Homewreckers

Summary

Selected Shorts – “Homewreckers”
Original Air Date: March 19, 2026
Host: Meg Wolitzer | Podcast: Symphony Space

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Overview

This episode of Selected Shorts, titled “Homewreckers,” explores matrimonial distress and the unraveling of marriages in unexpected, even comically small ways. Host Meg Wolitzer curates two spellbinding stories performed by acclaimed actors: James Thurber’s uproariously dry “The Breaking Up of the Winships,” performed by Christine Nielsen; and Louise Erdrich’s layered, bittersweet “The Big Cat,” performed by Keir Dullea. The episode concludes with a thoughtful interview with Erdrich, delving into her inspiration and craft.

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Main Themes

• Marriage and the Little Things: Both stories investigate how seemingly trivial irritants—debates about Donald Duck versus Greta Garbo, persistent snoring—can expose deep cracks in otherwise solid relationships.
• Comedy and Pathos: Humor is used to highlight both the absurdity and pain of marital discord.
• Memory and Character: The episode discusses how what stays with us from relationships (and stories) are the moments and character, more than the plot.
• Transformation and Time: “The Big Cat” is notable for spanning decades, tracing shifts in love, marriage, divorce, and family bonds.

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Key Segments & Insights

1. [00:39–04:05] Introduction and Episode Setup

• Meg Wolitzer introduces the episode, reflecting on the malleable nature of marriage and the ways its bonds are tested:

  “Marriage has taken on many forms in recent years, but whatever the shape or context...it remains one of the most important forms of bonding we have.”

• The stories will dig into how “the little things” can tip marriages into crisis, challenging the myth that only grand betrayals break couples apart.

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2. [04:05–20:35] Story One: “The Breaking Up of the Winships” by James Thurber

Performed by Christine Nielsen

Summary

• The upper-crust Winships descend into marital rupture after a petty argument about Greta Garbo versus Donald Duck’s artistic merit, observed by their hapless friend, who struggles to mediate.
• Their squabble escalates:
  • Marcia’s fandom for Garbo infuriates Gordon.
  • The argument spirals, culminating in Gordon proclaiming, “[Donald Duck] is exactly 10 times as great as Garbo would ever be” ([09:46]).
  • Public embarrassment, marital slights, and slapstick injuries to integrity follow.
• The friend ultimately can’t resolve their impasse, and both Winships cling to their positions as matters of personal honor.

Notable Quotes

• On trivial disputes turning weighty:

  “The trouble that broke up the Gordon Winship seemed to me at first as minor a problem as frost on a windowpane. Another day, a touch of sun, and it would be gone.” ([04:05])

• On artistic preferences becoming symbolic warfare:

  Marcia: “That speech just about perfectly represented the shallowness of his intellect and the small range of his imagination.” ([08:47])
  Gordon: “Her failure to see the genius of Donald Duck proved conclusively to him that she's a woman without humor.” ([09:09])

• On pride and irreconcilable differences:

  “He said that now it could never be wiped out and forgotten. No.” ([15:20])

• Comic escalation:

  “You and Donald Duck, both!” (Marcia, [14:51])

Memorable Moments

• The subject of their rift—Donald Duck versus Greta Garbo—is satirically inconsequential, highlighting the absurdity of real marital rifts.
• The friend’s dream (white rabbit with a watch) is a nod to surreal anxieties and the story’s comic legacy ([19:57]).

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3. [20:35–23:42] Interlude and Commentary

• Meg Wolitzer praises Christine Nielsen’s performance and contextualizes Thurber’s humor and legacy.
• Wolitzer deftly draws parallels between Thurber’s “marital storms” and the next, more contemporary story.

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4. [23:42–49:30] Story Two: “The Big Cat” by Louise Erdrich

Performed by Keir Dullea

Summary

• A man’s marriages (first to Elida, then to Lorraine) are refracted through comic tragedy and the literal and metaphorical “loudness” of women’s presence, embodied in snoring.
• Elida—intense, enigmatic, deeply loved—comes with a family whose “metallurgic symphony” of snoring ruins the narrator’s sleep for 20 years.
• After their amicable divorce, he marries Lorraine—a social, quiet-sleeper. Still, the ex-couple maintain ties for their daughter Valerie.
• Longing and unresolved love lead to furtive meetings, a rekindled daytime affair, and, eventually, remarriage—at the cost of hurting Lorraine and navigating guilt over material gain.
• The story climaxes in a symbolic return to noisy family gatherings, where the soundscape of snoring transforms into dreamlike visions of predation and vulnerability.
• The narrator faces the narrative of his life—his fleeting film roles and worth—through a montage Elida makes, underscoring themes of fleeting identity.

Notable Quotes

• On family noise as metaphor:

  “The women in my wife's family all snored...one memorable night I tossed and turned in a metal working shop.” ([23:45])

• On longing and exhaustion:

  “Deep rest was a drug. Waking from relaxed oblivion, I vibrated with an almost tear inducing pleasure. Why shoot up, I wondered, when just by depriving the body of uninterrupted sleep for 20 years you can have ecstasy with no side effects?” ([29:36])

• On post-divorce rituals:

  “Our divorce had been agreeable and final. Our post divorce meetings were lingering, tedious and self-congratulatory.” ([31:58])

• On betrayals and ambivalence:

  "You can live with a person, have an affair with a person, and still suddenly see an unfamiliar flash, like the belly of a fish in the shallows, there and gone." ([37:49])
  Lorraine: “Dad was right. He said you were after the money.” ([41:12])

• On unresolved identity:

  “It was worse somehow, seeing it on that giant screen bought with Lorraine's money. But there I was, my trivial works captured for all the ages.” ([42:14])

• Dreamlike marriage ending:

  “I woke although Elida's snarls had calmed to the loud gurgling purr of a big cat digesting its prey meal. I came to in a sick sweat, shaking...it took some time for me to understand that Elida’s body had not been satiated on mine, that she wasn't purring because she'd swallowed my heart.” ([48:45])

Memorable Moments

• The narrator’s quest for sleep becomes a metaphor for marital and existential peace.
• The climactic scene where Valerie catches her parents’ affair and expresses her pain and confusion:

  Valerie: “All this time. How selfish. Mean. I could have had you both together. Instead I’ve been trying to get used to you apart.” ([39:12])

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5. [49:30–55:19] Louise Erdrich Interview with Meg Wolitzer

Key Topics

• Genesis of “The Big Cat”: Erdrich describes setting details as composites of real and imagined, and how the “violent” ending emerges from a man’s dream state overwhelmed by women’s noise.

  “I feel like the snoring stands in for the noise we make as women...that appalls men, appalls partners, you know, appalls people in the wider sense.” (Erdrich, [51:29])

• On blending fact and invention:

  “It's our superpower to have like a restaurant that you say is real, but a made up, metallurgic symphony of snoring.” (Interviewer, [51:11])

• Hearing stories performed:

  “People emphasize work in places that you wouldn't expect. And the cadence of words is different. It's satisfying.” (Erdrich, [52:30])

• Short story vs. novel writing:

  “Short stories came to me in the beginning...now they come as more of a wave of emotion, the way poems do.” (Erdrich, [53:04])

• Responsibility and community:

  “It's not me. It's my parents. It's my tribe, my nation, the people around me.” (Erdrich, [54:57])

Memorable Moments

• Erdrich and Wolitzer bond over the pleasures of listening to one's own work performed by actors, and the surprise of unexpected emphases.

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Notable Quotes and Timestamps

• “Marriage is one long conversation checkered by disputes. And that's pretty much the truth, right? But you never know the specifics of someone else's marriage.”
  — Meg Wolitzer quoting Robert Louis Stevenson ([03:00])

• “Her belief in Garbo's greatness was a thing she could not deny and would not deny simply for the sake of living under the same roof with Gordon Winchip. The whole thing was part and parcel of her integrity as a woman and as well as a woman.”
  — Marcia Winship ([18:08])

• “Every year the James Thurber Prize is awarded to a book deemed to be the funniest. And one year, I got to be a judge, which was a thrill.”
  — Meg Wolitzer ([20:00])

• “I had never adored [Elida’s] snores, but I had adored, almost to the point of madness, Elida.”
  — Narrator (The Big Cat) ([26:03])

• “We can talk. How are the ripsaw on the welders?...What was I again? The polisher. I don't really mind that, she said. It's in my line of work.”
  — Narrator & Elida ([37:28])

• “All the snores from last night have stuck to the walls.”
  — Narrator (The Big Cat) ([24:28])

• “It was a pleasure to write those scenes. I really had fun.”
  — Louise Erdrich ([52:20])

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Conclusion & Reflections

The “Homewreckers” episode uses literary wit and drama to tease apart the complex truths of marriage. Through Thurber’s and Erdrich’s stories, listeners experience the volatility, humor, and heartache that can reside in the everyday moments of coupledom. The closing interview with Louise Erdrich is a candid, illuminating coda, offering listeners a deeper understanding of her process, the construction of story, and the playful, sometimes violent energy of domestic life.

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For more stories and interviews, visit selectedshorts.org or your preferred podcast platform.

Transcript

[Meg Wolitzer]

Matrimony on the rocks with a side of funny Quiet, for God's sake.

[Narrator (Friend of the Winships)]

You're yelling like a prize fight manager. Enraged at that she had recourse to her eyes as weapons and looked steadily at him for a while with the expression of one who was viewing a

[Narrator's Commentary / Observations]

small an horrible animal, such as a horned toad.

[Meg Wolitzer]

Coming up on Selected Shorts, humorous stories about marriages not made in heaven, as a long married couple fall out over Donald Duck and a spouse's bone jarring snores. I'm Meg Wolitzer, and you have to hear this and a talk with one of the authors, the sublime Louise Erdrich. You're listening to Selected Shorts, where our greatest actors transport us through the magic of fiction, one short story at a time. Marriage has taken on many forms in recent years, but whatever the shape or context is, it remains one of the most important forms of bonding we have. It makes two people into a family, and often one that includes a circle of friends and the preceding and perhaps succeeding generation. More is at stake than just the two people who've linked together. So what happens when that bond is tested? On this show, we share two stories in which marriages are in jeopardy, and they defy our expectations. We often think of divorce as being either cataclysmic, the discovery of an affair or the slow acid of disenchantment. But these stories tip the balance in favor of the little things. In one, a long established couple disagree loudly. In the other, two different wives shape the life of one man. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote, this marriage is one long conversation checkered by disputes. And that's pretty much the truth, right? But you never know the specifics of someone else's marriage. You think you know, but the minute the door closes and the couple is alone, things get said that you will never find out. Another writer, I'm not sure who said that what people remember from novels isn't plot but character, and maybe a variation of that is true about marriage. What you may remember most about your marriage, for better or worse, is what you did together. That trip to Sacramento, the time the dishwasher fell onto the kitchen floor. But what it was like to be talking to that other person, whether in Sacramento or standing in front of a dishwasher on the floor. And so the long conversation gets had. First, a favorite from our archives, James Thurber's the Breaking up of the Winships. We've also savored Thurber's fairy tales and sassy recollections of his Ohio childhood in in works such as My World and welcome to it. This hilarious story of a minor disagreement turning into a marital deal breaker was first published in the New Yorker in 1936 and has a whiff of old New York about it. The couple are affluent upper crust types in the era of men's clubs and women's bridge parties. The unnamed narrator is a character familiar from Hollywood comedies, the hapless friend trapped between two people. The Breaking up of the Winships is read by Broadway star Christine Nielsen, whose credits include Vanya and Sonja and Masha and Spike, and present laughter on television. She's appeared on the Gilded Age, among other shows, and here she is to make us laugh with James Thurber's the Breaking up of the Winships.

[Narrator (Friend of the Winships)]

The Breaking up of the Winships the trouble that broke up the Gordon Winship seemed to me at first as minor a problem as frost on a windowpane. Another day, a touch of sun, and it would be gone. I was inclined to laugh it off, and indeed, as a friend of both Gordon and Marcia, I spent a great deal of time with each of them so separately, trying to get them to laugh it off, too, with him at his club where he sat drinking scotch and smoking too much, and with her in their apartment that seemed so large and lonely without Gordon and his restless moving around and his quick laughter. But it was no good. They were both adamant. Their separation has lasted now more than six, six months. I doubt very much that they will ever go back together again. It all started one night at Leonardo's after dinner over their Benedictine. It started innocently enough, amiably even, with laughter from both of them, laughter that froze finally as the clock ran on and their words came out sharp and flat and still stinging. They had been to see Camille. Gordon hadn't liked it very much. Marcia had been crazy about it because she's crazy about Greta Garbo. She belongs to that considerable army of Garbo admirers whose enchantment borders almost on fanaticism and sometimes it even touches the edges of frenzy. I think that before everything happened, Gordon admired Garbo, too. But the depths of his wife's conviction

[Marcia Winship]

that here was the greatest figure ever seen in our generation on sea or land, on screen or stage.

