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.

This month, Laurie Moore chose Day Old Baby Rats, a story by Julie Hayden, which was published in the magazine in 1972.

Escaping from the street, she looks up to see where she is, a mistake, her head begins to spin.

Laurie Moore's stories have been appearing in the New Yorker for more than 20 years.

Her most recent book is a novel called The Gate of the Stairs.

It's out in hardcover from Knopf and is coming out in paperback in September.

She joins us from a studio in Madison, Wisconsin.

Hi, Laurie. Hi, Deborah.

So Julie Hayden died in 1981, and although she worked at the New Yorker for 16 years, the 10 stories that she published here seem to have been mostly forgotten.

She had a collection called The List of the Past, which is long out of print.

What made you think of reading this story?

I had first read this story as a college student when it was part of an anthology that had been signed in an English course that I was taking.

And the anthology was Susan K. Hill's Women in Fiction.

And Julie Hayden was, I think, probably the youngest person in the anthology, maybe Alice Walker was younger.

But the story fascinated me for a number of reasons.

I felt that somehow it was speaking some sort of dangerous truths about being a young woman in New York.

And the writing was riveting.

I just trusted the whole project of it and the daring of it.

And I thought, instead of Holly, go lightly, we have Holly, go darkly here.

And when I went to try to find literary friends who might have heard of her, I could find no one.

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