Reaching Inside: 50 Acclaimed Authors on 100 Unforgettable Short Stories

also by andre dubus iii

Gone So Long

Dirty Love

Townie

The Garden of Last Days

House of Sand and Fog

Bluesman

The Cage Keeper and Other Stories

Reaching Inside

Published in 2023 by

GODINE

Boston, Massachusetts

Introduction and Selection Copyright © 2023 by Andre Dubus III

For other copyrights, please see Acknowledgments

all rights reserved.

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

For more information, please visit godine.com

library of congress cataloging-in-publication data

Names: Dubus, Andre, III 1959- editor.

Title: Reaching inside : 50 essential authors on 100 unforgettable short stories / edited & introduced by Andre Dubus III.

Description: Boston : Godine, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: lccn 2022036552 (print) | lccn 2022036553 (ebook) | isbn 9781567927696 (hardcover) | isbn 9781567927702 (ebook)

Subjects: lcsh: Short story. | Authors, American--Books and reading. | Authorship--Psychological aspects. | lcgft: Essays.

Classification: lcc PN3373 .R35 2023 (print) | lcc PN3373 (ebook) | ddc 809.3/1--dc23/eng/20220831

lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022036552

lc ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022036553

This book is dedicated to all the wonderful students I’ve had the honor of teaching over the years at various universities, but most especially at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.

✦ Contents ✦

Introduction

Andre Dubus III

Ann Patchett

Sonny’s Blues ✦ James Baldwin

The Long-Distance Runner ✦ Grace Paley

Mary Gordon

I Stand Here Ironing ✦ Tillie Olsen

Pale Horse, Pale Rider ✦ Katherine Anne Porter

Madison Smartt Bell

King of the Mountain ✦ George Garrett

Sredni Vashtar ✦ Saki

Meg Wolitzer

Clay ✦ James Joyce

Yours ✦ Mary Robison

Dani Shapiro

The Circular Ruins ✦ Jorge Luis Borges

Getting Closer ✦ Steven Millhauser

ZZ Packer

Paper Lantern ✦ Stuart Dybek

A Solo Song: For Doc ✦ James Alan McPherson

Ann Beattie

Bliss ✦ Katherine Mansfield

The Prince ✦ Craig Nova

T. C. Boyle

The Brother ✦ Robert Coover

Sorrows of the Flesh ✦ Isabel Huggan

Anthony Doerr

The Garden of Forking Paths ✦ Jorge Luis Borges

Continuity of Parks ✦ Julio Cortázar

Gish Jen

Barn Burning ✦ William Faulkner

Bartleby, The Scrivener ✦ Herman Melville

Stewart O’Nan

Winter Dreams ✦ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Boys ✦ Rick Moody

