Diane Oliver: Neighbors and Other Stories | Reissued by Grove Press; Jan. 2024

The tragedy is obvious. Twenty-two-year-old Diane Oliver, from Charlotte, educated at the North Carolina Women’s College (UNC-Greensboro), a prodigious talent at the famed University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, killed in a motorcycle accident in 1966, just days before her graduation. 

Her posthumous short-story collection, Neighbors and Other Stories, released this past February by Grove Press, is an extended eulogy. Tayari Jones, award-winning novelist and current grande dame of Black Southern literature, laments, in the collection’s introduction, that she didn’t know Oliver’s work before receiving a simple advanced copy, “printed on plain paper, no intriguing cover, no laudatory blurbs from great writers.”

Jones was knocked down immediately. 

Part of Diane Oliver’s tragedy, yes, is the promise of unfulfilled talent. She only published a handful of stories in her lifetime, in Sewanee Review and Negro Digest. She wasn’t a fallen star. She was an incredibly gifted writer on the path to greatness. 

The titular story in Neighbors, an intimate look at the integration of an elementary school, won an O. Henry Award in 1967, the same year Joyce Carol Oates won the award’s First Prize for the story “In the Region of Ice.” John Updike won First Prize the year before; Flannery O’Connor, the year before that; John Cheever in 1964. Imagine what Oliver would have produced if she lived, at least, as long as O’Connor’s too-short brilliance. Imagine her exchanging wit with Joyce Carol Oates on social media.

Although the realistic “Neighbors” is her well-known effort, Oliver’s skill is most evident when she leans into surreality. The stories “The Closet on the Top Floor” and “Mint Juleps Not Served Here” read like fables. In the former, the first Black student at a college undergoes a mental break, shrinks from the world, and ends up living in her closet, as fellow white students view the strange behavior as proof that “colored people aren’t like us.” The latter is a spooky tale about a family living deep in a forest preserve, off the grid. 

“The best story, however—the one where Oliver forces you to understand her potential as a generational stylist—is “Frozen Voices,” an experimental, musical story about death, love, and betrayal in Michigan. Here, she writes with real maturity, pulling off sentences and refrains more seasoned writers would stumble on or avoid entirely. Sentences run like poetry, such as, when one character dies and another searches for the parents: “Searching back, remembering old faces, lost, seasons, but shivering in the winter, the echoing fragments of time now frozen solid in the earth. I could do nothing.” 

We’re never really grounded, the way we are in her other stories. The bravery is close to music and painting. It’s thrilling.

One can easily imagine an alternate universe where Oliver miraculously survives the motorcycle crash or decides, at the last minute, to catch a ride with someone else. We can see her continuing to thrive at Iowa, getting slowed down after graduation by real life. Money. Needing it. Losing it. Family, maybe, intruding on her writing time. Cruel societal expectations curbing her focus, as happened with many talented woman writers of her generation. 

Or perhaps we might imagine her in the current generation of MFA graduates—a few short stories in the New Yorker, Paris Review, a six-figure two-book deal, short-story collection followed by a novel, prizes and longlists, optioned for film by a commercially viable director, all culminating in a light-workload tenured job at an MFA program. 

These permutations do a tremendous disservice to Oliver. The 14 stories collected in Neighbors are excellent enough to exist without tragedy. Their moral clarity is proof that young people can already possess a true vision of the world.

Take “Frozen Voices.” We can easily imagine a world where an editor, agent, professor, or mentor discourages Oliver from experimenting. To return to the success of “Neighbors,” to write the same story with slight variations over and over, to write a novel that expands on the world and style of her traditional stories. 

We shouldn’t solely mourn the lost future. We should celebrate the purity. The joy of a young voice ripping across the page, undaunted. 

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