"A Conversation with My Father" recounts a discussion between the narrator and her bedridden father, who is eighty-six years old and dying. He asks his daughter to write a "simple story," the kind that Maupassant or Chekhov wrote, "Just recognizable people and then write down what happened to them next." The daughter says yes because she wants to make him happy. She does not like stories that follow a plot line from start to finish because they remove all hope—there is no room for something different to happen.

She tells her father this story: A woman had a son. The son became a junkie, and to preserve their relationship, the woman became a junkie, too. After awhile, the son gave up heroin and broke with his mother, who now disgusted him. The woman missed her son.

Her father is not happy with the story. He...