In the following review-interview excerpt, Smiley comments on critical reception to her collection The Age of Grief and discusses writing from the male viewpoint.

We talk too about The Age Grief, whose title story, a novella, deals with a pair of dentists and their three small daughters. The marriage is foundering, the wife has a lover. Told from the husband's viewpoint, the novella gets inside modern family life with exquisite sensitivity. The husband senses that he has arrived at a grief which is "the same cup of pain that every mortal drinks from."

Smiley says she was incredulous when The Age of Grief was nominated as a finalist for the NBCC Award. "I think if they had actually chosen me I would have been appalled, but it was great, it was totally unlooked for, so it was like this completely positive and totally abstract experience." Even the...