2018-07-03
45 分钟Ottessa Moshfegh joins Deborah Treisman to read and discuss "My Life Is a Joke," by Sheila Heti, from a 2015 issue of the magazine.
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 my life is a joke by Sheila Hetty, which was published in the New Yorker in May of 2015.
If there had not been a twinge of anxiety in me that something stuck, still needed to be said, I would still be in the ground.
The story was chosen by Otessa Moshfegh, who's the author of one short story collection and three novels, including Eileen, which won the PEN Hemingway Award for fiction, and my year of rest and relaxation, which will be published later this month.
Hi, Odessa.
Hi, Deborah.
So Sheila Headey published her first story collection in Canada, where she's from, in 2001 when she was 24.
But her breakthrough book in a lot of ways, was how should a person be?
Which she called a novel from life, and that was published here in 2012.
Was that what you first read by her?
No, this is the first thing I read, the story.
Sheila.
Hetty.
Really?
Yes.
Have you gone back and read the books?
I didn't want to.
I didn't want to have a context for this story.