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 Lynn Olman read her story,

Time for the Eyes to Adjust, from the December 17th, 2018 issue of the magazine.

Olman is a Norwegian writer and journalist. She's the author of six novels, including a

blessed child and the cold song. Time for the Eyes to Adjust is adapted from her novel Unquiet,

which was published in Norway in 2015, and will be published in English in 2019.

Now here's Lynn Oman.

Time for the eyes to adjust. To see, to remember, to comprehend. It all depends on where you

stand. The first time I came to Hammars,

I was barely a year old and knew nothing

about the great and upheaving love that had brought me there.

Actually, there were three loves.

I organize, catalog, a number.

I am the same age now that my father was when I was born, 48. My mother was

27. She looked both much younger and much older than her years back then. I don't know which of the

three loves came first, but I'll begin with the one that arose between my mother and my father in

1965 and ended before I was old enough to remember anything about it. I have seen pictures

and read letters and heard them talk about their time together and heard other people talk about

it, but the truth is you can never know much about other people's lives,

least of all your parents, especially if your parents have made a point of turning their lives

into stories that they then go on to tell with a God-given ability for not caring in the least

...