Lily Allen. Photograph courtesy of Jean Garnett.

“Who is Madeline?” asks my daughter. We’ve been singing that new Lily Allen song all morning—“Da da da da da da da who’s Madeline?”; we can’t get it out of our heads. How should I answer? Madeline seems to be a woman with whom the singer’s husband is having an affair? Then I’ll have to explain what an affair is. And wait, affair isn’t the word, since Allen and her husband had an open marriage, though the song tells us he’s “broken the rules” of their arrangement with Madeline … Anyway, I’m not going to try to explain nonmonogamy to a seven-year-old.

By a stroke of genius, I hit on the right answer: “I don’t know.” My daughter seems to need no further clarification on the issue, but I’m realizing that I do, actually. That is, I want to understand why for some reason, despite Allen’s deft and amusing sketch of this Madeline person as a vacuous, woo-woo home-wrecker, I feel a certain sympathy with her. I care about Madeline, about her desires and her right to pursue them without being villainized.

West End Girl, Lily Allen’s first album in seven years, is a pop marital memoir chronicling the dissolution of Allen’s partnership with the actor David Harbour in the wake of their agreement to try out nonmonogamy. I get why people are in raptures over this record. There’s a certain phoenix-from-the-ashes satisfaction in seeing a romantically wounded, no-longer-young woman artist explode back into the spotlight with a series of sexy, delectable bops: we love that for her. There’s the earworm indelibility of Allen’s tunes that has my kid humming them while brushing her teeth, the charm and humor of her lyrics, and the generosity of her voice, which confides in us like a friend: we love her for that. She’s very lovable.

Does it follow that her husband, and his “Madeline,” must be hateable? Because, whether Allen intended it or not, that appears to be one takeaway here. West End Girl has been described approvingly as a revenge album, and the consensus among fans seems to be that Allen sure got Harbour’s ass good, that in the process of transmuting her pain into art she has served him a much-deserved pillorying. Remind me why he deserves this? It does sound from the lyrics like there was dishonesty on his part, but his original sin, in the story of Allen’s record, is that he open-marriaged her. Read More

She was standing in the middle of the crowd. I looked at her once, and then I kept staring. I tried to see the other eyes in the room, green eyes, brown and blue, but I kept looking back at her. I looked, and she looked, and I moved toward her holding a plastic ring above her crooked fingers and hand. I thought, Somehow, I’ve conjured her. Or perhaps she’s conjured me.

Then I saw one of her eyes was brown and her other eye was green, like a wild animal.

So look into these eyes, and you’ll see what I saw that night.

THE NEW WORLD.

I pushed the plastic ring on her finger and the strange eyes shined.

I saw the future. Read More

Interior view of the San Francisco Columbarium & Funeral Home, as seen from the second floor, via Wikimedia Commons. © Frank Schulenburg / CC BY-SA 4.0.

An overcast morning in July on a train to San Francisco. In my coat pocket, a blank page torn from the back of a book, on which I’d written: “4th floor, Dome Room, South Wall, Tier 3, Niche 2.” Coordinates for finding you, or rather what remains of you, interred inside a niche at the Columbarium.

I once read that the late writer Kevin Killian used to drive out-of-town guests to a cemetery in Colma, a small, foggy town on the outskirts of San Francisco that, in the twenties, became a necropolis. The city dug up thousands of graves and transported them to make room for the living. The Columbarium stayed put thanks to its spatial economy: niches that contain the funeral urns are stacked on top of one another like multiple-dwelling units for the dead.

The purpose of Killian’s day trips to Cypress Lawn was to pay homage to the poet Jack Spicer, whose ashes were stored in a niche there. But you get the sense that these drives were occasions to spend a few hours with poets he didn’t know well but who he thought might share his frequency. He was genuinely enthused about visiting the final resting places of his artistic heroes. “For a man like me,” he wrote, “there’s no closure unless I go to the grave and fall down on it … and embrace spectral memory as a living thing in my arms.”

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John Cheever poses for a portrait with his wife, Mary Cheever, on March 13, 1964, at their home in Ossining, New York. Photograph by David Gahr/Getty Images.

Jim was too tired to make even a pretense of sociability, and there was nothing about the dinner to hold Irene’s interest, so her attention wandered from the food to the deposits of silver polish on the candlesticks and from there to the music in the other room. She listened for a few minutes to a Chopin prelude and then was surprised to hear a man’s voice break in. “For Christ’s sake, Kathy,” he said, “do you always have to play the piano when I get home?” The music stopped abruptly. “It’s the only chance I have,” a woman said. “I’m at the office all day.” “So am I,” the man said. He added something obscene about an upright piano, and slammed a door. The passionate and melancholy music began again.

“Did you hear that?” Irene asked.

— from “The Enormous Radio” by John Cheever, originally published in The New Yorker in 1947

I was the model for a group of mischievous, neglected, wise-before-their-time prepubescent girls who did everything from getting lost to nabbing the nuts put out for cocktails, and my mother was my father’s one-woman university for the study of women—especially pretty, selfish women. “The Enormous Radio” was written in early 1947, and it features the superficially attractive family that often opens my father’s short stories, whether they are set in New York City or in the suburbs that line the Hudson River—the Rhine of America. In this story, written when we lived in the brick apartment building at 400 East Fifty-Ninth Street near the East River, Jim and Irene Westcott and their two children live in an Upper East Side apartment building near the East River. They are an ordinary family except for one unusual thing: their love of music. They share an eccentric passion for Mozart, Beethoven, and Bach. They love the Chopin études and thrill to the Fifth Symphony. How can this be a problem? How could this enthusiasm unravel their perfect lives?

If the Westcotts have a guilty secret, something that sets them apart from the neighbors in their prewar brick building with its doorman and awning, it is this music. They are moved by Schubert quartets in a world where many people have adjusted their ears to silence, traffic noise, or the ambient music piped into public spaces. But as the Westcotts find out when a new radio triumphantly bought to replace the old one comes into their living room, their neighbors have a less savory assortment of guilty secrets.

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From Details of “Winter,“ a portfolio that appears in the Winter 1976 issue of The Paris Review.

Yan Lianke’s story “Plants, Stones, Dirt, and Sky,” translated by Jeremy Tiang, appears in the Fall 2025 issue of The Paris Review.

When an author is blocked from publication in his own country yet cannot live anywhere else, he finds himself being both debated and yelled at, attacked and beloved, forgotten but always remembered again, like a hedgehog that, for whatever reason, has to crawl along human pathways, surrounded by onlookers, getting kicked and shunted with sticks into the undergrowth, though there will inevitably be some people who find this creature as important as life itself and gently swaddle it in their clothes to carry it to an uninhabited part of the forest. Yet that hedgehog will crawl back onto the path whenever the sun is out.

Because the sun shines on that forest path.

Because the hedgehog longs for sunlight.

That’s how things are, cyclical and repetitious, repetitious and cyclical. Might the day come when the hedgehog expires on that sunlit path?

Since turning sixty, I’ve thought about death every single day. Read More