"Women of a Certain Age"—Source
An article titled "Women of a Certain Age" was published online in LitHub on November 27, 2023, with a subtitle: A Roundtable on Crafting Older Female Characters in Fiction. The guests included Elizabeth Strout, Fiona Davis, Andrea Lee, and Julia Alvarez, hosted by Lisa Gornick.
Lisa Gornick: doctorate in clinical psychology from Yale, graduate of the writing program at NYU.
Novels:
Ana Turns--24 hours of a very contemporary woman’s 60th birthday.
The Peacock Feast
Louisa Meets Bear
Tinderbox
A Private Sorcery
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Elizabeth Strout—author of literary fiction, and a lawyer; known for her short story cycles
Amy and Isabelle (1998)
Abide with Me (2006)
Olive Kitteridge (2008)—won a Pulitzer
The Burgess Boys (2013)
My Name Is Lucy Barton (2016)
Anything is Possible (2017)
Olive, Again (20190
Oh William! (2021)
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Fiona Davis—New York Times best selling novelist who writes historical fiction inspired by New York City architecture. Her novels are often set in iconic NY City buildings:
The Spectacular, 2023
The Magnolia Palace, 2022
The Lions of Fifth Avenue, 2020
The Chelsea Girls, 2019
The Masterpiece, 2018
The Address, 2017
A Wild Rose—short story in Amazon's Point in Time series—read free!
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Andrea Lee—American-born author of novels, short fiction, and memoirs. Her stories are often international in setting and explore questions of race and culture, as well as ideas surrounding national identity and foreignness.
Sarah Phillips (novel), 1984
Lost Hearts in Italy: A Novel, 2006
Red Island House: A Novel, 2021
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Julia Alvarez—from the Dominican Republic, she is known for works that examine cultural expectations of women both in the Dominican Republic and the US, and for rigorous investigations of cultural stereotypes. Poet as well as novelist and children's book author:
How the García Girls Lost Their Accents. 1991.
In the Time of the Butterflies. 1994.
Yo!. 1997.
In the Name of Salomé. 2000.
Saving the World: A Novel. 2006.
Afterlife: A Novel. 2020.
Cemetery of Untold Stories. April 2024
Women of a "certain age"
Lisa Gornick:
The idea of exploring mature female characters came to me while rereading Mrs. Dalloway (Virginia Woolf). Clarissa, I realized with a jolt, is only fifty-one. There are moments when she feels like a girl of eighteen, but she also sees herself as “unspeakably aged” and sidelined.
Lifespans have obviously changed since this novel was published; today, few women in their fifties or sixties or seventies think of themselves as decrepit. By contrast, many women in this age-group feel in their prime.
On her 60th birthday, Ana, the protagonist of my upcoming novel, Ana Turns, does a headstand, walks across Central Park, and visits her lover in his Harlem brownstone. That said, she senses the undertow of time and the entrance to the final third of her journey: an awareness that marks a shift in her consciousness from when she was a girl.
Women of a "certain age"
Julia Alvarez:
Just as your first question arrived in my inbox, and I was wondering, oh dear, how to get a handle on this big question, an email rolled in from a reader who had just finished my last novel, Afterlife, in which the protagonist, Antonia, is an older woman. The reader wrote:
Afterlife spoke to me on many levels. Poetry! Spanish! Culture! Grief! The book came to me at just the right time as it has taken me many life chapters to arrive here. I feel that my life is “kintsugi” putting all the pieces together to make it whole and beautiful.
At this point in my own life (73 years old) I too have many chapters behind me and if I’m lucky a few more to go. My kind reader references “kintsugi,” a Japanese concept of “repair” that does not try to hide or “beautify” the broken places and pieces, the wear and tear, scars and losses in our lives, but instead embraces them.
Aging has brought a lot of aches and pains and failing body parts but the view is incredible! To quote the African-American activist Ruby Sales (75): “I’ve now got hindsight and foresight and insight.”
Kintsugi
Kintsugi (Japanese: "golden joinery"), "golden repair" is the art of repairing broken pottery by mending the areas of breakage with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum. As a philosophy, it treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise.
