David Remnick

Hi, it's David Remnick and I've got some news for you. We're headed to the Tribeca Festival for a special live taping of the New Yorker Radio Hour. We'll be doing a one night only show at the festival's 25th anniversary, so come out and join us on Wednesday, June 10th at 8:15. Tickets are available now at tribecafilm.comaudio that's tribecafilm.com audio

Quince Sponsor

dressing for summer can be such a headache. You want to stay as cool as possible, but you also have to dress for the office AC blast. You need wearable pieces that work well together for those long summer days when you don't want to break the bank. And that's why I'm obsessed with Quince. They focus on high quality essentials. Think breathable linen, soft organic cotton, washable silk, but without the luxury markup. Quince helps you achieve an effortless, elevated look that helps you float through the summer with ease. Need layers? Quince has you covered with fun, easy to wear options like their adorable denim jackets and soft organic cotton sweaters. They work directly with ethical factories and cut out the middlemen so you're paying for quality, not brand markup. And it's not just clothing. Quince offers incredible choices for elevated essentials across home, kitchen, bedding and beyond. They bring that premium feel to all of everyday life. And if you want to talk the most elevated essentials, Quince even makes my favorite underwear. The Quince Cotton Boy Shore is perfect under a fun little sundress, keeping me comfortable wherever the summer takes me. Elevate your summer wardrobe. Go to quince.com nyfiction for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's Q u I n c-e.com NYFiction for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com NYFiction this show is supported by Notion.

Notion Sponsor

With the recent launch of custom agents, Notion became the collaborative AI workspace where teams and agents work side by side. And now their new developer platform is turning that workspace into infrastructure developers can build on. Notion's developer platform gives developers and coding agents the primitives to extend what's possible on Notion and take it beyond Connect to external systems, bring context in, take permission actions across your tool stack and expose custom agents capabilities to any system that needs them. It includes new primitives that allow systems to sync any data source into Notion, build any tool for your Notion agents, and orchestrate any agent in Notion. Plus, it's easy to use. CLI authenticates in one line. Workers deploy without provisioning infrastructure and with a cloud based zero infrastructure path, you can just write your code, deploy and you're done. Learn more about Notion's developer platform today at notion.comprx that's all lowercase letters notion.comprx to try Notion's developer platform today and when you use our link, you're supporting our show.

Deborah Treisman

This is the New Yorker Fiction Podcast from the New Yorker Magazine. I'm Deborah Treisman, fiction Editor at the New Yorker. Each month we invite a writer to choose a story from the magazine's archives to read and discuss. This month we're going to hear Evolution by Joan Silber, which appeared in the New Yorker in September of 2022.

Sarah Swanyen Bynum

I ran away with a boy when I was 16. He was three years older and I was enormously flattered that he wanted me to run off with him. We didn't say we loved each other, we didn't bring that up. But my lust for him was great and constant.

Deborah Treisman

The story was chosen by Sarah Swanyen Bynum, who is the author of three books of fiction, including the no Ms. Hempel Chronicles, a PEN Faulkner Award finalist, and the story collection Likes, which was published in 2020. Hi Sarah.

Sarah Swanyen Bynum

Hi Deborah.

Deborah Treisman

So you chose to read a story by Joan Silber, who has published 10 books of fiction in the past 45 years or so. Have you read a lot of her work and what makes it really stand out for you?

Sarah Swanyen Bynum

I love Joan Silver's work, which I first discovered in 2003 when I was reading the O hen Prize anthology, and she had a story in it called the High Road, and it was this first person voice that just leapt out and dazzled me. And I have just been such a admirer of her work ever since then. And each successive book has just been filled with these sharp, indelible voices telling their life stories, and I get pleasure every time I dive into one of them.

Deborah Treisman

What do you think makes her makes her voices so indelible in that way?

Sarah Swanyen Bynum

I think the retrospection. There's this mix of retrospection and immediacy where she's looking back on a life and reflecting on the shape of life's meaning. But then she is able to to animate it with this very intimate conversational tone and these vivid, magical details. So I love the combination of both this sense of like, sweep and perspective and then the just coziness that I feel whenever I'm with one of her narrators and one of her characters.

Deborah Treisman

Right and I guess that's true of this story, Evolution. We're aware from the very beginning that she's looking back, that the first person narrator's looking back. But then for most of the story, you're so immediately in the moment, in the present, that you almost forget it.

Sarah Swanyen Bynum

Yes. And that's one of her great magic tricks, is that we meet this character first when she's a 10 year old, and then when she's a 16 year old, and then when she'S the mother of two adult children. And she inhabits each of those experiences with total immediacy. Like the 10 year old, I feel as if I'm completely seeing the world through her eyes. And then again for the teenager, and then again for the older mother. And I am just given so much pleasure by the way in which she fully brings those different life stages to the page.

Deborah Treisman

And she's. This story, it was written as a freestanding story, but also as part of a novel in progress which became the novel Mercy. And I think like several of her books, it's sort of formed from a lot of different voices in a way, each telling their own story. And then those stories become woven together so that each story has its own life and can stand by itself.

Sarah Swanyen Bynum

Yes. And in fact, after I read the High Road, I then read the novel that that story became a part of. And it was the first time she had innovated this form where the stories are interwoven and ultimately create what she calls a ring. And that book and the way in which it reimagined how a novel could be shaped gave me so much permission.

Deborah Treisman

Yeah. And what made you choose Evolution?

Sarah Swanyen Bynum

Well, Evolution offers two of my greatest secret pleasures as a reader. And the first is a story that covers a lot of time. And the second is a story that follows the adventures of a teenage girl.

Deborah Treisman

Wonderful. I think we should now hear those adventures. So we'll talk some more after the reading. And now here's Sarah Swanyan Bynum reading Evolution by Joan Silber.

