This is the New Yorker fiction podcast from The New Yorker magazine.

I'm Deborah Treasman, 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 The Faithful by Elizabeth Hardwick,

which appeared in the New Yorker in February of 1979. In Amsterdam, we knew many people,

and not a single one has slipped from memory. Just now, dreaming, I am drawn back to a woman

painter named Simone, and to her fervent romancer, the eternal husband, Dr. Z.

The story was chosen by Lauren Groff, who's published seven books of fiction, including

the story collection's Delicate Edible Birds and Florida, which won the story prize in 2018.

Hi, Lauren.

Hi, Deborah.

So the story you're reading today, The Faithful, became a chapter of Elizabeth Hardwick's novel, Sleepless Nights, which was published later the same year in 1979.

You told me that you've read that book 15 times.

At least.

And no, I just read it again yesterday.

So I made 16 times.

The whole book? Well, it's a short book. It's 130 pages, something like that. It's one of my favorites. Every time you read it, you see something new. It's like a jewel, right? You turn it in the hand. You find something radically new and different and strange. So it's just one of those touchstone books for me, for sure.

What do you think is it that makes it that way? Yeah, I've been thinking about this book for years now,

decades. And it's unusual for a work of fiction, right? It doesn't have the Aristotelian arc, right? The rise

into a climax to a denouement, right? It's very much a constellated story.

It's a story that feels written from the flesh and the blood and the bone of Elizabeth

Hardwick's actual life while she said that it was very much a work of fiction, right? So there are

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