"The Surrogate"

9 October 2017: “Which just goes to show that you mustn’t trust a scrupulous realism— that sometimes sloppy fantasy comes closer to the true state of things.” –Tessa Hadley’s “The Surrogate”

Three posts in a row on New Yorker fiction podcast stories. Since I tend to save these for when I have big blocks of uninterrupted time, this is a sure sign that I’ve been spending a lot of time in my own head-space. Perhaps that latter fact is why this particular story’s theme—a kind of exploration of fantasy—stood out to me. In the discussion of the story after she’s done reading it out loud, Curtis Sittenfeld says of the piece’s main character, “Her fantasies…hinge on being unrealized, which I think it not that unusual.” I like that thought a lot, too--or at least I like thinking about it.