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 Lauren Groff read her story, Mother of Men, from the November 10th, 2025 issue of the magazine.

Groff's works of fiction include the novels Fates and Furies and Matrix, both of which were finalists for the National Book Award, and the Faster Wilds, which was published in 2023.

A new story collection, Brawler, will come out in February

of 26. Now here's Lauren Broth. Mother of Men. There are men in my house, too many men. I am being driven mad by the men who are

always in my house. There's my husband, a man I can't resent because he's grandfathered in,

and there are also the four men who have been building the bathroom addition to our bedroom

downstairs, a tall and wiry Italian guy from New Jersey

who talks a great deal and wears so much cologne that he seems to linger in the rooms even when

he's gone. Plus three quiet Venezuelans who often have to quickly redo the things that the

Jersey guy has done while he's taking a break.

In and out of the house, the workmen go all day, their boots crunching on the ram board over my

rugs. They slam the kitchen door, sit on my bed to stare at their work, cover all surfaces

with fine white dust. It has been five months already, but the addition is somehow still hypothetical, an open wound,

a tarp-covered construction, leaking air conditioning, allowing a scattering of palmetto bugs

as shiny as polished buttons to stream inside.

Once I woke up at midnight to a disturbance in the addition and squinted

into the dark of the construction and saw the weird, pointy, pale head of a possum looking at me

from a hole that remains open to the outdoors, where the bathtub's drain line is supposed to go.

Of course, of all the men in my house, the most shocking are my own

boys, who are no longer boy size but have somehow become man size. The younger one slender as a whip,

...