This is The Writer's Voice, new fiction from The New Yorker.

I'm Deborah Treesman, fiction editor at The New Yorker.

On this week's episode of The Writer's Voice, we'll hear David Rabe read his story, My Friend Pinocchio from the February 10th, 2025 issue of the magazine.

Raib is the author of more than a dozen plays, including sticks and bones,

in the boom-boom room, and Hurley Burley.

His books of fiction include Recital of the Dog, Girl by the Road at Night,

and Listening for Ghosts, which was published in 2022.

Now here's David Rabe.

My friend Pinocchio.

When I broke Kenny's bedroom door, I was in the middle of a crazy argument with my girlfriend.

Kenny and his wife Kathy were away, and actually I didn't ruin the door, but I damaged it and hurt my hand.

This was the girlfriend I'd run after in a panic-stricken wild breakout that destroyed my first marriage

and led to a nervous breakdown. Time in the breakdown lane. It turned out to be a kind of

walking collapse in the sense that pneumonia is sometimes walking. So I walked around pretty much

like shattered pottery glued back together haphazardly, all the while

drinking with a teeth-gritted determination to hang on to my girlfriend and survive. Not that pottery

can drink or walk, but I could and did, and one of the things I did in that time was break

Kenny's door. She was in the bedroom and I was outside it. We talked through

the door, each of us drinking, which was a big mistake, a big miscalculation that went unrecognized

at the time. I had some sort of idea or perception of her that manifested as this gigantic,

ungovernable feeling that I couldn't live without her.

It was like I was mid-air and only part-way down a long fall with no end in sight.

...