Beattie, Ann 1947–

PERSONAL: Born September 8, 1947, in Washington, DC; daughter of James A. and Charlotte (Crosby) Beattie; married David Gates (a psychiatrist), 1972 (divorced, 1980); married Lincoln Perry (an artist). Education: American University, B.A., 1969; University of Connecticut, M.A., 1970, graduate study, 1970–72.

ADDRESSES: Agent—c/o Janklow Nesbit, 598 Madison Ave., New York, NY 10022.

CAREER: Fiction writer. University of Virginia, Char-lottesville, visiting writer and lecturer, 1975–77, 1980, Edgar Allan Poe Professor of Creative Writing, 2001–. Harvard University, Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in English, 1977–78; Northwestern University, writer-in-residence at Center for the Writing Arts, 1994.

MEMBER: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, PEN, Authors Guild, Authors League of America.

AWARDS, HONORS: Guggenheim fellowship, 1978; Award in Literature, American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, 1980; Distinguished Alumni Award, American University, 1980; honorary doctorates from American University, 1983, Colby College, 1991; PEN/ Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, 2001.

WRITINGS:

Distortions (short stories), Doubleday (New York, NY), 1976, reprinted, Vintage Books (New York, NY), 1991.

Chilly Scenes of Winter (novel), Doubleday (New York, NY), 1976, reprinted, Vintage Books (New York, NY), 1991.

Secrets and Surprises (short stories), Random House (New York, NY), 1979.

Falling in Place (novel), Random House (New York, NY), 1980.

The Burning House (short stories), Random House (New York, NY), 1982.

Love Always (novel), Random House (New York, NY), 1985.

Spectacles, Workman Publishing (New York, NY), 1985.

Where You'll Find Me, and Other Stories, Linden Press/Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1986.

Alex Katz (art criticism), Abrams (New York, NY), 1987.

Picturing Will (novel), Random House (New York, NY), 1989.

What Was Mine (short stories), Random House (New York, NY), 1991.

(With Bob Adelman) Americana, Scribner (New York, NY), 1992.

(With Andy Grundberg) Flesh Blood: Photographers' Images of Their Own Families, New York Picture Project (New York, NY), 1992.

(Selector) The American Story: Short Stories from the Rea Award, edited by Michael M. Rea, Ecco Press (Hopewell, NJ), 1993.

Another You, Knopf (New York, NY), 1995.

My Life, Starring Dara Falcon, Knopf (New York, NY), 1997.

(Author of introduction) Mary M. Kalergis, With This Ring: A Portrait of Marriage, Chrysler Museum Library (Norfolk, VA), 1997.

Park City: New and Selected Stories, Knopf (New York, NY), 1998.

Perfect Recall (short stories), Scribner (New York, NY), 2001.

The Doctor's House (novel), Scribner (New York, NY), 2002.

Contributor of essay to Maine: The Seasons, 2001. Contributor of short stories to periodicals, including Esquire, Gentlemen's Quarterly, and New Yorker.

Follies: New Stories (novel), Scribner (New York, NY), 2005.

ADAPTATIONS: Chilly Scenes of Winter was adapted as the movie Head over Heels, United Artists, 1979, and reedited and released as Chilly Scenes of Winter, 1982; Beattie's short story "A Vintage Thunderbird" was adapted by Robert Clem as a short film, 1983. Be-attie recorded four stories from The Burning House for American Audio Prose Library, 1987, and recorded Picturing Will for Dove Books on Tape, 1990.

SIDELIGHTS: Novelist and short-story writer Ann Beattie "has become perhaps our most authoritative translator-transcriber of the speech patterns, nonverbal communications, rituals, and tribal customs of those members (white, largely middle class) of a generation who came of age around 1970—who attended or dropped out of college, smoked dope, missed connections, lived communally, and drifted in and out of relationships with a minimum of self-recognized affect or commitment," commented Robert Towers in the New York Review of Books. Beattie portrays people who feel "that their lives are entirely out of control, that they lack power and cannot be expected to take responsibility for the consequences of their actions," Margaret Atwood observed in the Washington Post Book World, adding, "Adrift in a world of seemingly pointless events … these characters cry out for meaning and coherence, but their world hands them nothing more resonant than popular song titles and T-shirt slogans." In exploring these lives of suburban angst, Beattie has been compared to such American authors as John Cheever, John Updike, Joseph Heller, and J.D. Salinger, all of whom chronicled the angst of a previous generation.

