This is the writer's voice, new fiction from The New Yorker.

I'm Deborah Treesman, fiction editor at The New Yorker.

On this episode of The writer's voice, we'll hear Jumpa Lahiri read her story, Jubilee,

from the July 7th and 14th, 2025 issue of the magazine.

Lahiri, a recipient of the National Humanities Medal and the Penn Malamut Award, among others, is the author of six books of fiction, including the story collections interpreter of maladies,

which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000, and Roman Stories, which was written in Italian and published in English in 2023.

Now here's Jumpa Lahiri.

Jubilee. A wooden ruler with the etched faces of Henry VIII's six wives running down the middle.

Ticket stubs from Hampton Court and the Chamber of Horrors, where we walked ahead of our

mothers, hand in hand, a few wrappers of dairy milk. I still see clearly the brochure from

Madame Tussaud's, a green nameplate on the cover,

with white lettering. We shuddered at the likeness of one particularly sinister man,

standing in an olive-colored three-piece suit with old brown pharmaceutical bottles behind him.

We'd seen him in the chamber, dedicated to those who poisoned and stabbed and slashed.

Later, flipping through the brochure, sitting side by side, we braced ourselves for his effigy,

how we dreaded turning to that page. A Mavis Galant's story I discovered only recently

likens the compulsion to save tickets and programs to a type of narcissism.

That's how a mother interprets a daughter's need to hold on to memorabilia.

But was that not what Galant had done in some of her stories, and taught me to do,

intertwining invention with preserved bits and scraps of life?

Already that spring, about to turn ten in the city of my birth,

I was attempting to leave some trace,

...