The New Yorker: Fiction · The New Yorker

David Bezmozgis Reads Sarah Shun-lien Bynum

April 1, 2024·1 hr 9 min·5 clips

David reveals how Bynum gives children a wildness and intimates the things they don't tell their parents.

The frame stays quiet, almost ceremonial. Deborah Treisman explains the podcast's monthly habit: a writer chooses an archival New Yorker story, reads from it, and talks it through. The returning guest picks Bynum's "Likes," an October 2017 story that slides quickly into tight family unease. The first excerpt stings. A father hears how sorry he sounds. His daughter, already mortified, hisses back that he has made her talk too much. From there, the reading opens out by inches. A sentimental sign with mangled syntax becomes household junk, but also a little monument to all the tomorrows nobody used well. The comedy is dry enough to hurt. The father's irritation over a supposedly Michigan-made object gives the scene a sharp comic nick without draining the sadness. Then technology comes in through ordinary parental panic. Dorothy worries about Snapchat, captions, disappearing photos, and the hopelessness of tracking what a child sees or sends. The story keeps that worry in the room: laptop light, a mouth guard, a neoprene eye mask. No grand speech about culture, just a bedroom and parents trying to keep up. Treisman is present but careful. She places the guest in a literary career, naming his novels and story collections, then lets Bynum's fiction do the heavy lifting. The close is plain: more than two hundred fiction episodes are available, along with The Writer's Voice, where magazine stories are read by their authors. What lingers is the generational gap. Bynum turns small misreadings into a patient portrait of parents trying to understand a child's disappearing world.

As heard by us

A dry, inward reading about fatherhood, embarrassment, and the uneasy privacy of a daughter's online life.

Sarah Shun-lien Bynum's "Likes," read here by David Bezmozgis, is a story of parental attention at its most fretful and least flattering. A father hears himself sounding sorry, watches his daughter retreat into embarrassment, and finds his mind snagging on the smallest household…

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