![]() ![]() I giggled and hiccupped - a parody of a drunk person, a character in a bad romcom. I suppose in a way it made sense in the context of the day and our flirtation. I was surprised, of course, but not so surprised as to jump back or make a comment. It was when Sarah and I went outside to share a cigarette, sitting in a dark corner of the country house garden that she kissed me. 'I’m really glad you’re happy,' I said back, helping him to mop it up. 'I’m really glad you like her,' he said to me that evening, spilling wine over himself. We laughed a lot and I was pleased for Steven - my best friend, who had been treated so badly by partners in the past. I found her charming and funny - she complimented me on my dress, my hair, my shoes. In hindsight I suppose we were flirting in a way that felt completely devoid of meaning or jeopardy because we were both straight. I’d spent time with them as a couple but before this wedding Sarah and I had never really talked. ![]() But then he brought her to meet us and she was perfect: fun but calm, wild without the violence. We’d winced behind his back when he said he’d found someone he thought he could have a future with. His relationships, up to Sarah, seemed to me more like protracted acts of masochism. ![]() ![]() Our whole group had been pleased the first time Steven brought Sarah to meet us he’d spent years dating women with wild temperaments who’d end up trashing his room or threatening to set his car alight unless he capitulated to whatever demand they had. We’d spent our year abroad together, living out a silly, sepia-tinged Italian fantasy - ' che bello! che dolce!' - and then graduated and moved to London and ended up with a circle of six or seven close friends. Steven and I had known each other since university. She was my best friend Steven’s* girlfriend. We were acquaintances, really, rather than friends. This is what I told myself the next day - this is how I wrote it off when Sarah* and I had sex. The story takes in the themes of loneliness, alienation, and the need for human connection and friendship.The hysteria of nighttime at a wedding - everyone an inflated version of themselves, like bubbles close to popping. The story is about a man trying to give up alcohol dependency in a rehabilitation centre, and his attempts to call his estranged wife and current girlfriend, hence the story’s title, ‘Where I’m Calling From’. Let’s conclude this pick of classic friendship stories with a short story by the American writer Raymond Carver (1938-88), originally published in the New Yorker in 1982. Raymond Carver, ‘ Where I’m Calling From’ But Edith and Sabitha’s cruel trick will have terrible ramifications for poor Johanna. Edith convinces Sabitha to forge love letters from Sabitha’s father to Johanna, the unmarried housekeeper for Sabitha. This story, set in Ontario in Canada, focuses on the friendship between Sabitha and Edith. The unsettling story sees a group of friends discussing how to hang their friend for committing an unnamed offence.Īlice Munro, ‘ Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage’.Īlice Munro (born 1931) is one of the leading contemporary writers of short stories. This short story was first published in his 1976 anthology, Amateurs. Many of his stories are deliberately absurdist, with hilarious but sometimes unnerving results. The American writer Donald Barthelme (1931-89) is sometimes labelled as a ‘postmodernist’ writer (a label he was not entirely comfortable with, but reluctantly accepted) and, occasionally, ‘metafiction’ (a label he was less happy with). ![]()
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