What It Costs to Get the Life You Want

The Atlantic

09-05-2025

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The wives in Mavis Gallant's stories aren't happy. In 'The Flowers of Spring,' from 1950, a woman named Estelle visits her paralyzed husband, Malcolm, at the hospital. She feels sorry for him but also resentful and trapped, and she wonders whether the wives of other disabled men also feel 'despair and discontent.' She'd 'been a charming bride'; now, a few years later, she sees herself as a 'delinquent wife.' She has no desire, despite the doctor's entreaties, to discuss her husband's condition.
First, here are five new stories from The Atlantic 's books section:
Many of Gallant's characters are 'strays,' as Vivian Gornick wrote last week. They are out of place in the world, supremely lonely, seeking something better or different in life. Three of the Canadian writer's later stories, which appear in the collection Varieties of Exile, focus on a woman named Lily Quale, who agrees to marry a humdrum diplomat named Steve Burnet, despite not loving him. She trusts that Steve will get her out of provincial Canada—but although he makes good on his promise, taking her to live in Europe, Lily has no interest in spending her life tied down to this kind yet dull man, and she leaves him not long after they arrive in the south of France. Why is she willing to do something so reckless to get what she wants? Gornick observes that Lily lives in a time when a woman couldn't make her way in the world alone. 'Whatever the future held for her, she was bound to pursue it through a man in whom she aroused desire: the only card she ever had to play,' she writes. Some women used that connection to advance, as Lily does. Others, Gornick notes, spent too much time with 'one Steve Burnet or another,' and the person they never became 'hardened' inside them.
Women today might have more freedom and more choices than Gallant and her characters did—but the kind of burdenlessness that Gallant's women seek can still be out of reach. Gallant herself yearned to be 'perfectly free,' Gornick writes, and found that the only way she could do it was by living in Paris, where she 'never felt at ease,' among people she never felt intimate with. She chose to have neither children nor a husband (after a brief youthful marriage) and was thus able to devote herself to her work. For her characters, freedom is more urgent than security; they make their choices without looking back.
But some women may feel more ambivalent. Even if these decisions are no longer as binary as they were in Gallant's era, attaining total independence in the 21st century can still mean forgoing, or de-emphasizing, the kinds of attachments that place demands upon us—things such as marriage, children, and a steady career. And in this less black-and-white world, where women have the opportunity to balance family, work, and leisure, people who feel pulled toward multiple kinds of fulfillment may find that dedicating themselves to one over the other is less simple than it was decades ago. There are now more paths to choose from, but that doesn't necessarily mean the choices are any easier to make.
The Writer Who Understood Aloneness
By Vivian Gornick
Mavis Gallant's short stories are about people, especially women, who prefer to live on the social margins. I cherish one of them most of all.
What to Read
Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya, by Jamaica Kincaid
Kincaid's account of her three-week trek in Nepal—undertaken to collect rare seeds with several botanist friends—is sure to make any reader appreciate their local flora. Kincaid views the Himalayas through the lens of her own home garden in Vermont, searching for plants she can cultivate in the North Bennington climate as her group climbs up through the mountains. I often paused as I read to look up the species she mentions, shocked to see some of the huge plants that grow naturally in alpine zones. She approaches the experience as a true amateur, always ready to learn something new, and her honest reflections on the trip's difficulties make the book intimate and amusing. Reading Among Flowers feels like traveling alongside Kincaid: You can experience the highs of the journey (gorgeous vistas, rare native-plant sightings, camaraderie and companionship) alongside the lows (leeches, arduous climbs, Maoist guerrilla groups) without ever having to navigate the forbidding range yourself. — Bekah Waalkes
Out Next Week
📚 Freedom Season, by Peniel E. Joseph
📚 The Emperor of Gladness, by Ocean Vuong
📚 Happiness Forever, by Adelaide Faith
Your Weekend Read
Is This the Worst-Ever Era of American Pop Culture?
By Spencer Kornhaber
What art can do is remind us that our lives are not simply shaped by systems—they're also a product of our own thoughts, inspirations, and relations. My favorite new TV show of this decade is HBO's Fantasmas, a comedy created by the former Saturday Night Live writer Julio Torres. It's a magical-realist depiction of a near future in which people live with bumbling AI assistant bots in housing complexes owned by corporations such as Bank of America. Torres's character wants to make surreal films about animals, but is being pressured to cash in on his backstory as a gay immigrant. (A streaming service run by Zappos—yes, the shoe company—commissions a screenplay called How I Came Out to My Abuela.) This subject matter asks, quite darkly, whether the artistic spirit can survive modern life. But the imaginative way the show is rendered—in a dreamscape of interconnected skits, featuring handcrafted set decoration, performed by talents from today's offbeat comedy world—offers a hopeful answer.