![\"Cover](\"http:\/\/ecx.images-amazon.com\/images\/I\/41OIi37MnDL._SL300_.jpg\" "\\"Cover")
<\/a><\/p>\nThe truth is, my reluctance to this particular work was born from my own embarrassment. Last year Ms. Meloy came to read at Vanderbilt, and though I enjoyed the reading, I was having a fit of awkward. It comes on sometimes, despite my best intentions at nonchalance, and there I was, fidgeting and unable to speak, when after she sat in the hallway outside the reading room, selling and signing copies of her book behind her plastic foldout chair. The book was around $15\u2014a price I didn\u2019t feel like paying at the time\u2014and there I was in front of her, feeling the money drawn from my hands, and gasping out stupidly that I loved Montana, too! She signed it \u201cFor Liz, a fellow Big Sky fan,\u201d and I left feeling outraged at my own jellyfish spine, convinced I would never read her book, more out of principle than anything else.<\/p>\n
Over the next few months, I glowered at the book on my shelf. I felt upset when The New Yorker\u00a0<\/em>published her story “The Proxy Marriage” in May, and even more upset when I actually enjoyed it.\u00a0When another story of hers, \u201cDemeter,\u201d was published in The New Yorker <\/i>two weeks ago, I decided to bring Both Ways <\/i>home for Thanksgiving break\u2014not to read it, but to pass it off to someone else, so I wouldn\u2019t have to look at it anymore.\u00a0The book was abandoned to a countertop, and then my cousin\u2014also a writer and reader\u2014picked it up.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t know about that one,\u201d I said, eyeing it narrowly as she flipped through the first pages. “Don’t blame me if it’s bad.”<\/p>\n But soon she had finished the first story, and over the course of the day, juggling her 6-month-old on her arm, my cousin read Meloy’s book. At 11 p.m., she was still reading. All I can say is that I was confused. When I went to bed around midnight, my cousin stayed up with the book.<\/p>\n The next morning I asked her how it went. Guess what? She\u2019d loved it.<\/p>\n So I began to reconsider. After all, it was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year<\/i>. After all, my revulsion at the read was petty, idiotic, and nonsensical.<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019ve got to read it,\u201d my cousin said. \u201cReally.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cOkay, okay,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n I packed it in my bag, drank a glass of wine as I waited in the airport, and flipped through the pages to the first story. Then I read the second story, the third, and the rest of the book over the next week.<\/p>\n Oh my Lord, was it good.<\/p>\n As George R.R. Martin once said, \u201cA reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.\u201d<\/p>\n For me, good fiction occurs when you are shocked into the consciousness of a fully realized character, in a fully realized situation. Good fiction opens us up to new identities. What\u2019s so wonderful about Meloy\u2019s Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It<\/i> is that it allows the reader not just to have new experiences, but also to return to something recognizable\u2014to encounter a long lost feeling\u2014really a kind of subconscious tone of experience that\u2019s been buried deep or glossed over by its banal surface. Her stories strike deep emotional notes subtly, gracefully, and with almost no visible artifice. It\u2019s astounding.<\/p>\n As Curtis Sittenfeld put it in his review of Meloy\u2019s collection, \u201cThey are people who act irrationally, against their own best interests \u2014 by betraying those they care about, making embarrassing romantic overtures and knowingly setting in motion situations they\u2019d rather avoid \u2014 and Meloy\u2019s prose is so clear, calm and intelligent that their behavior becomes eminently understandable.\u201d<\/p>\n He goes on to say that her characters act with \u201ca kind of banal, daily desperation\u201d\u2014perhaps that\u2019s the feeling I recognized in myself, when reading her prose.<\/p>\n Every page I turned I heard myself apologizing to Meloy in my head\u2014I\u2019m sorry, I\u2019m sorry, I\u2019m sorry\u2014<\/i>how could I have dismissed her, this?<\/p>\n At the same time, though, I\u2019m happy with how things turned out. If you\u2019ve hardened your heart to a book, and the prose stills find a way to maneuver through that tough casing, you know you\u2019ve come across something great, something beautiful, that will be a part of you for a long time. Maybe forever.<\/p>\n Have you ever read a book you were certain you would despise? Someone forced it on you, for one reason or another\u2014class or a kindly but pushy relative\u2014and every ounce of you resisted. You took the loathsome lump of a novel in your hands and a frown unfolded from every crook in your body. Your […]![\"190347521720777295_2VqSKbmb_c\"](\"http:\/\/writedrunkandeditsober.files.wordpress.com\/2012\/11\/190347521720777295_2vqskbmb_c.jpg?w=490&h=490\")
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