Swallowed hearing aids, origami obsessives and a husband who’s a former MI6 agent … Standard Deviation author Katherine Heiny isn’t short of inspiration, so why did it take 25 years to get her writing career off the ground?
Barely two minutes into our conversation, American writer Katherine Heiny is chatting about the perimenopause and Botox for migraines, and telling an amusing story about Kazuo Ishiguro and their shared late editor in the US. “Am I gossiping?” she asks over Zoom.
This month, the author of the hit novel Standard Deviation publishes her second short story collection, Games and Rituals. Following a lengthy hiatus after her first story was published in the New Yorker in 1992, when she was just 25, Heiny has been making up for lost time. Now 55, with two novels and two collections published in eight years, she is delivering on that early promise. One review in the New York Times described her fiction as “something like Cheever mixed with Ephron”, for which read highly crafted stories of quiet suburban despair that are also genuinely funny. A more contemporary comparison might be Anne Tyler with jokes.