Tobias Wolff

Wakefield ✦ Nathaniel Hawthorne

Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? ✦ Joyce Carol Oates

Jess Walter

The School ✦ Donald Barthelme

Bullet in the Brain ✦ Tobias Wolff

Kirstin Valdez Quade

Love ✦ William Maxwell

Dance of the Happy Shades ✦ Alice Munro

Mona Simpson

The Lady with the Dog ✦ Anton Chekhov

Good People ✦ David Foster Wallace

Richard Russo

The Lottery ✦ Shirley Jackson ✦ Builders ✦ Richard Yates

Ron Rash

Where Will You Go When Your Skin Cannot Contain You ✦ William Gay

A Worn Path ✦ Eudora Welty

Anna Quindlen

The Gift of the Magi ✦ O. Henry

Wants ✦ Grace Paley

Jayne Anne Phillips

A Good Man is Hard to Find ✦ Flannery O’Connor

In Dreams Begin Responsibilities ✦ Delmore Schwartz

Edith Pearlman

A Love Match ✦ Sylvia Townsend Warner

Roman Fever ✦ Edith Wharton

Peter Orner

Guests of the Nation ✦ Frank O’Connor

Welcome ✦ John Edgar Wideman

Joyce Carol Oates

Battle Royal ✦ Ralph Ellison

A & P ✦ John Updike

Bich Minh Nguyen

Cathedral ✦ Raymond Carver

In the American Society ✦ Gish Jen

Antonya Nelson

Heart of Darkness ✦ Joseph Conrad

The Girl Who Left Her Sock on the Floor ✦ Deborah Eisenberg

Rick Moody

The Company of Wolves ✦ Angela Carter

The Use of Force ✦ William Carlos Williams

Sue Miller

Spanish in the Morning ✦ Edward P. Jones

The Things They Carried ✦ Tim O’Brien

Colum McCann

A Ball of Malt and Madame Butterfly ✦ Benedict Kiely

The Love Object ✦ Edna O’Brien

Lois Lowry

A Small, Good Thing ✦ Raymond Carver

The Management of Grief ✦ Bharati Mukherjee

Dennis Lehane

Why Don’t You Dance ✦ Raymond Carver

The Second Tree from the Corner ✦ E.B. White

Phil Klay

The Grand Inquisitor ✦ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The Harvest ✦ Amy Hempel

Charles Johnson

An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge ✦ Ambrose Bierce

Trumpeter ✦ John Gardner

Pam Houston

Sara Cole: A Type of Love Story ✦ Russell Banks

A Note on the Type ✦ Ron Carlson

Ann Hood

Girl ✦ Jamaica Kincaid

Home ✦ Jayne Anne Phillips

Paul Harding

The Swimmer ✦ John Cheever

The Jewels of the Cabots ✦ John Cheever

Ron Hansen

To Build a Fire ✦ Jack London

Master and Man ✦ Leo Tolstoy

Jane Hamilton

Goodbye My Brother ✦ John Cheever

White Angel ✦ Michael Cunningham

Jennifer Haigh

The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street ✦ Mavis Gallant

Family Furnishings ✦ Alice Munro

Lauren Groff

The Overcoat ✦ Nikolai Gogol

The Shawl ✦ Cynthia Ozick

Robert Boswell

Madagascar ✦ Steven Schwartz

The Death of Ivan Ilych ✦ Leo Tolstoy

Russell Banks

The Artificial Nigger ✦ Flannery O’Connor

No Place for You My Love ✦ Eudora Welty

Julia Glass

A Father’s Story ✦ Andre Dubus

Young Goodman Brown ✦ Nathaniel Hawthorne

Dagoberto Gilb

La Noche Buena ✦ Tomas Rivera

Paso del Norte ✦ Juan Rulfo

Stuart Dybek

The Grasshopper and Bell Cricket

Yasunari Kawabata ✦ Birds ✦ John O’Brien

Emma Donoghue

An Attack of Hunger ✦ Maeve Brennan

The Yellow Wallpaper ✦ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Junot Díaz

Bloodchild ✦ Octavia Butler

Night Women ✦ Edwidge Danticat

Michael Cunningham

Work ✦ Denis Johnson

The Dead ✦ James Joyce

Lan Samantha Chang

French Lesson I: Le Meurtre ✦ Lydia Davis

The Cask of Amontillado ✦ Edgar Allan Poe

Ron Carlson

Babylon Revisited ✦ F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Tell-Tale Heart ✦ Edgar Allan Poe

Charles Baxter

The Corn Planting ✦ Sherwood Anderson

A Conversation with My Father ✦ Grace Paley

Richard Bausch

Hills Like White Elephants ✦ Ernest Hemingway

The Real Thing ✦ Henry James

Writing Prompts from the Contributors

About the Authors

Acknowledgments

Introduction

✦   ✦   ✦   ✦   ✦   ✦   ✦

Andre Dubus III

Late on a cold night quite a few years ago, I stood on a Boston sidewalk with the celebrated American novelist Tim O’Brien, who, miraculously, had become my friend. I say miraculously because he was a deservedly famous writer⁠—a winner of the National Book Award for his 1979 novel Going After Cacciato ; the author of the widely read and critically acclaimed The Things They Carried , a book many discerning readers have called a perfectly executed work; and the author of two other novels and a memoir and what was then his latest, In the Lake of the Woods .

I was in my early thirties at the time, and to support my own writing, I worked as a self-employed carpenter and part-time creative writing instructor. In the past five years, I had published two books that very few people had bought or read, though this fact did not bother me too much; I am the son of the master short story writer Andre Dubus, whose books had never sold well, and I believed that that was just how it went. I was also hard at work on what I hoped would become my second published novel, and I was in Boston that night to take my fiction writing class from Emerson College to hear Tim O’Brien read from his new book.