Sarah Swanyen Bynum

Evolution. I was 10 when my mother had to take me to the emergency room. I'd sort of skidded on our fire escape while I was recklessly dancing around on it, showing off for the kid in the apartment across the way. I'd done a bump to bump and I was singing Whoopty Wooftee and starting a foxy little move while waving the ends of my bathrobe sash when I slipped on the rusted flooring that was splashed with snow and clawed, collapsed on its see through slats in an unnatural crumple. The backyard was three floors below, two visible. I screamed when I tried to get up. I wanted my mother to hear me. She was watching tv. She thought I was asleep. How would she guess where I was? I knew I had done something very bad to my leg. Fortunately, Nini Seidenbaum, for whom I'd been showing off, screamed for her own mother. In the frozen air between our buildings, I heard her wail that I was dead. Every part of me was shaking. It was winter in New York, and I'd been fluttering around in my night clothes, and now I'd gone from entertainment greatness to being a heap of cracked bones in the wind. When my mother finally appeared, she carefully dragged me over the black metal slats and lifted me through the window. I was still trembling too much to speak, but I could see that my mother's face was pale and weird. I understood that dying, which I might be about to do, was something I'd have to manage alone, and no one had taught me how. I was angry about this. I'm fine, I said, not that nicely either, because this was New York in February of 1974. Nobody bothered to call an ambulance. You'd get old waiting. So Nini's mother ran to get us a taxi. Her father, whom I'd always liked, carried me down the stairs. But when he jostled my leg, handing me to my mother, I screamed again. Why did you do this, Kara? My mother kept saying. She said it as we move through traffic, and she said it as she carried me into the hospital, into the big scuffed hall crowded with New York at its bad news worst. A man held a bloody towel to his neck, which was the waiting area for the emergency room. We're okay now, sweetie, my mother said. We had to wait. She needs attention, my mother had to tell them. Over and over. She filled out a form. She kept walking up to some desk to ask questions. I hated this room. A man was shouting that the president of our country wanted to kill everyone here and that he was doing a good job, too. Nobody said one of the doctors would be with us very soon. There was no soothing behavior in this room. Wait or die waiting. Take it or leave it. Ahead of us in the line of chairs was a man with a mustache, with his arm around a man who was slumped against his chest. The leaning man was wearing his sweater inside out, and he was sleeping. Maybe he wasn't sleeping. Maybe he was dead. Would you bring someone dead to a hospital? Did people do that? The mustache guy was talking to him I know you hate St. Vincent's but it was the closest. We're almost in. Don't go under. Hear me, Eddie? They could have been brothers, but I thought they were friends. My own friend Nini had yelled to high heaven to save me. If no one else had been around, she would have phoned someone to help, and if she'd been the one to fall, I would have dragged her outside and talked a taxi into taking us. I had more nerve than she did and was better at persuading people. My leg was on fire now, even when I didn't move it. I told my mother this and she went up to the desk one more time. Meanwhile, the guy next to us had got to his feet and was settling his limp, maybe drugged out friend into the molded plastic chair, getting him positioned so he didn't fall to the floor. He smoothed his friend's hair down, he patted his head, and then he edged out of the row and along an aisle and headed through a hallway. Where was he going? He was gone. When I told my mother, she said, oh, he'll come back. But he didn't. The friend was alone. Well, they weren't friends, were they? A long time went by. I knew people did terrible things. I lived in New York, and I'd always been warned about what they might do. When a nurse called the man's name, my mother said, just let my daughter go in instead. You have to let her. We can't wait while you figure out what to do. Had I ever seen my mother cheat like this, I understood that she was cheating for my sake. But if he died because of us, what then? I was sure we'd never forget, though I think now that people do forget such things. The nurse was stumped for a few seconds. Hey, Edward, I said, and I shook his shoulder in a rough way, as if I were just a kid making fun of him. It hurt my leg when I moved. The man made a choking, burbling sound, desperate and liquid. He terrified us. Then he was alive, but he was a dying monster. The nurse got an orderly to move him onto a gurney, and she was wheeling him away from us before we knew what was happening, and then we had to wait again. I left there with a huge plaster cast on my leg, and I looked forward to having all my friends sign it. I had broken and splintered my tibia in a fairly major way, but what I took from that night most of all was the shock at the man walking out on his unconscious friend, the silent story of it. My mother said the man probably had reasons we couldn't know, which was definitely true. But what I held onto was the lasting certainty that I was going to have to look out for myself. It wasn't my mother's fault. She never neglected me before or after the divorce or led me to think that she would. But I saw what the world was. I saw how things could get. Nobody's sweetness could take that away. I ran away with a boy when I was 16. He was three years older, and I was enormously flattered that he wanted me to run off with him. We didn't say we loved each other. We didn't bring that up. But my lust for him was great and constant lust was a big deal in the world around me. People believed in sex in a way that they don't quite anymore. Did we run that idea into the ground? Overplay it? I could not have been prouder of myself in those days. To be following sex as my guiding star. I thought that it was an exalted idea as well as a source of beautiful sensations. I thought that anyone who didn't have my opportunities was living a lesser life. I should have paid more attention to Brody, the boy in question. I was much too abstract in the way that I viewed him. We both worked at a donut shop on West 8th Street. Ronald, the owner, was never there and told me to do whatever Brody said. We had the long weekend shifts. Busy in the morning and dull in the late afternoon. Do you care about the hostages in Iran? I asked him. This was a leading question. I didn't care all that much myself. Was I bragging about how heartless I was? Probably, and it drew Brody's interest. He said they'll be okay getting skinny, though. How pleased we were to be indifferent together. I said they were proof the US Wasn't as powerful as it thought it was. Brody said people keep discovering that over and over, like it's news each time. Totally, I said. I was so thrilled when I went to get more boxes from the back and he found me behind the storage shelves. For weeks after, the shop was our love shack. Up to a point. We kept our clothes on, though we did a lot of reaching around and under them. What delights we hid in that back room. I thought of them whenever I wasn't with him. Then he decided we should start cutting school and I sneaked him back to the apartment while my mother was at work. I had slept with two other boys a few times each, so I knew something, but not that much. The male anatomy was still an unfolding mystery to me. From the get go. My mother had said Brody was too old for me, and when she found out I was cutting school, I did it too many times. She banned him from our apartment and tried to get me to promise never to see him, which wasn't even the sort of thing she did. Cutting school, she said, is the gateway to a lot of things I hate to have to think about. In fact, she was right about that. Brody hardly ever talked about his family. His father drove a truck for the New York Post. That was all I knew. Brody's mother stayed home so there was no sneaking off to his place. He made fun of my mother, called her the Mouse Mother because she worked in a library. They'd met a few times when he came over and it had gone okay. Normal terse exchanges. He told her his favorite kind of books to read were true crime books. I like action and death, he said. True crime is a very popular genre, I said. Brody said I should just lie to her about seeing him, so I did. The only person who knew I had a secret life was Nini. What scared her about Brody was the way he got money at work. He sometimes rang up his own version of sales, but not too often. His other, more ambitious scam was stealing items from department stores and then returning them for cash. Once a cashmere sweater, once a silk shirt, once a watch. No one ever really goes to jail for that, I informed Nini. They were allied in my mind, the new bodily thrills and Brody's lawlessness. Sometimes we smoked weed in the park. I was very adamant about not drinking. I thought civilization had advanced beyond alcohol, which made people violent, to more peaceful drugs like cannabis. An evolutionary change. Smoking pot made me nestle in Brody's arms on the park bench, curve against him in delight. By May, Brodie had finished a year of community college, allegedly studying business administration, and he said he'd had it with school crap. Want a hitch to Arizona? He said it wouldn't be hard. He had a friend there we could stay with. It was a good place to live, he'd heard, the wide expanse of the desert. We had found a new place to have sex, Nini's bedroom when her parents weren't home. And he said this after a long, intricate session. My mother had said she hated seeing me hang all over him like a doting idiot. And why wasn't he with someone his own age? Did I know how pathetic I looked flinging myself at him? This insult had broken my loyalty to my mother. So I could go wherever I wanted, couldn't I? I'd never been farther away than Washington or Boston. My mother was horrified that I was so unlike the Kara she'd always known, but that was what elated me, the new depths I'd found in myself, my untapped capacities. I thought my mother had probably never had really good sex. Brody had ideas about what clothes I should bring to Arizona. It was early June in New York, not really hot yet, but we'd do better picking up rides if I brought some of the nice things I had that showed my figure. I was a small skinny girl with a big bust, and he admired the sundress with the plunging neckline and the T shirt that was tight and orange. Oh, also the ripped jeans with the tear near the crotch. We have to think ahead, he said. In the end a friend of his drove us as far as the New Jersey Turnpike, and I stood by the highway in my little orange T shirt and jeans with Brody lurking behind a tree. How smug I felt when a large truck stopped right away and Brody suddenly ran up to get in with me. The driver was an old fat guy and we squashed ourselves next to him by having Brody put me on his lap. My mother thought I was on a class trip to the Adirondacks. You cozy? The man said. He had a growly voice and snorted when he heard that we were heading all the way to Arizona. Did we know how far that