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Recently in Salon Mothers Who Think

Problem family
When domestic abuse showed up in my neighborhood, I had to decide whether to help or keep my distance.
By Jill Wolfson
[06/28/99]

The tyranny of fashion
As clothing comes to signify less and less about a person, I wonder if I should bother getting dressed at all.
By Erin J. Aubry
[06/25/99]

Column
Dog day
The death of a beloved friend makes plain the beauty of this world.
By Anne Lamott
[06/24/99]

Kickin' it
Mia Hamm's soccer prowess has finally launched women's sports into the mainstream. But is she ready for icon status?
By Ethan Zindler
[06/23/99]

Wild Thing
Oracles of history
At the turn of the millennium, Kathleen Krull's "They Saw the Future" gives kids a look at futures past.
By Polly Shulman
[06/22/99]

Complete archives for Mothers Who Think

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I wasn't on the list -- no surprise there since I haven't published a story in the New Yorker, or anywhere else for that matter, and in fact technically don't even write fiction, but only think about writing it. Still, I felt a kind of sick little bump when I scanned the table of contents and realized literary fame wasn't going to happen for me in this century.

Contributing to my momentary queasiness: Someone I know in the very vaguest sense is on the list, accompanied by a blurred-edged, overexposed picture of her in a pink silky shirt laughing it up with the rugged, arty male writers on either side of her. A year ago the same magazine ran her first story under the byline "Jhumpa Lahiri, a new author," and now she's essential enough to be included in its end-of-century fiction roundup.

Lahiri may be new to readers of the New Yorker, but she's ancient history to me. We both attended a fiction workshop six years ago at Harvard University summer school. She needed the class to get enough credits to finish up an MFA at Boston University, and she presented story after polished story with a kind of exact, amiable indifference that let us all know just how important this make-up workshop was to her (not very). I was seven months pregnant with my first child and writing with the wavering intensity of the hormonally challenged. I was not the class star.

Flash-forward five years: I was 10 weeks postpartum with baby No. 2, exercising a little, easing back into work, getting enough sleep to at least survive, and even, tentatively, resuming a conjugal life with my husband. The baby was fat and extraordinarily happy, and his older brother seemed genuinely glad to have him around. We were all doing better than I had expected.

Then the new issue of the New Yorker arrived. With an infant in the house, there wasn't time to read anything more profound or less urgent than the grocery list, but I could still flip through the cartoons and glance at the table of contents. And there she was, Jhumpa Lahiri, new author. While I was off procreating, she'd apparently managed to climb her way up the literary ladder from a wannabe fiction workshop to the top of the slush pile.

I skipped the story itself (this wasn't about the actual art, after all) and flipped straight to the contributors' page (thank you, Tina Brown, for adding one), where it said Jhumpa was a fellow in a Provincetown artists' colony and coming out with her first book next year. Standing there in my kitchen with an infant idly gnawing my shoulder, I felt both heavy and hollow. Could it be I was jealous?

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