[Matchup #9 in Tournament of Bookshit]

“Everybody has a story”

But I don’t like the story of a woman unsatisfied with her marriage, her greying hair still shoulder length from the 60s, taking a creative writing class at the community college, getting all nervous in her Hyundai parked outside under a leafless tree, going over in pen, again, the final revisions of her 3000-word story: the one about a woman her age, of average median household income, whose husband is also a strong but silent type reoccurring satellite figure in her empty life; who, like the amateur in jean overalls now crying in her Korean-made car, also drinks gin in her pajamas at night while playing solitaire, in an unnamed though evocatively New England-y town, whose racial demographic is similar to hers, except in the story the friendly mail man who dies of cancer because something needs to fucking happen is African-American, which her instructor (a man with both a novel and pony-tail “out”) told her she should include before she submits it to Glimmer Train, because those ladies are into black guys probably. READ MORE >