As a philosophy, kintsugi is similar to the Japanese philosophy of wabi-sabi, an embracing of the flawed or imperfect. Japanese aesthetics value marks of wear from the use of an object. It can also be understood as a justification of kintsugi itself, highlighting cracks and repairs as events in the life of an object, rather than allowing its service to end at the time of its damage or breakage.
Not only is there no attempt to hide the damage, but the repair is literally illuminated—a kind of physical expression of the spirit of mushin which carries connotations of fully existing within the moment, of non-attachment, of equanimity amid changing conditions.
Kintsugi
The vicissitudes of existence over time, to which all humans are susceptible, could not be clearer than in the breaks, the knocks, and the shattering to which ceramic ware too is subject.
This poignancy or aesthetic of existence has been known in Japan as a compassionate sensitivity, or perhaps identification with, [things] outside oneself. ( Christy Bartlett, Flickwerk: The Aesthetics of Mended Japanese Ceramics)
Women of a "certain age"
Julia Alvarez:
What I aspire to in my life is being an elder. All of us, if we live long enough, will grow old but only a few will become elders. This elderhood is something we make of ourselves, not a given.
It means, as with kintsugi, that we gather all of ourselves (no cherry-picking allowed!), our many layers, chapters, and embrace them and use them in service to others, most especially the younger generations that need our support, our high spirits, our solidarity going forward.
I no longer feel that burning ambition to make something of myself, to please others whether it’s my immigrant parents, or a love interest. Instead I am who I am, no monolithic impermeable self, but a changing work in progress, and sometimes regress.
That, too, has to be embraced, as we are bound to keep getting it wrong. There is no road map for getting old, as there was none for growing up, but we were given road maps by others, which often led us astray. So here’s to these discoveries and recoveries.
Women of a "certain age"
Andrea Lee:
Since it is a truth universally acknowledged nowadays that prosperous people in developed countries are leading longer and healthier lives than ever before, one question that arises is: does living an active life for longer mean that we simply have more time to expand our period of immaturity, or does it mean more time to acquire—or attempt to acquire—wisdom?
In my writing, I’ve always found it most interesting to portray characters in pursuit of knowledge, whether consciously or unconsciously; it’s a pursuit usually situated on the path toward an encounter with the Other—whether that otherness is defined by race, social class, culture, or sex.
I’ve written fiction and nonfiction about expatriate life in Russia and Italy and other foreign countries, as well as about being Black in white spaces in America.
Women of a "certain age"
Andrea Lee:
Red Island House, my latest novel, is about neocolonialism in Madagascar, and its main character, a Black American professor named Shay, is on a spiritual journey to understand her ancestral relationship to the continent of Africa, as well as to confront her own privilege as a prosperous citizen of the first world.
This personal progression, which is contained within the story of an Indian Ocean island increasingly exploited by foreigners, runs over two decades, from Shay’s late twenties to her early fifties, passing through marriage, divorce, the raising of children and building of a career.
Thus this contemplation fits directly into the larger themes of the novel. In general, I find that I wanted Shay’s journey into awareness to be more timeless than chronological.
By the end I wasn’t really counting her years, but trying to guide her into becoming smarter, braver, more perceptive, and more compassionate.
Women of a "certain age"
Fiona Davis:
It doesn’t seem fair, somehow, that older men are considered “distinguished,” while women are deemed “of a certain age.” In a number of my books, the younger female protagonist has a counterpart in an older female character, usually one with a juicy secret or two. They might have health issues that should’ve knocked them down, but didn’t, and they might be fiery but are never bitter.
“Seasoned” is an adjective that comes to mind, but not like a roast chicken. More like “having lived through many seasons”—harsh winters and satisfying summers—with more to come.
They’re not wise old sages, offering advice to the young ‘uns. They reject pity and own their choices.
I like to think my seasoned ladies are still changing and growing, possibly learning from their past mistakes—or not. They’re sharp and funny and drive fast.
Women of a "certain age"
Lisa Gornick:
Julia refers to the Japanese concept of kintsugi: embracing “the wear and tear, scars and losses in our lives.” It reminds me of another Japanese concept, wabi sabi: the acceptance of imperfection and impermanence. Both ideas are deeply appealing to me as a woman with lines on her forehead and the fragile pages of decades-old books on my shelves.
