willingness to travel to the heart of unabashed evil and then grope back out toward the light.

While many critics hailed "Shelter" as a major step forward, others shied away from the book's dense, lyrical rendering of the loss of innocence. Sales -- at 22,000, strong for a book of literary fiction -- did not meet its publisher's expectations.

For a writer who had early on won critical raves and commercial success as well as two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, the task of producing another full-length work could have been wrought with new pressures and doubt. But Phillips, who has always maintained that she writes for her own "psychic survival," persisted -- quietly, resolutely, bowing to nothing but her own imagination. Anyone who tried to interview her during those years hit a wall. She insisted on the big, white line between the books she wrote and the life that she was working hard to live.

In Prague, I knew Phillips first as the hub of her family -- the mother of two sons and the wife of an amiable physician whose eyes I once saw wet with tears as his wife read an essay about her work. Sometimes, in that place of seashell-colored buildings and accordion music and weddings that seemed spontaneous and hopeful, our families would explore together: boutiques and towers, the checkered countryside. She was guarded, perpetually cautious, never carefree. She was, it always seemed to me, more comfortable alone.

And yet. When it was just Phillips and me, just the two of us over hot chocolate and coffee, she was also generous and vulnerable, refreshingly direct. She would tell stories about Sam Lawrence. He was the editor whom she discovered while attending a workshop at a writing conference, a man she later called, in an inscription in her novel "Shelter," "the angel of my writing life, in every word." He was her editor until he died six years ago, another grueling, heart-rending death for the author. Phillips remembered:

"Mr. Lawrence," I asked him, "do you publish short stories?"

"Not if I can help it," he said. I gave him an edition of "Sweethearts" [published by Truck Press in 1976] and he phoned me and asked me to bring my stories to Boston. And that's how it began.

Next page | Life had turned her on its pivot and taken her to the opposite side of the breach