This is The Writer's Voice, new fiction from The New Yorker.

I'm Debra Treesman, 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-Haha, and The Dead Republic. His most recent novel, Love, came out earlier this year.

Now here's Roddy Doyle.

Life Without Children Doyle. 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 once, 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'd 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 Jesuses. 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. I've four kids.

...