Beattie first honed her craft writing short stories for the New Yorker, and many of these short stories are included in the five collections of her work published between 1976 and 1991: Distortions, Secrets and Surprises, The Burning House, Where You'll Find Me, and Other Stories, and What Was Mine. These collections reflect not only the characteristic concerns and style of their author, but also the evolution of Beattie's fiction. Reviewers tend to hold up Distortions, The Burning House, and What Was Mine as milestones in the author's development as a short-story writer. As New York Times reviewer Anatole Broyard noted of her earliest work: "In spite of a style that virtually eliminates personality, she still manages to haunt the reader with her work. The things her characters say and do are rather like the inexplicable noises very old houses make in the middle of the night. You wake up in alarm when you hear them—what can that be?—then reason asserts itself and you go uneasily back to sleep."

Margaret Atwood hailed The Burning House, Beattie's third story collection, in the New York Times Book Review. "A new Beattie is almost like a fresh bulletin from the front," noted Atwood: "We snatch it up, eager to know what's happening out there on the edge of that shifting and dubious no man's land known as interpersonal relations." In following the relationships in these stories, Beattie shows that "there are no longer any ties that bind, not securely, not definitively: jobs, marriages, the commitments of love, even the status of parent or child—are all in a state of flux." Atwood added that "freedom, that catchword of sixties America, has translated into free fall, or a condition of weightlessness, and the most repeated motifs in the book are variants of this."

Perfect Recall collects eleven long stories portraying older people in sexless alliances. In the New York Times Jennifer Schuessler noted that Beattie is "still writing about the shifting kinship structures of late-twentieth-century America, but in a richer, more expansive, even elegiac register," which she dubbed "freewheeling and soulful." Also writing in the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani noted that even as the stories in Perfect Recall "have become more structured, her authorial stance has shifted as well, her embrace of indirection and omission giving way to a more concerted effort to connect the emotional dots." While Kakutani viewed this change in style as a weakness, Schuessler praised Beattie's evolving approach as "so vivid and beguiling … that it isn't until you look again that you realize how rarely she reaches for metaphors or other figures of speech, and how little she needs to." Nancy Schapiro, in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, gave the collection qualified praise, writing that "Beattie mixes comedy and tragedy in a cohesive way." Still, Schapiro maintained that the stories may be too long, stretching "slight subjects beyond what they can well sustain." Enthusiasts of Perfect Recall also included Los Angeles Times reviewer Bernadette Murphy, who wrote that Beattie has "followed that tradition of portraying families in disintegration" into the new century with "a keen eye, a cutting sense of humor and wonderful depth." Booklist's Brad Hooper also praised the 2000 collection as exhibiting the "primary attraction of Beattie's fiction: people with whom we identify placed in recognizably human situations." "In the end," Schuessler concluded, "these sparkling stories succeed not as diagnoses of the state of our unions, but as stories, pure and simple—slices of life whose larger significance you can't quite pin down, about people who seem as real as any friend of a friend of a friend you've ever heard something interesting about."

Reviewers such as Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post Book World characterized Beattie as a "miniaturist … whose strength is brevity and who seems most sure of herself when loose ends are left untied; as a re-sult," contended Yardley, "she is more suited to the form of the story than that of the novel." Others have seen promise in Beattie's novels Chilly Scenes of Winter, Falling in Place, Love Always, and Picturing Will. Chilly Scenes of Winter offers Beattie's first extended look at the 1960s generation that finds itself lost and disillusioned in the 1970s. In an interview with Bob Miner, Beattie said: "I was going out of my way in the novel to say something about the '60s having passed. It just seems to me to be an attitude that most of my friends and most of the people I know have. They all feel sort of let down, either by not having involved themselves more in the '60s now that the '70s are so dreadful, or else by having involved themselves to no avail. Most of the people I know are let down—they feel cheated—and these are the people I am writing about."

Beattie's second novel, Falling in Place, was published in 1980. At the center of the work is a suburban family descending into chaos. As John Clavin Batchelor explained in the Village Voice, the novel "weaves a trap from which [the central] family cannot escape; their home is destroyed in the end by their own sloth, envy, selfishness, and lack of grace." Although, like Beattie's earlier fiction, the novel is peopled by characters adrift from the 1960s and treats some of the author's characteristic concerns, Richard Locke argued in the New York Times Book Review that Falling in Place "is stronger, more accomplished, larger in every way than anything [Beattie has] done." The critic commented that "there's a new urgency to the characters' feelings and a much greater range and number of characters and points of view." Moreover, Locke pointed out, "These characters are not just quickly sketched-in; no fewer than five have distinct points of view: we learn and come to feel a lot about them and about the way they see the world."

