
Good Reading Podcast
Carrie Tiffany on her powerful exploration of dementia in the novella. 'The Lady With The Dog'
An elderly couple are driving to the pound. At last, the old lady is getting a dog. The dog is driven through a gate in the fence to its new home. It goes to sleep in front of the black stove, but when it wakes, the old lady is confused. Doesn’t she already have a dog? The old lady slips a pair of pantyhose through the dog’s collar and walks it along the fence. For some reason the gate has disappeared. In the dog’s new home objects are uncoupling from their meaning. Is the dog still a dog? When the gate opens for the very last time will the dog go through? With whimsical drawings from artist Noel McKenna, The Lady with the Dog is a homage to the exquisite sadness of Chekhov’s famous short story. A masterful novella about the importance of animals in language and life. In this episode Gregory Dobbs chats to Carrie Tiffany about the relationship between her story and Anton Chekhov's short story of the same name, how Carrie managed to get inside the head of an Alzheimer's sufferer, and how those muddled conversations with her mother became the foundation of her prose in The Lady with the Dog





