L/A/R/K

newyorker:

“She would leave him, she thought, as soon as the petunias bloomed,” the writer announces, before going on to tell how “she” finally manages to leave behind her petunias and overbearing husband and then tries to make a go of it in New York, only to have her husband drag her back home six days later, crushed and exhausted, reduced to taking a perverse pleasure in thwarting his determination to rescue a garden she knows he cannot abide. “McCarthy is always her best heroine,” someone later observed. And there is much truth to this. But in McCarthy’s best stories no one is spared her irony or her contempt, not even the character she most closely resembles.

Mary McCarthy, Edmund Wilson, and the Short Story that Ruined a Marriage: http://nyr.kr/KOVhZh