This is the writer's voice new fiction from the New Yorker. I'm Deborah Treisman, fiction editor at the New Yorker. On this

episode of the writer's voice we'll hear J Robert Lennon read his story The Loop

from the August 26 2019 issue of the magazine.

Lennon is the author of 10 books of fiction,

including the novel Broken River

and the story collection See You in Paradise.

Now here's J Robert Lennon.

The Loop

Divorced, fired from adjunct teaching

after a botched attempt to unionize and her only child

lost to college Bev had for the first time and decades more freedom than she knew

what to do with. The empty house, hers alone,

disgusted her. She sold it against her daughter's wishes and moved to a two-bedroom

apartment in a new building downtown.

Between the house money and the monthly support payments from her ex, he was fucking his assistant

and had signed these things away with the heedless joy of a rabbit sprung from a trap.

She'd been given the opportunity to think carefully about what to do with the rest of her life.

This quickly came to seem like torture.

So she volunteered for moving on up. This was the charity

she donated her ex-husband's study desk to, a non-profit whose volunteers drove a big yellow truck around town collecting the

castoffs of the well-to-do and delivering them to people in need.

After her move settled into her newly purposeless life, she realized that she

...