was? Watch out for the rattlesnakes, he said when he led us off five exits further. We had to wait much longer there, and the guy in a Ford van who finally stopped had me sit in the front and Brody in the back, and he patted my knee the whole way and began to stroke the zipper and put his finger into the ripped spot. I didn't say a word. I thought it was my job to be polite and friendly. I got more worried as his hand got more insistent, and I had endured quite a lot by the time he let us off near Pennsylvania. Frodi thought it was funny when I told him, and I said, oh man, I was unhappy about it, but I wasn't frightened. Whatever happened was something I could put up with. Our next rides were guys who just wanted to talk, and Brody made up stories for them. We were going to Arizona so we could work on a date farm. We were going to Arizona to help manage his uncle's silver mine. We were going to Arizona to work in his grandmother's hotel, and I was going to sing in the hotel's restaurant. He had me sing for the driver. I could carry a tune okay, and I did Home on the Range and Muskrat Love without my voice cracking. I liked this part. And what were we going to do when night fell? How trusting I was. Brody had the driver drop us at a strip mall somewhere at the edge of Ohio where a hotel advertised rooms for $12 a night. He told the clerk we'd pay in the morning when we checked out, but the clerk said, I don't think so. Brodie said we were going to eat first and come back. I was starving and very glad to be chomping down on a filet o fish at the nearby McDonald's. Hits the spot, doesn't it? Brody said. We were going to be on the road for the next three or four days at least, he added, and we didn't have money for hotel rooms. If we wanted to eat, we were eating indoors at McDonald's, but the Rancho Deluxe restaurant a few doors down had picnic tables outside. We had to wait till everything closed and we could sleep on the benches no one would even see. It was a nice night, just a little chilly. I was only sorry that we'd have to sleep on separate benches. What a great girl you are, he said. McDonald's didn't stay open much longer, and then Brody had us hike laps around the strip mall to keep us in our beautiful health. He carried the pack with our things in it, and we had our arms around each other's waist as we walked, and I was in a glorious moment of my life. We walked past the dark stores with neon signs still lit and past a few eating joints whose brightness stayed on the Rancho took forever to close. We went around the mall any number of times, but then we rounded the corner and saw it dark at last. Brody put a blanket down on a bench for me, and he settled himself on another bench and we held hands under the table. Brody lit a roach and we passed it back and forth. I fell asleep on that plank of wood like a passenger on a boat. But how were we ever going to have sex if we never had a bed? Brody solved this for us one night somewhere in Missouri by deciding we could camp out at a rest stop behind a giant bush at the end of a parking lot, though I had the blanket under me on the grass. Once Brody got going, the pounding pounding of the act was more than I wanted, and I wondered what aim of evolution was served by designing it this way, what force of nature wanted Brody's enthusiasm to leave welts on my back. When it got too bad, I shifted around so I was on top, which Brody liked fine, but I was already battered. And yet I believed more than ever that we were nature's dearest creatures, its adepts, its glowing initiates. My battered self slept on Brody's chest on the way to Oklahoma the next day. We had a creepy driver who told dirty jokes and laughed at the punchlines. It was her pussy all along. He didn't try to touch me, but he kept repeating the lines and grinning. When he dropped us off at a rest stop, I decided I had $9 in my wallet that we could spend for a motel. You are such a princess, brody said. We're starting to smell, I said. Excuse me, Ms. Royalty. We fought over this until I thought he really was going to sleep outside by himself. But in the end he let me check us in and I took a rapturous shower for so long that the hot water ran out on Brody, who had no interest in making love that night. Okay, if that was how he felt. I slept poorly and sadly, hearing the murmur and whistle of his breath. Our last day in Texas was steamy hot and had one unpleasant incident. Brody tried to steal a pack of American cheese and three pepperoni sausages from a gas station grocery, and the guy followed us to the door and said, people get shot for less. I was terrified. Brody said nothing and kept his head down as he gave up the goods. Arizona was thrilling to see. Outside the windows there really were cacti, but it was midnight on a dark desert night by the time we got close to Tucson, where his friend lived. He won't mind our showing up so late. We'd been let out at a bare strip of closed snack joints along the highway. There were two payphones and one of them worked. Brodie fed it all his change and dialed a number that rang and rang. After what seemed like hours, I heard him say, russell. Yeah, it's me. Really? I told you. He wanted Russell to come pick us up wherever we were, but Russell apparently wanted us to hitch to his house, so we stood with our thumbs out. But no vehicle of any kind was stopping at this hour. Brodie got more change from me and went back to the payphone to call again, and in the wee hours of the morning, an old Dodge Dart came out of the black highway and stopped for us. What an asshole you are, the driver said. He looked okay, skinny in his T shirt, wearing a straw cowboy hat to keep out the sun to come. Russell, my man. So good to see you, Brody said. Who's the girl? Kara. Isn't she cute? Not really, he said. I was in the back seat. They were in the front And Brody looked back at me, scowling. I don't even know you, russell said. And you've got me driving all over the state for you. They had met, by Brodie's account, at a retreat in Nebraska that his high school St. Somebody's had had with other Catholic schools. He and Russell had sneaked away from the Sylvan premises together and had been sent home in disgrace, thereby forming a lifelong bond, or so Brody had decided. I'm so happy to be in Arizona, brody said. It just feels freer here. The air. I fell asleep in the car with the free air blowing on my head, and Brody woke me up later to walk me into a very small adobe house cluttered with furniture I couldn't see. I was put in an armchair to sleep and I didn't wake up till bright daylight got me and I could hear voices from what turned out to be a kitchen alcove. The girl is awake, brodie said. The two guys were laughing about something that was good and eating toast, and Brody actually gave me a piece from his plate. I scarfed it down without even speaking. I hadn't known how hungry I was. Russell said I could finish the loaf if I went out for supplies afterward with Brodie. A 15 minute walk to the grocery store and we could admire the scenery. I saw that Russell's cube of a house was one room with too many chairs in it. In the corner was a mattress with blue sheets, which seemed to be where Russell slept. You know what I think? Brody said. You know that retreat we were on? They were right about one thing, Father Mike. Don't remind me. He said that nature was how God revealed himself to us. Have you been outside yet? What kind of God wants it to go up to 97 by noon? Russell said. Well, the great thing is this house has a swamp cooler. You know how they work. You're only sweltering a little, right? You've gone very local, Brody said. I was still thinking about God and nature. I had my own secret theory that sexual feeling existed to impress on humans the sense of a beyond the reality of another plane. There was no other reason for it to be the way it was. I certainly wasn't going to say any of this to Brody, though I'd once talked to Nini about it. I sort of loved the landscape, so flat you could see forever with its cluster of houses, the vivid blue sky and a horizon with mountains on one side. And I liked the little bodega where we pooled our money to get bread and peanut butter and hot dogs and milk. I felt sure that we could find jobs in this city. Russell worked in a Xerox store a few days a week. We could do that. Brody and I could be a couple living together. We got a bit lost walking back to the house, and once we were there I washed fast and then collapsed on the armchair and fell asleep. I woke up who knew when, with Brody nestled next to me and his hands all over me, ready for action. He was lifting my T shirt over my head, unhooking my bra. I was doing my part in glee and reunion, rising to our bodily celebration, when I heard the sound of water running in the kitchen sink, and I knew then with my eyes closed, that Brodie had us performing for his friend. I went on with it anyway, but the arousal was like a bad dream, a friction with a burn to it. I did what I could to speed him on. I wanted it over. We were coiled in the armchair in a twisted pose that was hard on my bad leg, and when he collapsed against me, he said into my neck, you liked that, didn't you? I had never really loved Brodie if love requires adoration, but everything about his body was very dear to me. What a simple life I'd tried to lead. You were great, I said. Why was I afraid to make him angry? Maybe I just always took what I thought was the easy road. Russell was gone by the time we stirred ourselves and got up from the chair. He came back sometime later when we were trying to make a dinner out of hot dogs and bread and some cheese we found in his fridge. The girl is a great cook, brody said, offering him some. Russell chomped on it and said, how long did you think you could stay here? What was your plan? Five or six years, brody said. Russell didn't laugh. You have another day, he said. That's it. He offered recommendations. There was a Y, there was a homeless shelter, there were places where you could camp. But you shouldn't have anything valuable on you. You have each other, he said. I wasn't sure how ironically he meant that. You know I have a friend in Phoenix, prudy said. We can hitch there. You never told me, I said. That's great. Plan B, he said, since some people don't know what friendship is. That night in our big armchair, he was a force of non stop ardor, a zealot of every orifice. More than ever before. I didn't forget that Russell was there on his mattress across the room. A flush of horror came and went, but I did what we were doing. I was used to it, and I thought that Phoenix would probably be better. The friend there lived in a big house with a great view, according to Brodie. Good night, babe, he said when we were done, and he fell asleep in seconds with his weight on my chest in what seemed like the middle of the night. I woke to feel Brody twisting around and getting up. By the time I opened my eyes, he was standing nearby, pulling on his pants. I'm going out to see the sunrise, he said. Sleep on my girl, which I did. He wasn't there when I woke up, and I was glad to have the bathroom to myself, though I didn't hog the shower for too long. The little house was very quiet when I emerged. I thought it was soulful of Brody to stay on after sunrise, still looking at whatever the vista was. Maybe I'd walk a