Homewreckers

Summary

Selected Shorts: “Homewreckers” – March 19, 2026

Episode Overview

This episode of Selected Shorts, titled “Homewreckers,” explores the intricacies and foibles of marriage through two distinct short stories: James Thurber’s “The Breaking up of the Winships” and Louise Erdrich’s “The Big Cat.” Hosted by Meg Wolitzer, the episode features lively readings from acclaimed actors and concludes with an insightful conversation between Wolitzer and Erdrich.

Theme:
Marriage under strain from the small, often ridiculous, but potent forces that shape partnership. The episode reveals how the mundane and the absurd can tip the balance in intimate relationships—from a debate over Donald Duck to the cacophony of familial snoring.

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Key Discussion Points & Story Summaries

The Price of Small Quarrels: “The Breaking up of the Winships” by James Thurber

Read by Christine Nielsen
Main Segment: [04:52] – [21:23]

• Premise:
  The story recounts the fraught dissolution of Gordon and Marcia Winship’s marriage—sparked by a comical argument about whether Greta Garbo or Donald Duck is the greater artist.

• Escalation from the Trivial:

  • The couple’s fight starts over differing opinions about Garbo’s film "Camille" ([05:15]).
  • Marcia is a Garbo devotee; Gordon is indifferent, favoring detachment and, provocatively, Donald Duck ([06:22]).
  • Their disagreement turns absurdly combative (“Donald Duck is ten times as great as Garbo will ever be!” – Gordon, [07:20]), escalating resentments and leading to mutual scorn and separation.
  • Attempts by their unnamed friend to mediate only reinforce how irreconcilable their incompatibilities have become.

• Public Humiliation and Stubbornness:

  • At a party, Marcia misconstrues Gordon’s lighthearted discussion with a novelist as an intentional slight, reigniting the quarrel ([09:15]).
  • The narrative highlights how “the resentment of the misunderstood husband” and the wounding of pride can trump rationality.

• Notable Quotes:

  • “Quiet, for God’s sake. You’re yelling like a prize fight manager.” — Gordon ([01:00], [07:07])
  • “Well, that speech just about perfectly represents the shallowness of his intellect and the small range of his imagination.” — Marcia ([07:34])
  • "I cannot conscientiously live with her again. I believe that he is great, that the man who created [Donald Duck] is a genius. Probably our only genius." — Gordon ([11:56])
  • “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 Winship.” — Narrator ([12:54])

• Outcome:
  The marriage crumbles not from betrayal or disaster but from stubborn pride and trivial disagreements, with both parties irrevocably wounded by what began as a minor quarrel.

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The Long Conversation: Reflections & Transition

Meg Wolitzer Commentary: [21:23] – [23:59]

• Thurber is celebrated for turning comic escalation into an art, and Nielsen’s reading captures that legacy.
• Wolitzer muses on marriage as “one long conversation checkered by disputes,” and how story and character—not plot—anchor our enduring memories ([02:30]).
• Quote:
  “What you may remember most about your marriage, for better or worse... is what it was like to be talking to that other person, whether in Sacramento or standing in front of a dishwasher on the floor.” — Meg Wolitzer ([02:57])

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Living with Noise and Nostalgia: “The Big Cat” by Louise Erdrich

Read by Keir Dullea
Main Segment: [25:47] – [51:35]

• Premise:
  A man recounts how the snoring women in his wife Elida’s family, including Elida herself, came to dominate his married life, shaping not only his sleep but the trajectory of his relationships.

• Marriage, Divorce & Remarriage:

  • The narrator’s inability to sleep due to Elida’s and her family’s thunderous snoring becomes a motif for marital sacrifice and endurance ([25:47]–[28:00]).
  • After a divorce from Elida, he enjoys blissful sleep and quickly remarries Lorraine, who “slept like a drunk kitten” ([29:35]).
  • Despite contrasting lifestyles and personalities between Elida and Lorraine, the narrator remarks on the subtleties of marital routines, habits, and irritations.

• Lingering Attachments & Emotional Complexity:

  • Monthly meetings with Elida (about their daughter, Valerie) turn fraught once the narrator remarries.
  • A forbidden kiss leads to an affair; "We were extremely happy for ten months" ([39:39]).
  • Their daughter, Valerie, inadvertently discovers the affair, bringing to a head the familial tensions and longing for cohesion:
    • “I could have had you both together. Instead I’d been trying to get used to you apart.” — Valerie ([41:21])

• Money, Guilt, and Self-Awareness:

  • Lorraine accuses the narrator of being after her money; he insists otherwise, yet admits to taking a settlement.
  • Watching a montage Elida once made of his “bit-part” acting career, the narrator confronts regret, guilt, and the narrative of his own life ([44:15]–[48:30]).