Falling in Place drew critical attention for its almost journalistic depiction of Beattie's world. New York Review of Books contributor Robert Towers remarked that the author's realistic style recalls other media. "On a page-by-page basis the novel held my interest as an exceptionally good documentary film or television program might." Jack Beatty, however, found fault with Beattie's characteristic view of the world. He maintained in a New Republic review that "Beattie's sociological realism is superficial, a reflective realism of accurate detail—what songs are in, what clothes, what expressions—rather than the kind of critical realism whose exemplar is Buddenbrooks." Pearl K. Bell, writing in Commentary, was especially critical of Beattie's style. "Making no comic gestures, taking everything in with her customary neutrality and giving it all back," wrote Bell, "Miss Beattie seems oblivious to her readers, unperturbed by their inevitable irritation and boredom." Locke countered, however, that Falling in Place "establishes Ann Beattie not merely as the object of a cult or as an 'interesting' young novelist, but as a prodigiously gifted and developing writer who has started to come of age."

In her next novel, Love Always, Beattie's "theme is a somber one, the failure of love between parents and children, between husbands and wives, between couples of every sexual persuasion," observed New York Times reviewer Christopher Lehmann-Haupt. The novel tells the story of Nicole Nelson, the fourteen-year-old star of the soap opera Passionate Intensity. Nicole takes a vacation from the Hollywood sets to visit her Aunt Lucy Spencer, who writes a pseudo-advice column for an offbeat magazine in Vermont. These two and the other characters, including Nicole's agent and Lucy's friends and colleagues, all become intertwined in a chaotic free-for-all that ricochets toward the moment when Nicole's mother dies offstage in an accident. In the end, concluded John Updike in the New Yorker, Love Always "is sadder than satire, for it is about the emptiness not of these lives but of our lives."

Love Always "is clearly Beattie; as intelligent as ever about contemporary pain and oddness, but less composed and quite a bit funnier," noted Richard Eder in the Los Angeles Times Book Review. He added that the author's "use of comedy is exuberant, sometimes uncontrolled, occasionally precious." Lehmann-Haupt offered a similar view, suggesting that "Beattie's narrative technique is essentially Keystone comedy, with sudden jump-cuts from one character's point of view to another and outrageous collisions among the various subplots of the comedy." However, in the opinion of Elizabeth Ros-ner in the San Francisco Review of Books, Beattie's humor is not enough. "Instead of the tightly woven display of wit and satire Beattie seems to have intended," Rosner wrote, "the book is a loose collection of plot-lines going nowhere." She concluded, "This novel is missing both intensity and passion, and the weak humor it contains is inadequate to take their place."

The novel Picturing Will "is a bitter-sweet story that captures the psychological terrain of parenthood with the sure hand and accuracy of a photographer," observed Tim Falconer in Quill & Quire. "In fact, photography is a central image in the book." The book follows Jody, a small-town portrait photographer with artistic aspirations, her young son, Will, her lover, Mel, and her ex-husband, Wayne. As the novel progresses, Will's mother becomes captivated by her emerging career as an artist and his father drops out of the picture; only his "stepfather" comes forward to give him the love and affection expected of a parent. In its portrayal of Will and his family, Merle Rubin commented in the Christian Science Monitor, the novel "focuses on the peculiarities of the parent-child relationship in a world of splintered families and parents whose attitudes run the gamut from intense empathy to outright refusal of responsibility." The events of the novel make clear, in Rubin's words, "that adults … cannot always calculate the effect they have on children; that a child's unfathomable mixture of imagination and ignorance, vulnerability and resilience, exposes him to danger and hurt while protecting him in unexpected ways."

T. Coraghessan Boyle presented his evaluation of Picturing Will in the New York Times Book Review, noting that Beattie "has created a surprising, lyrical and deeply affecting work that is both radical in its movement and perfectly attuned to its telling." "Her style," Boyle added, "has never been better suited to a longer work, and she writes out of a wisdom and maturity that are timeless. But look to the details, the small things. They are everything here." Boyle characterized Picturing Will as Beattie's "best novel since Chilly Scenes of Winter … and its depth and movement are a revelation."