little myself. I was looking for my baseball hat. Everybody said you needed a hat here, but I couldn't find our backpack. Not anywhere had I put my hat in my shoulder bag. My bag was on the floor with its contents spilling out. My wallet was still there, right on top, and I could see immediately that the billfold was empty. I was suddenly very afraid that a robber had come in while we slept, and I wanted to tell Brodie. As if Brodie weren't gone. I went back to the bathroom to check. No Brody shampoo, no Brodie shaving cream. He'd made a clean sweep in the kitchen. There was a note on the table. Looks like your asshole boyfriend is gone. I'm at work. See you later. Here's a key. Do not leave the door unlocked if you go out. R There wasn't much food left. Three slices of bread, two slices of cheese. And that was the moment when I couldn't stand it. I was weeping, little soft sobs that turned louder. I heard myself howl. Brodie had left me without anything, in the middle of nowhere. Brodie, whose penis had been in every portal of my body. Brodie, whose skin I'd licked and loved the taste of, whose smell was in my clothing. I took Russell's key and walked outside, past trees with branches like gnarled fans and houses the color of sand and rust. But I didn't get very far in the heat without a hat, too. Where had Brody looked at any sunrise? I was heading back and I knew what I was going to do. My mother was at the library, at her job, but she'd be home by 6, which was 3 here, and I could call her collect. I'd given my mother a bad scare and I was sorry. Now I got the door to Russell's house unlocked, which wasn't Easy. And when I went back inside, I was hoping that Brody would be there. But of course he wasn't. How could I keep on longing for him? Well, I could. I knew he had dishonored the power of our bodies by running away. I'd stayed faithful to my beliefs. I buoyed myself with this truth while I waited for Russell to get home. My poor mother. Russell had been home for a while. He'd been grouchy but had fed me some spaghetti when I finally tried phoning her. Oh, Kara, she said when she heard my voice. Why did you do this? She had pestered and plagued Nini, who would say only that we were on the road. She had called Brody's family, who thought he was at a friend's but weren't sure. She had called the police, who took the details but said it was difficult to track runaways across state lines. You're okay, she said. Tell me how you are. I'm totally okay. I'm fine, I said. And she knew how to send me a money order. She knew how to buy me a plane ticket that I could pick up. She knew how to get me out of there. You'll be home soon, sweetie, she said. Arizona is not a bad state, I said. Oh, Kara, my mother said. Russell was not happy about my staying one more night, and when he drove me into town the next morning to get the money order, he said, I think you owe me some for room and board. I peeled off a 20 and said, I'll never forget you. Which was true, if not kindly meant. He took me to the airport. He could have been much worse. All those hours of travel. I was longing for Brodie. I had to switch planes in Phoenix. I'd never done such a thing alone. And of course I kept looking for him in the airport. Wherever I was, I occupied myself by remembering all that we'd done in bed or in that ridiculous easy chair. My mind was furnished with Brody. My mother met me at the gate and she crushed me to her in a long hug, saying, do not do this again. In truth, I was really very happy to be home, and I hoped she was going to make me pancakes the way she'd done when I came back from science camp. You have no idea what you put me through, she said. Do you? And I had to go be a junior again. With three weeks left in the semester, I was a walking ghost. I couldn't talk to anyone except Nini. Nini said, you'll never be the same, will you? But after a while I had stories for those who asked the thing about hitching, I told people, is that you can't let drivers leave you in some nowhere spot. You have to speak up. I told them that a person could get by on no money at all. My boyfriend said I was too reckless. But we came out of it fine. Who in my class had done what I'd done? Well, it was 1980. Some had done worse. I was good at reporting certain scenes. Me singing songs for a truck driver. Brody stealing delicious food, food for us from a gas station. Brody bragging about me to his friend. My mother was afraid I was going to escalate, take off into drugs and crime, dare myself into bigger trouble. And I might have. But I didn't. Not then. Why didn't I? I was still hungry for Brody for a long time, and I wasn't sure I liked anything else. I knew perfectly well that he was an asshole. I'd sort of always known it. But I thought that what we'd had was a tremendous thing in its way. It had taken me more than 2,000 miles across the country. It had caused me to sleep on the ground, on benches and chairs without even minding. It had led me to eagerly slip into dozens of vehicles driven by strangers. It had its own unnamed beauties of feeling. I didn't have to call it love, and I didn't. But even as I thought pretty poorly of him, I believed it was something. I'd been through my days and nights of initiation, testing my mettle, and I took pride in that. I had now passed beyond a lot of what went on around me. I turned out to be much closer to normal than my poor mother ever expected. I got into cocaine a little in college, and some of my boyfriends were alarming. But. But I was all right. I never held up a bank or OD'd on anything or joined a cult or even dropped out of school. I did things I still regret. I slept with the best friend of a boyfriend I really liked. I slept with a professor my dear female pal was in love with. I did this because I could, and because such adventures were still irresistible to me. I thought that I was onto something that had been known throughout history but never acted out as candidly. Nini, who was studying anthropology at nyu, pointed out to me that sexual behavior was always a social construct. Okay, I'm a creature of my times, I said. Actually, Nini had had affairs with women and was much more up to date than I was. I lived at home during those years. I took the subway up to City College in Harlem, and I let my Mother meet only one of the boys I dated, if you could call it dating. He was a nice guy. Anyone could see that. Nerdy but alluring who talked to my mother about geophysical research. She thought it was fine when I went off to Berkeley for grad work. Following him, though we split up midway through the first semester. Northern California, it turned out, was a great place for me. What a pleasant and civilized climate. What cool people. So when I came home to frozen New York for Christmas break, I felt distant and older. Long ago I had lived here, but I was happy to see Nene again, and I fondly walked by my old high school, even stopped by the donut shop on 8th street that had once been rash enough to employ me. My old boss, Ronald, was behind the counter, a little balder and more creased. Look at you, he said. You were a pipsqueak when I saw you last, and now you're a grown woman. How's it been going without me? I said. Business was down. 8th street wasn't what it once was, but he was always glad to see his old workers crullers weren't selling. Did I want one for free? I did. It was so sad about Brodie, wasn't it? He said. What? Brody had never been completely out of my thoughts, and I used to guess how far he'd hitched and where he'd ended up. Las Vegas. Baja. Ronald, who couldn't get over my not knowing. I thought you two were friends, finally got to the sentences about how Brody had been killed some years ago when he drove through a stop sign right into another car somewhere in Maine. Brody had a car in Maine? I thought you two were friends, ronald had to say again. And then I was walking down 8th street with the cruller in my hand. My first thought was to be struck with remorse for the mean things I said in our fights. Brody, I'm sorry. And my next thought was to want back what he'd stolen. My hat that I liked and a favorite scarf that had been in the backpack. No Brody to blame anymore. Brody was gone. How could it be that even if I'd never planned to see him again, our story was a different story now. He'd been dead for years without my even knowing, which made me feel ignorant and shallow. I hope he'd thought of me often and well in whatever time he'd had. Was I allowed to hope that? I would have liked to do something in his memory, set down a bunch of flowers somewhere, but I couldn't really think of a symbolic spot. Nini always said Americans were totally feeble in their death rituals. Her senior thesis had been on Bali, which had big cremation ceremonies that even the Taurus went to, according to Nini. Balinese Hindus thought cremation freed the soul to enter the upper realm, where it might eventually be released from the cycle of birth and death. Evil residents of the lower realm were always trying to claim the soul. It would be just like Brody to walk into such a battle. I did light a candle for him in my room, but I didn't tell my mother, and I never told Nini either. In California a decade later, I had my daughter Isabel, four weeks earlier than anyone expected. My ex didn't even know that he was the father. My mother wanted to fly cross country to help, but I wouldn't let her. This was stupid of me, actually. Six years later, after I had my second daughter, Elena, my mother said, I thought you were smarter than me. You were. Life is not all progress, I said. In fact, I have loved being the mother of two daughters. Amazing creatures with distinct characters ever changing. As teenagers, they confided in me much more than I would have expected. How innocently upbeat I'd been about sex compared with them. Well, I knew what they knew, but I had other terms for it, other measures. Isabel lived with her raging disappointment, her entirely correct moral horror at the state of the world, and said that heterosexual sex, she didn't like other kinds, was marked by selfishness and prone to violence. Violence. I couldn't get her to give me a for instance, except to say that choking was sort of a thing. It wasn't freedom to her, this sex. Elena hated the way certain people were always posting their intimate reports on social media, and yet most of the time they had crushes on various men. They managed in their ways, my clever, despairing girls when I was 10 and jumping around on the fire escape doing my foxy little moves. What did I think I was doing? As my mother asked, putting on my power. That's what I thought I was doing. I remembered Nini wailing to her mother that I was dead. Ha ha. I wasn't. But I was taken to the land of the dead, that demented emergency room. My mother tried to edge me away from the worst, the bleeding and the ranting. Later, I told Nini it was all very interesting. I acted as if I'd wanted to know everything, though I didn't. Who does? When I was back in school with my plaster cast with all the signatures on it, I'd look at those names and feel superior for having been in that room. With its evidence of what the body was. I believed my tibia would grow back fine. I was a confident girl. But bone didn't last forever, did it? I kept this question to myself, as if no one were in on the mystery but me.

