David Rabe joins Deborah Treisman to read and discuss “The Other Side of the Street,” by John Updike, which appeared in a 1991 issue of the magazine. Rabe, a fiction writer, playwright, and screenwriter, is the author of more than a dozen plays, including the Tony Award-winning “Sticks and Bones,” “In the Boom Boom Room,” and “Hurlyburly.” He received the PEN/Laura Pels Theatre Award as a Master American Dramatist in 2014. His novels include “Recital of the Dog” and “Girl by the Road at Night.”
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 the other side of the street by John Updike, which was published in the New Yorker in October of 1991.
He inhaled Hayesville happiness.
He saw his entire life past and to come as an errant encircling of this forgotten center.
The story was chosen by David Rabe, the playwright and fiction writer whose novels include Recital of the Dog, Dinosaurs on the Roof, and Girl by the road at night.
Hi, David.
Hi.
So I know some other ideas came up, but Updike was pretty much the first writer you thought of reading for the podcast.
Why was that?
He's been, you know, he's sort of been in my mind for, since I first started writing or thought about writing.
He was always meaningful to me, and then there's a period of time where I stopped reading him.
I just willfully stopped because I felt like it was the only way to write, the way he was doing it.
And so I just stopped.
And I can remember talking to friends, and I would kind of even developed some harsh opinions of him that were really inauthentic on some level.
Right.
Based on just a need to kind.
Of separate what for you is at the heart of his appeal.
Yeah, I mean, it's a funny way we have, you know, there's kind of a cross of backgrounds in a way.