Lauren Groff

I read New Yorker stories in bursts, several at a time, when I'm between books. A New Yorker story is just that, a New Yorker story, which is sometimes a comfort, sometimes so tidy it's dull, and sometimes a reading moment in the middle of the night. This week, Lauren Groff's 'Brawler', a story about diving and pills, was a reading moment. Somewhere in the middle of the middle column on the page, she starts her dive. The dive is the moment. Like the levitation dreams where you are slow motion somersaulting in a large room or hall.

Then Sara, the diver, goes home where a cheetah is chasing across the tv screen in gorgeous slow motion. Her mother, the thin, wasted, naturo/homeo/pillhead, recedes, and Sara, the diver, her daughter, leaps. After the cheetah, we see elephants washing, and then, later, the great huffing buffalo, followed by male springbok climbing aboard female springbok. Her mother lays her head on Sara's lap as 'the television scrolled onward through the miracles of the savannah and the lifting of white names through blackness'.

These terrible/serene moments—a mother's head on your lap when you are young—are riveting as you read, as I read, in the middle of the night.