What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver

He says his kids were crazy and so was his wife, Myrna, who eventually fell for another man named Ross whom she met at Alcoholics Anonymous. He was surprised to see his elderly single mother kissing a man on the sofa upstairs. The manuscript version of the same title appears in Beginners (2009).Ī man reflects 'about three years back' on his struggle to come to grips with a couple of troublesome relationships. The narrator asks the photographer in for coffee. 'Viewfinder' Ī hook-handed man takes a photograph of the narrator's house from the street, then sells it to him.

The story was adapted in the 2010 film Everything Must Go starring Will Ferrell and written and directed by Dan Rush. She mocks the record player and records he gave them, saying: 'Will you look at this shit?' The story ends with her trying to make sense of the man's situation before quitting her wondering altogether. Then the drinking man dances with the girl, and she says to him: 'You must be desperate or something.' Several weeks later, the woman is telling her friends about the man at his yard sale. When the music begins the man asks the couple to dance. The drinking man tells the young woman to put a record on. They haggle a little over prices and buy a TV and a bed.

A young couple stops by to select furniture for their new apartment. The reader gets the feeling that he may be selling all his possessions, looking to start life anew. It tells the story of a drinking man overseeing his yard sale. The Quarterly West version incorporated many of Lish's suggested changes, while the final version was 9% shorter. The story was first published in Quarterly West in Autumn 1978 and later in The Paris Review in Spring 1981. In 1977, Carver submitted a story with this title to Esquire, which Gordon Lish subsequently edited and retitled 'I Am Going to Sit Down', but no version ever appeared in Esquire. Considered by many one of American literature's most ambitious short-story collections, it was this collection that turned Raymond Carver into a household name in the publishing industry. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love is a 1981 collection of short stories by American writer Raymond Carver, as well as the title of one of the stories in the collection.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver