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Say you’re a writer and you’re seeing a therapist, would you want your therapist to read your work? Should your therapist read your work? What if she declares she won’t read your work? And what if your therapist is also a writer? Should you read her work? In addition, is there a chance that she could also be treating your fellow-writers (you live in New York, after all)? Lerner’s new story, “The Readers,” explores whether the self on the page is the same as the self in a therapy session—and, perhaps even more important, the self on an F train. But, in this dissection of empathy and identification, what initially appears to be a set of playful existential dilemmas becomes far more freighted when the narrator discovers that he has to have open-heart surgery, and, in the wake of his operation, captures that experience in prose. Lerner, who recently underwent cardiac surgery himself, once again reveals his skill in tracing lines that both smudge and delineate the distinction between life and fiction.
— Cressida Leyshon, deputy fiction editor
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