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

I'm Deborah Treasman, fiction editor at The New Yorker.

On this episode of The Writer's Voice, we'll hear Tessa Hadley read her story, Cecilia

Awakened from the September 17th, 2018 issue of the magazine.

Hadley has published nine books of fiction, including

the novel The Past, and the Story Collection's Married Love and Bad Dreams and Other

Stories, which was published last year. Now here's Tessa Hadley.

Cecilia awakened. Cecilia awakened.

Cecilia awakened from her childhood while she was on holiday in Italy the summer she turned 15.

It was not a sexual awakening, or not exactly, rather an intellectual or imaginative one.

Until that summer, the odd child she was had seemed to fit in perfectly with the oddity of her rather elderly parents.

Her father, Ken, worked at a university library, and her mother, Angela, wrote historical novels, and when they came late to marriage, and then to childbearing and child-rearing, they saw no reason to change

the entrenched pattern of their lives or to become more like ordinary people.

No one who knew them could quite imagine afterward how they had managed nappies and dummies and spooning in baby food.

They themselves couldn't really remember how they had managed it.

A scalling baby must have been an eruption of anarchy in lives that were otherwise characterized by restraint and irony.

It was only the wants, in any case.

There was just Cecilia, and she hadn't squalled for long.

Even when her father was still carrying her in a backpack,

she had looked around her with those wise, huge eyes that were so like her mother's,

pale and heavy-lidded, drinking everything in with appetite and wonder, but not participating in it.

Soon she had learned to hate children's parties, preferring a trip to a museum or a castle

...