Katherine Heiny: ‘Writing about sex and relationships ends up being about infidelity’

Barely two minutes into our conversation, American writer Katherine Heiny is chatting about the perimenopause and Botox for migraines, and telling an amusing story about Kazuo Ishiguro and their shared late editor in the US. “Am I gossiping?” she asks over Zoom.

This month, the author of the hit novel Standard Deviation publishes her second short story collection, Games and Rituals. Following a lengthy hiatus after her first story was published in the New Yorker in 1992, when she was just 25, Heiny has been making up for lost time. Now 55, with two novels and two collections published in eight years, she is delivering on that early promise. One review in the New York Times described her fiction as “something like Cheever mixed with Ephron”, for which read highly crafted stories of quiet suburban despair that are also genuinely funny. A more contemporary comparison might be Anne Tyler with jokes.

“I think Anne Tyler is very funny,” Heiny says. “But I’m not sure that that’s why people read her.” Tyler is one of her greatest influences. “I feel like everything I hope to be, I owe to her. I read her and think: ‘Wow, she’s not making a joke every paragraph, maybe I don’t have to do that, either.’ But then I go back and do that, because I’m insecure and I’m afraid people won’t read me if there’s not a joke every two seconds.”

Talking to Heiny is like opening a tumble dryer mid-cycle as colourful anecdotes pile one on top of each other: there was the time on a flight when an elderly man in the aisle seat, whom she assumed had mobility issues because he kept asking her to climb over him, got up and walked around: “I basically gave this man a free lapdance!” she exclaims. “I couldn’t even be mad at him because it was so hilarious.” When she was searching for a plausible health scare for a character in her second novel, Early Morning Riser, her husband called to say he was taking his squash partner to ER as he was suffering with dizziness and blurred vision – it turned out his friend was wearing his wife’s bifocals by mistake. “I thought, I don’t even have to change this,” she says. “I can just put it right in.

“If something really funny happens to me, it’s very inspiring. It makes me want to write,” she says. Most of the stories in the new collection were sparked by just such moments: her father mistaking his $4,000 hearing aid for a cashew nut and eating it (Twist and Shout); her brother telling her that a local man had been banned from all the bars in her home town for “doing donuts in the driving lot” (Sky High). The title story, Games and Rituals, was written when she was 22. She found it during a house move, and although it is set in the 1980s it only needed a little updating. Her husband read it and decided it should be the title of the new collection. “I thought: OK, they never ever go with my titles, maybe they’ll go with his.”

Her husband, Ian McCredie, is a British former MI6 agent, who once received death threats from the KGB. Naturally she has a good meet-cute story: she saw him in a bar wearing a tuxedo and “nearly gave him a heart attack” by joking that he was a secret service agent. It was not until they had been dating for a while that he confessed the truth. She had never heard of MI6 and only clicked once he mentioned James Bond. “I don’t think we make sense on paper but as a couple we really work.”

The story of a mismatched couple who really work is the basis for Standard Deviation, the novel that made Heiny’s name in 2017. People often assume that the charismatic Audra – surely modern literature’s most compelling over-sharer – and her older, more reticent husband Graham, from whose wry, often bemused perspective the story is told, are based on Heiny and McCredie, but she is “much more Graham”, she insists. Audra was born out of an awkward exchange with an American neighbour in the Netherlands, where they lived for a time. “I just talked and talked until no words were coming out of my mouth,” she says. “That was the day I started thinking about Audra.”

Heiny has the comic writer’s knack of taking a character’s idiosyncrasies – Audra’s complete lack of a filter – and making them joyfully relatable. (And she can say more in a pithy parenthesis than many writers manage in a page.) She has a genius for spinning universality out of the absurdly specific – origami, say. “Why aren’t there nice, well-rounded people who enjoy a bit of origami, the way there are nice, well-rounded people who enjoy a bit of bondage?” Audra muses loudly at a folding convention to which they take their son Matthew. Matthew, who is diagnosed with Asperger’s in the novel, is not based on Heiny’s son Angus, but she did draw on his origami obsession as a boy, in particular the eccentric characters encountered at origami club. “Oh, these origami people are intense,” Heiny says now.

The youngest of three, Heiny grew up in Midland, Michigan, the headquarters of the Dow Chemical Company, where everyone, she says, was basically a scientist. Her father was a chemical engineer and her mother was a chemist. “It was pretty much as if they had brought the wrong baby home from the hospital,” she says. “Everyone was like: ‘Why can’t she do math?’” Her brothers became a chemical engineer and a software engineer, while she went to Columbia to take an MFA in poetry, followed by another in creative writing.