I first met O’Brien at a party at my father’s house several years earlier. I was shy around him, this man whose work I revered, until he told me that he wanted to get into better physical shape and could I put him on a weight-training program. Using my father’s bench and weights, I spent the next half hour showing Tim various exercises and how to do them and when and for how long. A few months later, he was invited to read at the MFA program I was enrolled in up in Vermont, and after his reading to hundreds of people, after he’d signed dozens and dozens of books, we went to a bar where, over a pitcher of beer, we planned to work out together early the next morning before his master class, which we did for nearly two hours.

And so, at that bookstore that night in Boston, Tim and I treated each other like the friends we’d become. But in front of my writing students, all of whom admired O’Brien’s work as much as I did, I felt mildly embarrassed about this for I never would have met O’Brien if my father had not also been a writer accomplished enough to have Tim O’Brien come to his house. The overwhelming majority of my students did not come from families with writers in them. Plumbers maybe. Waitresses (many of them single mothers) for certain. Truck drivers or electricians or accountants. But few of them had ever met a famous author, let alone seen him or her in one of their homes.

After Tim’s reading, I tried to introduce him to as many of my students as I could. He had a full crowd that night, and after it was over, my newly inspired students walking back to their city campus, Tim and I stood on the sidewalk talking about our workouts when a taxi pulled to the curb. But I’d forgotten to have Tim sign my copy of his new novel, and just as he was about to leave I asked if he would mind signing one more, and he took out his pen, opened his book, and inscribed something on the title page before we hugged and then he was gone.

Under the nearest streetlight I read what he’d written: Andre, I hope this reaches inside.⁠—Tim.

I read the line three times. It was like walking by an open window and hearing music you didn’t know you’d been trying to play your entire life. Reach inside. Isn’t that what I’d been trying to do daily for years? To capture on the page human truths, large or small, that may then gather the power to reach inside another? I wanted to chase down Tim’s taxi, and I wanted to thank him for that line.

I tell this story about Tim O’Brien because within it lies the underpinnings for this anthology: that writers, even the most accomplished among us, are no different from the rest of us, and that many of them, if not all, share O’Brien’s wish that their work will go deeply enough into its subject for it to reach inside the reader.

Nearly ten years after that evening with Tim and my students, writing daily and nightly and failing far more than succeeding, I found myself the author of a novel that rose to the top of the bestseller lists, that put me on TV shows and in awards ceremonies, that sent me down the red carpet of a Hollywood premiere, that made me and my young family some real money, something that I and the people I came from had never known. I was invited to travel the country to read from the novel at universities and bookstores, libraries and literary festivals, from coast to coast. And the strangest part of all this is that I found myself regularly in the company of my literary heroes, women and men whose work I’d been reading and trying to emulate for years. Along the way, I have discovered something: as I huddled with my literary heroes in pubs or restaurants or shared a cab on the way to an airport or sat around the dinner table at one of their homes, the overwhelming majority of them spend a lot of time talking about what they’re reading or have just read or are getting ready to finally read.

The idea for Reaching Inside rose from these conversations, past and present. It became clear to me again and again that no matter how celebrated these writers had become, the overwhelming majority of them had come from childhoods with no writers in them, and what had put them on their artistic paths was reading just the sort of work that Tim O’Brien had inscribed to me, writing that entered them and their dream worlds, had maybe even altered their view of life and their place in it, writing that, ultimately, made them want to write something substantial themselves.

So why not ask writers to write about that? For each of them to choose two short stories that had done that to them?

I sent out letters of invitation to fifty of the finest writers in the country and asked each of them to choose two short stories⁠—one canonical and perhaps one that is lesser known⁠—that have fed them in some way, that have kept that artistic flame lit or sparked it for the very first time, and then to write one brief essay about both stories. The results of those invitations are what you have here before you. In a time of so many digital distractions, of short attention spans and cluttered thinking, this anthology is simple in its approach and design: fifty compelling essays about one hundred accomplished short stories by fifty distinguished living writers.

