I Know You

“I Know You” is a collection of short stories about growing up that is centered on and meant for adults or near-adults. It deals with the beauty that comes from observing and asking questions, urgently and of everything including yourself, but has much more to do with the pain of losing innocence. To trace the full extent of that pain, each of my stories evoke some significant delights of childhood: in “A Box in Manhattan” it is a surety about people, in “I Know You” it is a glittering fantasy about perfect love, in “Fragile Things Outside the Treehouse” it is a feeling of safety. The characters are at different stages of life—early high school, senior in college, early thirties—but they are all stubborn women who deny until the last possible moment that those significant childhood delights cannot survive in the world as they have come to know it.