Deborah Treisman

That was Sarah Swanyan Bynum reading Evolution by Joan Silber. The story appeared in the New Yorker in September of 2022 and became part of Silber's novel Mercy, which was published in 2025.

Sarah Swanyen Bynum

We are in uncharted territory.

David Remnick

Staff writer Evan Osnos on the New Yorker Radio Hour.

Sarah Swanyen Bynum

I think all of us right now are trying to make sense of an avalanche of news every day, and there aren't very many places where you can go and understand how something looks in the grand scope of history and context. That's what I come to the New Yorker for.

David Remnick

I'm David Remnick, and each week my colleagues and I try to make sense of what's happening in this chaotic world. And I hope you'll join us for the New Yorker Radio Hour.

Notion Sponsor

Most people don't realize how much of their personal information is being bought and sold every day. Data brokers are making billions, pulling details about you from public records and the Internet, then packaging and selling it, usually without your consent. That's how your information lands in the hands of scammers, spammers, even stalkers. It's why you get endless robocalls and why ads seem to follow you everywhere. That's where Aura comes in. Aura actively removes your data from broker sites and keeps it off. They also instantly alert you if your information shows up in a breach or on the dark web. But Aura goes beyond data protection. With one app you get a vpn, antivirus, password manager, spam call protection, dark web monitoring, and even up to $5 million in identity theft insurance, all backed by 24. 7 US based fraud support. Other companies might sell just credit monitoring or just vpn. Aura gives you all of it together at the same price competitors charge for just one service. Start your free trial today@aura.com safer. Protect yourself now@aura.com safer.

