Jane Smiley, born in Los Angeles California, she spent her childhood growing up in Webster Groves, Missouri, a suburban city in St. Louis, Smiley graduated from a Community School, and went to a private school in Missouri, John Burroughs School from grades 7-12. She held a Bachelor’s degree in Arts and literature at Vassar College in 1971. She earned a Master’s degree in Fine Arts in 1975, and in 1978 a PhD from the University of Iowa. While pushing herself towards achieving her doctorate degree, she also spent a year studying abroad in Iceland as a Fulbright Scholar. She became a Professor of English at Iowa State University, helping and guiding undergraduate and graduate creative writing workshops in 1981 to 1996. At the end of the year in 1996, she decided to relocated to California. She returned from Iceland to teach a creative writing course at the University of California, Riverside, in 2015 (Britannica).
In many ways the ironic title of the first novella refers to the desire of it’s main character, the protagonist, a middle aged mother of five adult children
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Notably, Ordinary Love is a feminist story. Ordinary Love and Good Will, which were published together, are intentionally paired works, one from the point of view of a mother and the other told from the point of view of a father. Smiley uses one of these narratives to portray a predominantly masculine character, with it’s plot being very linear and compressed, but also one as truly feminine character, with a plot that relies on revealing what is hidden. Ordinary Love is the story of a woman who helped create and then destroy a perfect family. Rachel Kinsella the protagonist, a middle-aged woman, reveals an affair that devastated and broke her marriage to her children’s father, only for her children, now adults, reveal shocking tales of physical abuse, abandonment, and inappropriate behavior suffered in the presence and being around their