Nell Freudenberger’s fiction has spanned settings as far-ranging as Southeast Asia, the Indian subcontinent, French Polynesia, and New York City. Across these landscapes and throughout her four novels and short story collection, Lucky Girls, which received the PEN/Malamud Award and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction, she has shown herself to be a keen observer of the fissures and convergences between cultures near and far, the power dynamics that shape communities, and the trespasses and intimacies that form across these gaps.

Freudenberger’s story in the February 2026 issue, “The Precipice,” follows a middle-aged woman recounting the trials of her all-girls high school’s literary magazine, which was presided over by two male English teachers. The Arden School for Girls, with just sixty students per grade, attempts to transpose East Coast rigor onto the languorous climate of southern California, instituting high academic standards and following a fixed social hierarchy. As they approach adulthood amid the school’s “impossible contradictions,” the students find themselves caught between abstract freedoms and concrete rules. Recollecting this period, the narrator confronts anew the questions she and her peers had unknowingly addressed—those of selfhood, desire, and authorial agency.

 
Becky Zhang: “The Precipice” is set at a private all-girls school in Los Angeles in the Nineties, but is written from the perspective of a woman in the present looking back on that time in her life. Why did you choose to cast the story in a retrospective frame?

Nell Freudenberger: I don’t usually write in the first person, or from a perspective this close to my own. What prompted this story was thinking about the ways my kids’ school experiences are different from the one I had. Sometimes their dad or I will mention a memory that shocks them: the pipe bomb that exploded in the bathroom of his public junior high school in Birmingham, Michigan; or the teacher who called students at my private high school by derogatory nicknames based on race or ethnicity. I hope that the examples of flagrant racism and the sexual relationships between teachers and students in this story would be impossible, or at least much less likely, today, but those are familiar stories.

What really interested me was the way that memories are interconnected; once you start writing about the past, details that you couldn’t have remembered in a vacuum occur to you, and people and events snap into focus. These newly remembered events, from our current vantage, appear utterly different than they did at the time.

Zhang: The two English teachers in this story—Wheeler and Boyd, as they are called by their students—are each other’s foils: Wheeler is tall, Boyd is short; Wheeler is prim, Boyd is unkempt; Boyd uses overhead lighting in his classroom, while Wheeler prefers the light of three “mismatched” lamps. I wondered whether their differences were as pronounced as they seem to be for the narrator, or whether they might be inflated by memory.

Freudenberger: I actually do think of them as quite different. They’re men of the same generation, and they may have made some of the same mistakes, though that doesn’t excuse them. I don’t think Boyd would have been especially progressive regarding race, for instance. As a young woman, though, I remember thinking that I met two types of older men: one type thought of girls and women as potential conquests; the other, much rarer type thought of us as individuals. Boyd belongs to the second category, and for that reason his impact on some of the girls he teaches is profound.

Zhang: Wheeler and Boyd seem to pay tribute to the archetype of the charismatic, unorthodox teacher (I’m thinking of Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Mr. Keating from Dead Poets Society) while coming to life as distinct personalities of their own. Were there literary precedents you had in mind while creating their characters?

Freudenberger: I have to admit: I loved school, and I still love reading about it. George Orwell’s essay “Such, Such Were the Joys” made a huge impression on me as a teenager (and makes the Arden School look fairly tame). John Williams’s Stoner, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, and Heather McGowan’s Schooling are some others that come to mind, along with Donald Barthelme’s great stories “The School” and “Porcupines at the University.” But I wasn’t thinking of any particular literary precedents when I was writing this story; I thought of the teachers I had and some I’d heard about, and those people together became Wheeler and Boyd.

Zhang: “The Precipice” takes place before the pervasiveness of the internet as we know it today. The narrator notes how, without access to Google or a smartphone in your hand, you simply didn’t have the answers to most things back then. The story is also a Künstlerroman, in which the narrator gets closer to finding her voice as a writer. How did this particular time period inform the narrator’s creative and intellectual growth?

Freudenberger: I’m going to go out on a limb and say that it was a lot easier to develop as a writer back then. Books, and especially poetry, were a more central part of the culture. Many of my classmates, even those who weren’t that interested in English classes, read for pleasure. Obviously there was less to distract us. (Maybe if you were really procrastinating, you might chat with a friend for an hour on the newly cordless phone or read “It Happened to Me” in Sassy magazine.) At my school, we read mostly white European or American authors, so we missed out on a lot. We did read much more poetry than high school students seem to read today, and I remember loving The Norton Anthology of Poetry because it gave you a sense of how one generation of writers responded to another.

