But this isn't a lecture course. The only way any of us can learn this craft is by saturating ourselves in examples of it, in and out of print, and t… - Richard Yates

Rachel became slowly aware now, even while talking and listening to her own voice, that there might well be something universal about the pleasure a grown girl could take in disparaging her mother. Maybe it happened with sons and their fathers, too, or with all grown children and the ever-diminishing presence of parents in their lives; in any case, the knowledge didn't prevent her from pressing on, as if to see how far she would dare to go.

Then she asked me if I wanted to know something, and without waiting to find out whether I did or not, she told me.

But late that night, as Irving Berlin himself might say, something kind of wonderful happened. I took that little bastard of a story and I built the hell out of it.