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 paper losses by Laurie Moore.

They all slept in the same room in separate beds and saw other families squabbling and squabbling

so that by comparison theirs, a family about to break apart forever, didn't look so bad.

The story was chosen by Gary Steingart, whose fiction journalism and essays have been appearing in the magazine since 2003.

This latest novel, which was excerpted in The New Yorker, is super sad, true love story.

This is Gary Steingart's second appearance on The Fiction Podcast.

Welcome back, Gary.

Hey, good to be back.

So the first time you were on in 2008 you chose a story by Andrea Lee and this time it's a story by Laurie Moore.

Are you a fan of Laurie's work in general?

Oh yes, I'm a huge fan.

Laurie's work was some of the first work I ever encountered when I got to college and decided to become a writer.

Is that when it happened?

That's when it happened.

And I realized quite quickly that I could never write short stories like that.

And I never really wrote a short story.

I think I wrote two short stories in my whole life and I keep a picture of Laurie Moore by my bedside.

I work in bed to remind me not to write short stories because it's very hard to get them to be this good.

Yeah, what was it in her work that really got to you?

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