This is The Writer's Voice, new fiction from The New Yorker. I'm Debra Triesman, fiction editor at The New Yorker.

On this episode of The Writer's Voice, we'll hear Matthew Klam read his story, The Other Party, which appeared in the December 19th, 2022 issue of the magazine.

Klam is the author of the collection, Sam The Cat, and other stories, and the novel Who Is Rich, which was published in 2017.

Now here's Matthew Klam.

The Other Party. My daughter walked into the house with a boy named Brendan.

She came into the kitchen limping a little, her mascara smeared, and laid out on the floor in front of the stove.

I was dipping a cookie in icing, checking the color to see if it needed more green.

Every year in December, our block had a Christmas cookie swap, a ritual that had become one of the less disgusting parts of the holiday season.

I was home a lot and took care of things, the cooking and the house stuff. Before being home a lot, I'd worked on a TV show in Los Angeles.

It was shot on two gigantic stages at a movie studio in Burbank, in your building shaped like a wizard hat that you could see from the Ventura Freeway.

I was out there for a year, living in a canyon above sunset, and missed my kid so badly that when I passed the playground of the elementary school into Luca Lake, I had to pull over, smoke a cigarette, and cry.

All day long, a dozen of us sat around a big table in a dark room writing a soapy drama about an inner city hospital for a guy who'd optioned my novel and wanted me to learn the ropes.

He said I had potential, and he thought of what he was giving me as a priceless education, one that came with specific instructions, like a Fabergé egg he wanted me to stick up my ass to keep it safe, but then he got angry and forgot about the egg and kicked me so hard that it shattered, and while I was bleeding to death, he blamed me for breaking it.

When he fired me, I came home, and a few months later the pandemic hit. I did the shopping and the driving and the cleaning. I figured out how to vacuum inside the radiator, and at night I'd close my eyes, and I'd see the top rack of the dishwasher.

My wife, Monica, moved her practice online, and I'd hear her down in the basement, not the words or even the tone so much as the endlessness of it, with her patience on screen, in states of dislocation and despair, as she put in more hours than she had in her entire life.

Before the TV show, I'd been a serious writer with big ambitions, but supporting a family was a whole other thing.

I lived in a little cage now, which I'd built for myself, and I was comfortable in it. I was like a housekeeper who folded underpants and got laid.

My wife was either the customer or the boss, she and our daughter came first, and everything hinged on nobody being mad at me.

In the spring we got vaccinated, and in the fall they went back to school in the office.

I was examining the test cookie in the light, by a window that overlooked a row of backyards, while listening to Christmas music and wondering when to start dinner.

I felt protected by the holiday, and by this baking and the neighborly union to come.

Like our Labor Day block party, which featured beer pong and a spoon race, the cookie party made the world feel smaller and saner, and I was happy to have Rachel safely at home, and Brendan in the doorway, looking down at her with a stupid expression.

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