Growing up can mean growing pains and the joys of new independence. With maturity comes the shift from infinite possibilities to imminent realities. These thirteen stories describe the slow and subtle experience of growing up, allowing us to reflect upon the forces that pushed us toward adulthood and away from the familiar ground of youth that must be left behind if we are to learn how to soar on our own.

These stories amount to something more than a celebration of the holidays dotting our calendars from month to month. Even though holidays can occasion a return to the familiar, these stories challenge traditional associations. Each story serves to complicate how we observe the human observation of holidays and offers a nuanced understanding of related themes such as family and motherhood, travel, grief and mourning processes, and memory. More generally, holidays are days of observance, and that aspect alone offers a lot to unpack.

The eight stories in The Nature of Longing move beyond conventional boundaries of race and gender to explore the universal desire to belong. Avoiding easy answers, Alyce Miller probes the overlapping worlds of blacks, whites, gays, and straights, all caught in the ordinary human struggle to connect with parents, spouses, lovers, friends, and children. In the title story, a gay librarian in upstate New York is cruelly outed but finds comfort in the letter of a man he's never met. In "Color Struck," a black mother in East Oakland struggles with her inability to name, and thus to accept, her albino daughter. In "Summer in Detroit," a black man, visiting his ailing white grandmother, is forced to relive a personal tragedy that occurred during the 1967 riots. The novella that closes the book, "Dead Women," examines a young American woman's search in Europe for romance that lasts beyond desire. Miller gives substance to her characters' poignant longing, which manifests itself in unexpected ways.