Zhang: Though the story doesn’t delve too much into the sociopolitical landscape of Los Angeles at the time, we get glimpses of tensions along the lines of class and race among the girls at Arden, as well as a detail concerning the narrator’s own ascension to upper-middle-class status following her father’s pivot from running a repertory theater to working in Hollywood. Were there specific historical events or cultural phenomena that you were thinking of while writing this story?

Freudenberger: This was during the Clinton presidency, and neoliberal passivity was in full effect in this version of Los Angeles. Like all big cities, L.A. was one city layered on top of another and another. There may have been students who were much more politically engaged, but I remember my friends as being blithely indifferent to current events. That’s obviously not true of high school students today, but they don’t have much choice.

Zhang: The narrator reflects on her impressions of As I Lay Dying, a novel that bores her peers but intrigues her. “I didn’t mind death or even boredom,” she writes. “The harder it seemed to me, the better I liked it.” What inspired the inclusion of William Faulkner?

Freudenberger: There’s a juvenile impulse to love what’s difficult, especially when you’re trying to prove yourself intellectually. Later on, I learned to love writers like Toni Morrison or Virginia Woolf for better reasons—because their styles require work from us, and that spark of comprehension is one of the most satisfying things about reading. Of course, there are equally important things to learn from writers who use a more colloquial or accessible syntax, but I think we do students a disservice when we worry too much about what they can understand.

Zhang: When her fictionalized account of a classmate’s intimate experiences is read by others, the narrator undergoes a kind of vertigo: she inhabits the perspective of that classmate, Rosie Franklin, and then thinks of another peer, the unpopular Carmen Iricheta, with a new degree of clarity or affinity. How does telling her classmate’s story enable—or curb—the narrator’s capacity for empathy?

Freudenberger: Writing does prompt empathy, but also transgression, especially when writers imagine themselves into other subjectivities. I have certain rules for myself—for example, I ask permission if I want to write about someone who I think has less power than I do, and I don’t do that kind of writing in a first-person voice.

On the other hand, I think a lot of fiction writing is theft, and ethical guardrails don’t really change that. The narrator of the story is getting a first taste of that when she writes about Rosie Franklin. As a young writer, you don’t imagine that anyone’s going to read what you write; that gives you freedom to experiment. The panic that the narrator experiences when her teacher pulls that essay out of his briefcase is something I still feel whenever anything I write is published.

I’m always struck by the way people who were in the same place at the same time can remember their experiences radically differently. Even siblings grow up in different houses. Even people who aren’t writers reconstruct their experiences as narrative, and those narratives become or replace our actual memories. Putting memories into words has the power to shake the foundations on which families or institutions rest. It’s a dangerous thing to do.

Zhang: The fear of writing something into reality is one that the narrator comes to contend with many years later. As the narrator says, “It did sometimes happen—not because of any magical capacity on my part, but because we all imagine our fears and have some ability to predict the future.” Is this a preoccupation you find yourself confronting in your own work?

Freudenberger: Yes, I have this superstition. As the narrator says, I think there’s a rational explanation. We write about the things we don’t understand—maybe that’s another way of saying the things we fear—and adults usually aren’t afraid of things unless they have a reasonable chance of happening.

We’re always writing about ourselves, however much we try to trick ourselves into believing otherwise. I have to start pretty far away from myself in most cases, and then, usually by the end of a short story, I’ve figured out why I wrote it, what unpleasant thing I was hiding from. For me, writing often feels like one humiliating revelation after another. Joan Didion wrote about the fear of bringing things into the world by writing about them; when you name bad things, as she did so precisely, they’re much harder to ignore.

Zhang: Turning Rosie Franklin’s story into fiction turns out to be a pivotal moment for the narrator’s development as a writer, albeit a complicated one. Do you have an idea of what her next writing-related turning point might be?

Freudenberger: I don’t think of characters as existing outside the boundaries of the fictions they inhabit, so I’m not sure I have an answer for this one. For me, the next writing-related turning point would have been getting to college and falling in love with a lot of new writers, especially poets I hadn’t read in high school. I remember a twentieth-century American poetry lecture, taught by the great literary critic Helen Vendler, in which the final exam was just one prompt: write about your relationship with a poet we read this semester. I chose John Ashbery, whose poems had been given to me by a person I was dating, and who wrote so beautifully about “Some Trees”—the same trees that I saw every day on my way to class. It was easy to feel that my life was bound up with those poems, and it was that kind of relationship with a writer that expanded my horizons as a reader and tentative writer of fiction.