[Narrator (Friend of the Winships)]

But it exasperated him that night. Gordon hates or used to exaggeration, and he respects, or once did, detachment. It was his feeling that detachment is a necessary thread in the fabric of a woman's charm.

[Marcia Winship]

He didn't like to see his wife

[Narrator (Friend of the Winships)]

get herself into a sweat over anything, and that night at Leonardo's he unfortunately used that expression and made that accusation. Marcia responded, as I get it, by saying a little loudly, they'd gone on to scotch and soda, that a man

[Marcia Winship]

who had no abandon of feeling and no passion for anything was not altogether

[Narrator (Friend of the Winships)]

a man, and that his so called

[Marcia Winship]

love of detachment seemed simply covered up a lack of critical appreciation and understanding of the arts in general.

[Narrator (Friend of the Winships)]

Her sentences were becoming long and wavy and her words formal. Gordon suddenly began to pooh, poo her.

[Narrator's Commentary / Observations]

He kept saying poo.

[Narrator (Friend of the Winships)]

An annoying mannerism of his. I've always thought he wouldn't answer her arguments or even listen to them. That, of course, infuriated her.

[Marcia Winship]

Oh, Pooty, you too?

[Narrator (Friend of the Winships)]

She finally more or less shouted, and he snapped at her, quiet, for God's sake. You're yelling like a prize fight manager. Enraged at that, she had recourse to her eyes as weapons, and looked steadily at him for a while with the expression of one who was viewing a

[Narrator's Commentary / Observations]

small, small and horrible animal, such as a horned toad.

[Narrator (Friend of the Winships)]

They sat in moody and brooding silence for a long time without moving a muscle, at the end of which, getting a hold on herself, Marcia asked him quietly enough, just exactly what. What actor, on the screen or on the stage, living or dead, he considered greater than Gabo. Gordon thought a moment, and then he said, as quietly as she had put the question,

[Narrator's Commentary / Observations]

donald Duck.

[Narrator (Friend of the Winships)]

I don't believe he meant that at the time, or even thought that he meant, however that may have been. She looked at him scornfully and said,

[Marcia Winship]

well, that speech just about perfectly represented the shallowness of his intellect and the small range of his imagination.

[Narrator (Friend of the Winships)]

Gordon asked her not to make a spectacle of herself. She'd raised her voice slightly and went on to say that her failure to see the genius of Donald Duck proved

[Narrator's Commentary / Observations]

conclusively to him that she's a woman without humor.

[Narrator (Friend of the Winships)]

That he said he'd always suspected. Now he said he knew it. She had a great desire to hit him, but instead she sat back and looked at him with her special Mona Lisa smile,

[Marcia Winship]

a smile rather more of

[Narrator (Friend of the Winships)]

contempt than, as in the original, of mystery. Gordon hated the that smile. So he said that Donald Duck happened to be exactly 10 times as great

[Narrator's Commentary / Observations]

as Garbo would ever be, and that anybody with a brain in his head would admit it instantly.

[Narrator (Friend of the Winships)]

Thus the Winships went on and on and their resentment swelling, their sense of values blurring, until it ended up with

[Marcia Winship]

her taking a taxi home alone, leaving her vanity bag and one glove behind

[Narrator (Friend of the Winships)]

in the rescue, and with him making the rounds of the late places and rolling up to his club around dawn. There, as he got out. He asked his taxi driver which he

[Narrator's Commentary / Observations]

liked better, Greta Garbo or Donald Duck?

[Narrator (Friend of the Winships)]

And the driver said, well, I like Greta Garbo best. Gordon said to him bitterly, oh, pooh

[Narrator's Commentary / Observations]

to you too, my good friend.

[Narrator (Friend of the Winships)]

And he went to bed the next day, as is usual with married couples, they were both contrite, but behind their contrition lay sleeping the ugly words each had used and the cold glances and the bitter gestures. Well, she phoned him because she was worried. She didn't want to be, but she was. When he hadn't come home, she was convinced he had gone to his club. But visions of him lying in a gutter or under a table, somehow horribly mangled, haunted her. And so at 8 o' clock she called him up. Her heart lightened when he said hello.

[Narrator's Commentary / Observations]

Roughly.

[Marcia Winship]

He was alive, thank God.

[Narrator (Friend of the Winships)]

His heart may have lightened a little, too, but not very much, because he felt terrible. He felt terrible, and he felt that it was her fault that he felt terrible. She said that she was so sorry and that they'd both been very silly. And he growled something about, well, he's glad she realized she'd been silly anyhow. That attitude brought a slight edge to the rest of her words. She asked him shortly if he was coming home. He said, sure, sure, he's coming home.

[Narrator's Commentary / Observations]

It was his home, wasn't it?

[Narrator (Friend of the Winships)]

She told him to go back to bed and not be such an old bear, and hung up. The next incident occurred at the Clark's party a few days later. The Winships arrived in fairly good spirits to find themselves in a buzzing group of cocktail drinkers that more or less revolved around the tall and languid figure of the guest of honor, an eminent lady novelist. Gordon, late in the evening, won her attention and drew her apart for one drink together, feeling a little high and happy at the time, as is the way with husbands mentioned lightly enough. He wanted to get it out of his subconscious the argument that he had had with his wife about the relative merits of Garbo and Duck.

[Narrator's Commentary / Observations]

The tall lady, lowering her cigarette holder,

[Narrator (Friend of the Winships)]

said in the spirit of his own gaiety, that he could count her in on his side. Unfortunately, Marcia winship, standing some 10ft away, talking to a man with a beard, caught not the spirit, but only a few of the words of the conversation,

[Marcia Winship]

and jumped to the conclusion that her

[Narrator (Friend of the Winships)]

husband was deliberately reopening the old wound for the purpose of humiliating her in public. I think that in another moment Gordon might have brought her over and put his arm around her and admitted his defeat, but he was feeling Pretty fine. But as soon as he caught her eye, she gazed through him freezingly, and his heart went down. And then his anger rose. Their fight, naturally enough, blazed out again. In the taxi they took to go home from the party, Marcia wildly attacked the woman novelist. Marcia had had quite a few cocktails,

[Marcia Winship]

defended Garbo, excoriated Gordon and laid into Donald Duck.

