Williams was born February 11, 1944, in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, to William Lloyd, a minister, and Elisabeth (Thomas) Williams. She graduated magna cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts degree from Marietta College in Ohio in 1963. Williams received her Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing from the University of Iowa in 1965.

After college, Williams worked as a data analyst for the U.S. Navy for three years before turning to fiction writing full-time. Her first novel, State of Grace (1973), garnered Williams a lot of attention from readers and critics. Taking Care (1982), her first collection of short stories, exhibited Williams’s ability with short fiction. As of 2006, she had written nine books of fiction and non-fiction. “The Girls” was originally published in the Idaho Review VI in 2004 and then anthologized by Michael Chabon in the 2005 edition of The Best American Short Stories.

Williams is known...