In which editor Adam Ross interviews bestselling author Stephanie Danler about her upcoming memoir Stray. In this episode, Danler discusses the differences between writing fiction and memoir and gives the listener a behind-the-scenes look into how a book gets refined in its final stages of editing

In which we hear from editor Adam Ross in Nashville, Tennessee.

The argument I want to make is that Carl Phillips has used sex as a mode of philosophical inquiry—“fucking a way forward,” as he puts it in a poem from Silverchest, sex, as he writes in another poem from the same volume, having “at last become / an added sense by which to pass ungently but more / entirely across a life.”

It’s already been a hard winter. Like our cover image, the nation seems to be buried in the impeachment mess, snowed in by snow jobs, blinded by white out. And no forecast predicts a change in this oppressive political weather.

going through the oceans of files, talking
  of boys who were no angels? no. to serve is
a right and our duty, each to each—but
  the potential juror peers into the courtroom
as if it were quarantined for the plague.

Beyond the car seat or the doctor’s prescription, Erin just wasn’t up to the sight of all those other children: the toddlers, the nursing infants, the drooling babies. PARK—anonymous, failed—was the place that fit.

I don’t mean the way New York itself hardens you through constant friction with endless streams of people, their pettiness and self-absorption rubbing against your own until you are encased in a shell of indifference and even cruelty. I mean he solidified me. He gave me substance I had lacked.

and I thank her, and once again I know as if by
physical touch alone the innocence and kindness
of the hopeful before the world disappoints them

There are plenty other private types: a disgraced Exxon executive—here he comes now scooting past my house, yielding for an armadillo—a turncoat from the Jersey mob, with new veneers. I’m former CIA. Here in Portofino Palms the living’s easy, and the big sun blights the shadows of the omertà.