This is the writer's voice, new fiction from the New Yorker.

I'm Deborah Treisman, fiction editor at the New Yorker.

On this episode of the writer's voice, we'll hear Roddy. Preesman, Fiction Editor at the New Yorker.

On this episode of the writer's voice, we'll hear Roddy Doyle read his story, Life Without Children,

from the October 19th, 2020 issue of the magazine.

Doyle is the author of 13 novels, including the Booker Prize winning

Patty Clark Ha Ha Ha ha, and the Dead Republic. His most recent novel, Love, came out earlier

this year. Now here's Roddy Doyle.

Life Without Children.

Once years ago when the Life Without Children

Once years ago when the children were children, someone had asked Alan if he had any children, and he'd said no.

He hadn't expected to say it. It hadn't been part of a plan. It wasn't a woman he was talking to. It wasn't the possibility of sex that had pushed him to say it. He remembered it as a choice, a junction yes or no, and just the ones he'd gone for no, and for the rest of the evening he'd been a man with no children. It had been dreadful really having to constantly

remind himself that he had no kids because that was what he had been for more

than two decades, the man with kids.

From the second he woke to the point in the night when he stopped knowing that his eyes

were closing, he'd been that man.

And the evening he denied it, he'd still been that man, out for the night with no witnesses,

but still up past his neck in four childhoods.

It had felt like the worst thing he'd ever done for years. He'd been Peter in the

garden of wherever denying four little Jesus. He knew that if it had been a woman and the denial had led to sex, he'd have shouted something

as he was coming in a room off a room in the back of her car.

He'd have groaned it.

...