Women of a "certain age"
Julia Alvarez: Talking about writing
My two most recent protagonists, Antonia in Afterlife and Alma in forthcoming The Cemetery of Untold Stories are older than my protagonists in earlier novels. A big part of that is I write to understand and make meaning of what I’m up against in my own life. I wrote How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, my first novel, because back then there weren’t many stories about the immigrant experience from a female point of view.
And I desperately wanted to understand that experience for myself and others. So I wrote into that gap. I find the same silence surrounding truly complex and vital older women protagonists.
As for wabi sabi? Acceptance of imperfection, oh yes. I remember when I was stuck on how to tell Antonia’s story and later Alma’s, a writer friend sent me to Leonard Cohen's “Anthem”:
forget your perfect offering
there is a crack in everything
that’s how the light gets in!
Women of a "certain age"
Lisa Gornick:
There’s a wonderful phrase that Lauren Groff used to describe one of her characters: “She’s not me.” Groff was referring to the relationship between memoir and fiction and the “biographical fallacy” of presuming if a character’s biography is similar to the author’s, the two are one.
In Ana Turns, I appropriate the idea for a different purpose when Ana, on her 60th birthday, thinks about her reckless young self that she’s “not me.”
At times, she sees herself as a tree trunk with concentric circles—at core, unchanged. At other times, the transformations seem more disjunctive, like a caterpillar to a butterfly.
Women of a "certain age"
When you think about your characters—and yourself—how do you see the connection between younger and older selves?
Elizabeth Strout:
Such an interesting question. Experience helps make us who we are, or at least it’s one part of what makes us who we are.
Women of a "certain age"
Fiona Davis:
In my book, The Spectacular, the connection between younger and older selves is very much present throughout. One timeline involves a nineteen-year-old Rockette dancing at Radio City Music Hall in the 1950s, while the other features the same woman in the early 1990s, as a fifty-five-year-old.
I truly enjoyed writing about a wide-eyed innocent learning the ropes of life in New York City, as well as mining the ruefulness that I feel when I look back at my life and some of the choices I made as a young woman.
The personal connection to Marion is a strong one, as the health issues the older Marion is coping with—Parkinson’s—are my health issues as well (although she’s much further advanced). Although it’s really only a subplot in the novel, I was interested in exploring what it would be like for a dancer (someone who is used to having full control of her body), to lose that control.
Young Marion has the freedom to look outward and seize every opportunity, while older Marion is required to redefine her place in the world and how she plans to move through it.
Women of a "certain age"
Julia Alvarez:
Your question, Lisa, instantly sent me to the wonderful poem, “The Layers,” by Stanley Kunitz, written in his seventies. (He went on to become Poet Laureate at ninety-five. I find a lot of his poems about aging resonate with me.) Stanley writes:
I have walked through many lives, some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
Stanley Kunitz, "The Layers"
Women of a "certain age"
Julia Alvarez:
I think it’s important in creating complex characters to give readers a sense of those layers. Everyone has a back story, or rather, back stories. Of course you can’t unload them all on your readers, you have to be selective.
Like the speaker in Stanley’s poem, I believe each character, myself included (!), has “some principle of being which abides.” A through-line. Not quite Lisa’s “unchanged core,” because that through line is changed by what it goes through—the story I’m telling or living as a person.
In writing down that character or in living my life, I have to make choices about which layers to highlight and include. “Live in the layers, not the litter,” Stanley says later in the poem. Selection is important—we don’t want to litter our stories with details and information our readers or the people in our lives don’t need.
The choices a character makes about what to carry forward on the page and in the life tell us a lot about that person.
Women of a "certain age"
Andrea Lee:
For me there’s no disjunction between past and present in the way that I conceive my characters, and the way that I think of myself. I think Ana’s tree ring analogy is wonderful: always expanding, yet in some way always the same.
Or, I tend to think of the character I am creating as a river of which the beginning and end are out of sight.
Heraclitus famously observed that one never steps into the same river twice, and certainly every river is always moving and changing—yet there is something ineffable that makes each an individual and particular river: this quality could be described as name; identity; or even, soul. The fact of constant change is part of the nature of the river, but so is its identity, which is a kind of permanence—timelessness.
When creating a character going through different life stages, I try to address the interplay between endless variation and that which stays the same. The whole thing is paradoxical, and so is every human life, as we live it, and as we attempt to write it.
