Anyway, I was gonna tell you, just because it’s a fun story...” It turns out Katherine Heiny doesn’t only write short stories; she speaks in them. Conversation with the Standard Deviation author is peppered with vignettes, delivered in neat packages with droll punchlines. She’s explaining how for her, the germ of an idea usually begins with something from her own life. Take “Damascus”, from her glorious new collection Games and Rituals, in which a mother believes her son is high on life – before realising, actually, he’s probably just high.
“When I was in high school, I would go out drinking at parties, and I would come home and stand at the foot of my parents’ bed – they’d be, like, in bed reading – and just basically do stand-up for 20 minutes. And my parents never thought this was anything other than, like... spontaneous socialisation,” she says incredulously. Then, one day, her son came home from working at the supermarket, looking really happy. “I thought, ‘He loves his job! He’s high on life!’ And then I was like, ‘I can’t believe I just thought that’.”