Here, we have Mary Gordon on works by Tillie Olson and Katherine Anne Porter: Without these two stories, I would not have written fiction . . . it felt like a blow, shattering the last of my resistance to writing prose. In Tobias Wolff’s exploration of Hawthorne’s Wakefield and Joyce Carol Oates’s widely anthologized masterpiece Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? Wolff asks: [W]hat are the consequences, over time, of this habit of holding oneself apart and looking in? Can you, once you’ve taken the backward step, ever reclaim your place in the living stream?

We have Joyce Carol Oates herself studying the choice of two verb tenses used in John Updike’s A & P: Is this an error on the author’s part or a shrewd decision? When we write/read/think in the present tense, we are literally not yet in possession of what comes next . . . We also have Anna Quindlen’s deeply personal and moving description of how her literary education is like the strata of the earth. When you dig down, you can see the layers . . . first you need to learn about storytelling, and then you need to learn about life, in all its complications and contradictions.

In Junot Díaz’s insightful essay on stories by Edwidge Danticat and Octavia Butler, two completely different writers, he draws compelling parallels between Danticat’s poverty-stricken Haiti and Butler’s bleak dystopian dreamscape: It’s as hellish a scenario as it sounds and for those of us descended from enslaved Africans, all too believable.

Here, too, Michael Cunningham argues: Every story, whatever its nature, is by definition a single writer’s attempt to tell some section of a story too vast to be told. He then goes on to focus on the masterful endings of two short stories, comparing James Joyce’s The Dead to Work by Denis Johnson.

In Julia Glass’s essay, she confronts the question: By what false certainties do all of us live, trivial or grand, God-fearing or profane? And in his exploration of two John Cheever stories, Paul Harding discovers this: Repression and concealment are arguably Cheever’s artistic preoccupations . . . they are the sources of his stories’ sublime beauties . . . Sue Miller takes on Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried and Edward P. Jones’s Spanish in the Morning, parting the curtain on their individual shapes, on the improbable way (each) is made. And Richard Russo, in an essay that is as personal as it is instructive, examines how stories change as we, their readers, age and change. His focus here is on Builders, by Richard Yates, and Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery, and he delves into each with his characteristic humor, rigor, and compassion.

There are more essays, of course, each as beautifully written as another, each inspiring and edifying in its own specificity of voice and vision. In gathering these compelling pieces, I was reminded of a line from Willa Cather: A writer is at his best only when writing within the character and range of his deepest sympathies. In other words, we must care about our writing subjects and, often, it is the writing itself that leads us to discovering just what that is. These passionately written essays are inspiring and instructive, and therefore infectious: readers are bound to find themselves finishing an essay, then reaching immediately for the short story they’ve just read about.

But more than any of this, what we have here in this lovely, moving, and, frankly, powerful anthology is an open invitation to its readers that they too are invited to this grand circus that is the writing life, that no matter whether someone has won the Pulitzer Prize or the National Book Award, as many of these contributors have, whether you began life on blue-collar back streets or in white-collar comfort, whether you’ve ever met a published writer or believed the authors of famous books were all dead, everyone is welcome here, everyone is encouraged to open this book and to take in these masterful essays that reach inside us, and, as Tolstoy reminds us, transfer feeling from one heart to another.

—⁠Andre Dubus III

Reaching Inside

Ann Patchett

✦   ✦   ✦   ✦   ✦   ✦   ✦

sonny’s blues

James Baldwin

the long-distance runner

Grace Paley

✦   ✦   ✦   ✦   ✦   ✦   ✦

In the spring of 1985, I got a letter from the University of Iowa telling me I had been accepted to the Writers’ Workshop. The teaching assistantship I had been awarded consisted of a little bit of money and, more important, in-state tuition. All I had to do was teach an undergraduate course called Introduction to Literature that would comprise two novels, two plays (one Shakespeare, one contemporary), a selection of poetry, and some short stories. I was twenty-one years old, and in those days I cared about short stories more than anything else. I received a free desk copy of The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction , and the summer before I drove to the Midwest to be a writer, I read the whole thing. As far as I was concerned, there was nothing in it that touched James Baldwin’s Sonny’s Blues.

