In a heliocentric universe, Emma’s but a satellite, basking in his regal glory for a short spell-and then expendable. But therein lies the problem: as a famous man, Antony has an immeasurable sense of privilege, utterly fathomless to so-called ordinary people. This is what celebrity signifies more than anything else-it is the strict refutation of the banal.” If Antony is “extraordinary,” Emma herself can bathe in his aura only as long as he wants or needs her. Being married to an uber-famous actor, Antony Grégoire, may make Emma’s world semi-magical, as when he proposes to her on The Tonight Show, but it also makes Emma realize several disturbing things about this relationship-all of them psychologically and emotionally detrimental to her.Īntony’s of a special breed, and being with him has its indisputable allure: “ordinary concerns, ordinary disappointments and sorrows, had less to do with me than they did with other people. Much of “The First Wife” is expository, delineating with fine precision the many complexities of Emma’s problematic marital situation. The famous have mutated, amassed characteristics-refinements or corporeal variations-that allow their projected images, if not their bodies themselves, to dominate the rest of us.” Here, as elsewhere in this collection, Sneed’s prose style is one of her greatest attributes as a fiction writer, allowing her to flesh out interiority in a polished, elegant voice. Emma, the narrator, thinks, “The famous do resemble the unfamous, but they are not the same species, not quite. How does fame affect the famous person? This is the question posed in “The First Wife,” which appeared in the PEN/O. Two stories revisit a theme played out fully in Sneed’s first novel, Little Known Facts: the issue of fame. The stories that make up her most recent collection The Virginity of Famous Men reveal an extraordinary range of types. It’s the inner spaces where Sneed truly excels, with a riveting prose style that captures the depths of her characters’ thoughts, feelings, and conflicted selves. Author of two novels and story collections, Christine Sneed is a master of short as well as long fiction.

Little Known Facts by Christine Sneed