No Filter

·57 min·4 clips

After her parents died, a seven-year-old asked her uncle to unscrew the mirrored door from the medicine chest — and has never let a mirror back into her home since.

1. Selected Shorts presents two short stories under the theme 'No Filter,' exploring the divide between private selves and public faces, hosted by Meg Wolitzer at Symphony Space. 2. Host Meg Wolitzer introduces the frame; no single author hosts this episode — the stories are selected by Wolitzer and performed by Alicia Reiner and Patricia Callamber. 3. The episode's thesis is that social media's promise of authenticity ('no filter, I woke up like this') still conceals real imperfection — what we post is not truth but deepest wish. 4. Wolitzer describes losing a morning to a stranger's lost-hamster story on social media, framing the compulsion as evidence that humans are 'hardwired for story,' even fictional or curated ones. 5. 'Unselfie' by Amy Bender, read by Alicia Reiner, opens in a bar in an unnamed small town where the narrator — a woman who avoids mirrors — shares fragments of her past with a frizzy-haired redhead passing through on a road trip to meet her birth father in Nebraska. 6. The narrator reveals she lost her parents at age seven, but the aunt and uncle who raised her could never keep their stories straight about the cause: drowning, heart attack, and other conflicting accounts. 7. The full story, eventually disclosed, is stranger: her parents sent an email the night before they died, telling the godparents where to find their ashes and to pick up their daughter in Seattle — and no one has explained who placed the ashes in the bank safety deposit box. 8. The narrator's signature trait — appearing to float — began the same year her parents died, and she links it to losing interest in mirrors: without a reflective surface to 'check on' her face, she feels lighter and less anchored. 9. She describes removing the mirrored door from the medicine chest on her first night in her aunt and uncle's house; her uncle complied with a screwdriver and kissed the top of her head, relieved to have something concrete to do. 10. Her explanation is precise and unusual: 'I didn't like my eyes seeing my eyes. I wanted instead for it to do its work out in the world on its own.' 11. After the redhead's excitement about the story overtakes their conversation, the narrator plays two rounds of Pac-Man, encoding her initials as JPS for Jean-Paul Sartre, 'purveyor of nothingness.' 12. The story closes with the narrator releasing the redhead from memory like dropping ballast from a hot-air balloon — rising a little higher in space — while scanning the Omaha World Herald for news of sensational deaths. 13. Alicia Reiner backstage calls 'Unselfie' 'meandering in the way the best short stories are' and compares it to Virginia Woolf's short fiction for its deep insight delivered through an apparently casual surface. 14. 'Best Western' by Louise Erdrich, read by Patricia Callamber, opens with its narrator, a straight-A student who abandoned community college to run away with Ricky, the lead tenor of the Flathead Valley Choir. 15. The narrator and Ricky form the Midnight Specials duo, playing hotel lounges and wedding dances from Oregon to Upper Peninsula Michigan, with Ricky's voice carrying them and the narrator serving as 'the visual asset.' 16. Ricky's defining characteristic is an almost pathological need for sleep — he courts it like a lover, using foam earplugs and a black silk eye mask, and his disposition collapses entirely when sleep eludes him. 17. The marriage's turn arrives at the Thunderbird motel in Minneapolis-St. Paul, where Ricky tells his wife her lipstick is off-center and then, in a dreamy voice, that her mouth is 'set crooked on your face' and 'goes with the rest of it.' 18. The violence escalates at a wayside park outside Billings: Ricky grabs the narrator's arm and twists it so the paring knife she is using cartwheels off the table; he says 'I read your mind just now' and smiles his big clean football-captain smile, and she smiles back. 19. Both stories use reflective surfaces — medicine chest mirrors, lipstick mirrors, a crane-game mirror reflecting infinite dimensions — as the physical correlative for the gap between how characters see themselves and how they are seen. 20. Listeners who enjoy short literary fiction performed by skilled actors, stories about women navigating identity and grief, and Erdrich's and Bender's body of work will find both pieces rewarding; those looking for nonfiction, news, or interview content will not.

As heard by us

A patient, literary hour about the gap between public image and private self.

Selected Shorts treats public image and private self as a quiet, steady tension, with Meg Wolitzer guiding the hour through social media, revelation, and the gap between who people seem to be and who they are willing to admit. The tone is literary and unhurried.

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Why you'd press play

For when you want fiction about selves obscured and revealed.

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