2023-03-08
1 小时 13 分钟Claire-Louise Bennett joins Deborah Treisman to read and discuss “Family Walls,” by Maeve Brennan, which was published in The New Yorker in 1973. Bennett has published two books of fiction, “Pond” and “Checkout 19.”
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 family walls by Maeve Brennan, which was published in the New Yorker in March of 1973.
He might as well not have seen Rose, but he had seen her, and he wondered if it could possibly have been intentional to shut the door on his face like that.
The story was chosen by Claire Louise Bennett, who's published two books of fiction, Pond and Checkout 19.
Hi, Claire Louise.
Hi, Deborah.
So you chose a Maeve Brennan story today, and I know that you've just written the introduction to a reissue of her story collection, the springs of affection.
So she has likely been on your mind.
How did you first come to her stories?
I first came to Maeve Bellen's stories quite a few years ago.
I live in Ireland, but saying that it's not as if she is one of the most well known irish writers, I don't suppose.
But I did come across the springs of affection, an earlier edition of springs of affection, I think, in a secondhand shop when I bought it.
So I became a fan kind of immediately.
I loved her writing style.
I loved her attention to detail that sometimes kind of borders on the obsessive.
It was interesting to read over those stories again, and I really couldn't understand it this time around that she is just not more well known, I suppose.
Why do you think that is?
I mean, she, she was actually quite well known in the US because of her New Yorker pieces, I suppose, but not so much in Ireland.