A man ignores his wedding anniversary and is so sickened by the bowl of flowers his wife has placed by his bed that he drops them and breaks the precious cut glass. Another man is so enraged by seeing his wife close the kitchen door when he comes in from work that he enters a state of fevered reverie where he concludes ‘nothing in his life made sense’. In a different story, the mess and argument caused by an improperly laid fire makes Mrs Derdon leave the house, sure that she ‘was not coming back’.
The stories in Maeve Brennan’s The Springs of Affection (first published in the New Yorker, and, after her death in 1993, as a collected edition in 1997) are not about dramatic flights of fancy or the memorable red-letter days of a life.
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