Let's Do

While the women in Let's Do are hard on themselves, they're also without self-pity. They weather life's quotidian tragedies with grit and determination. But it's not just Meacham's women who are wounded. Bill, in "Good Fences," newly retired and vaguely unhappy, ponders where a line has been crossed after meeting his new neighbor, a young single mother. For other men, like Carter in "The Assignment," such reflection turns malevolent when his girlfriend, frightened by a near-assault, demands that he attack her so that next time she'll be better prepared.

Meacham's stories have a novel's heft; crafted with immediacy and candor, they reveal her uncanny precision in locating those points from which to propel her characters to a different and unexpected place -- a place where there's no second-guessing, and all bets are off. (Spring 2005 Selection)