an independent life. Miller described characters in
an era preoccupied with self-awareness and a subse-
quent sense of empowerment. Americans were com-
ing to believe that introspection made it possible to
understand one’s motivations, influences, and ac-
tions. New possibilities for women indicated that a
woman could simply redirect her energies to create
a new life based on her personal values and guide-
lines and perhaps have it all. For women, “having it
all” generally meant having a happy family, satisfying
work, and sexual fulfillment.
For Anna Dunlap inThe Good Mother, her recent
divorce from Brian, a man she considered cold and
repressed, means a new measure of joy and freedom.
She looks forward to life alone with her four-year-
old, dearly beloved daughter, Molly. She sees Molly
and herself as a pair, with Molly as her sidekick.
When she falls in love and finds emotional and sex-
ual fulfillment with her new lover, Leo, she sees the
possibility of even more happiness. As she and Leo
spend more time together, they draw Molly into
their relationship in what seems like an idyllic family,
one that makes its own rules. Not having anticipated
the missteps by her lover, nor the power of moral
judgment against their unconventional lifestyle,
Anna feels devastated when her ideal life crumbles.
Her former husband sues for custody of Molly, and
Anna faces the worst possible outcome, losing her
custody battle.
Inventing the Abbotts(1987), a collection of short
stories, reflects the decade’s preoccupation with self.
Characters evince awareness of self and of social
class differences, and they negotiate the complex
family relationships resulting from divorce and re-
marriage. As Miller explores the conflicts arising
from the new possibilities of freedom and indepen-
dence, her fiction asserts a moral perspective and
recognizes the fallacy of control in shaping a life.
Impact Miller’s studies of ordinary people repre-
sent the ideal life as a surprisingly complex and per-
haps illusive goal, despite the freedoms of the 1980’s
and the positive effects of conscious self-exploration
and good intentions in its pursuit. Rather than
critiquing 1980’s American culture directly, then,
her fiction portrays the limits of the celebration of
personal freedom at the decade’s core.
Further Reading
Herbert, Rosemary. “Sue Miller.”Publishers Weekly
229, no. 18 (May 2, 1986): 60-61.
Humphreys, Josephine. “Private Matters.”The Na-
tion242, no. 18 (May 10, 1986): 648-650.
Miller, Sue.The Stor y of My Father: A Memoir. New
York: A. A. Knopf, 2003.
Bernadette Flynn LowSee also Literature in the United States; Marriage
and divorce; Psychology; Women in the workforce;
Women’s rights.Minimalist literature
Definition Literary movement characterized by
the paucity and simplicity of its language and its
focus on essential meanings and structures
Literar y minimalism in the 1980’s was a reaction against
what some saw as the excesses of postmodernism, particu-
larly its increasingly tenuous links with ever yday reality
and its antirealist modes of representation. Minimalism
also represented a reaction against the excesses of Ronald
Reagan’s economic policies.
Even before the 1980’s began, American literature
had become increasingly theory-laden, seeking ref-
uge in universities that began to cultivate crops of
professional “creative writers.” A bevy of self-referen-
tial postmodern theories were on the ascendance,
even as Susan Sontag and other critics railed against
the encroachment of theories at the expense of
representation and engagement. At the center of
these interpretive wars, writers created language-
centered, self-reflexive self-parodies, cutting truth
and reality loose in a maze of fictional and meta-
fictional antinarratives. American minimalist litera-
ture of the 1980’s was a response to postmodernism’s
aggressively antirealistic and antimimetic approach
to subject matter and narrative technique. It is diffi-
cult to characterize the 1980’s minimalism as a co-
gent movement, however, because during the de-
cade in which most of its practitioners achieved
literary recognition, they never formed a unified
school or published a universally adopted mani-
festo. Even at its peak, therefore, American literary
minimalism was never more than a loose alliance of
a small group of mostly West Coast writers who re-
acted against the social malaise of Reaganomics
and spiritual malaise of the American way of life.
Dusting up the techniques of realism of which post-
modernism was so suspicious, they proceeded to cre-The Eighties in America Minimalist literature 651