Invalid Souls: Hilton Als discusses Jean Stafford and her story "Children Are Bored on Sunday" with The New Yorker's fiction editor, Deborah Treisman. Reading by Eliza Foss.
This is the New Yorker fiction podcast from the New Yorker magazine.
I'm Deborah Treisman, fiction editor at the New Yorker.
Every month we ask a writer to choose a story from the magazine's archives to read and discuss.
Today we'll hear a story by Jean Stafford called children are bored on Sunday, which was published in the magazine in 1948.
She wanted them to go together to some hopelessly disreputable bar and to console one another in the most maudlin fashion over a lengthy succession of powerful drinks of whiskey to compare their illnesses, to marry their invalid souls for these few hours of painful communion.
Children are bored on Sunday was chosen from the archives by Hilton Als, a staff writer and theater critic for the New Yorker.
Hi, Hilton.
Hi, Hilton.
Jean Stafford was a novelist and short.
Story writer who published quite a few.
Pieces in the New Yorker, mostly in the 1950s.
Children are born on Sunday was her.
First story that the magazine published.
What made you choose this one?
I'm always fascinated by how she handles the incredibly hard balance between the internal and external worlds.
Often in the lives of women, we get one or the other.
We don't get a sort of admixture.
And what I liked so much about her work always was that the external world always sort of provides a trigger for an emotional, intellectually pretty arduous journey that the character goes on.
The story is about a woman going.
To the Metropolitan Museum of Art and while there, sort of working through her own psychological crisis, or not really working through it, actually, but experiencing it.