Had a dreary class tonight after which an enormous fifty-year-old matron who can neither spell, punctuate, nor write coherent English cornered me to … - Richard Yates

Tracing the cause of his alienation and its manifold effects, Yates would speak of his mother with a scathing, obsessive hatred that sometimes brought him to the brink of tears.

Yeah, well, you're right, but what the hell; there's nothing anybody can do about it. Besides, that's ancient history now. I don't even think about it much any more, from - you know - from day to day. Good, she said. It's always important to keep the day-to-day stuff separate from the ancient history, isn't it.

All of this, of course, was but a fleeting distraction from Yates's ultimate concern. "Why aren't you writing?" he'd hector Childress and the others—or, if a given story was already written (and set in type), "Why aren't you revising this? You should be constantly revising!" Nothing was finished in Yates's eyes, not even his own best work: "How could I improve it? he'd fire back [...] Such zeal had the same effect on Childress as on Monica two years before—he began to realise that if this was what a true vocation involved, then perhaps he should consider something else.