I rented half a duplex in Iowa City with Lucy Grealy, a friend from college. Lucy and I had the same financial-aid package, and the same deep feeling for Sonny’s Blues. It was the single thing that made us look forward to teaching. Again and again we went over the story, sitting at our fragile kitchen table. The narrator’s love for his brother Sonny was well intentioned but so filled with misunderstanding. How could anyone who didn’t live for art fully comprehend the suffering of someone who did? As we were about to begin our lives as writers, the story made us feel we were poised to face the same dangers Sonny faced⁠—our own tortured souls, a break from all who loved us and could never understand us, even the heroin seemed possible. All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it, Sonny’s brother tells us. And even then, on the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations. But the man who creates the music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air. James Baldwin understood that even as we prepared to give our lives to art, we faced the very real risk that no one would listen. It didn’t matter though, we couldn’t stop ourselves. We were doing the thing we were called to do.

I included Sonny’s Blues in just about every literature or creative writing class I ever taught, but I haven’t taught one in a very long time. When I went back to my Norton Anthology all these years later, I found that I had underlined more sentences than I left alone, writing notes of explanation to myself in the margin, adding stars for emphasis. I also found that in the intervening years, I had become something of a postmodern reader; I wasn’t as comfortable with such a straightforward story of suffering and grief as I had once been. Baldwin does nothing to soften the blows: the death of the boy’s uncle, the death of the beloved only daughter, the deathly struggle of Sonny, who, we are led to believe, may make it through his addiction but very possibly will not. I soon remembered everything I had loved in the unflinching telling. When Lucy and I had first read the story, in graduate school, we thought the message was that art is unimaginably hard. Now I can see that Baldwin was telling us that life is hard, and that art, however difficult, is for the lucky ones. In art at least the pain could be put to use.

This time around, reading Sonny’s Blues made me think of another story I loved: The Long-Distance Runner, by Grace Paley. She too had something to say about the past, about being pulled to what is no longer there, to what is there, to what we love and are afraid of. She does it in a way that I’m more comfortable with now, a slightly surrealistic vision of the world where the things we’d rather not admit about ourselves are laced with a dose of palliative humor. Paley’s alter-ego Faith puts on her running shorts and jogs back to her old neighborhood. She finds it crumbling, trash strewn, and completely African American.

‘I used to live here,’ I said.

‘Oh, yes,’ they said, ‘in the white old days. That time too bad to last.’

When Faith is charged by an angry mob, she runs to seek shelter in her childhood apartment. There she is taken in by Mrs. Luddy, who lives with her son Donald and three baby girls in foster care. Every time Faith starts to leave, she can’t quite make it. I’d get to the door and then I’d hear voices. I’m ashamed to say I’d become fearful. Despite my wide geographical love of mankind, I would be attacked by local fears. From her perch at Mrs. Luddy’s window, which had once been her own window, Faith gives us a larger view of the world: the tiresome routines and sweet pleasures of motherhood, the lifesaving value of a woman’s friendship, the change and the sameness of the view over time. Like all Grace Paley stories, this one feels as if it were meant to be read aloud, or possibly sung. In its cartoon reality, it feels oddly like something that might have happened, and that the truth of the actual events was perhaps stretched out by too much telling.

Grace Paley was born in the Bronx in 1922, and it is the Bronx Faith goes back to when she runs. James Baldwin was born in Harlem in 1924, and that’s where Sonny goes when he gets out of prison. None of this necessarily provides the two stories with a connection to each other; still, they make a comfortable fit. If Faith did run home after Mrs. Luddy pushed her out, she may well have gone through Harlem. She may have run all the way to Greenwich Village, where Sonny played jazz in a club with the people who understood him and were truly his family. Had they met somewhere along the way, Sonny and Faith, despite whatever differences there were between them, I believe they would have understood each other perfectly.

Mary Gordon

✦   ✦   ✦   ✦   ✦   ✦   ✦

i stand here ironing

Tillie Olsen

pale horse, pale rider

Katherine Anne Porter

✦   ✦   ✦   ✦   ✦   ✦   ✦

Without these two writers, I could not have written fiction. I mean these words literally and not metaphorically.