[Narrator (Friend of the Winships)]

Gordon tried for a while to explain exactly what had happened, and then he

[Marcia Winship]

met her resentment with a resentment that

[Narrator (Friend of the Winships)]

mounted even higher, the resentment of the misunderstood husband. In the midst of it all, she slapped him. He looked at her for a second under lowered eyelids and then said coldly, if a bit fuzzily,

[Narrator's Commentary / Observations]

this is the end. But I want you to go to your grave knowing that Donald Duck is 20 times the artist Garbo will ever be. The longest day you or she ever live if you do. And I can't understand, with so little lived for, why you should.

[Marcia Winship]

Then he asked the driver to stop

[Narrator (Friend of the Winships)]

the car, and he got out in wavering dignity.

[Valerie (Daughter)]

Caricature cartoon.

[Narrator (Friend of the Winships)]

She screamed after him.

[Marcia Winship]

You and Donald Duck, both you and

[Narrator (Friend of the Winships)]

the driver drove on. The last time I saw Gordon, he moved his things to the club the next day, forgetting his trousers to his evening clothes and his razor. He had convinced himself that the point at issue between him and Marsha was one of extreme importance, involving both his honor and his integrity.

[Narrator's Commentary / Observations]

He said that now it could never

[Narrator (Friend of the Winships)]

be wiped out and forgotten. No.

[Narrator's Commentary / Observations]

He said that he sincerely believed Donald Duck was a great creation, as any animal in all the works of Lewis Carroll.

[Marcia Winship]

Probably even greater.

[Narrator (Friend of the Winships)]

Perhaps much greater. He was drinking. There was a wild light in his eye. I reminded him of his old love of detachment.

[Narrator's Commentary / Observations]

And he said, oh, to hell with detachment.

[Narrator (Friend of the Winships)]

I laughed at him. But he wouldn't laugh if, he said

[Narrator's Commentary / Observations]

grimly, marsha persists in her silly belief that that Swede is great and that Donald Duck is merely a caricature. I cannot conscientiously live with her again. I believe that he is great, that the man who created him is. Is a genius. Probably our only genius. I believe, further that Greta Garbo, just another actress, God is my judge, I believe that. What does she expect me to do? Go whining back to her? Pretend that I think Garbo is wonderful and that Donald Duck is simply a cartoon? Never.

[Marcia Winship]

He gulped down some scotch, table straight.

[Keir Dullet (Narrator of The Big Cat)]

Never.

[Narrator (Friend of the Winships)]

I could not ridicule him out of his obsession. I left him and I went over to see Marcia. I found Marcia pale but calm and as firm in her stand as Gordon was in his.

[Marcia Winship]

She insisted that he had deliberately Tried

[Narrator (Friend of the Winships)]

to humiliate her before that gawky so

[Marcia Winship]

called novelist whose clothes they were the

[Narrator (Friend of the Winships)]

doubted that she'd ever seen and whose

[Marcia Winship]

affectations obviously covered up a complete lack of individuality and intelligence. I tried to convince her that she

[Narrator (Friend of the Winships)]

was wrong about Gordon's attitude at the Clark's party, but she said she knew him like a book. Let him get a divorce and marry that creature if he wanted to. They can sit around all day, she said, and all night too, for all I care.

[Marcia Winship]

And talk about their precious Donald Duck, that damn comic strip.

[Narrator (Friend of the Winships)]

And I told Marcia that she shouldn't allow herself to get so worked up about a trivial and nonsensical matter.

[Marcia Winship]

She said it's not silly and nonsensical to her. It might have been once, yes, but it wasn't now.

[Narrator (Friend of the Winships)]

It made her see Gordon clearly for what he was.

[Marcia Winship]

A cheap, egotistical, resentful cad who would descend to ridiculing his wife in front of a scrawny, horrible stranger who could not write and who would never be able to write. Furthermore, her belief in Garbo's greatness was a thing she could not deny and would not deny simply for the sake of living under the same roof with Gordon Winchip. The whole thing was part and parcel of her integrity as a woman and as well as a woman. And she could go to work again. He would find out.

[Narrator (Friend of the Winships)]

There was nothing more that I could say or do. I went home and at night, however, I found that I had not really dismissed the whole ridiculous affair as I hoped I had, for I dreamed about it. I tried to ignore the thing, but it had tunneled deeply into my subconscious. I dreamed that I was out hunting with the Winchips and that as we crossed a snowy field, Marcia spotted a rabbit and taking quick aim, fired and brought it down. Oh, we all ran across the snow toward the rabbit, but I reached it first. It was quite dead. But that was not what struck horror into me as I picked it up. What struck horror into me was that it was a white rabbit.

[Louise Erdrich]

I was wearing a vest.

[Marcia Winship]

I was carrying a watch. I woke up with a start.

[Narrator (Friend of the Winships)]

I don't know whether that dream means that I'm on Gordon's side or on Marsh's.

[Narrator's Commentary / Observations]

I don't want to analyze it. I'm trying to forget the whole miserable business.

[Meg Wolitzer]

That was Christine Nielsen performing James Thurber's the Breaking up of the Winships. I'm Meg Wolitzer. Thurber was a master of comic escalation and Nielsen did him proud. The quarrel seems to linger in the air like the aftermath of a storm. For all we know, the Winships are still out there, fuming. When I saw that we were doing James Thurber, I thought, well, that's a blast from a long lost past. Thurber was a legendary humorist and cartoonist, a member of the Algonquin Roundtable, a staff writer at the New Yorker, and he was pithy and mordant and extremely popular. Every year the James Thurber Prize is awarded to a book date deemed to be the funniest. And one year I got to be a judge, which was a thrill. I'm so glad you got to hear one of his stories. There's a lot more where that came from. When we return, Louise Erdrich explores two marriages. I'm Meg Wolitzer. You're listening to Selected Shorts recorded live in performance at Symphony Space in New York City and at other venues nationwide. Welcome back. This is Selected Shorts, where our greatest actors transport us through the magic of fiction one short story at a time. I'm Meg Wolitzer. On today's show, we're hearing stories about matrimonial challenges, but we hope that you'll always be willing to say I do to our offer of great tales that cover the gamut of human emotion. Just go to selectedshorts.org or search for us wherever you get podcasts. And while you're there, subscribe to the show so you'll never miss another episode. Our second work, the Big Cat, is by the contemporary master Louise Erdrich, whose many published works include the novels Love Medicine, the Night Watchman, and the Roundhouse. We've featured her nuanced and perceptive short stories many times over the years, so we were not surprised to find that she's put her indelible stamp on this portrait of two marriages and one bemused husband. You'll hear how Louise Erdrich takes her time here, letting the story of a marriage spool and unspool. You probably won't know where the story is going, and listening to it, I could feel the freedom and sense of surprise that Erdrich herself might have experienced when she was writing it. After the story, you can hear some part of my talk with Erdrich about it. Our reader is Keir Dulet. He's best known as Dave in 2001 A Space Odyssey, but enjoys a busy regional theater career in shows such as Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and On Golden Pond, both with his wife, Maya Dillon, who is also a regular Selected Shorts reader. Here's Keir Dulet with The big cat.