Deborah Treisman

So Sarah, our first vision of Kara is of this 10 year old sashaying around on her New York City fire escape in the middle of winter, swinging her bathrobe belt and singing. Quite a way to establish a character from the get. Do you think that that moment is in any way symbolic? You know that we have this girl who's in a sense kind of playing with danger and then engaging with sexuality and then suddenly gets hurt by it.

Sarah Swanyen Bynum

There's also an Exuberance. There.

Deborah Treisman

There is, yes, which.

Sarah Swanyen Bynum

And the exuberance is there in the performance, but it's also there in the language with which the narrator recollects this moment. The whoopty, whoopty and the foxy little move. I mean, even the way she tells the story has the sassiness that I imagine that that 10 year old girl had out on the fire escape. So yes, it's absolutely setting up the vulnerability of the body, the fact that this exuberant 10 year old does end up majorly fracturing her tibia. And it also sets up the curiosity about winning people's attention through her sexy moves. But to me, almost as importantly, it introduces us to this joyful, playful aspect of her character as well. Right.

Deborah Treisman

And then we go straight from that exuberance to this kind of abrupt awareness of death. You know, as she's coming in the window, she's suddenly quite sure that she's going to have to manage dying alone. And she's angry at her mother for not having taught her how to do it, which. Which is kind of hilarious as well, because her mother hasn't yet done it, so how would she know? But this moment of getting hurt leads to that revelation that she has both at home and at the hospital when she sees this man be abandoned by his friend, that in a sense, one is always alone and one does have to manage alone.

Sarah Swanyen Bynum

One does. But then, interestingly, the story almost makes a counter argument to that because we see this character always in relationship, whether that's with her mother or with Nini, or with the irresistible Brody, or with her own daughters at the end. So I'm struck by how that realization she has is put into conversation with the actual story that we see unfold, where even, even with Russell, she has this sort of interesting, wry exchange at the very end. And that's just one of sort of the many tensions and contradictions in the story that bring it so much sort of aliveness to me.

Deborah Treisman

Yeah, I mean, and we get the tension of that almost immediately because she says after this injury that she realizes that she will have to look out for herself. That's the lesson she walks away with. And then, well, it's six years later, but it's instantly on the page. She puts herself entirely into Brody's hands, you know, completely trusting this not very trustworthy guy. So is that about not having learned the lesson she thought she'd learned, or is that about defying that lesson or the pessimism of that lesson?

Sarah Swanyen Bynum

I think in so many ways this story is about the defiance of pessimism. I feel as if it is a wonderful kind of yelp of defiance that she lets out Both in her 16 year old self and then in a sort of much more reflective, bemused way as she's looking back on it, she's not judging or apologizing for what her 16 year old self went out in search of. And even despite that rather bleak revelation that she has there in that opening in the emergency room and that sort of first encounter with the body's fragility and impermanence, I feel as if sort of the real energy of this story comes from her insistence upon the body's vitality and its enormous capacity for feeling and experience.

Deborah Treisman

Yeah. That's something she stands by.

Sarah Swanyen Bynum

Yes.

Deborah Treisman

Her whole life, it seems.

Sarah Swanyen Bynum

Yeah. And you know, one of the things that's so striking to me about Silver's work is how her work is very idea driven. It's very. Her novels, they thematically cohere. Each novel has like a different preoccupation that it's exploring through these woven together voices. And in this story, I feel as if the story offers quite plainly one of the ideas that it's interested in exploring. When Nini says to her sexual behavior is always a social construct. And I just marvel at the fact that the story kind of runs directly at that idea without ever simplifying it or feeling as if it's purely illustrative.

Deborah Treisman

Yeah. I just want to first think about the ideas that Kara has in the course of the story. Because there are four or five spots where she does try to define sexuality in some way. And it's, I don't think ever in terms of society. It's always in terms of nature and God and living on a higher plane. So for her, in her mind, that time Anyway, when she's 16, it's not a social construct, it's more a kind of natural force.

Sarah Swanyen Bynum

Absolutely. And I feel as if she's seeking an ecstatic experience, an experience beyond herself, an experience that allows her to tap into something much greater and more mysterious. And for her at this age, sex and sex with Rhodey is the way that she's accessing that or beginning to apprehend the possible. And absolutely, she doesn't sort of think of her behavior that way in terms of being socially constructed. But it's interesting how the moment where she's talking about not drinking and not believing in alcohol sort of becomes a snapshot of the mindset of the time in which she grew up. And it's the moment that the title arises out of. So I thought that was such a deft way for Silbert to introduce the historically specific ways of thinking that Kara has absorbed while not actually having her 16 year old self. Think about her erotic life in terms of a product of the 70s.

Deborah Treisman

Yeah, exactly, exactly. She calls it, you know, a guiding star, an exalted idea. She says they're glowing initiates, you know, as though it's a religious cult. Sexual feeling existed to impress on humans the sense of a. Beyond the reality of another plane.

Sarah Swanyen Bynum

Yes, it's wonderful to see her take off in these flights of language when the rest of her narration, you know, is very plain spoken. It's sometimes even a little vernacular, you know, One of the qualities about Silber's prose that I really admire is just how clean and unfussy and forthright it is. And, you know, she makes it seem so effortless, but in fact, it's incredibly hard to write a voice that feels that natural. But even in this very direct, plain spoken language, there are these moments where the language becomes elevated and they happen so gently. They really do feel like we're just kind of like lifting off for a moment into her exalted excitement. And I was remembering that Joan Silber had been a student as an undergraduate of Grace Paley. And I was thinking about how Grace Paley's stories are also absolutely suffused with that sense of a vital, living voice. And how I feel as if Silver is so much the inheritor of that. So I was poking around on the Internet and I was thinking about Joan Silver and Grace Paley. And then I found this wonderful thing that Silver had written about being Paley's student. And she said what she taught the most thoroughly was the need for vividness. I know this is a vague term, but she applauded the moments when characters fully animated the prose, when their hidden energies and unforced capacity for eloquence took over. And I was thrilled when I stumbled across this because I felt as if that captured so beautifully exactly those moments that you were just referencing, those moments when she is talking about the spiritual plane that she is lifted onto through her erotic adventures. But the language feels just ripened with that eloquence in a way that I loved experiencing as a reader.

Deborah Treisman

Yeah. And the joke of it all is that she's experiencing this exalted spiritual pleasure and joy and kind of uplift with someone who is so pedestrian and unworthy of it. It's almost like a feat of pure imagination for her to invest it with those qualities when Brody's at the other end of it. Absolutely.

Sarah Swanyen Bynum

But one of the great things about this portrait of Brody is that it makes completely clear that he is totally besides the point, that he just sort of happens to be the unwitting partner in her own exploration of this.

Deborah Treisman

Yeah, in Jesus, she never actually loves him, she just loves his body.

Sarah Swanyen Bynum

Yes. And the way she talks about it though, really convinces me of how powerful that attraction was that she felt. And it's so funny when we get the dialogue from Brody because it's such a stark contrast to the ways in which she talks about how just transported she is by him. And yeah, it does create this wonderful bit of humor in the story.

