Annie Dillard, Forever

5 November 2012

It was Annie Dillard’s A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek that made me want to be writer. I mentioned this recently to a friend who studied with her at Wesleyan, and he confirmed two things I’ve often heard about her: she was a chain smoker most of her life, and she’s a generous person.

Revisiting The Maytrees, her last novel—”last” by Dillard’s own account, i.e. in an interview she said she was done with writing—I am reminded of what strikes me, again and again, about her writing: intelligence, humor, strangeness:

She was twenty-three.  She could not imagine that a brave man could shrink from risking one woman’s refusal.  She wanted only a lifelong look at his face and his long-legged, shambly self, broken by intervals of kissing.  After a while she might even, between kisses, look into his eyes.  No time soon.

The Maytrees is a beautiful story, well told.  What a privilege to read it again.