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, on our 150th episode of The Podcast, we're going to hear The Shorn Lamb by Gene Stafford,

which was published in the New Yorker in January of 1953.

At the thought of her mother's golden hair in the fire light and the smell of her perfume in the

intimate warmth, and the sound of her voice saying, isn't this gay Miss Baby? The tears came faster.

For in her heavy heart, Hannah felt certain that now her hair was cut off,

her mother would never want to sit so close to her again.

The story was chosen by Garth Greenwell, whose first novel, What Belongs To You, was published in 2016.

His second book of fiction, Cleanness, will come out in January.

Hi, Garth.

Hi, Deborah.

So, can you tell me what made you choose a story by Gene Stafford to read today?

You know, I am a late discoverer of Gene Stafford. I studied poetry for most of my,

really for most of my life. And Gene Stafford was to me horrifyingly only Robert Lowell's first

wife. And I picked her up recently and, you know, I am a convert and have a convert's enthusiasm.

I just think she's extraordinary.

What is it that defines her for you?

So, there's this remarkable ability that she has to balance this kind of lacerating irony

with a very plangent pathos. And that's a combination that I find very few writers get right.

I mean, I think she faces up to, you know, this very, very brutal sense of how people treat one

...