• Notable Quotes & Highlights:

  • “20 good years, one bad year, a thousand little issues come home to roost.” — Elida ([36:28])
  • “Maybe we should have an affair where we see each other only by day and never sleep together. You know, at night.” — Elida, whimsically proposing their arrangement ([39:31])
  • "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." — Narrator ([50:26])
  • “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.” — Narrator, grappling with his dream ([51:25])

• Final Reflections:
  The story ends with the narrator back in the snoring house, newly appreciative of his place in the family's peculiar symphony, and aware that happiness in marriage is as layered and discordant as a houseful of sleepers.

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Author Interview: Louise Erdrich in Conversation

Segment: [52:44] – [57:24]

• On Story Origins:

  • Erdrich describes drawing on Minneapolis settings and “imagined” relationships.
  • She explains how the family’s legendary snoring became a metaphor for the “noise women make... that appalls men, appalls partners, you know, appalls people in the wider sense” ([53:34]).

• On Writing Fiction:

  • Quote:
    “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.” — Louise Erdrich ([55:09])
  • She reflects on using family and community as inspiration, saying her work’s significance to Native American representation comes from “my parents. It’s my tribe, my nation, the people around me.” ([57:02])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Marriage is one long conversation checkered by disputes.” — Meg Wolitzer quoting Robert Louis Stevenson ([02:16])
• “Oh, Pooty, you too.” — Marcia, in a moment both cutting and ridiculous ([07:12])
• “How many hours? I elaborated on the vivid images that accompanied the soundtrack. A lioness worrying the leg off a carcass...” — Narrator, “The Big Cat” ([50:48])
• “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.” — Louise Erdrich ([53:34])

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [01:27] — Episode intro and overview by Meg Wolitzer
• [04:52] — “The Breaking up of the Winships” (read by Christine Nielsen)
• [21:23] — Host reflection on Thurber and marriage
• [23:59] — Introduction to Louise Erdrich and “The Big Cat”
• [25:47] — “The Big Cat” (read by Keir Dullea)
• [51:35] — Reflection on “The Big Cat”
• [52:44] — Meg Wolitzer’s interview with Louise Erdrich

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Tone & Insights

• The episode is witty, observant, and compassionate, blending comic absurdity with genuine emotional inquiry.
• Both stories emphasize that it is often the littlest things—quirks, habits, slights, or bodily noises—that shape the course of a partnership.
• The readings bring humor, heart, and pathos, reminding listeners that every marriage is its own inscrutable and fascinating story.

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Conclusion

This episode of Selected Shorts masterfully examines how marriages unravel or endure, not exclusively through major betrayals or disasters, but often thanks to the accumulation of tiny blows and strange affections—the “long conversation” of life together. Through Thurber’s comic fatalism and Erdrich’s affectionate yet unsparing modern portrait, the show delivers a resonant look at what it really means to be somebody’s other half.

Transcript

[Meg Wolitzer]

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[Narrator/Reader (James Thurber's story)]

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 small and 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, 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, isn't 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 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 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/Reader (James Thurber's story)]