She moved to New York to temp and do bar work until her writing career took off. Her story How to Give the Wrong Impression was rejected about 30 times before her friend told her that you are supposed to try the New Yorker first. So she sent it to the New Yorker and within a couple of days received a call from the fiction editor. Although it was wonderful to have a story accepted at such a young age, it didn’t change her life. It did land her an agent, but the prevailing wisdom was that short stories didn’t sell and she had to write a novel. “So I just sort of stalled out of fear, and waited for this novel idea to come,” she says.

In the meantime, she took up writing YA novels under a pen name “to keep body and soul together”, turning out a new book every two months. “Writer’s block disappears if you have a deadline. It taught me so much.”

After she married and had two sons, Angus and Hector (now 20 and 22), she was able to continue writing around childcare and the various moves for McCredie’s job. They now live in Maryland, but during a stint in London she discovered Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary and Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, novels in “this weird class of their own” that made her realise the potential of comic fiction. But it was only really once her youngest son began school that she started properly writing again. “I thought: ‘Forget all this novel stuff that my agent talked about, I’m a short story writer.’ And once I decided that, I could write more short stories than I knew what to do with,” she says.

Her first collection, Single, Carefree, Mellow, was finally published in 2015. There was one couple – Graham and Audra – that she found herself returning to. She had a new agent, who told her she couldn’t wait for the next chapter. “I was like: ‘Don’t call it a chapter, that freaks me out. It’s just a story,’” she says. “But I sort of backed my way into writing a novel.”

When you write a book “you get an idea. And then you get another idea. And then you get another idea. And you go from there,” she says, citing one of her heroes, Stephen King. “That always seemed to me like the least helpful advice. But that’s kind of how it works. If you’re waiting for a novel to pop into your head fully outlined, it’s never going to happen.” Standard Deviation was published in 2017, followed by Early Morning Riser, about a primary school teacher who marries the local Casanova, in 2021.

Not being able to write her own fiction for all those years made Heiny deeply unhappy: she would even be jealous of characters who were writers in films or on TV. “I was so afraid I didn’t know how to do it any more,” she says. “But it never really goes away.” When it comes to writing about the messy business of bringing up children, from toddler meltdowns to teenage craziness, Heiny has clearly done her time: “War is hell, yes. But so is Cub Souts,” Graham reflects in Standard Deviation.

But her real subject is the even messier stuff of adult life: “I just like to write about sex and relationships, and that ends up being about infidelity a lot,” she confesses, and her fiction jangles with love triangles. “This is the true price of infidelity,” one of Heiny’s likable second wives muses in the story 561. “Twenty years later you and your husband have to help his ex-wife move out of the former family home.” She prefers to open her stories after a relationship or friendship is over. “What’s left? How do you take something positive and go on?”

Despite some dark corners, Heiny’s work might be criticised for a lack of grittiness; though not all her characters inhabit Graham and Audra’s world of posh delis and dinner parties, they are always from similar backgrounds. “I would come to a halt if I started thinking: ‘Is this representative of everybody?’”, she says. “There are a lot of reasons that you can give yourself for not writing, and you don’t have to add something more to that list.”

Hints of the stormy past few years work their way into the new collection, with mentions of Trump, Covid and even the British tabloids’ treatment of Meghan Markle. Heiny struggled to write during lockdown – “I would have an idea for a story and then I would sit at my desk and nothing would happen” – she thinks because she was missing the inspiration of comic encounters with strangers.

Her father died during this time, and death also began to creep into Heiny’s writing. Her success came too late for either parent to fully appreciate, she says. Her mother had dementia, which Heiny wrote about with devastating acuity in the Guardian shortly after Standard Deviation was published, and although her father knew Early Morning Riser was dedicated to him, he died before it came out. “Storytelling takes two people, and now my mum is not here, I miss her telling stories, but I also miss having stuff to tell her,” she says. “I think that the act of taking something and making it into a story that you share with someone else, even if it’s just one person – that’s an act of love.”

One of the few good things about getting older, she says, is that she has more stories to draw on. “But it is almost never something sad that motivates me to write. It is almost always something funny,” she stresses, as if our conversation has taken too serious a turn. Then she embarks on a story about texting McCredie to say she had some big news, shortly after the publication of Early Morning Riser; he pulled off the highway and called home, only to hear that one of his grown-up sons now liked lettuce. “For somebody or something to make me laugh is the thing I want most.”

• Games and Rituals will be published by 4th Estate on 18 April. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.