SOURCE: "No Sense of an Ending: Real Mothers," in Room of One's Own, Vol. 10, No. 3/4, March, 1986, pp. 111-23.

In the following essay, Howells examines Thomas's story endings in Real Mothers, noting that their indefiniteness signals the still-unexplored territory in modern women's lives of revising male-centered myths of human relationships.

And she doesn't look back. In my story, that is. She doesn't look back in my story.

        Audrey Thomas, "Crossing the Rubicon"

This is the ending of Audrey Thomas' last story in her collection Real Mothers, and while it may be the end there is no sense of an ending here. Instead of closure, the effect is one of disruption of a story (or a storyteller) divided against itself in an exposure of fiction making and the failure of fiction and real life to coincide. Arguably such an ending is appropriate in a collection whose very title signals the...