This is The Writer's Voice, new fiction from The New Yorker.

I'm Debra Treesman, Fiction Editor at The New Yorker.

On this episode of The Writer's Voice, we'll hear Andrew Martin read his story, Risk, Discipline from the December 22nd, 2025 issue of the magazine.

Martin is the author of the novel Early Work and the story collection Cool for America.

A new novel, Doundeim, from which this story was adapted, will be published in March.

Now here's Andrew Martin.

Risk, Discipline.

When Violet and I finally decided to get married, I was in the middle of a depression so deep it had developed

into something more like psychosis.

I felt like I was

pretending to be myself. I don't mean I was playing the role of the husband to be, the good

son, the whatever. I mean I was going around thinking, what would I do right now if I were Malcolm?

I didn't feel like myself, but I wasn't inhabiting, I don't know, a persona or anything.

I was a glitchy, mutating thing, a vague CGI blur from the last act of a late 90s blockbuster.

I felt like multiple selves at once and also like maybe I didn't exist.

We were hungry for joy.

Joy was not the kind of word either of us had used unironically in the

past, but some of our irony had been scoured off by loneliness and terror. We were having

trouble being funny, except in abrupt, gallowsy ways. Violet's emergency medical instructions

taped to the refrigerator in March included a funeral do not play list that was just

living on a prayer, taking care of business, and any version, rendition, or interpolation of

forever young. It was offensive at that time to aspire to happiness, at least out loud, but people

...