Women I've Known
New and Selected Stories by Greg Johnson

Johnson's fiction is regional writing at its best, “Southern” fiction that focuses especially on Atlanta and the New South.

About The Book

These twenty-four stories, seven new and the rest selected from Johnson's previous four collections, range from “The Metamorphosis,” where a young female impersonator is torn apart by her fans, to “Last Encounter with the Enemy,” a battle of wills between Flannery O'Conner and a precocious 11-year-old boy. Other woman writers from the past encountered here include Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, and Emily Dickinson. Stories from the new collection have been included in The O. Henry Prize Stories, New Stories from the South: The Year's Best, and the PEN Syndicated Fiction Project.

About The Author

GREG JOHNSON is the author of 11 previous books: the novels Pagan Babies and Sticky Kisses, a collection of poetry, a biography of Joyce Carol Oates, three works of literary criticism, and the short story collections Distant Friends, A Friendly Deceit, I Am Dangerous, and Last Encounter with the Enemy. He was named Georgia author of the Year in 1991 and 1997. His fiction has garnered wide acclaim, from The New York Times, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and Chicago Tribune to the Dallas Morning News, Los Angeles Times, and San Francisco Chronicle. A professor of English at Kennesaw State University, he lives in Atlanta.

From The Book

“Crazy Ladies”

Every Southern town had one, and ours was no exception. One year, my sister and I had an after-school routine that included watching the Mouseketeers on TV, holding court in the neighborhood treehouse we'd built, along with several other kids, in a vacant lot down the street, and finally, as dusk began and we knew our mother would soon be calling us to supper, visiting the big ramshackle house where the crazy lady lived. Often she'd be eating her own supper of tuna fish and bean salad, sitting silently across from her bachelor son, John Ray, who was about the same age as our parents. Becky would slither along through the hydrangea bushes, then scrunch down so I could stand on her shoulders and get my eyes and forehead—just barely—over the sill of the Longworths' dining-room window. After a few minutes I'd get down and serve as a footstool for Becky. More often than not we dissolved into a laughter so uncontrollable that we had to race back through the bushes, snapping branches as we went, and then dart around the corner of the house to avoid being caught by John Ray, who sometimes heard us and would jump up from the table, then come fuming out the back door. He never did catch us, and to my knowledge was never quick enough even to discover who we were. Naturally his mother didn't know, and didn't care. But there came a time—that summer afternoon, the year Becky was thirteen and I was eleven—when the crazy lady took her obscene revenge.

For me, that entire summer was puzzling. Our father, the town druggist, had begun keeping unusual hours. We could no longer count on his kindly, slump-shouldered presence at the supper table, and when he did join us there was a crackling energy in him, a playfulness toward Becky and me that he'd never shown when we were younger. And while our father, a balding and slightly overweight man in his forties, had taken on this sudden, nervous gaiety, our mother underwent an alarming change of her own. Her normally delicate features, framed by fine, wavy auburn hair, had paled to the point of haggardness. There was a new brusqueness in her manner—she scrubbed the house with a grim ferocity, she made loud clattering noises when she worked in the kitchen—and also a certain inattention toward her children, a tendency to focus elsewhere when she talked to us, or to fall into sudden reveries. This bothered me more than it did Becky, for it seemed that even she was changing. In the fall she'd be starting junior high, and she'd begun calling me “Little Brother” (with a slight wrinkling of her nose) and spending long hours alone in her bedroom. All through childhood we'd been inseparable, and Becky had always been called a tomboy by the neighborhood kids, even by our parents; but now she'd started curling her hair and painting her stubby nails, gingerly paging through movie magazines while they dried. What was wrong with everyone? I wanted to ask—but when you're eleven, of course, you can't translate your puzzlement into words. For a long while I stayed bewildered, feeling that the others had received a new set of instructions on how to live, but had forgotten to pass them along to me.

One humid afternoon in August, the telephone rang; from the living room, we could hear our mother snatch up the kitchen extension.

“What?” she said loudly, irritated. “Slow down, Mother, I can't make out—”

At that point she called to us to turn down the TV; from my place on the floor I reached quickly and switched the volume completely off, earning a little groan from Becky. She sat cross-legged on the couch with a towel wrapped tightly around her head, like a turban. We'd been watching American Bandstand.

“You turn it up,” I said, with the same defiant smirk she'd begun using on me.

“Hush,” Becky whispered, leaning forward. “I think something's wrong with Grandma.”

We sat quietly, listening. Our mother's voice had become shrill, incredulous.

“Why did you let her in?” she cried. “You know she's not supposed to—” A long silence. Whenever our mother was interrupted, Becky and I exchanged a puzzled look.

“Listen, just call John Ray down at the bank. The operator, Mother—she'll give you the number. Oh, I know you're nervous, but­—Yes, you can if you try. Call John Ray, then go back in the living room and be nice to her. Give her something to eat. Or some coffee.”

Silently, Becky mouthed the words to me: the crazy lady.

I nodded, straining to hear our mother's voice. She sounded weary.

“All right, I'll call Bert,” she said, sighing. “We'll get there as soon as we can.” When she stopped talking, Becky and I raced into the kitchen.

“What is it, Mama?” Becky asked, excited. “Is it—”

“It's Mrs. Longworth,” Mother said. Absent-mindedly, she fiddled with my shirt collar, then looked over at Becky. “She's gotten out of the house again, and somehow ended up in your grandmother's living room.” Briefly, she laughed. She shook her head. “Anyway, I've got to call your father. We'll meet him over there.”

Praise for the Book

“Greg Johnson knows the story’s secrets: the vivid detail that brings it alive, the pacing necessary to hold the reader’s attention, the knowledge of the human heart to make it both surprising and inevitable, and the emotion at its core that will make you weep.” —Sheila Kohler

“Greg Johnson keeps raising the bar on his storytelling skills. “Shameless” is a ravishing study of misplaced passion. The charm of this collection as a whole is its gift of showing a writer digging deeper into the heart of his material.” —Gail Godwin

ISBN 0-86538-119-4, $22.95 hardcover