Deborah Treisman

And I don't think we ever get a physical description of him, do we?

Sarah Swanyen Bynum

We don't. Which was fun because then we can just project our own fantasies onto what this 19 year old might look like.

Deborah Treisman

Well, let's talk about that. Because I was 16 about six or seven years after Kara, and so I inherited a bit of that era in my attitudes. But this is not a story that would be set today. You know, we're much less open to hearing about 16 year old girls sexuality at this point. If you were setting a story right now in which a 19 year old takes a 16 year old girl across state lines for sexual purposes, you would be sending the police and he could actually go to prison for that. So it's kind of fascinating to read it from the perspective of Kara's grown daughters who see sex in such more negative light.

Sarah Swanyen Bynum

And I feel as if by allowing the duration of the time in the story to stretch all the way up to our present moment, or approximately our contemporary moment, really defines so much of the story's meaning and purpose. Because if the story had simply ended with Kara's safe return and her wanting pancakes for breakfast, the story would have had a very different impact and a very different meaning. And I feel as if the introduction of the grown daughters and the granddaughter's own deep ambivalence about love and romance and heterosexual sex is really what casts these teenage adventures in a. It's not in any ways a nostalgic light. And that's again something else I really appreciate about Soper, about how she can write about this past and this freedom without romanticizing it. And in some ways I feel as if Kara's telling of her own erotic coming of age offers a sort of counter narrative to the language that we have currently to think about young women's sexuality. You know, and she has that great line at the end about. Well, I knew what they knew, but I had other terms for it, other measures. And I was just thinking about how now, telling her story and sort of looking at the circumstances, it would be so tempting to pathologize it. How her behavior is the result of growing up with absent father. And she's a latchkey kid, and she's seeking out the attention and affirmation of an older man and using her body to gain that. And I feel as if in her telling of it, she counters that she argues against that by continually kind of insisting upon. On her own agency, by celebrating her own sort of robustness, if that makes sense, that she really wants to make clear to us that she did not want to be a sort of shrinking violet in the world. Or a victim. Or a victim. Exactly. And I just. I think it's quite amazing how the story allows us to both see the real danger she was in and the real violations that she endured, while not sort of retroactively pathologizing it as a case of a hapless young woman being the victim of the world. That's true.

Deborah Treisman

But I also. I wonder, you know, about the counterpoint to that, because if you look at some of the language that's used. Well, first of all, in the second ride, the truck driver or the van driver is, you know, sticking his finger into a hole in her jeans. And she does say she had endured quite a lot by the time he let us off near Pennsylvania. And she does say that she thought it was her responsibility to be polite and friendly and not object to this. So. And then the next sexual act is Brody pounding and pounding and putting welts on her back. And she refers to herself as battered and wonders, you know, it was not what she was looking for. It was more than she wanted. That's the expression she uses.

Sarah Swanyen Bynum

Yeah.

Deborah Treisman

And then the next time he's, you know, stripping her in front of his friend, and that feels violating. It's friction with a burn to it. It's a bad dream, she calls it. A flush of horror came and went. But I was used to it, she says. So if you isolate the moments of actual sex and her saying after that scene, why was she so afraid of making Brody angry? You know, she didn't stop him because she was afraid. You can look at it with today's eyes. You can look at it even with eyes from then and see she's perhaps using the language of what she wants these experiences to be rather than the language of what they actually were.

Sarah Swanyen Bynum

Yeah. And that's such A difficult question to wrestle with as a reader, which is that. Which do we give more weight to that? But the scenes that she actually shows us, and it's true, those scenes are really unsettling, really disturbing. And even the sort of euphemisms with which she speaks of what's happening make them all the more disturbing when she uses that phrase. You know, I endured quite a lot. Yeah, that euphemism was quite chilling to me. And the physical detail of the welts on her back, the horrible way in which Russell and Brody refer to her as the girl repeatedly, like she's never referred to by name. I mean, the story is unsparing in including those moments and those details. And so much of that is what we see happen in scene. Yet the narrator is at the same time offering us this elevated, just rapturous language about how enamored she is of the sexual ecstasy that she has discovered. So it's really interesting to think about, like, do we take the narrator at her word for that, about that, or do we sort of look more dispassionately at what is actually being shown to us in these scenes? And I feel as if the story doesn't land, you know, in one place, and that's one of its powers, is that it doesn't decisively sort of say, yes, this is an unreliable narrator. Like, I don't feel like the story's making that argument. But yet the welts on the back, the. Oh, that probing finger. They're hars. They're hars. Yeah. And the story doesn't let us off from experiencing those.

Deborah Treisman

Yeah. In a way, it made me think a bit about Lolita, because we're getting it from the opposite end, you know, where Humbert Humbert uses all kinds of flowery language to cast a positive light on what he's doing. And here Kara is on the other end of it and using that language to cast a positive light. But maybe also, you know, I think what the language that Joan Silber used when talking about the story in a Q and A was. She's pledged to being sturdy, to being equal to what happens. So Kara, in her own mind, is framing these moments as part of her quest for experiences, part of her quest to own her. Her own sexuality, and somehow maybe avoiding being damaged by these things in that way.

Sarah Swanyen Bynum

Yeah. Like as if what she calls her innocently upbeat attitude about sex is the thing that makes it possible for her to have come out on the other side of this.

Deborah Treisman

Yeah. She's kind of irrepressible. She is in some way, she is. And what's interesting also is that, you know, Brody abandons her and steals from her and does everything bad he can do. But it seems as though in Kara's life, men become somewhat disposable. You know, she's like. She doesn't bother telling her ex that she had his child. We never hear about who the father of the second daughter was.

Sarah Swanyen Bynum

Right. The geophysicist serves his purpose because he gets her out to California and then we never see him again.

Deborah Treisman

Yeah.

Sarah Swanyen Bynum

The men end up kind of being beside the point that they're useful in terms of achieving that sense of expansiveness or that sense of possibility that Kara is so hungry for, that they allow her appetites to have sort of full reign free reign, but that ultimately they're still just very much supporting characters.

Deborah Treisman

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And we never. I mean, I suppose Brody's the one we get to know the most, but we don't really get to know him. All we know of him are the words that come out of his mouth and his actions, you know?

Sarah Swanyen Bynum

Yeah. And then when we learn of his death, that is, you know, we feel that all the more keenly of who was Brody? Why was he in Maine? Like, the abruptness with which he leaves this plane impresses upon both Kara and on us as the readers just how little we know about him.

Deborah Treisman

Yeah. And there's that moment when she finds out that he's died and she says, how could it be that even if I'd never planned to see him again, our story was a different story now. And it's not the first time that she brings up stories. When she comes back from Arizona, for a while, she's a walking ghost and she's sort of silent. But then after a while, I had stories for those who asked. And that becomes, in a sense, like her dancing on the fire escape. It's her means of entertaining others and also feeling somehow superior. You know, she's seen things that they haven't. So she's very aware of. Of her lived experiences as stories in an interesting way.

