Fiction Podcast: David Sedaris Reads Miranda July

In this month’s fiction podcast, David Sedaris reads “Roy Spivey,” by the writer and filmmaker Miranda July. The story, which appeared in the The New Yorker in 2007, is about a young woman’s encounter with a famous actor aboard an airplane, and the reverberations of their exchange throughout her life.

The narrator meets the “Hollywood heartthrob,” whom she refers to as “Roy Spivey,” (it’s “almost” an anagram of his name, she coyly tells us), when she is seated next to him after being updated to first class on a flight. At the end of a flirtatious plane ride, Spivey writes a number on a page of her SkyMall magazine—a phone number with the final digit missing, which he instructs her to memorize—and, though she never calls the number, the memorized digit becomes a talisman that she relies upon during painful moments later in her life.

True to July’s style as a storyteller, the exchange between the narrator and Spivey is awkwardly hilarious—she tries to wash her smelly armpits in the bathroom, he ends up spritzing them with Febreze for her—but the story is, finally, about the flipside of the narrator’s in-air fantasy: her heartbreaking paralysis when it comes to real life. Here she is in the aftermath of the flight:

That evening, I found myself standing in the middle of my living room floor. I had made dinner and eaten it, and then I had an idea that I might clean the house. But halfway to the broom I stopped on a whim, flirting with the emptiness in the center of the room. I wanted to see if I could start again. But, of course, I knew what the answer would be. The longer I stood there, the longer I had to stand there. It was intricate and exponential. I looked like I was doing nothing, but really I was as busy as a physicist or a politician. I was strategizing my next move. That my next move was always not to move didn’t make it any easier.

Sedaris, whose most recent New Yorker piece was about Valentine’s Day and taxidermy, says he was “completely, mysteriously shaken up” by July’s story when he first read it. He compares the experience to that of reading works by Lorrie Moore; though seemingly loaded with jokes, the lighter parts of the narrative accumulate into an unexpectedly affecting whole. “I’m laughing, I’m laughing, I’m laughing,” says Sedaris, “and, at the end, I’m just devastated.”

You can hear Sedaris’s reading of “Roy Spivey,” and his discussion with The New Yorker’s fiction editor, Deborah Treisman, by listening above or by downloading the podcast for free from iTunes.