I'm Meg Wallitzer, and on this selected shorts, how far will you go to support your loved ones?

Would you attend a thousand-track meets?

Lie to them about how good they were in their school play, cats?

Or consider haunting them at the supermarket?

This week, stories about parental figures doing the right thing from some unusual perspectives.

You're listening to Selected Shorts, where our greatest actors transport us through the magic of fiction, one short story at a time.

There's a reason why families find their way into fiction so often.

They offer up everything a writer needs, plot, character, drama, surprise.

We can explore how love does not preclude mystification or exasperation, and how we can live with people day after day and still have

no real idea what they're thinking or feeling. We can look at the generational aspect of family.

Everyone is someone's child, parent, or grandparent,

or was. On this program, two stories that explore family from unusual perspectives. In the first,

the mother-daughter bond becomes a whole history of women. In the second, we skip a generation

to explore the bond between a grandparent and grandchild.

In real life, it's often true that family can overstay its welcome, but that's less true in fiction,

where we seem to only want to hear more about characters who are related to one another,

regardless of their personalities. Some of the best fiction ever written is about family. Maybe it's because the

reader knows there's going to be conflict, or maybe it's because there's an opportunity to get

perspectives from different generations. Or maybe it's simply a relief that it's an imaginary family

and not yours. And I should add that there's also a relief for a fiction writer whose subject is

family. As long as that writer doesn't get dangerously close to the hot stove of nonfiction,

he or she will still get invited to Thanksgiving. The Protean author Zadie Smith is beyond

...