The writer can choose what he writes about,” said Flannery O’Connor, “but he cannot choose what he is able to make live.

The exciting part of all of this, to me, is that we always have a basis on which to proceed. The reader is out there, and she’s real. She’s interested in life and, by picking up our work, has given us the benet of the doubt.

All we have to do is engage her.

To engage her, all we have to do is value her.

The boldness of this leap teaches us something important about the short story: it is not a documentary or rigorous accounting of the passage of time or a fair-minded attempt to show life as it is really lived; it’s a radically shaped, even somewhat cartoonish (when held up against the tedious real world) little machine that thrills us with the extremity of its decisiveness.

I think, therefore I am wrong, after which I speak, and my wrongness falls on someone also thinking wrongly, and then there are two of us thinking wrongly, and, being human, we can’t bear to think without taking action, which, having been taken, makes things worse.

The story is not there to tell us what to think about happiness. It is there to help us think about it. It is, we might say, a structure to help us think.