Ann Beattie, "Find and Replace"

Ann's not too happy Mom found a new man to live with.

(from Follies)

"Ann!" she said. "Oh, are you exhausted? Was the flight terrible?"

It's the subtext that depresses me: the assumption that to arrive anywhere you have to pass through Hell. In fact, you do.

A cool, quiet little story about moving on. This world is a comfortable place to be in. Complicated but not soo much so, charming but oddly blunt. There's a little bit of meta haunting this thing; the title refers to the narrator's using real life in her fiction by changing the names. f course, this character's name is Ann, so it's not a courtesy she extends to herself, or to us, I guess. Anyway, I can take meta in small doses, I guess. I liked this story. Read it here.