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3 weeks ago | 
newyorker.com | Cressida Leyshon
This week’s story, “Marseille,” takes place in the city of the title, where three friends are gathering for a short break. What drew you to Marseille as the setting? In response to a similar question you asked some years ago—about a story set in Rome—I remember saying that it was fun to write about arguments in beautiful settings. Here, again, I think I am drawn to the idea of a reunion in a charming place, and how that charm can suddenly tip.
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1 month ago | 
newyorker.com | Cressida Leyshon
This week’s story, “Techniques and Idiosyncrasies,” takes place in a doctor’s office when the narrator, Lilian, is having her annual checkup. What drew you to this setting? There is a distance between a patient and a doctor or a nurse—there is an innate imbalance—and yet the procedures and conversations are deeply personal, even intrusive.
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Jan 19, 2025 | 
newyorker.com | Cressida Leyshon
This interview was featured in the Books & Fiction newsletter, which delivers the stories behind the stories, along with our latest fiction. Sign up to receive it in your in-box. This week’s story, “The St. Alwynn Girls at Sea,” is about a girls’ school that takes to the North Atlantic Ocean aboard a ship during a time of war. When did this premise first come to you? Did it arrive fully formed or start with a single image or episode or character? I guess it came fully formed.
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Dec 22, 2024 | 
newyorker.com | Cressida Leyshon
This story is based on a real incident involving my father that occurred in the mid-nineteen-eighties, when the military regime of Chun Doo-hwan was at its height. But it was not published in a literary magazine until 1988, after some measure of democratization had been achieved. However, depicting a person who claimed to be a spy for North Korea was still a sensitive issue that touched on major taboos in Korean society at the time, so I had to write it with some discretion.
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Dec 8, 2024 | 
newyorker.com | Cressida Leyshon
This week’s story, “Between the Shadow and the Soul,” is about a fifty-year-old woman named Eliza who has taken early retirement from her job. For the first time in her life, she finds herself with nothing to do. How destabilizing is this moment for her?
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Nov 17, 2024 | 
newyorker.com | Cressida Leyshon
The narrator of your story “Minimum Payment Due” is mired in debt and, from the outset, trying to avoid calls from collection agencies. Did you want to write a story about debt? Yes, that was definitely the starting point. It’s a compelling predicament to have a character embroiled in debt, with its automatic urgency and its built-in stakes, and there seems to be a universality to debt—or at least the fear of it.
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Oct 20, 2024 | 
newyorker.com | Cressida Leyshon
Your story “War Dogs” takes place in an animal-care facility at an airport. When did you come up with this as the setting for a piece of fiction? This is hardly an original thought—and there are tons of writers who have been exploring this for a long time—but as I was working on my last book, “The Hive and the Honey,” I began to form a deep artistic interest in the possibilities of using the canvas of fiction to tell stories where the points of view and perspectives are less centered on . . . humans.
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Oct 13, 2024 | 
newyorker.com | Cressida Leyshon
This week’s story, “My Camp,” opens with its narrator, a writer, searching for a holiday house in the depths of the New Jersey countryside, an activity he describes as a compulsion or an addiction. Why did you choose New Jersey? How addictive is the search for property? New Jersey chose me: I was born there and grew up on the Jersey Shore, just past the southern terminus of the Pine Barrens, where this story is set.
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Oct 13, 2024 | 
newyorker.com | Cressida Leyshon
Lore Segal, who died on Monday, at the age of ninety-six, published her first short story in The New Yorker in 1961, and her final one two weeks ago, some sixty-three years later. Her earliest work for the magazine drew on memories of her last days in Vienna, the city of her birth, as the Nazi persecution of Austrian Jews was deepening, and on her experiences as a refugee after her parents managed to get her on a Kindertransport to England, in 1938.
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Sep 29, 2024 | 
newyorker.com | Cressida Leyshon
This week’s story, “Stories About Us,” is another installation in your “Ladies’ Lunch” series. Here, the women talk about being subjects in stories that Bridget is writing “about a group of friends getting older together.” Why did you want to add that metafictional element? I am always puzzled about questions about why I put things in stories. I am not so interested in questions. The fact of the matter is I don’t know. They seem to fit in because they belong in there.
