'It's not so easy, just living a life,' says the unnamed female narrator of 'Living at Home', second of the three novellas that make up this collection. The narrator is a psychiatrist who works with autistic children, lives with a man who is mostly away, and copes with a mother who is sliding gently into senility. 'Going through my mother's decline,' the narrator says, 'simply widened the scope of what I'd guessed at all along, what I seemed to be born knowing ... the extreme difficulty in managing the details of ordinary life.'

LRB 7 April 1994 | PDF Download