“How Can I Tell You?” was originally published in the December 1, 1962, issue of The New Yorker. It was collected in The Hat on the Bed (1963). It is currently most readily available in The Collected Stories of John O'Hara (Random House).

I return to John O'Hara's “How Can I Tell You?” for the electricity of its dialogue, the pungent lightness of its details, the economy of its construction, and the sense of immensity O'Hara generates beneath its concrete matter-of-factness— what Auden describes in his 1937 “As I Walked Out One Evening”:

John O'Hara published about four hundred short stories and, since his death, during recurring periods of interest in his work, editors have found and published more. He was one of the most productive and, every once in a while, one of the most brilliant and capable, writers of short fiction in the history of the form. To readers of a certain age, he is identified with The New Yorker, where, until August 20, 1949, he published regularly. After that date—it marks the issue in which the magazine ran a negative review of O'Hara's novel A Rage to Live—he did not publish there for eleven years. He claimed, in fact, to have stopped writing short stories in 1949 and, according to his Random House editor, Albert Erskine, in his foreword to O'Hara's previously uncollected short fiction in The Time Element & Other Stories (1972), did not begin to write them again until 1960, when he and the magazine were once more friendly.

“How Can I Tell You?,” a 1962 story, is a good example of what Lionel Trilling called in his introduction to Selected Short Stories of John O'Hara (1956) O'Hara's “passionate commitment to verisimilitude,” a manifestation of O'Hara's “brilliant awareness of the differences within the national sameness”— terms of praise one could well apply, by the way, to much of the work of Raymond Carver.