What is Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It about?

Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It is a collection of short stories about the battlefields that exist in seemingly benign domestic spaces, in kitchens and living rooms and cars. A young ranch hand falls for a recent law school graduate who appears unexpectedly in his remote Montana town. A young father opens his door to find his dead grandmother standing on the front steps. Two women weigh love and betrayal during an early snow. In all of the stories, people are torn between different versions of their lives, trying to maintain two opposing possibilities at once.

What was your inspiration for writing the collection?

This collection really started with the Granta list. I was working on a novel when Granta asked if I had a new short story for their Best Young American Novelists issue—and they needed it in a month. I had published a few stories in magazines, but I didn’t have anything new ready, so I got out the few half-finished stories that still seemed promising. (I abandon lots of stories for good, but a few seemed fixable.) After I started working on the stories, and seeing ways to make them better, I got used to the pace again, and wrote more stories, and then a collection started to seem more urgent than a novel.

About Maile Meloy

Maile Meloy’s first novel, Liars and Saints, was shortlisted for the Orange Prize, and was a Richard and Judy Summer Read. She is also the author of the novel A Family Daughter and the story collection Half in Love. Her stories have been published in The New Yorker, Granta, Prospect, and other publications. In 2007, she was chosen as one of Granta’s 21 Best Young American Novelists, and her new collection, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It, was selected as one of the New York Times Book Review’s Ten Best Books of 2009.

Read a story from Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It.

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