Maybe this story could be a little bit sweeter, but I'm not sure how: "City Girl" by Alice Hoffman (O.Henry 2025 Anthology)

The easiest critical posts for me to write about contemporary American short stories concern stories where a lay reader might be confused what makes the story in question worth reading. I write for the intelligent, curious lay reader, so these stories feed into what I'm trying to do perfectly. I find a thread worth pulling on that might not occur to most readers, and I pull on it. The hardest stories to post about are the ones where I either dislike them so much I don't see anything worth further appreciation (although once in a while, it can be instructive to write about why I don't think the story is worth this kind of consideration), or stories that are so obviously good and easy to appreciate, any reader can see why they're in a "best of" collection. 

"City Girl" by Alice Hoffman is in the latter category. Although its subject matter, concerning a teenage girl who decides to drop out of school and get high with a drug addict in her rich father's New York condo, is pretty normal for an anthology like the O.Henry, the sweet and --dare I say--happy ending isn't. This is more the kind of story you'd find in the Coolest American Short Stories series than in O.Henry or Best American Short Stories. Normally, in a high-end literary short story collection, I'd expect the girl to continue wandering toward her own destruction in a quasi-nihilist way. Instead, all the bad things that happen in "City Girl" only serve to treat the reader to the dopamine-producing kindness of the girl's father-in-law, Gig. 

There's not much to add to that, but I will note one characteristic about the story that might not be readily apparent. There's a diversity of opinions among writers about how much of a character's motivation to show. I think most writers agree that's it's possible to either show too little or too much, but I feel that with a majority of stories in contemporary short story collections, there's a tendency to agree with Aatif Rashid and err on the side of showing too little rather than too much:

"And so, writers end up clarifying their characters' desires with such precision that their narratives becomes perfect structures of cause and effect—this character left her husband because her mother never left her abusive father. This character is withdrawn because his mother never told him she loved him. This character is depressed because her brother drowned when she was young. It's Freud reduced to teleology, and it cheapens the complex reality of human experience."

Iago from Othello is often held up as an exemplar of a character without a fully explained motivation. I Googled Iago, and I assume this must be who they're talking about. 

That's kind of where the narrator/protagonist of "City Girl" begins. She confesses at the beginning to not listening to her father's warnings. She gives only surface motivations for her recklessness: "We loved the city, even though it was dangerous," or "I only felt alive when I was dancing" as an explanation for going to clubs while underage. Both of these only take us one level into motivation, and they invite further questions, the answers to which we are denied. Why do the father and daughter love the city in spite of it being dangerous? Why does she only feel alive when dancing? 

Most of the girl's true motivations for the first half of the story can be summed up in her own profession of ignorance: "I don't know what I was looking for." However, there is a point, soon after she brings Cooper, an older drug addict, into her family's home, when she has what in therapy would be called a breakthrough. She has just gotten done letting Cooper take her virginity, and she is cleaning her blood off the couch, when she looks at herself in the mirror and says that "all at once I knew I had done this because I could never be a dancer." She's too tall to go as far in dancing as she wants, and since she's denied what she really wants, she's decided to go ahead and ruin herself.

Once we get this confession, others follow. "My own real father hadn't wanted me; my mother loved her baby boys." We get a full backstory of a father who abandoned her and a mother who was distant from her. When her father-in-law rescues her and puts her in a detox clinic, she meets with therapists, and there, a whole torrent of motivation comes gushing out after she tells the doctor she thought she saw a little girl beside the pool she jumped into in despair:

"My doctor said it was me, me before Gig, when my mother would leave me alone when she went to work and I sat in one place, terrified, until she came home. And then one day I walked out the door, tired of being terrified. I decided I wouldn't be a child anymore, I would do as I pleased. I would step out of the world and make my own way."

"City Girl" has come up with a different way of resolving the too much motivation/too little motivation dilemma. It began the story by withholding it, and by the end of the story, it was brimming over with it. This parallels the way the story begins with a character who is mired in nihilistic indifference to her own suffering, then begins, little by little, to be open to the possibility of happiness.

Narrative theory might prefer that stories refuse to give too much motivation. We can have hints about why Iago hates Othello, but ultimately, Iago should hate Othello because he just does. And that's all fine for plays, and yes, in some ways, it is reflective of how the human psyche is incomprehensibly complex. But for human beings living our lives, we do kind of need to understand our own motivations if we're ever going to find any level of happiness. "City Girl" begins in narrative purity and ultimately defects to human kindness, and in the process, it refuses to continue to kill its darlings and delivers us a teenage girl with hope for her future. I think most readers will approve of the rebellion.