Published in 2002, The Doctor's House began as a novella and developed into a novel told from several viewpoints. The story follows Andrew and Nina and their experiences growing up as children of an abusive father. For their mother, the doctor's estranged wife, marital infidelity drives her to drink. Because the doctor never gets to speak for himself, readers must determine for themselves the trustworthiness of the portrait these three narrators create. "It's a challenge to glean the truth," wrote Booklist's Donna Seaman, adding that the novel's structure creates "an aura of almost sacred mystery." A Publishers Weekly contributor expressed dissatisfaction with Beattie's technique, noting that the narrators' "gossip, self-pity and self-deception undermine the trauma." A Kirkus Reviews contributor also complained that, while the novel is "smartly written … one balks at the time spent in the company of these relentlessly unhappy people." Like Library Journal reviewer Starr E. Smith, who praised Beattie's "forceful prose," an Economist writer noted that the novelist "conjures up a wholly believable world, cruel and unattractive as that world might be." With The Doctor's House Beattie continues to demonstrate "her gift for revealing the dark truths at the core of human relationships," summed up Jo Ann Beard in a review for O magazine.

In her short stories and novels, Beattie continues to chronicle the lives of those people who came of age in the 1960s, following them throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s and the new century. "Beattie's power and influence … arise from her seemingly resistless immersion in the stoic bewilderment of a generation without a cause," explained John Updike in the New Yorker, "a generation for whom love as well as politics is a consumer item too long on the shelves and whose deflationary mood is but dimly brightened by the background chirping of nostalgia-inducing pop tunes and the faithful attendance of personable pet dogs." "Beattie is a master of indirection," Boyle maintained. "Her stories are propelled not so much by event as by the accumulation of the details that build a life as surely as the tumble and drift of sediment builds shale or sandstone. Pay attention to the small things, she tells us. All the rest will fall in place." Thus, Murphy maintained in the Los Angeles Times, "Those who approach Beattie's work with the attention she demands and a willingness to engage in equal measure their brains, intuitions and hearts will … be rewarded in some indefinable, but life-affirming way."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 8, 1978, Volume 13, 1980, Volume 18, 1981, Volume 40, 1986, Volume 63, 1991.

Contemporary Novelists, 7th edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 2001.

Dictionary of Literary Biography: Volume 218: American Short-Story Writers since World War II, Second Series, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1999.

Montresor, Jaye Berman, editor, The Critical Response to Ann Beattie, Greenwood Press (Westport, CT), 1993.

Murphy, Christina, Ann Beattie, G.K. Hall (Boston, MA), 1986.

Rainwater, Catherine, and William J. Scheick, editors, Contemporary American Women Writers: Narrative Strategies, University Press of Kentucky (Lexington, KY), 1985, pp. 9-25.

Short Story Criticism, Volume 11, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1992.

PERIODICALS

America, May 12, 1990, P.H. Samway, interview with Beattie, pp. 469-471; October 12, 1991, p. 253.

American Spectator, April, 1990, p. 45

Atlantic, December, 1976, p. 114; June, 1980, p. 93.

Book, March-April, 2002, Penelope Mesic, review of The Doctor's House, p. 72.

Booklist, November 15, 2000, Brad Hooper, review of Perfect Recall, p. 586; December 1, 2001, Donna Seaman, review of The Doctor's House, p. 605.

BookPage, February, 2002, review of The Doctor's House, p. 18.

Boston Globe, April 20, 1987, p. 23; January 21, 1990, p. B49; February 3, 1990, p. 9; May 26, 1991, p. A13.

Christian Science Monitor, September 29, 1976, p. 19; January 31, 1979, p. 19; October 23, 1979, Maggie Lewis, "The Sixties: Where Are They Now? Novelist Ann Beattie Knows," pp. B6-B10; June 4, 1980, p. 17; February 9, 1983, p. 15; August 26, 1985, p. 21; November 10, 1986, p. 30; February 5, 1990, p. 12.

Commentary, February, 1977, p. 62; February, 1979, p. 71; July, 1980, pp. 59-61; March, 1983, Joseph Epstein, "Anne Beattie and the Hippoisie," pp. 54-58.

Commonweal, September 6, 1985, p. 474; May 18, 1990, p. 322.

Contemporary Literature, winter, 1990, Steven R. Cen-tola, interview with Beattie, pp. 405-422.

Detroit Free Press, March 10, 2002, review of The Doctor's House, p. 4G.

Economist, March 9, 2002, review of The Doctor's House.

Entertainment Weekly, March 1, 2002, review of The Doctor's House, p. 74.

Esquire, July, 1985, Richard Ford, "Beattie Eyes," pp. 107-108.

