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Liz W's avatar

"To read Carver is to face down that most worrisome of quandaries: what are we to do with the lives that are not remarkable, those lives that everyone else ends up living?" - I am crying.

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Bryan Williams's avatar

I love what you write about the 70s/80s damp-carpet purgatorial feel of Carver. I wonder if for a lot of old-millennial writers/readers from working class families, this aspect means Carver hits a little too close to home. I feel so uncomfortable reading him; he resonates with something from so early in my childhood I can barely articulate or even remember it -- my parents' inability to connect with their older sick relatives, my sense they didn't have enough hours in the day to take care of me and be happy in their own lives, etc.

You could say that about a lot of periods in literature, ofc, but the specific feel of 80s precarity really brings it home to me.

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