Context
Deborah Eisenberg was born in 1945 to
a homemaker mother and a pediatrician father. She was raised outside
of Chicago in the suburb of Winnetka, a place she has referred to
as “hermetically sealed” and middle-class. Her parents, who are
of Jewish decent, raised her as a Jew even though Winnetka was,
by her own description, “anti-Semitic and restricted.” A brown-haired
girl, Eisenberg felt like an outcast amongst the mostly blonde children
in her primarily protestant town. In addition, throughout her childhood
she suffered from a serious case of scoliosis—a condition in which
the spine is bent irregularly—and was therefore required to wear
a full body metal and leather brace that went from her ears almost
down to her knees. Sent to boarding school to complete her early
education, Eisenberg's childhood and teenage years were characterized
by social and emotional distress. Always difficult, she developed
a rebellious attitude, acting out and causing problems in numerous
ways.
After boarding school, Eisenberg's parents wanted her
to attend Marlboro College in Vermont, but she ran off with her
boyfriend to New York City instead. In New York, Eisenberg acquired
her undergraduate degree at the New School in downtown Manhattan. While
working as a waitress, she met the man with whom she would spend
most of her life, actor and playwright Wallace Shawn. She herself
has described Shawn as the strangest person she'd ever met. Shawn's
father, an editor at the New Yorker, encouraged
Eisenberg to try her hand at writing, and he eventually published
her first short story, "Flotsam," in the mid-1980s.
Eisenberg, along with Alice Munro and Francine Prose, quickly became
known as one of a select group of her generation's most important
female short fiction writers.
Eisenberg's first book-length collection of short fiction, Transactions
in a Foreign Currency, was published in 1986,
followed by Under the 82nd
Airborne (1992), The Stories
(So Far) of Deborah Eisenberg (1997),
and All Around Atlantis (1997).
Unlike most contemporary fiction writers, Eisenberg has continued
to focus exclusively on the short fiction form and hasn't published
any novels to date. Nevertheless, critics consider her to be one
of her generation's major literary masters.
“Twilight of the Superheroes” is the title story in Eisenberg's most
recent collection, which deals with the psychological aftermath
of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.
Many believe that she infused the stories with some of her own experiences
after the attacks, although Eisenberg has never confirmed this.
The critical reception of the work, however, has been generally
positive, and she has received much praise for her ability to capture
the emotional experience of the attacks without lapsing into cliché.
Eisenberg currently lives in both New York City and Virginia, where
she teaches writing at the University of Virginia.
