Joy Williams Biography

American writer, born in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, educated at Marietta College and the University of Iowa. Her first novel, A State of Grace (1973), explored the consciousness of a woman about to give birth; it was followed by The Changeling (1978) and Taking Care (1982), a collection of stories. It was with Breaking and Entering (1988), her first novel to be published outside America, that Williams gained a reputation as one of the exponents of the hard-edged American movement described as Dirty Realism. Her whimsical, delicately written tale of a drifting vagrant couple is also reminiscent of the lyrical eccentricity of the domestic comedies of Anne Tyler. In The Stories of Escape (1990) a similar blending of the whimsically introspective and the real is employed.