Born in Washington, D.C., Beattie grew up in Chevy Chase, Washington, D.C.. She gained attention in the early 1970s with short stories published in
The Western Humanities Review,
Ninth Letter, the
Atlantic Monthly, and
The New Yorker. Critics have praised her writing for its keen observations and dry, matter-of-fact irony which chronicle disillusionments of the upper-middle-class generation that grew up in the 1960s. In 1976, she published her first book of short stories,
Distortions, and her first novel,
Chilly Scenes of Winter, later made into a film. Beattie's style has evolved over the years. In 1998, she published
Park City a collection of old and new short stories, about which Christopher Lehman-Haupt wrote in the
New York Times:
[The stories] are arranged chronologically, which allows the reader to trace the development of the author's technique. It also lets one see the contrast between the latest stories and the earliest, an experience of sufficient subtlety and complexity to reduce one in this limited space to the following gross generalizations: Gone is the deadpan style of the early and middle stories, in which Ms. Beattie lays out on a dissecting table the behavior of her disaffected post-counterculture yuppies and then leaves it up to the reader to do the anatomizing. Gone, too, are the stabs of lyricism of the middle period, particularly the endings that try poetically to recapitulate the story's action but feel tacked on and artificial. .. In the best of these stories, Ms. Beattie's ability both to commit herself and to knit her commitment into the finest needlework of her artistry contrasts sharply with the irritating moral passivity of her earlier work.
Beattie has taught at Harvard College and the University of Connecticut and presently teaches at the University of Virginia, where she is the Edgar Allan Poe Chair of the Department of English and Creative Writing. In 2005 she was selected as winner of the Rea Award for the Short Story, in recognition of her outstanding achievement in that genre.
Her first novel,
Chilly Scenes of Winter (1976), was adapted as a film alternatively titled
Chilly Scenes of Winter or
Head Over Heels in 1979 by Joan Micklin Silver, starring John Heard, Mary Beth Hurt, and Peter Riegert. The first version was not well received by audiences, though upon its re-release in 1982, with a new title and ending, to match that in book, the movie was success, and is now considered a comedy classic.