Discuss “Light Secrets”, by Joseph O’Neill

[We meet every Sunday after a new New Yorker magazine is published.]

Greetings, Fictioneers!

On Sunday, January 25, 2025 at 4 pm CST/5 pm EST/3 pm MST/2 pm PST, on Zoom, we will discuss the New Yorker Fiction story from the issue dated January 19, 2026: “Light Secrets”, by Joseph O’Neill. We last read O’Neill’s “Keuka Lake”, from February of 2025, about a newly widowed woman's visit with her sister in Montreal and her coming to terms with her husband's fatal car accident. O’Neill’s partner, Rivka Galchen, wrote last September’s “Unreasonable”, about a bee researcher navigating funding cuts, her daughters' struggles with addiction and heartbreak, and her lab director's unexpected departure.

1. Read “Light Secrets” at this link. Try a private or incognito window if blocked by the New Yorker's paywall or through the Libby app via your local public library “card”.
2. Want to listen to it? Use the “Listen to this story” audio module on the story page (29 minutes at 1x speed) or at this link (31:17 with intro and ads).
3. The author interview, “Joseph O’Neill on Why a Story Should Be Like a Poem”, is at this link.

[quoting]
Joseph O'Neill was born in Cork, Ireland, on 23 February 1964. He is of half-Irish and half-Turkish ancestry.
O'Neill's parents moved around much in O'Neill's youth: O'Neill spent time in Mozambique as a toddler and in Turkey until the age of four, and he also lived in Iran. From the age of six, O'Neill lived in the Netherlands, where he attended the Lycée français de La Haye and the British School in the Netherlands. He read law at Girton College, Cambridge, preferring it over English because "literature was too precious" and he wanted it to remain a hobby. O'Neill started off his literary career in poetry but had turned away from it by the age of 24. After being called to the English Bar in 1987, he spent a year writing his first novel. O'Neill then entered full-time practice as a barrister in London, principally in the field of business law. Since 1998 he has lived in New York City.

Career
Writing
O'Neill is the author of five novels. He is best known for Netherland, which was published in May 2008 and was featured on the cover of the New York Times Book Review, where it was called "the wittiest, angriest, most exacting and most desolate work of fiction we've yet had about life in New York and London after the World Trade Center fell". It was included in The New York Times list of the 10 Best Books of 2008. Literary critic James Wood called it "one of the most remarkable postcolonial books I have ever read". In an interview with the BBC in June 2009, US President Barack Obama revealed that he was reading it, describing it as "an excellent novel."

Among the books on the longlist, it was the favourite to win the Man Booker Prize. …

His next novel, The Dog (2014), was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction, named a Notable Book of 2014 by The New York Times, and shortlisted for the Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction. His most recent novel, Godwin, was published in June 2024. It was a Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and shortlisted for the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award.
O'Neill is also the author of Good Trouble (2018), a collection of short stories, most of which first appeared in the New Yorker or Harper's magazine. Two of his stories have been awarded an O. Henry prize. …
O'Neill has also written a non-fiction book, Blood-Dark Track: A Family History, which was a New York Times Notable Book for 2002 and a Book of the Year for the Economist and the Irish Times.
In 2019, O'Neill began to publish political essays in the New York Review of Books. He has also written literary and cultural criticism, notably for The Atlantic Monthly.
Teaching
He is a Distinguished Visiting Professor of Written Arts at Bard College.
Personal life
O'Neill speaks English, French and Dutch. He played club cricket in the Netherlands and the UK, and has played for many years at the Staten Island Cricket Club, much like his Netherland protagonist Hans. His love of cricket continues and he is an active player (as of 2015). In an interview with The Paris Review in 2014 O'Neill said, explaining his interest in writing about Dubai in The Dog, "I’ve moved around so much and lived in so many different places that I don’t really belong to a particular place." He lives in Brooklyn with his partner, writer Rivka Galchen.”
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• from Wikipedia English's Joseph_O'Neill_(writer,_born_1964) page , footnote marks and links removed.