Henningfeld is a professor of literature at Adrian College who writes on literary topics for a variety of publications. In this essay, Henningfeld considers how the unresolved grief and mourning over events in the past impinge on the characters' present conditions and render their futures ambiguous.

For the characters in Bobbie Ann Mason's short stories and novels, the past is a troubled landscape, one that they strive to keep hidden from their present lives in every way possible. Yet the past always manages to bubble up in some way, and the grief and mourning they refuse to acknowledge in the past have very real consequences in the present.

In her book Understanding Bobbie Ann Mason, critic Joanna Price alludes to this: "In several of the stories, Mason explores the effect of the past on the present, as her characters attempt to reconcile them through the process of...