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 we're going to hear My Life Is A Choke by Sheila Heady,

which was published in the New Yorker in May of 2015.

If there had not been a twinge of anxiety in me that something still needed to be said,

I would still be in the ground.

The story was chosen by Ateza Moshfeg,

who's the author of one short story collection and three novels,

including Eileen, which won the Penn Hemingway Award for Fiction,

and my year of rest and relaxation, which will be published later this month.

Hi Ateza.

Hi, Deborah.

So Sheila Heady published her first story collection in Canada,

where she's from, in 2001, when she was 24,

but her breakthrough book in a lot of ways was How Should A Person Be,

which she called a novel from Life,

and that was published here in 2012.

Was that what you first read by her?

No, this is the first thing I've read.

The story.

She, Le Heady.

...