In a move reminiscent of her characters, the two pulled off the highway and threw a coin into the air to determine whether they would drive toward Taos or Santa Fe. The coin came up heads; they drove to Santa Fe.
By the time she came to Santa Fe in 1976, then, the dominant frameworks of Tallent's future fiction were in place: a keen interest in anthropology and a midwestern faith in the importance of family and marriage. Tallent sifts through the detritus of relationships, analyzing the shards of contemporary families and piecing their histories back together. She is particularly concerned with the archaeology of marriages, and her fiction increasingly focuses on the roles of children within the family. (Her first child, Gabriel, was born in 1987.) Tallent's fiction is distinguished by her precise eye for detail, as if she had been entrusted with memorializing the houses, landscapes, and mores of contemporary American family life for future generations. She has met with remarkable success: her first published story -- "Ice," in the New Yorker, September 1980 (collected in her 1983 book) -- marked her coming-of-age as a professional writer.
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