"In her many celebrated novels and story collections, Joy Williams tends to confront-with mordant comedy and bluntness and often a kind of ambiguously mystical quality (befitting the child of a minister)-life's great array of horrors, whether petty, overwhelming, or inscrutable. These preoccupations appear as well in the essays she has been writing for decades, including for this magazine, many of which she collected in the 2001 book . Writing in The New Yorker, James Wood once attempted to identify the distinctive features of her stories: "concision, jumped connections, singular details, brutal humor.""
"WS: What initially attracted you to the subject of Gene Hackman's death? JW: The dog in the crate. First reports indicated that it was an exceedingly cruel break-in. Zinna in the crate was an image that stayed with me (along with the persisting recall of the of Ron Currie Jr.'s remarkable first book ). WS: What surprised you most in your research? JW: That the silence emanating from Gene Hackman's son was so impenetrable. WS: Revisiting his work, is there a Hackman film that caught you off guard or that has particularly resonated? JW: Night Moves felt like a discovery. Great movie. Strange that it wasn't shot in the Keys though-instead Sanibel Island and Wakulla Springs!"
Joy Williams confronts life’s horrors with mordant comedy, bluntness, and an ambiguously mystical sensibility. Her nonfiction portraits distill sparse, verifiable facts into lean collages that reveal character through singular details and brutal humor. Williams focused on the lonesome February death of Gene Hackman, his wife, and their dog Zinna, seizing on the haunting image of Zinna in a crate after a reportedly cruel break-in. Reporting and research exposed an impenetrable silence from Hackman’s son. Revisiting Hackman’s films, Night Moves emerged as a striking rediscovery, noted for being shot on Sanibel Island and Wakulla Springs rather than the Keys.
Read at Harper's Magazine
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