[Keir Dullet (Narrator of The Big Cat)]

The big cat. The women in my wife's family all snored and when we visited the holidays every winter I got no sleep. Elida's three sisters and their bomb proofed husbands loved to gather at her parents house in Golden Valley in the inner ring suburb of Minneapolis. The house was less than 20 years old, but the sly tricks of the contractor were evident in every sagging sill, skewed jam, cracked plaster wall, tilted handrail, and most significantly in the general lack of insulation that caused the outer walls to ice up and the inner walls to resound every night. The sounds were different. Helplessly cognizant, I formed mental scenarios while drifting in and out of sleep. One memorable night I tossed and turned in a metal working shop. From the far end of the second floor hallway came the powerful rip of my mother in law's rough cut saw from below on the living room's fold out couches, the intermittent thrum of welders, torches, a wild hissing as the sisters noses sparked and soldered invisible objects beside me, Elida finishing touch, the high pitched bur of a polisher perfecting a metal surface. Elida was slight and she was dressed in precise quiet colors. She sat with her hands folded, wore clear nail polish and almost undetectable makeup. You would never have imagined that such a stark little person could produce such sounds. Ambien earplugs, two pillows over my head. Nothing could shut the noise out. I lay awake stewing, even though I knew I should feel sorry for them. The sisters and their mother had visited sleep clinics, endured surgery, blown their CPAPs off their faces, tried every nose strip and homeopathic remedy they that existed. It wasn't that they liked the snore, but that they were incurable. I think they took comfort in solidarity, though Elida admitted that she loved sleeping in that noisy house and sometimes they snored in unison, which was terrifying. One sub zero vacation morning my daughter Valerie ran her fingers across the ice furred downstairs living room wall and asked, what is this? Daddy Snores, I said, blue with tiredness. All the snores from last night have stuck to the walls. Later, after her mother and I had divorced, Valerie wistfully recalled that moment as the first time she realized how alive the sound was and all the noise emanated from the women in the family. Later still, she asked her mother at what age she'd begun to snore and asked me if that was the reason we'd split up. Valerie was worried for her own future. I assured her that the Snoring had nothing to do with the divorce, which was amicable but also unavoidably painful. I laughed and hugged Valerie. I even told her that I adored her mother's snores. I had never adored them, but I had adored, almost to the point of madness, Elida. From the first time we met, we found each other in Hollywood as Minnesotan expatriates always do, common sense driving them together. Though to leave the land of 10,000 lakes for a thirsty city built on a desert may speak of some interior flaw. For Elida, it was a compulsive lure of film editing. In my case, the shame of acting. Although I auditioned endlessly and always had work, my parts generally lasted between 6 and 12 seconds. I rarely had a line, but I had Elida. Her intense green stare, her Nordic pallor even after years of sunlight, her slender gliding walk, and the dark swerve of her severe haircut. She was mine. When Valerie turned 12, I was cast in a supporting role in a movie that got a lot of attention. It could be my fabled break. But Elida suddenly panicked over how unhappy Valerie was in high school and decided that the schools in Minneapolis were more nurturing. We moved back. I had to accept the fact that my film career was over. I had worked steadily and spoken a line or two, given many a meaningful glance, tipped villains, sucker punched heroes, spilled coffee on or danced around movie stars in revolving doors. I'd appeared in dozens of films, TV episodes, commercials. But Elida hadn't been doing well, and both of us got better, more reliable jobs back home. Elida loved the miniscule, the hundreds of tiny decisions that together produce a great flow of scenes. She applied this love of detail to her new vocation, planning corporate events. I also loved the small when it consisted of learning to say lines in dozens of different ways with different tones, tonal qualities, inflection and gestures. In my new job as fundraiser for a vibrant local theater company, I perfected the gestures and tones that I hoped would coax donations to my organization for my birthday that year, perhaps to console me for the life I'd given up, Elida somehow managed to clip and spice together a half hour movie of my bit parts, which she set to eerily repetitive music. Shortly after she gave me that gift, which she titled man of a Thousand Glimpses, we parted. I moved out of our downtown condominium near nurturing Dessalles High School. The first couple of months after leaving Alida, I bolted out of work exactly at 4pm I drove to my tiny apartment, impatiently, hungrily addicted not to a new relationship, but to sleep itself. Deep rest was a drug. Waking from relaxed oblivion, I vibrated with an almost tear inducing pleasure. Why shoot up, I wondered, when just by depriving the body of uninterrupted sleep for 20 years you can have ecstasy with no side effects? Except, I might say, for Lorraine. It took no time at all before I was sleeping the entire night beside a woman whom I feared I had married too quickly because she slept like a drunk kitten. From the beginning I had to consciously keep myself from referring to Lorraine in casual conversations as my current wife. Though it was taken as a joke, I knew better. It was a slip. Lorraine Schatz was the daughter of the owner of an immensely successful Midwestern sporting goods chain with outlets in the exist of the exurbs throughout the Tri State area. She was also a lover of theater arts. At the annual gala dinner from my theater company, which Alida organized pro bono the year we parted, Lorraine spoke between the salad and the entree. Her flattering words of thanks to our supporters, which screened a plea for still greater largesse, impressed me with their genuine awkward grace. Lorraine reveled in that sort of gallow when people bid on donated items, the use of timeshares in warm countries, fur coats, ski packages, signed books, hand painted scarves. Scarves draped our chairs and we took superb vacations. Lorraine was blond, social, generous and loved to barbecue. Elida was dark, wayward, introverted, frugal, and usually a vegetarian. Lorraine could drink a whole bottle of cold pinot gris between 5 and 6pm Elida might sip one murderous snore inducing glass of Cote d' Rhone between 11 and midnight. After the divorce, Elida and I met once a month to discuss Valerie. We had agreed to do this early on, even when it hurt to see each other every time. After we had wincingly established where Valerie's college tuition would come from or whether she needed a new therapist. After Elida had confided the latest news of Valerie's boyfriend, who we both hoped would turn out to be simply experience, we would conclude the hour with a cheerful goodbye, perhaps saying, oh, that wasn't bad, or even good to see you. We laughed in relief. We hugged, patted each other on the back, sometimes drank a cup of tea before the drive home. We never kissed, not even on the cheek. Our divorce had been agreeable and final. Our post divorce meetings were lingering, tedious and self congratulatory. Once Lorraine and I were married, however, the meetings with Elida became more difficult. The boyfriend had turned out to be a problem we suspected addiction. We also began, without warning, to fight it would start with some obscure thing and progress to even more obscure things. By the end of our meetings, Elijah and I were worn out. Then, after one particularly difficult session, still upset as we were saying goodbye, Elida, instead of hugging me, stuck out her hand. I took her hand and held onto it until she met my eyes. Her glare pulled me to her, and I shocked us both by kissing her studious, pale lips. We jumped apart as though scorched and turned away. We didn't speak of it. Our next meeting was set up by email, and I found myself walking eagerly toward Nick's, a restaurant off Loring park, which was quiet and decorous by day, with leather booths and gauzy curtains that let in glowing white rafts of winter light. Elida was sitting at the 3rd Booth Inn and raised a hand as I entered, then put a tissue to her eyes. She'd been crying, a rare event. It usually meant, frighteningly, that she had some breakthrough realization about me that she'd repressed for years. Warily, I asked her what was wrong. She told me that Valerie had started snoring. Her boyfriend had left her, thank God. But now Valerie was refusing to believe that her mother's snoring hadn't precipitated our divorce. Of course it didn't. Maybe not, but we had other issues. Who doesn't? 20 good years, one bad year, a thousand little issues come home to roost, I thought. You know, because of those good years, we might still get back together. Elida said. Until Lorraine. She doesn't snore, does she? I admitted as much. Ah. Elida turned to look out the window, and her dark, glinting hair swung sorrowfully along her cheek. Hmm. The first time we spent the night together, St. George Street. I warned you I snored. I'd already been to a specialist and had surgery, which only made it worse. It's almost a relief to sleep alone now. At least I'm not blasting a man out of bed. I never minded. I thought of the couch in Los Feliz that had wrecked my back, the walk in closet with a floor pallet in our Minneapolis condominium. I'd adjourned to those lonely sleeping venues. On most nights I did mind, but her fixed gaze shook my heart. Last month you kissed me. I did? We grew perplexed. Eight in silence, each secretly imagining the other's face. From time to time, I was very conscious of the drama of the situation. Any actor would have been. Elida sought that out. You're trying on expressions she said, laughing. It was true. Various expressions crossed my face, but none felt right. The elements wouldn't meld. My eyes would express affection while my mouth was tense. Surprise would lift an eyebrow while my upper lip worked cynically. Embarrassment smote me. At least that was real. I put my face in my hands and I tried to breathe, but my hands covering my mouth made me hyperventilate. When I looked up, Elida was signing the credit card slip. She folded her napkin. Don't get up, she said. From now on, let's do a phone call or email. I really hate email, I said. For personal stuff, please sit down. We can solve this. She sat down, irrationally elated. I ordered a bottle of wine. This is a bad idea, elida said.

