The following podcast contains explicit language.

Hello and welcome to the audio book club for Monday, October 31st.

Today we are going to discuss This Beautiful Life by Helen Schulman, a book that came out this year about a viral video, which ruins the life essentially of two teenagers in a New York City prep school.

I'm Hannah Rosen, editor of

double X. I'm joined here by Emily Bazelon, who covers law, and is also an editor at double X. Hi, Emily.

Hey, Hannah. And Josh Levine, who's the executive editor of Slate. Hello.

Who sometimes rarely, never talks about fiction critically and is proud to join us in these inaugural fiction.

Exactly.

His inaugural fiction podcast.

It's very exciting.

Before we begin, I'm going to turn to Emily who's going to tell us about our book for next month.

We are going to read The Good Mother by Sue Miller, which came out in 1986.

So I discovered it was having its 25th anniversary,

a good excuse to revisit whether it deserved all the attention it got at the time, whether it's

as haunting as I at least remember it. And Hannah and I are going to be joined for that podcast by

Amy Bloom, a celebrated fiction writer. Okay, so let's start at the beginning.

Helen Shulman makes an interesting decision.

She opens the novel with a very, very short chapter, which is about the viral video itself.

She just describes the video.

And I'm going to read you a tiny bit of that description.

It is done by a 13-year-old girl. Apparently the music in the

background is Beyonce. I love to love you, baby. And she describes the image this way. Her

...