“No One's a Mystery” was originally published in the August 1985 issue of Harper's Magazine. It was collected in Time with Children (1987). It is currently most readily available in Fiction 100: An Anthology of Short Fiction (Prentice-Hall).

When I think of great initiation stories, it's always Joyce's “Araby” that immediately comes to mind, and after that Sherwood Anderson's powerful American tale with its distinctive race-track setting, “I Want to Know Why.” Between the two of them, these stories, with their near-miraculous fusion of the vernacular and deep and wondering portrayals of the crucial moment in the education of two quite distinctly different adolescent boys, one a turn-of-the-century Irish Catholic from Dublin, the other a country boy from the Middle West, set the highest aesthetic standard for this variety of story. Moreover, they reveal to us what all short fiction in essence cries out to be.

Lyric poetry!

Short stories are as close as I get myself to writing lyric poems, and these two stories come as close as any in creating the effect of the lyric, with its intense recollection of a certain way of having been—usually, it's the memory of having been deeply in love, with the hope of having that love reciprocated— and the shock of the loss of that hope. It's nothing short of miraculous the way these two stories reveal to a young man just how much of the chaos and near-insanity of his floundering childhood and youth present a certain pattern of understanding and loss. A story such as this thrills you with the intensity of its unfolding, gives you hope that in your own hopelessness you are not alone, and creates in your blood a particular emotional effect that we associate usually with only the finest lyric poems.

But after all of the polemics and lamenting and honest skull-scratching that we've all suffered through, I have to say, during the past twenty years with respect to the question of equality for women in the modem world, the question comes to mind: what's a girl to do? Where does a young woman go to find a portrayal of female initiation that is as beautifully made and emotionally unsettling as the Joyce and Anderson stories?