Five Points, spring-summer, 1997, Robert W. Hill, "Ann Beattie," pp. 26-60.

Georgia Review, winter, 1999, Erin McGraw, review of Park City, p. 775.

Globe and Mail (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), March 17, review of Perfect Recall, p. D16; March 2, review of The Doctor's House, p. D3.

Horizon, Volume 25, 1982, Jay Parini, "A Writer Comes of Age," pp. 22-24.

Hudson Review, spring, 1977, p. 150; fall, 1977, Peter Glassman, review of Distortions, p. 447; summer, 1983, p. 359; winter, 1999, review of Park City, p. 759.

Kirkus Reviews, December 1, 2001, review of The Doctor's House, p. 1622.

Library Journal, December, 2000, Mary Szczesiul, review of Perfect Recall, p. 194; January, 2002, Starr E. Smith, review of The Doctor's House, p. 148.

Literary Review, Volume 27, number 2, Larry McCaf-fery and Gregory Sinda, "A Conversation with Ann Beattie," pp. 165-177.

London, March, 1983, p. 87.

London Review of Books, December 5, 1985, p. 22.

Los Angeles Times, January 18, 1990, Josh Getlin, "Novelist Focuses on Childhood Isolation," pp. E14-E15; May 2, 1991, p. E7; December 28, 2000, Bernadette Murphy, review of Perfect Recall, p. E3.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, June 9, 1985, p. 3; October 12, 1986, p. 2; July 19, 1987, p. 6; January 21, 1990, p. 3.

Maclean's, June 23, 1980, p. 52; July 1, 1985, p. 65; February 26, 1990, p. 54; August 19, 1991, p. 43.

Michigan Quarterly Review, summer, 1993, James Plath, "Counternarrative: An Interview with Ann Beattie," pp. 359-379.

Ms., December, 1976, p. 45; January, 1979, p. 42; July, 1980, p. 28; July, 1985, p. 16.

Nation, October 30, 1982, p. 441.

New England Review, Volume 1, 1979, Blanche H. Gel-fant, "Ann Beattie's Magic Slate or the End of the Sixties," pp. 374-384.

New Republic, June 7, 1980, p. 34; July 15, 1985, p. 42.

Newsweek, August 23, 1976, p. 76; January 22, 1979, p. 76; May 5, 1980, p. 86; June 17, 1985, p. 81; January 22, 1990, p. 62.

New York, January 22, 1990, p. 30.

New Yorker, November 29, 1976, John Updike, "Seer-esses," pp. 164-166; June 9, 1980, p. 148; August 5, 1985, p. 80; December 10, 2001, review of Perfect Recall, p. 106.

New York Review of Books, May 15, 1980, p. 32; July 18, 1985, p. 40; May 31, 1990, p. 33; August 15, 1991, pp. 9-11.

New York Times, August 24, 1976, p. 33; January 3, 1979; January 14, 1979, Gail Godwin, review of Falling in Place, p. 14; May 11, 1980, Joyce Maynard, "Visiting Ann Beattie," p. 14; September 25, 1982, p. 16; September 26, 1982, Margaret Atwood, review of The Burning House, p. 1; May 27, 1985, p. 13; October 1, 1986, p. C23; January 4, 1990, p. C20; April 23, 1991, p. C16; September 24, 1995, Sven Birkerts, review of Another You, p. 12; January 2, 2001, Michiko Kakutani, review of Perfect Recall, p. E9; January 14, 2001, Jennifer Schuessler, review of Perfect Recall, p. 7; February 26, 2002, Michiko Kakutani, review of The Doctor's House, p. E7; March 10, 2002, Rand Richards Cooper, review of The Doctor's House, p. 11.

New York Times Book Review, August 15, 1976, p. 14; May 11, 1980, Richard Locke, "Keeping Cool," pp. 1, 38-39; June 2, 1985, p. 7; October 12, 1986, p. 10; June 28, 1987, p. 24; January 7, 1990, p. 1; May 31, 1990, p. 33; May 26, 1991, p. 3; May 11, 1997, p. 10; June 28, 1998, Lorrie Moore, "A House Divided," p. 15; July 25, 1999, review of Park City, p. 24; December 5, 1999, review of Park City, p. 105; January 14, 2001, Jennifer Schuessler, review of Perfect Recall, p. 7; June 3, 2001, review of Perfect Recall, p. 26; December 2, 2001, review of Perfect Recall, p. 66; February 17, 2002, review of The Doctor's House, p. 22; March 3, 2002, Scott Veale, review of Perfect Recall, p. 20; March 10, 2002, Rand Richards Cooper, review of The Doctor's House, p. 11; March 24, 2002, review of The Doctor's House, p. 18; June 2, 2002, review of The Doctor's House, pp. 22-23; March 2, 2003, Scott Veale, review of The Doctor's House, p. 28.