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 window pane. 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 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 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 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 that here was the greatest figure ever seen in our generation on sea or land, on screen or stage. 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. He didn't like to see his wife get herself into a sweat over anything. And that night at Leonardo's, he. 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 who had no abandon of feeling and no passion for anything was not altogether a man, and that his so called love of detachment simply covered up a lack of critical appreciation and understanding of the arts in general. Her sentences were becoming long and wavy and her words formal. Gordon suddenly began to poo. Poo her. He kept saying poo. 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. Oh, Pooty, you too. 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 small and horrible animal, such as a horned toad. 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 actor on the screen or on the stage, living or dead, he considered greater than Garbo. Gordon thought a moment, and then he said, as quietly as she had put the question, donald Duck. I don't believe that he meant that at the time, or even thought that he meant it, however that may have been. She looked looked at him scornfully and said, well, that speech just about perfectly represented the shallowness of his intellect and the small range of his imagination. 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 conclusively to him that she's a woman without humor. 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, a smile rather more of 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 as Garbo would ever be and that anybody with a brain in his head would admit it instantly. Thus the Winships went on and on and their resentment swelling, their sense of values blurring, until it ended up with her taking a taxi home alone, leaving her vanity bag and one glove behind in the restroom 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 liked better, Greta Garbo or Donald Duck. And the driver said, well, I like Greta Garbo best. Gordon said to him bitterly, oh, poo to you too, my good friend. 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. Roughly, he was alive, thank God. 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. It was his home, wasn't it? 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. The tall lady, lowering her cigarette holder, 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 and jumped to the conclusion that her 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 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. Defendant Garbo excoriated Gordon and laid into Donald Duck. Gordon tried for a while to explain exactly what had happened, and then he met her resentment with a resentment that 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, 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. Then he asked the driver to stop the car, and he got out in wavering dignity. Caricature cartoon. She screamed after him. You and Donald Duck, both you and 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 Marcia was one of extreme importance, involving both his honor and his integrity. He said that now it could never be wiped out and forgotten. No. He said that he sincerely believed Donald Duck was a great creation as any animal in all the works of Lewis Carroll, probably even greater, perhaps much greater. He was drinking. There was a wild light in his eye. I reminded him of his old love of detachment, and he said, oh, to hell with detachment. I laughed at him, but he wouldn't laugh if he said grimly, marcia 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. He gulped down some scotch. Never. 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. She insisted that he had deliberately tried to humiliate her before that gawky, so called novelist whose clothes they were the doubtiest that she'd ever seen and whose affectations obviously covered up a complete lack of individuality and intelligence. I tried to convince her that she 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. And talk about their precious Donald Duck, that damn comic strip. And I told Marcia that she shouldn't allow herself to get so worked up about a trivial and nonsensical matter. She said it's not silly and nonsensical to her. It might have been once, yes, but it wasn't now. It made her see Gordon clearly for what he was, a chance, 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. 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 Winships, 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. I was wearing a vest. I was carrying a watch. I woke up with a start. I don't know whether that dream means that I'm on Gordon's side or on Marsh's. 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 and Nielsen did him proud. The quarrel seems to linger in the air like the aftermath of a storm. For all we know, the win ships 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 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. Noble is a training brand built for everyday life and and the All Day Knit is their most flexible shoe. With the breathable knit upper, it's designed to move with you from workouts to long days on your feet to commuting or travel. No bull is offering 35% off your first order. Visit www.nobullproject.com and use code NOBULLAUDIO for 35% off your entire first order. There are countless reasons to learn a new language. Whether you have an upcoming trip planned or you simply want to learn a new skill. Rosetta Stone breaks down your new language into bite sized pieces and focuses on speaking practice for real conversations. Rosetta Stone's True Accent feature even helps you perfect your pronunciation. I mean pronunciation. Visit RosettaStone.com today. Rosetta Stone How Languages Learned Tyler Redick

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[Meg Wolitzer]

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 Dullea]

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 that existed. It wasn't that they liked to 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 Alaida, 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 for 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 blonde, 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 and perhaps say, 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, Elida 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 linting hair swung sorrowfully along her cheek.

[Narrator/Reader (James Thurber's story)]

Hmm.

[Keir Dullea]

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/Reader (James Thurber's story)]

Why?

[Keir Dullea]

We can talk. How are the ripsaw on the welders? Elida knew my nicknames were her mother and sisters.

[Narrator/Reader (James Thurber's story)]

Ha.

[Keir Dullea]

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. All this time. How selfish.

[Narrator/Reader (James Thurber's story)]

Mean.

[Keir Dullea]

I could have had you both together. Instead I'd been trying to get used to you apart. I was facing the facts, and then 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. He didn't trust you. 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 told her of the proposed terms of my divorce. That family is worth more than 100 million.

[Narrator/Reader (James Thurber's story)]

You could get a settlement.

[Keir Dullea]

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 Elida 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. 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, if you can call their. Everything that happens. Yeah, they're all relationships for me.

[Meg Wolitzer]

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.

[Meg Wolitzer]

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. A group of Women at a table.

[Louise Erdrich]

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

[Meg Wolitzer]

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.

[Meg Wolitzer]

It's really funny, too.

[Louise Erdrich]

Oh, good.

[Meg Wolitzer]

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.

[Meg Wolitzer]

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.

[Meg Wolitzer]

Do you always know which it is? What feels like the beginning of a novel versus a story? You somehow sort of know. Have you ever had the experience of writing one and it turned out to be the other?

[Louise Erdrich]

So many of 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 the 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.

[Meg Wolitzer]

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.

[Meg Wolitzer]

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.

[Keir Dullea]

Thank you.

[Louise Erdrich]

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

[Meg Wolitzer]

So.

[Louise Erdrich]

And I'm glad you thought I loved it.

[Meg Wolitzer]

I loved it. 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 formally 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 contributed 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 aloud to them from this book. 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.

[Keir Dullea]

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