“The woman, who is me—why pretend otherwise?—wants to love a man she cannot have.”
—The opening salvo of Diane Williams’s story “All American”
This sentence has it all: complexity, risk, play, cadential perfection; it puts you on notice that nothing in Williams’s story will be business as usual.
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Dawn Raffel's most recent book, The Strange Case of Dr. Couney, was chosen as one of NPR’s best books of 2018. Previous books include a memoir, The Secret Life of Objects; a novel, Carrying the Body; and two story collections, Further Adventures in the Restless Universe and In the Year of Long Division. Her writing has been published in O, The Oprah Magazine, BOMB, New Philosopher, The San Francisco Chronicle, Conjunctions, Black Book, Open City, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, Arts & Letters, The Quarterly, NOON, and numerous other periodicals and anthologies. She currently works as an independent editor for individuals and creative organizations, specializing in memoir, short stories, and narrative nonfiction. She is also a certified yoga instructor and teaches embodied creative writing.
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Ah yes. I love this sentence. This whole story, in fact. I think any single sentence from it could be grabbed and singled out as a “sentence I love.”
In my thesaurus, Diane Williams is synonymous with “acuity,” and I say this not only because the word “acuity” is derived from acus the Latin word for “needle,” but also because just by looking at the word itself you get a cut, all of which mirrors the very incisiveness of Williams’s prose as well as the almost x-ray strength of her vision.