This is the New Yorker Fiction Podcast from the New Yorker magazine.

I'm Deborah Treesman, 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.

Always as part of Laura's consciousness was the worry that her parents would divorce.

They weren't volatile and didn't fight, not the way married people fought in books or movies,

but instead picked up one another in a slime, monkey-like manner,

each baiting the other until one of them might be forced to slam a door or yell at the dog.

This month we're going to hear Naked Ladies by Antonia Nelson,

which was published in The New Yorker in May of 1992.

The story was chosen by Laurie Moore, who is the author of eight books of fiction,

including The Story Collection Bar, and The Novel Agate at The Stairs.

Hi, Laurie.

Hi, Deborah.

Now you read this story when it came out in 1992?

Yes, I did.

I actually have even taught it in creative writing classes,

but I'd sort of forgotten about it.

And then when you asked for me to think of something, then I remembered this story.

What struck you when you first read it?

What made you want to teach it?

Well, I love stories that are about children discovering the mysteries of their parents' marriages,

and also having as the observer of that marriage someone who is potentially sort of a writer or an artist.

...