[Narrator's Commentary / Observations]

Why?

[Keir Dullet (Narrator of The Big Cat)]

We can talk. How are the ripsaw on the welders? Elida knew my nicknames for her mother and sisters. Ha. She clinked my glass. What was I again? The polisher. I don't really mind that, she said. It's in my line of work. Really. I miss you. Maybe we should have an affair where we see each other only by day and never sleep together, you know, at night. She was speaking whimsically, but we proceeded to do exactly that. We were extremely happy. For 10 months. To be sure, I felt bad about lying to Lorraine, but she noticed nothing. She made a few demands, seemed happy enough with my company, and continued to barbecue, even in December. Meanwhile, Valerie had left college, and Elida and I were meeting in our old condominium overlooking the poison brown waters of the Mississippi. Then one afternoon we were dressed, sipping tea, looking out at the river. When Valerie dropped her suitcase inside the door, she was astonished to see us sitting there. She gaped silently for a moment and then clumped down the hall in her big snowshoes. Elida gave me an oddly insolent look. You can live with a person, have an affair with a person, and still suddenly see an unfamiliar flash, like the belly of a fish in the shallows, there and gone. She had known exactly when our daughter would arrive home. Valerie screamed when she saw the untucked covers in our bed, the scattered pillows. She clumped back into the living room. How long has this been going on? We told her. She began to sob.

[Valerie (Daughter)]

All this time. How selfish.

[Marcia Winship]

Mean.

[Valerie (Daughter)]

I could have had you both together. Instead I've been trying to get used to you apart. I was facing the facts, and then

[Keir Dullet (Narrator of The Big Cat)]

she pressed her mittened hands to her temples as if to keep her head from flying apart. We all started crying and for a while felt miserable. Then Elida snorted and we burst into hysterical laughter. It was decided that I would come clean and leave Lorraine Schultz. Elida and I would remarry. Although it was strange, the idea gave me an enormous sense of rightness. Things were falling into balance. My elation continued all the way back to Lorraine's and my house on Interlaken Boulevard in Hopkins, facing the golf course, a beautiful stone house with creamy painted walls, a wet bar in the basement and a vast screening room for movie viewing parties. Sitting in my car and looking up the flagstone walk, I thought of the pallet on the floor of the condominium's walk in. I would regret leaving this lavish, comfortable house bought with Lorraine Schott's money. I would regret leaving Lorraine, too, the silent comfort of her presence. Every night Lorraine pitched a Maholika vase, then a framed photograph of us in Peru. She threw a few other breakable objects at the wall and at last hefted a crystal unicorn that she had had from the age of 10. You'll regret throwing that, I said. Please don't. I am so sorry. Dad was right. Tears rolled down her face into her collar, wetting her throat. I was stricken. I couldn't stop apologizing. Never before had seen her so truly upset or sad. Dad was right, she said again. He said you were after the money.

