She is feeling out of control and uncomfortable in her body (she is pregnant). He becomes annoyed: “You’re always calling attention to yourself. I have a very tough week ahead of me.” She agrees, but it is hard, when she feels this way. She can’t just give up and go to bed. She has to go on trying to make dinner. But as she lifts four pieces of chicken on one sheet of tinfoil, a piece drops to the floor.
Aisha Sabatini Sloan
Episode 22: “Form and Formlessness”
In an essay specially commissioned for the podcast, Aisha Sabatini Sloan describes rambling around Paris with her father, Lester Sloan, a longtime staff photographer for Newsweek, and a glamorous woman who befriends them. In an excerpt from The Art of Fiction no. 246, Rachel Cusk and Sheila Heti discuss how writing her first novel helped Cusk discover her “shape or identity or essence.” Next, Allan Gurganus’s reading of his story “It Had Wings,” about an arthritic woman who finds a fallen angel in her backyard, is interspersed with a version of the story rendered as a one-woman opera by the composer Bruce Saylor. The episode closes with “Dear Someone,” a poem by Deborah Landau.
Rachel Cusk photo courtesy the author.
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