The story is complex, so we'll start with the family: a mother, a father and their two girls, one of whom is fifteen and recently lost her virginity (albeit somewhat unwittingly; she turns to the man directly thereafter and gasps, "Did we go all the way?"). Oldest daughter becomes pregnant. Mothe...
I read this book when it first came out back in 1998. At that point, I was still in middle school and had seen it featured at our library. Through the years I have often thought back on that book and while I couldn't remember precisely what it was about, I knew it involved elephants and for some ...
This is a disturbing book, one that once begun kept me turning the pages. It is very typically Gowdy, meaning that the protagonist is a humanized creep. And that is what marks Gowdy apart from the good writer — the ability to bring to her readers a feeling of understanding, and even some empathy,...
Deep down, beneath the lurid sex and freakish characters, this collection of short stories, We So Seldom Look on Love -- a gorgeous title borrowed from a poem by Frank O'Hara --, has a gooey, warm heart.I think, this book is absolutely divisive. Some people will see Barbara Gowdy's stories as exp...