Stories Were My First Literary Love: An Exclusive Guest Post by Lily King

We love Lily King’s, Writers & Lovers and Euphoria, gorgeous novels about love and ambition. Lily’s following up those dazzling books, both bestsellers, with a luminous story collection, Five Tuesdays in Winter, and we asked her to recommend three of her favorite story collections.
Her name was Connie. She was fifteen and she had a quick, nervous giggling habit of craning her neck to glance into mirrors or checking other people’s faces to make sure her own was all right.
After dozens of short stories by men that inspired five-paragraph essays with the theme “man vs nature” or “man vs man,” our teacher had finally assigned a short story by a woman: “Where Are You Going, Where Have you Been” by Joyce Carol Oates.
 Their father was away at work most of the time and when he came home he wanted supper and he read the newspaper at supper and after supper he went to bed. He didn’t bother talking much to them, but around his bent head Connie’s mother kept picking at her until Connie wished her mother was dead and she herself was dead and it was all over.
God, I loved that story. I was passionate about that story in a way that I had never been passionate about “To Build a Fire” or “The Rocking Horse Winner.”
We hadn’t read short stories in middle school. But this was ninth grade and a new school and a teacher who had studied creative writing as well as literature. The story starts out with humor and cynicism and a bored teenager, unfairly maligned by her family, finding small thrills at the shopping plaza or hamburger counter on a Saturday night. A few pages later Connie has been lulled into submission by lines of songs, masculine cues, and the waning promise of romance.
I wrote an essay about “appearance vs. reality,” how Connie looked and walked and talked differently once she got out of the house, and how she is ultimately tricked (and raped and murdered, though I’m not sure I fully understood that then) by a man doing a similar con on her. But the essay did not capture the way I felt about the story, how I read it over and over, how it was shaping me and helping me understand what I wanted in this world. I wanted to do that, what Oates was doing, create a world in a few pages then flip that world inside out in a way no one would expect.
“My sweet little blue-eyed girl,” he said in a half-sung sigh that had nothing to do with her brown eyes but was taken up just the same by the vast sunlit reaches of the land behind him and on all sides of him—so much land that Connie had never seen before and did not recognize except to know that she was going to it.
The next year that same teacher had us write our own short stories. I wrote about a girl in her parents’ bedroom the night before they separate. I got a much better mark than the ones I got on the essays. He told me I should take his creative writing class the next year. I did. And the year after that, too.
Stories were my first literary love, that unforgiving form that demands perfection and rarely gets it. But when it does—when you fall in and get flipped around—it’s pure magic.
Collections:
Friend of My Youth by Alice Munro—Munro is a genius, as we all know, a true and rare master of this form. She has a powerful authorial presence from the first sentence of every story. I have a story and you are going to sit down and listen to it, she commands, and you obey. The title story of this collection is my favorite of everything she wrote, though the “Runaway” tryptich is a close second.
Sunstroke by Tessa Hadley—a woman’s son comes to her for relationship advice; a young wife and mother kisses another man on a dark lane—unremarkable moments made electrifying by Hadley’s control and detail and ability to create very sexy men.
9 Stories by J. D. Salinger—I know. Salinger. Young girls. Not that I even registered that when this became my bible for at least a decade sometime around 1979. Voice, humor, dialogue, family, pathos, yearning—I responded viscerally to all those elements in this collection. I think, too, I was attracted to all the intimations of real terror of the world, all the emotion roiling beneath the surface, right alongside a deep delight in our quirky humanity.