Sarah Shun-lien Bynum

I ran away with a boy when I was 16.

He was three years older, and I was enormously flattered that he wanted me to run off with him.

We didn't say we loved each other.

We didn't bring that up.

But my lust for him was great and constant.

I love Joan Silver's work, which I first discovered in 2003 when I was reading the O. Henry Prize anthology.

And she had a story in it called The High Road.

And it was this first-person voice that just leapt out and talked.

dazzled me.

And I have just been such an admirer of her work ever since then.

And each successive book has just been filled with these sharp, indelible voices telling their life stories.

And I get pleasure every time I dive into one of them.

I think the retrospection, there's this mix of retrospection and immediacy where she's looking back on a life and reflecting on the shape of life's meaning.

But then she is able to animate it with this very intimate conversational touch.

and these vivid magical details.

So I love the combination of both this sense of like sweep and perspective and then the just coziness that I feel whenever I'm with one of her narrators and one of her characters.

Yes, and that's one of her great magic tricks is that we meet this character first when she's a 10-year-old and then when she's a 16-year-old and then when she's the mother of two adult children.

And she inhabits each of those experiences with total immediacy.

Like the 10-year-old, I feel as if I'm completely seeing the world through.

through her eyes and then again for the teenager and then again for the older mother.