Writer Ann Beattie agreed to share the keynote speaker duties at the First Biennial John Updike Society Conference at Alvernia University with her painter-husband Lincoln Perry because she was an Updike supporter and Updike was a supporter of hers.
A Vogue article about her new collection, The State We’re In: Maine Stories, reminds us of that connection. Journalist Megan O’Grady writes, “As John Updike told her when they first met, ‘You figured out how to write an entirely different kind of story.”
He was talking about what O’Grady described as her stories’ “open-ended capaciousness, so unlike the deterministic, epiphany-shaped prose that has defined the short form.”
Just as Updike’s characters aged, so have Beattie’s. They’re “mostly older and less cool these days: They order crackers from Amazon; they’ve been through divorces or estrangements and are on second or third attempts at life. They have a sense not of the ending but of an ending. The result is a newfound ephemerality—a fledgling bird found in a recycling bin, and unexpected pregnancy, an attempted suicide,” O’Grady writes.
Here’s the entire article: “Wandering Beyond the Page: Ann Beattie on Her New Collection, The State We’re In.”