It was 1972. I was in graduate school, getting an MFA. I believed I was a poet. There were poets I could look to: Plath, Sexton, Rich. Particularly for me, Denise Levertov. But I couldn’t find women fiction writers doing what I wanted to do: to write lyrically, and to include the large issues. Life, death, identity, heartbreak: the world. I had been enlivened by Lessing’s The Golden Notebook and revved up by Mary McCarthy’s The Company She Keeps. But both lacked the lyric touch, and this was central to what was most important to me.

My first reading of I Stand Here Ironing was a reading through tears. Forty-two years later, I read it through tears. But that first reading: a revelation. It was what I was looking for: fiction that was unabashedly unironic, uncool . . . unmale. This was a story about a mother and a daughter. It contained details like swollen breasts and the hysteria of getting children dressed in the morning. The language flowed with a breathtaking immediacy; there was a hint of not made in America in the cadence. And among many astonishments: the inclusion in so brief a story of the political realities of the larger world. Mentioned just briefly, but studding the surface like red nails on a white wall, are the Depression, the War . . . most importantly the abiding fear of nuclear annihilation.

The specificity of her details seared images into my brain. Unbearable, the clarity of the scene at the convalescent home, where the sick child is sent to be fattened up because her mother has been told by experts that she cannot provide the proper nourishment.

High up on the balconies of each cottage the children stand, the girls in their red bows and white dresses, the boys in white suits and giant red ties. The parents stand below shrieking up to be heard and the children shriek down to be heard.

And how deft the evocation of those paradoxically paradisal days when the child, sickish but not sick, stays home with the mother in a cocoon of unreal safety.

Mostly Emily had asthma, and her breathing, harsh and labored, would fill the house with a curiously tranquil sound. I would bring the two old dresser mirrors and her boxes of collections to her bed. She would select beads and single earrings, bottle tops and shells, dried flowers and pebbles, old postcards and scraps, all sorts of oddments.

Perhaps the most heartbreaking aspect of the story is the mother’s guilty acknowledgment of her failures⁠—none the less real because there was no choice.

She was a beautiful baby . . . You did not know her all those years she was thought homely, or see her poring over her baby pictures, making me tell her over and over how beautiful she had been⁠—and would be, I would tell her⁠—and was now, to the seeing eye. But the seeing eyes were few or nonexistent. Including mine.

That same year, 1972, and quite by chance, I discovered Katherine Anne Porter in an anthology that we graduate students who were teaching Freshman Composition were required to use. I read Pale Horse, Pale Rider and it felt like a blow, shattering the last of my resistance to writing prose. She was doing it, what I thought could not be done. She was writing about death and love and war with an imagistic richness and a radiant, demanding narrative line.

The story must take its place in the outstanding literature of the First World War, but its contribution is singular. It is, after all the story of the War at Home, and from a Woman’s point of view. And it is the story of the Spanish Influenza Epidemic, which dealt as many deaths as the War Itself.

The rooms Porter created were as real to me as my living room but she was fearlessly using the large words that⁠—post-Hemingway⁠—we had been told (but I was yearning for them) we were not allowed to use. In this story I found a sentence that I still find miraculous, impossible: it should not work, but it is the sentence of all sentences that I most admire: Death is death and for the dead it has no attributes.

It begins in a dream and moves to a newspaper office where Miranda, the heroine, encounters patriotic bullying and the hazards of being a working woman in a male domain. Two Liberty bond salesmen are waiting for her, suggesting that if she doesn’t buy a bond, her job will be in danger. The older is drawn with a few, masterful strokes. He might be anything at all: advance agent for a road show, promoter of a wildcat oil company, a former saloon keeper announcing the opening of a new cabaret, an automobile salesman⁠—any follower of any one of the crafty, haphazard callings.

I still remember the hair standing up on the back of my neck at the juxtaposition of the words crafty and haphazard.

I can only conclude that the reason Porter hasn’t achieved the eminence she deserves is that her best work is in the short story, the unfavored younger sister of prose fiction. And everything she writes is from a perspective that is unabashedly and unmistakably female. When a pathetic failed hoofer confronts Miranda for giving him a bad review, she responds in a way that is all too familiar to women who are called upon to judge: You shouldn’t pay any attention at all. What does it matter what I think. And not least among the