Deborah Treisman

And now here's Sarah Swanian Bynum reading Evolution by Joan Silber.

That was Sarah Swan-Yen Bynum reading Evolution by Joan Silber.

The story appeared in The New Yorker in September of 2022 and became part of Silber's novel Mercy, which was published in 2025.

So, Sarah, our first vision of Kara is of this 10-year-old sashaying around on her New York City fire escape in the middle of winter, swinging her bathrobe belt and singing.

It's quite a way to establish a character from the get-go.

Do you think that that moment is in any way symbolic?

You know, that we have this girl who's in a sense kind of playing with danger and then engaging with sexuality and then suddenly gets hurt by it.

Right.

And then we go straight from that exuberance to this kind of abrupt awareness of death.

As she's coming in the window, she's suddenly quite sure she's going to have to manage dying alone.

And she's angry at her mother for not having taught her how to do it.

which is kind of hilarious as well because her mother hasn't yet done it.

So how would she know?

But this moment of getting hurt leads to that revelation that she has both at home and at the hospital when she sees this man be abandoned by his friend that in a sense one is always alone and one does have to manage alone.

Yeah, I mean, and we get the tension of that almost immediately because she says after this injury that she realizes that she will have to look out for herself.

That's the lesson she walks away with.

And then, well, it's six years later, but it's instantly on the page.

She puts herself entirely into Brody's hands, you know, completely trusting this not very trustworthy guy.

So is that about not having learned the lesson she thought she'd learned or is that about defying that lesson or the pessimism of that lesson?

Yeah, that's something she stands by.