This is the New Yorker Fiction Podcast from the New Yorker magazine.

I'm Deborah Treesman, 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 Family Walls by Maeve Brennan, which was published in

The New Yorker in March of 1973.

He might as well not have seen Rose at all, but he had seen her.

And he wondered if it could possibly have been intentional to shut the door in his face

like that.

The story was chosen by Claire Louise Bennett, who's published two books of fiction,

Pond and Checkout 19.

Hi Claire Louise.

Hi Deborah.

So you chose a Maeve Brennan story today, and I know that you've just written the introduction

to a reissue of her story collection, The Springs of Affection, so she has likely been

on your mind.

How did you first come to her stories?

I first came to Maeve Brennan's stories quite a few years ago.

I live in Ireland, but saying that it's not as if she is one of the most well-known Irish

writers, I don't suppose.

But I did come across The Springs of Affection, an earlier edition of Springs of Affection,

I think in a second hand shop, and I bought it.

...