O, February, 2002, Jo Ann Beard, review of The Doctor's House, p. 114.

Partisan Review, Volume 50, 1983, Pico Iyer, "The World according to Beattie," pp. 548-553.

Ploughshares, fall, 1995, Don Lee, "About Ann Beattie," pp. 231-235.

Publishers Weekly, November 20, 2000, review of Perfect Recall, p. 44; November 19, 2001, review of Perfect Recall, p. 34; December 17, 2001, review of The Doctor's House, p. 63.

Quill & Quire, February, 1990, p. 27; May, 1991, p. 30.

Rapport, Volume 21, 2000, review of Perfect Recall, p. 18.

Review of Contemporary Fiction, spring, 1999, Brian Evenson, review of Park City, p. 184; fall, 2002, Suzanne Scanlon, review of The Doctor's House, pp. 141-142.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch (St. Louis, MO), January 7, 2001, Nancy Schapiro, "Beattie's Short Stories Are Long on Local Detail," p. F10; April 14, 2002, Nancy Schapiro, review of The Doctor's House, p. F10.

San Francisco Chronicle, February 21, 2001, Heidi Benson, "Ann Beattie Makes Eye Contact," p. C1; February 17, 2002, Jane Ganahl, "Ann Beattie; You Can't Pin a Label on This 'Lifer'," p. 2.

San Francisco Review of Books, summer, 1985, p. 18.

Saturday Review, August 7, 1976, p. 37.

Southern Review, winter, 1992, David Wyatt, "Ann Beattie," pp. 145-159.

Story Quarterly, Volume 7-8, 1979, G.E. Murray, "A Conversation with Ann Beattie," pp. 62-68.

Time, May 12, 1980, p. 79; July 1, 1985, p. 60; January 22, 1990, p. 68.

Times Literary Supplement, March 27, 1981, p. 333; October 25, 1985, p. 1203; August 14, 1987, p. 873.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), October 5, 1986, p. 3; May 24, 1987, p. 4; January 31, 1988, p. 7; January 28, 1990, p. 3; May 5, 1991, p. 5; July 19, 1992, p. 8; February 25, 2001, review of Perfect Recall, p. 3.

Us Weekly, January 22, 2001, Michael Tyrell, review of Perfect Recall, p. 39.

Victoria, February, 2002, Michele Slung, "Romancing the Word," pp. 38-39.

Village Voice, August 9, 1976, Bob Miner, "Ann Beattie: I Write Best When I Am Sick," pp. 33-34; March 26, 1979, p. 86; June 2, 1980, p. 38.

Vogue, January, 1990, p. 106.

Voice Literary Supplement, November, 1982, p. 6.

Wall Street Journal, January 19, 2001, Gabriella Stern, review of Perfect Recall, p. W9.

Washington Post, February 4, 1990, p. F1.

Washington Post Book World, October 3, 1976, p. F5; January 7, 1979, p. E1; May 25, 1980, p. 1; September 19, 1982, p. 3; May 26, 1985, p. 3; January 28, 1990, p. 5; May 12, 1991, p. 8; October 24, 1999, review of Park City, p. 10; February 4, 2001, review of Perfect Recall, p. 15; February 10, 2002, review of The Doctor's House, p. T06; March 17, 2002, review of Perfect Recall, p. 12.

Weber Studies, spring, 1990, Neila C. Seshachari, "Picturing Ann Beattie: A Dialogue," pp. 12-36.

Webster Review, fall, 1985, Barbara Schapiro, "Ann Beattie and the Culture of Narcissism," pp. 86-101.

Women's Review of Books, April, 1984, p. 5.

World Literature Today, spring, 1999, Deirdre Neilen, review of Park City, p. 333; winter, 1999, review of My Life, Starring Dara Falcon, p. 145.

Yale Review, summer, 1977, David Thorburn, review of Chilly Scenes of Winter, pp. 585-586; Volume 85, 1997, Lorin Stein, "Fiction in Review," pp. 156-166.

OTHER

Ann Beattie Interview with Kay Bonetti (sound recording), American Audio Prose Library (Columbia, MO), 1987.