Sarah Swanyen Bynum

Yeah. And she's interested, too, in how the duration of the story changes its meaning, just as how Silber is very interested in that. And then she tells another story about, you know, she tells herself another story about Brody fighting the evil residents in the afterlife, you know, so, you know, so it's like there's both the spiritual story happening, there's the sentimental story, and then there's the Buddhist reincarnation afterlife. Yeah. So I love how those are all existing Together at the same time. And I feel as if that presence of that sense of there always sort of being after life or a sense of a world beyond ours is just thrumming beneath the entirety of evolution as a story. That even as we're there at the gas station and getting the hot dogs, as grounded as it is in the sort of quotidian nature of life on earth, that there's also always this sort of like just low thrum.

Deborah Treisman

Yeah. And then, you know, at the end, we go back to the opening, we go back to the foxy little dance moves on the fire escape and to that. To the kind of terror of the emergency room. And that first moment where she becomes aware of the body as the housing for both life and death. Right. The center of life and the center of death. And I suppose that kind of captures the dialectic of the story.

Sarah Swanyen Bynum

Yeah. I feel as if in some ways, this story does a wonderful job of dismantling the common wisdom that teenagers are convinced of their own invincibility or, you know, that they believe they're immortal or they're invulnerable. And by starting the story with Kara's first brush with mortality and the fact that her leg continues to hurt even years afterward, that great moment where after the horrible sex in the armchair, you know, she. She feels his weight making her bad leg hurt. You know, the story doesn't let us forget the impermanence and the fragility of the body. And. And I feel as if Kara is aware of that. She is not a teenager convinced of her own immortality. And in fact, I feel as if that makes her embrace and her seeking out these ecstatic physical experiences feel all the more charged because she does know that this is not going to last forever.

Deborah Treisman

Yeah. So, you know, we do have this flash forward at the end to Kara as an adult with her adult daughters. And that serves a purpose. It shows us how much has changed socially in attitudes towards young women and sex, or in young women's attitudes towards sex, I suppose. And it also shows us Kara at a different time of her life. And. And I'm wondering how you think she has evolved.

Sarah Swanyen Bynum

I mean, I think one of the ways that she has evolved is by recognizing that change doesn't necessarily mean improvement. And it's amazing how in just half a page, we have three generations there talking to each other. There's like a conversation happening between mothers and daughters across a wide range of time periods and experiences. And Kara's mother says to her, I thought you were smarter than me. You were. And Kara replies, life is not all progress. And I am so struck by how the story allows me to look at this sort of larger sweep and to ask, it wasn't better back then, you know, and certainly all of those chilling details that the story unblinkingly includes remind us that it's not better than. But the very concise little snapshot that she offers of her daughter's experience now does not look like progress to me. That does not look as if it's a freedom or a power that has expanded. So I feel as if maybe that is one of the things that Kara has come to see more clearly with time. I think she's also come to see more clearly that what she was describing to herself as freedom was much more complicated than that. And I think the ways in which she does touch down in those particular scenes of sex complicate her narrative and complicate her 16 year old notions about the progress that she was the beneficiary of. Right. And there's, you know, it's interesting because there's that one, there's like a little tiny moment where we hear Brody saying something kind of just inane when he's like, oh, Arizona, I feel so free here. It's the air. And there's just this funny little rye moment where Kara describes herself falling asleep in the car with the free air blowing her hair. And it's such a little gesture, it's such a light gesture, but I feel as if that's a kind of moment when the older retrospective narrator is looking back a little more wryly, a little more critically about this notion of freedom and what that meant in that moment. Yeah, so I think, you know, when she then brings that word up again at the end when she's talking to Isabel and Isabel is talking about sex being marked by selfishness and prone to violence. Kara comments, it wasn't freedom to her, this sex. And I wonder if she were to push that thought a little further, would she now say that the sex that she was having in 1980 was that freedom? And I feel like that's a question that this story and the telling of

Deborah Treisman

it raises, raises, but doesn't answer.

Sarah Swanyen Bynum

But doesn't answer. But I was so happy that she raises it because it was exhilarating to me to be back in the body and mind of a 16 year old who was just feeling so high on the possibility of what sex could be. And I don't know if that's a feeling that 16 year olds have available to them anymore in the same way, you know, like You. I'm a little younger than Kara is, and I came of age sort of six, eight years later than she did. And in that moment when the sexual freedom of the 70s was shifting into the fear around HIV and AIDS. But even as I was coming of age, kind of at that moment of transition, I still just remember so clearly that sense of excitement and hunger to experience something kind of beyond the everyday. And I love how Kara, as this narrator, is able to give voice to with such conviction.

Deborah Treisman

Yeah. And one thing that Kara doesn't mention in relationship to her daughters is the fact that back in 1980, sexual discovery was discovery. It was a first time. No one had seen it on the Internet.

Sarah Swanyen Bynum

Yes.

Deborah Treisman

And that's a huge, huge difference for her daughter's generation.

Sarah Swanyen Bynum

Absolutely. There's that great line about how even though she's had sex a couple of times, male anatomy was still an unfolding mystery to her. Yes. And I think part of the excitement and the sense of a possibility was the mystery that was still attached to it. And there is that very sort of subtle node to the different moment that her daughters have come of age. And I couldn't get her to give me a for instance, except to say that choking was sort of a thing. And I loved, like, the just kind of bewildered way in which she. She says was sort of a thing. Again, this is such a deeply endearing voice. I just love this character. I love her voice. I love the frankness with which she talks about her, you know, her adventures and her blind spots. So I do feel as if one of the biggest things. Questions that leaves us is that question you raised earlier about which do we listen to more? This wonderfully warm, frank, funny, forthright voice or the scenes that she paints for us?

Deborah Treisman

Yeah. And ultimately, we probably just have to listen to both.

Sarah Swanyen Bynum

Yeah.

Deborah Treisman

Well, thank you so much, Sarah.

Sarah Swanyen Bynum

Deborah, thank you. This was great fun.

Deborah Treisman

Joan Sober has published 10 books of fiction, including the story collections Ideas of Heaven and Fools, and the novels Improvement, for which she won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN Faulkner Award, and Mercy, which was published last year. Her most recent story in the New Yorker, Safety, was also published last year. Sarah Swanyen Bynum is the author of the novels Madeleine Is Sleeping, a National Book award finalist, and Ms. Hempel chronicles and the story collection Likes. She was named one of the New Yorker's 20 under 40 fiction writers in 2010, and she's been publishing fiction in the magazine since 2008. You can download more than 220 previous episodes of the New Yorker Fiction Podcast, including one in which Sarah Swanyun Bachelor reads Extra by Yiyun Lee or subscribe to the podcast for free and Apple Podcasts. On the Writer's Voice podcast, you can hear short stories from the magazine read by their authors. You can find the Writer's Voice and other New Yorker podcasts on your podcast app. Tell us what you thought of this program on our Facebook page, or rate and review us in Apple Podcasts. This episode of the New Yorker Fiction Podcast was produced by John Lamay. I'm Deborah Treisman. Thanks for listening.

Sarah Swanyen Bynum

From prx.