Photographs by John Ranard.
Women are no less familiar than men with desire, pride, anger, aggression, selfishness and greed.
Nor are they strangers to deception and cruelty. Women too can appreciate the melancholy of the fact that when two persons are passionately joined together, one must win and the other lose. Like boxing, Ms. Oates's stories are about people struggling with one another, trying to wrest temporary victories from the recalcitrance of love and fate. They are about the triumph and the failure of the will, and about disappointment, which waits for us all, like age and death. The thing to watch out for in writing about boxing is sentimentality.