This is The Writer's Voice, new fiction from The New Yorker. I'm Deborah Treesman, fiction editor at The New Yorker.

On this episode of The Writer's Voice, we'll hear Laurie Siegel read her story on the agenda from the September 18th, 2023 issue of the magazine.

Siegel's most recent books are the journal I did not keep, new and selected writing, and ladies lunch and other stories which comes out this month.

Now here's Laurie Siegel.

Forgetting as an Olympic sport, you know how TV uses competition to turn us on to baking, interior decorating, fashion and what all.

I proposed the great ladies forgetting Olympics.

Busy said, you mean whoever forgets the most names gets the gold, forgets more words, words, words that bring it.

And dates and appointments far as said.

Busy said addresses. I remember a lot of calling me several times for the address of the party that turned out to be,

I forget what we call a Jewish wake. For Sylvia's deceased aunt, poor Laurie, spent the evening trying to remember from where she knew Sylvia or if maybe she had never met her.

Forgetting people, Ilka said, I had an email from a Samsung who writes as if I should know his brother, his mother, the only Samsung's I know are Kafka's bug and the one in the Bible.

I picked up a story I published in 2007, which it said, it's not that I don't recognize what I wrote, but I couldn't think how it ended.

So anyway, said Farah, impatiently, this is this morning. I'm enjoying my coffee, going to turn on the news.

And I think wait a minute, today's the fifth. Imagine yourself in an elevator in free fall. Your stomach has been left behind or drops into your boot.

So is it your heart that drops into your pants? I forget the idiom, but wasn't it on the fourth? I was having dinner with Irwin.

Irwin's folks are my mother's distant cousins who went to Canada. Irwin is the in between generation younger than myself.

Then my son, but older than my grandson, Hammy, I think. Anyway, so I marched myself into my office, turned on the computer.

I have this big desktop because of my bad eyes. Got briefly hysterical when I couldn't remember how to find the calendar, found it.

And it was. It was yesterday that Irwin was in town.

I see him sitting at the table waiting for me, except that I can't remember where we were supposed to meet.

Wait, Ilka said, wait, wait, wait, Samson. Laught his son was some and his brother Gregor came from Chicago, was it?

And they put Laughty into what's the name of the assisted living place?

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