Women of a "certain age"
Lisa Gornick:
Ann Tashi Slater has been interviewing writers for her series in Tricycle, ”Between-States: Conversations about Bardo and Life.” Whereas I was familiar with the idea of bardo in Tibetan Buddhism as the passage from death to rebirth, in her interviews, Slater explores a more expansive view of the concept as “between-states,” including moments “when we go into the zone while doing creative work.”
The phase of life we’re talking about—no longer young, not yet old—might be considered a bardo state. As Fiona wrote, Marion in The Spectacular is redefining ”her place in the world and how she plans to move through it.” Shay in Andrea’s Red Island House is facing a crisis in “her carefully fabricated notion of a marriage of distance and tolerance.”
Antonia in Julia’s Afterlife is a recent widow, isolating during a time of profound mourning, while Lucy in Liz’s Lucy by the Sea, also recently widowed, is thrust into the collective liminal state of the pandemic. In my own Ana Turns, Ana is at a watershed moment where she could continue to nurse resentments and anxieties or, perhaps, enter her seventh decade in a freer, more generous way.
Women of a "certain age"
Does the idea of bardo resonate with how you imagine your characters—these or others—and think about yourself?
Fiona Davis:
I think, as we get older, we begin to incorporate the past, present, and future into a kind of rolling bardo state: worrying about what’s ahead, ruminating on what came before, all while trying to live in the moment. But I think that makes for a rich character in a novel. You might have a protagonist who is trying to solve a problem in the present while drawing on her past experiences in order to do so.
As an author, I love it when the character pulls me back in time and begins telling me about something that happened before, knowing it will impact on what she’s going through in the current timeline and in the final chapters. To be in a rolling bardo state is to be free-flowing, almost as if time doesn’t exist. [Gertrude]
Women of a "certain age"
Julia Alvarez:
Your question, Lisa, helped me understand and give a name to the characters I find the most absorbing to write and read about. They are characters in the bardo, in liminal, in-between states, neither caterpillar, nor butterfly, with the jury still out on who or what will emerge or not emerge at all. “Characters in conflict are the most interesting,” one writing teacher used to coach us—that tension and uncertainty keep us turning the page, even when the conflict is seemingly under control or submerged and suddenly triggered by something that happens.
It’s why I have often written about bicultural/bilingual characters—and aren’t we all bi- this and bi-that, or maybe myriad this and myriad that (“I am large, I contain multitudes”). Everything is pending, everything is in the offing.
Antonia, my protagonist in Afterlife, is suddenly widowed, she has just retired from a long professional life as a teacher in a classroom. The solid ground under her feet has vanished. “Who am I going to be anymore? Antonia asks her sister after Sam’s memorial service. The rest of the novel is her lived answer to that question.
Women of a "certain age"
Lisa Gornick:
As the retort to bellyaching about getting old—”What’s the alternative?”—highlights, aging is synonymous with living. Nonetheless, the word is rife with paradoxes. On the one hand, aging connotes diminishment and breakdown. On the other, it suggests wisdom and refinement: aged whiskeys and ukuleles are improved.
Recently, a friend told me about her decreased appetite for social interaction: after two hours at a party, she’s ready to pack up and go home. Was this, I asked, because she has less energy and a shorter attention span, or because she is more discriminating about what is worthwhile and more confident about asserting herself—because she finds the reading she commonly does upon her arrival home more nourishing than a third hour of chit chat? (Perhaps you hear the echoing of “more” as opposed to “less….”)
Question
Did you ever write about women of your age now when you were younger—and, if so, do you think you got it right? Was there anything you got wrong? Anything you’ve learned from living with your characters who are now your chronological peers?
Women of a "certain age"
Fiona Davis:
My first book, which I wrote in my mid-forties, featured a character in her eighties. The story had dual timelines, which meant that I also wrote about a seminal moment in her life as a young woman. I’m very glad about that, as otherwise I don’t think the older version of her would have been as three-dimensional.
By writing the earlier timeline first, it became a little bit like when you run into someone from high school: instead of noticing the gray hair and wrinkles, you see the “ghost version” of them as a seventeen-year-old. The ghost version of my character as a young woman was very much present as I wrote the eighty-year-old’s scenes, with all of the old hurts and resentments – as well as the joys of that earlier time—bleeding into the aches and pains (and wisdom) of having lived for eight decades.
