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 Claire Sistanovich read her story different people from the January 30th, 2023 issue of the magazine.

Sistanovich's debut story collection, Objects of Desire, which came out in 2021, was a finalist for the Penn Robert W. Bingham Prize.

She was named a 535 honoree by the National Book Foundation in 2022. Now here's Claire Sistanovich.

Different people.

When Gellie was young, she lied to her diary. It was not a toy diary. She had dutifully filled several of those already, notebooks and girlish colors, with ostentatious locks and many at your keys.

This new diary had a dull brown cover and no means of protecting itself. It was an object she could imagine becoming an artifact.

She wrote in smooth black ink that glittered mysteriously until it dried, and she chose her words carefully, the longer the better.

There were some words squeezed to fit in the narrow space between lines, much narrower than she was used to, that she wasn't sure how to pronounce. She wrote for an audience. She was 12 years old.

The problem was that her life was uneventful. She had a mother and a father and a backyard, and although she didn't have a dog or a cat, she had been permitted to have a bird.

It had a pale blue breast. She said breast without embarrassment, or tried to, because it was childish not to.

And black and white feathers that looked like an elegant houndstooth coat.

These colors were much better than the bright green and raucous yellow of other parakeets, but there still wasn't much to write about a bird.

In 100 years, when Gilly was dead, we're so old that her skin had turned to paper and all her words to pure precious truth.

No one would want to read about cleaning out the bird cage, no matter how much she had thought about it.

Dread consumed her for days in advance of the task, discussed overpowered her as she swept the small hard pellets into the trash.

The bird released from its cage, sent him sad on Gilly's head, its pale, bony feet, pressing into her scalp.

So she made stuff up. Her inventions were subtle and artful. She didn't become an orphan or contract an unexplained illness.

She didn't escape the tree-lined street where nothing ever happened.

In fact, Gilly mostly didn't lie about herself at all. That was harder than it looked.

But it was easy she discovered to lie about her parents because when she really thought about it, she realized that she barely knew them.

Of all the injustices of being a child, this might have been the greatest. They had known her for her entire life.

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