Tobias Wolff

And it's not a craft book, but Alicia Altman's Permission, for the reasons we were just talking about, I think is a book that every memoirist or creative nonfiction writer should read, should have.

As far as memoirs that are inspiring, one of our contributors, Don Davies, wrote a memoir called Mothers of Sparta, which is one of my favorites, and I always go back to This Boy's Life by Tobias Wolff.

Mm-hmm.

And all of Nick Flynn's memoirs.

For more New Yorker Fiction audio, try the New Yorker Fiction podcast, where we invite writers to choose stories from the magazine's archives to read and discuss.

This month, Colm Toivin reads Awaiting Orders by Tobias Wolff.

You can find that and other New Yorker podcasts in your podcast app.

If you're a New Yorker subscriber, you get access to all episodes of The Writer's Voice ad-free and to everything else we publish, award-winning journalism, criticism, fiction and poetry, plus games and cartoons.

Each month, we invite a writer to choose a story from the magazine's archives to read and discuss.

This month, we're going to hear Awaiting Orders by Tobias Wolff, which appeared in The New Yorker in July of two thousand and five.

Morse had spent twenty of his thirty-nine years in the army.

He was not one of those who claimed to love it, but he belonged to it as to a tribe, bound to those around him by lines of unrefusable obligation, love being finally beside-

Hi, Deborah.

So, uh, the last couple of times that you were on the Fiction Podcast, you chose stories by Sylvia Townsend Warner and Mary Lavin.

What made you go for Tobias Wolff this time?

Maybe it's the same thing, the idea that something very plain, um, something that doesn't, you know, have gorgeous writing in it or have any sort of obvious efforts towards transcendence, um-