The New Yorker: Fiction · The New Yorker

Lauren Groff Reads Elizabeth Hardwick

August 1, 2025·1 hr 12 min·5 clips

Lauren Groff has read Elizabeth Hardwick's novel 15 times, finding something radically new each time.

The frame is spare. Deborah Treisman introduces Lauren Groff, who has chosen Elizabeth Hardwick's The Faithful from the magazine's archive. Groff comes to the story through Hardwick. Treisman notes that it appeared in February of 1979 and later became a chapter of Sleepless Nights. The handoff is quiet, then the episode steps aside and lets Hardwick's Amsterdam world breathe. Simone comes into focus fast. The excerpt follows a woman painter and Dr. Z, whose pursuit of her survives marriage, habit, humiliation, and a taste for theatrical gestures. His romance is showy. Potted tulips, whistled appeals, and European poetry make his longing sound polished, comic, and more exposed by the minute. Simone refuses the pattern. Depression, withdrawal, and a blunt lack of care for anyone, herself included, help break the tie. The fallout does not stay private. The doctor's wife and nurse take Simone's refusal almost as an insult to the household order they have kept intact. Hardwick's irony stays cool. Pain moves through the room like bad weather. By the end, the world has shrunk: affairs stop recurring, travel and tennis fade, the nurse retires, Simone dies, and Dr. Z understands the loss too late. Treisman returns to Groff, her books, her forthcoming collection, her bookstore in Gainesville, and the podcast archive.

As heard by us

Lauren Groff reads Hardwick's Amsterdam memory piece as a cool, exact study of desire, dependence, and endings.

Lauren Groff's episode returns to Elizabeth Hardwick's The Faithful, a Sleepless Nights piece set in Amsterdam and fixed on Simone, a woman painter, and Dr. Z, the married doctor whose romance with her has the air of ritual as much as passion.

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