New Yorker Fiction 2014

A WRITER'S WIT
Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens to you.
Aldous Huxley
Born July 26, 1894

The Most Difficult Meal

July 28, 2014, Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, “Last Meal at Whole Foods”: A twenty-eight-year-old male narrator whose mother has three months to live recalls his life as a child with his single parent. ¶ I kept thinking as I read this story: I’ve been here (caring for elderly parent), and I find it uncomfortable. Yet Sayrafiezadeh takes us to a familiar place that also belongs just to his narrator and mother: the professor who impregnates his mother but who’s too busy to marry her or provide for his son; their life of living on Goodwill and Whole Foods; his mother’s fixation on seeing that he receives a proper education—even to the point of playing Scrabble missing an “f”. She is squeamish about his manners:

Lettering: Marion Deuchars/Photo: James Ross

“When I was a child, she would screech and recoil anytime my finger approached the vicinity of my nose” (66).

The narrator is at a painful point: wanting to care for the only person who may have cared for him, and, yet hoping to move on with his own life. And again, most of us have been there or will be at some point, and his story is an insightful reminder that we will also become the one who requires care. The author’s collection of stories, Brief Encounters with the Enemy, came out in 2013.
Lettering by Marion Deuchars
Photograph by James Ross