Women of a "certain age"
Julia Alvarez:
Once again, Lisa, your question/reflection helps me understand myself and my characters, Antonia in Afterlife and Alma in my upcoming novel, The Cemetery of Untold Stories, and what I thought was a quirk only they and I shared, less appetite for social interaction. Antonia and Alma (and Alvarez) are writers and feel less desire to be out there in the book biz world, making a name for themselves, or hanging out at dinner parties, exchanging pleasantries or jockeying for attention.
When talking about Alma and Afterlife I often referenced the Japanese aesthetic of stripping away excess (as in a haiku) so that what remains is charged. Old age does bring richness and accumulation of memory and experience. But it’s also about stripping away and getting to the heart of the matter. Socializing without intimacy can be exciting but also exhausting. “Who has the time for the litter?” to return to Stanley Kunitz’s quote. The rich layers, the sweet core, more and more that’s what I’m after.
Women of a "certain age"
Julia Alvarez:
Even as a younger writer I was always interested in older folks, especially women. Maybe it was that I grew up in an extended family in an oral culture and our viejitas were our libraries, our storytellers, and often the ones with more time to give to us children. That said, writing about women my age now (seventy-three) when I was younger, I can see I often romanticized them or flattened them. I didn’t inhabit them in the same full, achy way I do now that I am spending time in a body with many of its parts reaching their expiration dates.
They also were not the front-row center character, who was usually a younger woman. If an older woman was narrating, she was looking back and telling us about her life as a younger self.
One last thing: when my agent finished reading the draft of my upcoming novel, The Cemetery of Untold Stories, he called it “feral.” I loved the term. I no longer wanted to tame or tidy the wildness and mystery by exerting too much control or caging my characters in too mannered a style or too monitored a plot. I’ve spent a lifetime in this craft. I wanted to get out of my self-constructed and safe craft corral.
Women of a "certain age"
Julia Alvarez:
At one point, Alma, the protagonist, asks herself about what old age as an artist might look like on the page—what some critics refer to as “late style,” often a term used condescendingly. As an older writer, I am more willing to take risks now that I’m no longer in the running for world’s darling writer. I never was, and never will be, and so be it.
What a relief. And the irony is that although I can no longer run fast and bending brings on a debilitating jab of pain in the joints—and I can’t do handstands like your Ana—I have more internal freedom than ever before.
Thoughts? Questions?
"Women of a certain age"
Women from the 1980s on, or thereabouts, took over the mystery genre, and then the historical novel, and re-configured the genres. More specifically, they adopted a woman's perspective on the lives they wrote about, creating female detectives with the attitudes, habits, opinions, problems and perspectives of young women trying to make a living for themselves as professionals in a man's world, and doing so as solo individuals, without husbands, children, or family other than a community of close friends. But as time passed, and other women authors wrote, they adapted genres to their own goals as writers, primarily adding a focus on social issues. Margaret Maron for example consistently tackled the changes brought on by the shift in the North Carolina economy from agriculture to technology.
The changes to the genre were even more profound among the women who wrote historical novels. They resurrected the forgotten history of women and other underrepresented populations, like Geraldine Brooks in Horse, all of Kate Quinn's novels, Secret River, and Salt Creek among Australian novels. In Clark and Division, Naomi Hirahawa wrote about Japanese internment during WWII, Attica Locke about Black lives in the South, and Louise Erdrich about native Americans.
"Women of a certain age"
So perhaps their perspective has shifted slightly, yet again, or it might have changed with just a few authors rather than the many female writers who rewrote the history and mystery genres. Women novelists have always been interested in women's lives, although generally considered insignificant by other writers. But their contributions to history, and literature, are being recognized and some at least seem to be refocusing their novelistic lens, not just on issues important to them, but on women's lives as a subject worth writing about.
There is some historical precedent, not a lot, but some. The Bronte sisters of course, although their novels tend to focus imaginatively on the limited choices available to women during those constrained social eras. And Jane Austen of course, but then again she wrote consistently about the plots, plans, and wisdom of young women who need to find a husband in a society that offered almost no other options for women but marriage. Even as late as WWI (Downton Abbey), only marriage offered the limited freedom that women were allowed in those times. Women essentially had no life, no place in society, unless they married.
