The New Yorker: Fiction · The New Yorker

David Wright Faladé Reads Madeleine Thien

April 1, 2025·1 hr 17 min·5 clips

Lou's panic attack on the 27th floor reveals her struggle with control as an immigrant woman.

Transformation first shows up as a tempting idea. The opening question asks what it would mean to take a pill that could change a life, send someone backward, and make another self possible. Treisman keeps the setup clean: the story, its place in the magazine's December 2021 archive, and David Wright Faladé in the usual writer guest chair. His reason for choosing it has a personal line through it. He knew Madeleine Thien through the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library, so the choice feels less random than quietly attached. Then the story takes over. Lou is in an inquiry with Susan, the investigator, who is trying to sort out a complaint around John Sadler. The scene works because Susan keeps reaching for one kind of story, and Lou keeps refusing it. Susan sees Lou as someone harmed, an outsider and a subordinate. Lou will not let that become the whole account. Her answers are calm enough to be more unsettling than anger. The line about eating from a bowl and turning it over bothers Susan because it means something, but not in the way Susan expects. Lou catches the imbalance right away. Susan cannot read her, and that failure gives Lou back some control. Shame is offered as a burden Lou should not carry, but Lou questions why shame has to enter at all. Fourteen years come into view, but lost time still does not make Lou give up her own sense of worth or survival. Her answer lands hard: no one takes advantage of her, because living that way would have erased her long ago. The episode then returns to the archive, with Treisman placing Faladé's work and this conversation on the long shelf of New Yorker fiction readings.

As heard by us

A taut Fiction reading about power, shame, and Lou's refusal to be explained by others.

David Wright Falade's reading of Madeleine Thien's "Lou Reshaping" lingers on a scene of office inquiry where every polite phrase carries pressure.

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Why you'd press play

Press play for a calm reading that turns a workplace investigation into quiet moral pressure.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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