[Valerie (Daughter)]

He didn't trust you.

[Keir Dullet (Narrator of The Big Cat)]

A former bit part actor, he begged me to make you sign a prenup. But I said no, you're so wrong. He's the one. Because I had little money and because money hadn't figured into my first marriage except for the problem of not having it, I was until that moment, unaware that this had even been discussed. I put it out of my mind. I didn't think about it until a month later. I had moved out of Lorraine's house into a studio apartment. I continued to see Elida only during the day. I wasn't quite ready for the walk in. Closet. Are you crazy? Elida said, putting down her teacup one afternoon after I'd told her of the proposed terms of my divorce. That family is worth more than 100 million.

[Valerie (Daughter)]

You could get a settlement.

[Keir Dullet (Narrator of The Big Cat)]

They'd never even miss it. I waved her off, but every time I thought about how handy, how fantastic it would be to have money, I wavered. With my non profit salary, I could barely afford to soundproof Valerie's old bedroom. I told myself that I'd keep my pride and sleep on the closet floor. I'd walk away without a cent. But I didn't. Of course. We bought the condominium next door and removed two walls. This gave us an easy path into a large room where I set up a huge screen. Before it, we arranged several couches of immense size and comfort. I slept there in grateful quiet. I didn't take Lorraine for that much, comparatively speaking, and Schatz's family was relieved. Still, they hated me enough to threaten for a while to get me fired. One night Elida surprised me by playing the montage of clips she had made from my birthday years earlier. It was worse somehow, seeing it on that giant screen bought with Lorraine's money. But there I was, my trivial works captured for all the ages. I hadn't noticed when I first viewed the movie that Elijah had made of those fleeting cameos and set pieces, a sort of narrative man of a thousand glimpses started out with crowd scenes. Me here, me there. The nice looking, unobtrusive bystander reading a newspaper, glancing up at the sound of a gunshot. A man crossing the street, exiting a bakery, jumping into his car, uncoiling a hose to water down his lawn. Next, a better man appeared, somewhat older, more heroic. I ran toward a river with a child in my arms. I was a soldier dragging his buddy to safety. I lowered a dog in a basket from a burning building, addressed people through a bullhorn, rushed into waves, and dived toward despairing arms. After that, I became a good father. Inflated bicycle tires, opened refrigerator doors, lay back smiling in my late night shopper's easy chair, had my waist measured, drove several carloads of screaming kids to sports events. Small wonder I then got a pounding headache, clutched my jaw, my leg, my heart wincing in agony. Next, there came a turning point which had been much applauded at the first viewing. I smoked a cigarette in cheap motel. A beautiful woman silhouetted in the shower behind me. Afterward, ruined, I poured myself drink after drink, ordered a third martini, fell off a bar stool, crawled under a table and licked a woman's ankle. I sank even lower, stuck a gun in a teller's face, took cash from the drawer of a fast food register. I palmed an apple from a pile, stole a moped, a diamond bracelet, a newspaper. These crimes kept me tossing in bed. I stared at ceilings, my eyes luminous, hollow with glare, haunted by ghosts, by women, by hallucination. Sleepless, I got clumsy. I was hit by a car, crushed by a falling girder, devoured by a live volcano, axed, mauled, infected with bubonic plague. I was identified several times in liverish green morgulite, by stricken, dignified women. It was shocking the way I just kept dying, physically, then mentally, a wreck of a man. I leapt from a bridge, a window. I parked a train on the tracks and drank deeply from a flask. I smiled at the swiftly approaching lights and laughed soundlessly. The end Elida left. I played the movie over and over. How dark was my narrative. Why had Elida killed me off instead of letting me rescue dogs at the end? This downward trajectory gave me a moral chill. I decided that I had not only wasted my life, but I acted ignobly in taking money from Lorraine. Although Elida and I made Valerie happy and I'd thought I was contented with Elida, I knew now, as I'd known before, the nature of her true feelings for me. I destroyed the movie. It would be years before anyone noticed that my long ago birthday gift had disappeared and I was once again dispersed to the confetti of B movies, failed TV sitcoms, and clumsy commercials. No one would ever have the cruel patience to assemble my life, glimpse by glimpse, again. When the holidays came around, I insisted that we stay at the house in Golden Valley. Why not? I'd already counted a million holes and a million ceiling tiles the first night at Elida's parents house. We all had a mirthful loving dinner and did the dishes together. Elida's relatives had easily absorbed me back into the family, where my role, though peripheral, was also vital because I was Valerie's father. After you turned in and Elida fell asleep beside me, I lay on my back waiting. Usually took her about an hour or so to really get going, but her sisters and her mother had already begun. Valerie and a girl cousin had sneaked a bottle of wine into their sleeping bags and were now drifting off next door. The real snoring hit with abrupt ferocity. The orderly mechanical regularity of the metalworking shop had been abandoned. Now it was more like a pack of wolves snarling over a kill. I closed my eyes. On my mental screen I saw lions driving the wolves, or hyenas maybe, into the veld. On a hill overlooking the bloody feast, a baboon whooped. How many hours? I elaborated on the vivid images that accompanied the soundtrack. A lioness worrying the leg off a carcass, two others feeding off a male raking his ribs with teeth and claws while their cubs mock fought nearby. At last I dropped off in the deepest part of the night. I woke although Elida's snarls had calmed to the loud gurgling purr of a big cat digesting its prey meal. I came to in a sick sweat, shaking. Perhaps my imagined scenario had triggered some terror from my evolutionary past. I had dreamed that I was the hunted animal thrown to earth, being eaten alive. The tearing of my flesh, the snap of jaws wrestling at my bones, the blissful lapping as my throat opened. All this seemed absolutely real to me. It took some time for me to understand that Elida's body had not been satiated on mine, that she wasn't purring because she'd swallowed my heart. Thank you.

[Meg Wolitzer]

Keir Dullet performed Louise Erdrich's the Big Cat. I'm Meg Wolitzer. This story reminds us that happiness is complex and that what constitutes happiness in a marriage is especially complex. Like some of Alice Munro's work, Big Cat takes place over years and its leisureliness and sense of time passing make it imaginable as a novel. I would read a whole book about these people, and if I did, I would definitely want to hear more about the various snoring cures tried by the different women in this family. And indirectly, the story partners well, sonically, with the Winships, the personification of the first wife, as almost enveloping her husband might also bring to mind James Thurber's playful drawings of large, menacing spouses. I've long been a Louise Erdrich fan, and it was great to catch up with her and ask about this story and her writing life in general.