Vita Sackville West
Novel: All Passions Spent (1931)
All Passion Spent is written in three parts; the first part introduces Lady Slane at the time of her husband's death. She has been the dutiful wife of a "great man" in public life, Viceroy of India and a member of the House of Lords. Her children plan to share her care between them much as they divide up the family property but, completely unexpectedly, Lady Slane makes her own choice, leaving fashionable Kensington for a cottage in suburban Hampstead that caught her eye decades earlier, where she will live alone, except for her maidservant, and please herself; for example, allowing her descendants to visit only by appointment. Part 1 concludes with Lady Slane's developing friendships with her aged landlord Mr. Bucktrout and his equally aged handyman Mr. Gosheron.
Part 2, shorter than the others, is composed of Lady Slane's thoughts as she muses in the summer sun. She relives youthful events, reviews her life, and considers life's influences and controls, happiness and relationships.
Vita Sackville West
Novel: All Passions Spent (1931)
In Part 3, summer is over and Lady Slane has settled into her cottage, her contemplative life, and approaching end. To her initial annoyance, her past life still connects her to people and events, in particular Mr. FitzGeorge, a forgotten acquaintance from India who has ever since been in love with her. He introduces himself and they form a quiet but playful and understanding friendship.
Mr. FitzGeorge bequeaths his fortune and outstanding art collection to Lady Slane, causing great consternation amongst her children. Lady Slane, avoiding the responsibility of vast wealth, gives FitzGeorge's collection and fortune to the state, much to her children's disgust and her maid's amusement. Lady Slane discovers that relinquishing the fortune has permitted Deborah, her great-granddaughter, to break off her engagement and pursue music, taking the path that Lady Slane herself could not.
Rosamund Pilcher
The Shell Seekers (1987)
Shifting in time, the novel tells the story of Penelope Keeling, the daughter of unconventional parents (an artist father and his much-younger French wife), examining her past and her relationships with her adult children. When the novel opens, Penelope is in her 60s and has just been discharged from the hospital after what was seemingly a heart attack. Penelope's life from young womanhood to the present is revealed in pieces, from her own point of view and those of her children. Much of the forward impetus of the novel involves the work of her father, including a painting called The Shell Seekers, given to Penelope as a wedding present.
New trends?
Demon Copperhead (Barbara Kingsolver) and David Copperfield (Charles Dickens)
He showed me the way into a story that I had found impossible to write for several years. I spent close to three years absolutely sure that I wanted to tell the story of what’s happening to my community, our communities, here in Appalachia as a result of the opioid epidemic. I wanted to tell the bigger story, sort of the whole historical context of how this region has been exploited by big capital for centuries, and how that has shaped the identity of this region and how it has created institutional poverty here. It has suppressed our culture of education. It has done all kinds of things that we Appalachians get blamed for.
I think that outsiders look at this region as backward, this whole hillbilly stereotype of these shiftless people who lack the ambition to get a proper education and pull themselves up by their bootstraps, et cetera. These are my people. I’m Appalachian; that’s my identity. This is home. This is the place and these are the people that I love who make me who I am, who make me happy to be alive.
New trends?
Demon Copperhead and David Copperfield
The story I wanted to tell was about the orphans—really literally the orphans of the epidemic, of whom we have an entire generation here coming up through our school system—how little is being done for them and how these are the throwaway kids of a very wealthy society. Who wants to hear that story? I just really felt blocked. I couldn’t find a way in.
And then through a very strange circumstance, I had a visit from Dickens, this sort of ethereal visit in his house in Broadstairs, and he told me to tell this story. He said, “Look, nobody in my time wanted to hear about these orphans either, and I made them listen.” I sat up and took note. And what he told me is, “Point of view is your tool. Let the child tell the story.” And I started writing it that night on his desk, the desk in his house at Broadstairs where he wrote David Copperfield.
New trends?
Turn of the Key (Ruth Ware) and Turn of the Key (Henry James)
Ur-stories (original, primitive)—Example: Ur-Hamlet
Next Week
Tom Lake, Ann Patchett