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with nell freudenberger nell is the author of the short story collection, Lucky Girls, and the novels, The Dissident, the newlyweds, and the upcoming Lost and Wanted, release date April 4th, 2019. She is a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and a Coleman Fellowship from the New York Public Library. She was named one of the New Yorkers 20 under 40, which I can now give up on

ever attaining myself now that I'm 42. She graduated from Harvard and has an MFA from New York

University. She currently lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her family. So welcome,

Nell, to Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. Thanks so much for having me.

So Lucky Girls, your first collection of stories was based

on a story by the same title that you had published in The New Yorker in 2001. So I want to hear

the story basically of how that happened. You were working at the New Yorker at the time. Go from

there. I was working as an editorial assistant and I'd come there from an MFA program at NYU. So I had

some stories and I had a writing routine and I would usually get up before work and do a little bit, you know, not a lot, an hour and a half or two hours in the morning and they had a... I think that's kind of a lot before work, but... Yeah, anyway, but we were young then. Yeah, that's true. That's true.

That's true.

Publishing doesn't start at 8 in the morning.

And so I had a Yeah, I mean, but we were young then. Yeah, that's true. That's true. That's true. Publishing doesn't start at 8 in the morning.

And so I had a story and the New Yorker was doing a debut fiction contest that was for people

who had never published before, and that was definitely me.

And, you know, the only story I had that I felt comfortable showing that was finished

took place in India. And I think I thought at the time that, you know, I just, I sort of didn't have a right to write about that place. It wasn't my place. I spent a lot of time there. And I think the time I was writing in the morning was a way to kind of escape back there and be in a different world. And so that was what I'd been working on. And I gave it to Bill Buford, who was the fiction editor. Most of the work was sent in or sent in by agents of writers who hadn't published yet. And later, one of the other fiction editors told me that Bill had read it and then they had all read it and they said that they liked it, but they thought the ending was really abrupt. And it turned out that Bill had dropped the last four pages behind his couch. So, you know, a lot of luck in all sorts of ways. But it was great when it was published. It was really exciting. Wow. So what happened after that? Were you just like over the moon? Did everybody come running and ask you to turn it into a

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