[Interviewer]

We've listened to one of your stories, the Big Cat, which is fantastic. So I always try to track for myself, even as a reader and a writer, where a story comes from. But it may be sort of like figuring out where a dream comes from. I'd love to hear about the genesis of it.

[Louise Erdrich]

I like your take on stories because I feel the same way. I'm not sure where they come from. Sometimes I can trace back details. It's set in Minneapolis. Some of the settings are real. The restaurant where they reconnect, the condominiums, which I've seen from the outside and I just imagined. And then this relationship you can call their everything that happens. Yeah, they're all relationships for me.

[Interviewer]

I don't know if you feel this way as a fiction writer. You can pull things from life and things that are not from life feel like it's our superpower to have like a restaurant that you say is real, but a made up, metallurgic symphony of snoring. I like to think that you were just really excited when you came up with that.

[Louise Erdrich]

I was excited by the end, which is violent in a lot of ways. But what's most violent is based on a Man's dream state in which he's surrounded by the noise of women. I feel like the snoring stands in for the noise we make as women in so many ways. That appalls men, appalls partners, you know, appalls people in the wider sense.

[Interviewer]

That is a great way of thinking of it. And I'm already thinking of a million things. Like women screaming in happiness at a restaurant. Right.

[Meg Wolitzer]

A group of women at a table.

[Louise Erdrich]

And it's always this gesture. Come on, keep it down.

[Interviewer]

And saws and metal instruments with their teeth. It's so evocative.

[Louise Erdrich]

It was a pleasure to write those scenes. I really had fun.

[Interviewer]

It's really funny, too.

[Louise Erdrich]

Oh, good.

[Interviewer]

What was it like to hear the story read by someone who is not you?

[Louise Erdrich]

It's strange, I suppose, but it's also very satisfying. People emphasize work in places that you wouldn't expect. And the cadence of words is different. It's satisfying.

[Interviewer]

I know. I feel absolutely the same way. So you've always written about families and the opening chapter of Love Medicine. I guess it started off as a short story, and it was about family members gathering on a reservation for the funeral of an Ojibwe woman. Do you feel like more of a short story writer or a novelist? Or do you not think that way? I know you're also a poet.

[Louise Erdrich]

Well, short stories came to me in the beginning, and it's harder to write them sometimes. Now they come as more of a wave of emotion, the way poems do. But now I've started writing into a longer form, and I really love doing that. At the same time, when I have a story and an ending I'm so excited about. Just feels so gratifying to be able to bring a reader into a world. Immerse the reader and then, see, now you can leave.

[Interviewer]

Do you always know which it is? What feels like the beginning of a novel versus a story?

[Meg Wolitzer]

You somehow sort of know.

[Interviewer]

Have you ever had the experience of writing one and it turned out to be the other?

[Louise Erdrich]

So many. The novels that I was writing in the beginning had stories embedded within them. So somebody would tell a story, or there would be a series of narrators. Or somehow you would feel that this story was coming from a source within the novel. But it sometimes didn't have a lot of bearing on the novel. And then I started making the stories have more bearing, or not using multiple narrators. And at last started writing from one point of view, which was a huge breakthrough for me. I didn't think I would sustain a point of view over a novel, and when I did, I loved it. I have to have a very powerful relationship with that character.

[Interviewer]

So you've brought Native American life into the center of American literature. Do you feel a responsibility as a writer, or do you write what you want to explore or love? Or are they sort of interchangeable?

[Louise Erdrich]

It's not me. It's my parents. It's my tribe, my nation, the people around me. I mean, it's everybody else who has been essential to me who has done this.

[Interviewer]

Well, it's just such a wonderful body of work and a continuing wonderful body of work. Thank you so much for talking to me. Really. We're so happy to have your story on the show.

[Meg Wolitzer]

Thank you.

[Louise Erdrich]

I'm happy too. I'm very happy. It's this story. I was delighted when I It's a

[Interviewer]

really good story, so.

[Louise Erdrich]

And I'm glad you thought I loved it.

[Interviewer]

I loved it.

[Meg Wolitzer]

That was author Louise Erdrich. A longer bonus version of this interview is available on our podcast platforms. Love is a many splendored thing, says the old song. But love is one thing and marriage is quite another. The reason everyone gets teary eyed at a wedding is that there's something moving about the idea of a couple who are deeply in love beginning their formerly united life together. Yet when we get all teary, that's not all we're thinking about. Not entirely, maybe unconsciously, we fast forward and sometimes we picture the whole thing, this perfect love holding fast over time even as the two gorgeous young people all young people are gorgeous grow slightly worn under the weight of their mortgage and inadequate childcare, yet still hold strong as a couple like they promised each other they would. But here's the thing. We can't ever know if they're going to hold strong. Statistically, it's not at all unlikely that something tempting or terrible or ludicrous will do some sundering. You never know if a lifetime of amiable coexistence is is going to be shattered by a whim or if there's possibly more than one. The one For a member of a couple, there's something perversely enjoyable in looking at photos of famous married couples who didn't last. You stare at these old photos and say to the people in them, you're gonna hate her soon or he's gonna steal all your money. Get out while you can. I'm the happily married Meg Wolitzer. Thanks for joining me for Selected Shorts. Selected Shorts is produced by Jennifer Brennan and Sarah Montague. Our team includes Matthew Love, Drew Richardson, Mary Shimpkin Vivienne Woodward, and Magdalene Robleski. The readings are recorded by Myles B. Smith. Our programs, presented at the Getty center in Los Angeles are recorded by Phil Richards. Our mix engineer for this episode was Jennifer Nolson. Our theme music is David Peterson's that's the Deal, performed by the Deardorf Petersen Group. Selected Shorts is supported by the Dungannon Foundation. This program is also made possible with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature. Selected Shorts is produced and distributed by Symphony Space. Hey, if you've ever wanted to do Selected Shorts in your own home, I have a suggestion. I have a novel coming out for kids and since kids do like to be read too, maybe you could read

[Interviewer]

aloud to them from this book.

[Meg Wolitzer]

I co wrote it with my son Charlie Panick and it's one of those scavenger hunt books with a lot of really cool clues in it. Great for ages 7 to 11. That's found sound. Read it aloud, let your kid read it, let your grandkid read it, let adults read it, whatever.