Photo by Beowulf Sheehan
Roxana Robinson has written six novels and two short fiction collections—plus her widely acclaimed biography Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life. Her stories generally gravitate to privileged lives, to East Coast families with summer homes and positions to uphold. But as any number of critics have pointed out, no one who becomes immersed in her tales of heroin addiction, PTSD, and the complications of divorce would ever apply such reductive labels such as domestic, WASP, or women’s stories to her fiction.
She once told Publishers Weekly she knows that in contemporary letters “any mention of WASPs” is supposed to be ironic. Her work, though, follows a more classic tradition, showing how the world works through the lens of the well-born and well-meaning who don’t always realize that their actions carry monumental ripple effects on those with less power, including their own children.