The New Yorker: Fiction · The New Yorker

Jennifer Egan Reads Margaret Atwood

January 1, 2025·1 hr 7 min·5 clips

Jennifer Egan explains why Margaret Atwood's grotesque story 'Cat' haunted her for decades.

Deborah Treisman begins with the podcast's familiar setup. She introduces herself as fiction editor and explains the monthly routine: a writer picks a story from the magazine's archive, reads it, then discusses it. This time the choice is Margaret Atwood's Cat. Jennifer Egan, introduced through her fiction and The Candy House, says she wanted to return to a story she had not read since the nineties. That memory matters. She is not chasing a new discovery so much as checking on something that stayed lodged in her mind. Then the reading takes over. Atwood's Cat moves through a tense, stylish world of design work, suggestion, professional argument, and private unhappiness. Gerald keeps pressing on the story. The excerpt follows fights over visual provocation, from lingerie and broken perfume bottles to leather gloves, tied stockings, and the limits of taste. Cat's room starts to feel smaller. Her thoughts slip from work irritation to time with Gerald, a stalled city, wilted flowers, and Hairball's bottle sitting there with its odd charge. The prose tightens as it goes. What starts as a quarrel over commercial images turns into something more trapped: self-blame, dependence, and a life that has become hard to move inside. Treisman's frame stays light. She lets Egan's memory, the archive, and Atwood's sentences do the work. The ending is simple: credits, Egan's long New Yorker connection, and pointers to the Fiction Podcast archive and the Writer's Voice feed. The episode does not push. It invites, reads, and steps back.

As heard by us

Jennifer Egan reads Margaret Atwood's "Cat" as a cool, cramped study of appetite, taste, and confinement.

Jennifer Egan's choice of Margaret Atwood's "Cat" gives this Fiction Podcast episode a crisp double perspective: a story first published in 1990, read now by someone who says it has stayed with her since that decade.

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