This is The Writer's Voice, new fiction from The New Yorker.

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

On this week's episode of The Writer's Voice, we'll hear Jim Shepard read his story,

The Queen of Bad Influences, from the June 16th, 2025 issue of the magazine.

Shepard, a winner of the Ray Award for the short story, is the author of 13 books of fiction,

including the novels The Book of Aaron and Phase 6, and the story collection The World to Come.

Now here's Jim Shepherd.

The Queen of Bad Influences.

Throughout her childhood, Constance called the gorse that grew on the hillsides above her house

honey bottle and gathered fistfuls of it despite the spines, so that her hands would smell of it,

a smell that seemed to combine oatmeal and hot metal and sun. The smell was somewhat a solace

when it came to her devastating shyness, a shyness that so galled her mother that when Constance were treated

into sniffing her fingers in public, her mother could hardly restrain herself from swatting her daughter's

hands from her nose. Her older sisters had no such inhibitions and considered Constance a minor

mortification, while she understood their high spirits to be a manic display of an unhappiness that their mother viewed as a

necessary part of their social success. She agonized through birthday parties. She refused school games.

She perambulated the fringes of family gatherings, setting everyone's teeth on edge. Her most vivid

recollections of childhood seemed unconnected, like lighted rooms scattered across a city,

and she had decided that the most painful felt only distantly related to her.

When she hadn't been absent-minded, she had been diffident, and when she hadn't been diffident,

she had presented as vacant. It was in no way clear to her how she had evolved into a moderately

confident young woman of 20.

...