Madeline Gray
speaker
549 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 11 Sep
Madeline Gray’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
It's the Midwest.
And you've got this little boy, Cricket, who spends a lot of time by himself.
He doesn't have, you know, really friends at school.
And in his own home, he stays downstairs because if he goes upstairs, then his stepdad's going to probably beat him up or do something else egregious.
And we have this gorgeous moment quite early on in the novel where he's walking across a bridge and comes to meet a girl, Pia, and another boy who becomes irrelevant.
Pia says to him, hey, I've seen that you do like cool art and calligraphy in class.
Would you mind doing some calligraphy of some words I'm going to tell you as graffiti on like a playground or something, is it?
And he goes, yeah, all right, like thrilled to be asked to do something by a kid who's slightly older and a girl at that.
And he begins to do the most kind of beautiful and ornate graffiti works of what soon we realise are just kind of euphemisms about masturbation.
I can't remember.
Yeah, exactly.
Stop the jock or whatever.
And he sees in this moment, he feels he's met a kindred spirit because he's
This girl clearly has a mind that he doesn't think, you know, belongs in the milieu that he's been in in his area and she describes his work as ornate.
And I think this was the first time I got a sense of what the novel would be because, you know, she says the word ornate instead of fancy.
Yeah.
And when Cricket hears this, he thinks, this, he realised, was the essence of art.
It was precise.
It was stratifying.
Its specificity, its refinement alienated someone like Ray, a dullard, and Ray is the other boy.
Showing 261–280 of 549 · page 14 of 28
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