"Accurate Witness" by Nell Freudenberger / The Sewanee Review
‘Give her her eyes and her mouth, since her heart is an accurate witness.’
If you were to equate short stories with meals, “Accurate Witness” (7,000 words), by Nell Freudenberger in The Sewanee Review, offers a healthy alternative to the sugary rush that comes with big, emotional, barn burning story climaxes.
Let me make a case here for this more muted, nutrient-rich dish. “Accurate Witness” delivers what literary fiction is purported to provide. And to make sure we’re on the same dictionary page, Merriam-Webster defines “literary” as “writings having excellence of form […] and expressing ideas of permanent or universal interest.” While “Accurate Witness” is certainly a story for our times, it plays for the ages.
This story doesn’t offer a carnival barker opening that gets you in the tent. We start with Betsy, an eighty-year-old woman visiting her youngest son’s home to pick up her grandson for their monthly museum visit. It slow rolls from there, through nearly 20% of the telling, before we get to the spark of the story; Betsy’s son sharing the awful news of an assault (one that “sounded sexual in nature”) his wife experienced during a late-night subway ride.
That brought me back to the start of the story in search of a content warning, considering where things might go. There isn’t one, probably because this is a story about the long-term ramifications, not the immediate horrors, of sexual assault. But also because it’s about much, much more; our history, our memory of it, and, sometimes, our unwillingness to proclaim—or even see—the truth.
Freudenberger notes:
“When I wrote this story, I was thinking a lot about my mom’s generation and what #metoo looked like from their vantage point.”
I encourage you to check out the story before reading further here, even though I always make an effort to not be a “spoiler” in these appreciations. There are subtleties in this work that you’ll want to experience on your own.
I’ll wait while you have at it.
Welcome back. Quite a story, yes?
“Accurate Witness” is long as short stories go, but none of that length is wasted. Nell Freudenberger is a novelist, and it shows here. The characters and the settings are richly detailed and the time covered is wide—across the full span of our main character’s adulthood. All the particulars, whether physical, emotional, or psychological, are woven together in ways that make the themes of miscommunication, of blindness, of the fallibility of memory sing way past the boundaries of circumstance.
It culminates in a surprisingly nuanced conclusion.
There are so many things that work well in this story, but in the interest of not overstaying my welcome, I want to zoom in on one particular craft element.
The primary focus—the “A-line” story—of Betsy and the realizations she makes about her relationship with her boyfriend-and-then-husband, Victor, across a span of decades is judiciously and movingly handled. What struck me, though, is something we’re more used to seeing in novels, where writers have the space / length to pursue it; that is the use of subplots.
“B-lines”—the separate (sub)plotting of secondary characters’ stories—usually run in parallel to the A-line story in order to spark a consideration of the story’s theme(s) in a slightly different light to deepen the telling. Often that parallel B-line is a mirror image of the A-line. Consider the Boo Radley subplot in To Kill a Mockingbird, and how Scout and Jem’s (and our) misinterpretation of that character ran alongside the A-line of Atticus’ defense of his wrongly accused client, Tom Robinson.
The B-line in “Accurate Witness” is that of Betsy’s son Jamie and his wife, Nasrin. Freudenberger plants some subtle clues in the younger couple’s relationship that can leave readers wondering if they aren’t headed down a similar path to the one Betsy and Victor navigated.
Jamie is described as weak-chinned and “boyish,” even though he’s likely in his 40’s. Noting that he’d played the role of Peter Pan as part of his Junior High years locks him in our minds as an eternal child. He hasn’t risen to his ambitions as a filmmaker, and he seems to be overwhelmed in his role as a househusband. The minimally developed C-line of his older, more successful brother, who followed his father into the field of finance and lives a lavish life with his family in another state, sheds even more light on Jamie’s situation.
Jamie’s wife Nasrin, on the other hand, is a successful obstetrician and the breadwinner. She comes from a prominent Iranian family, is multi-lingual, and is also “lovely”, according to Betsy. She had “considered [Jamie] to be the lucky one when they married.” Nasrin has her life together in a way that Jamie doesn’t, making them an unlikely pair.
Further, when describing Jamie and Nasrin’s son, Cyrus, Betsy notes that “her grandson’s skin was as light as Jamie’s, but he had a mop of dark hair like his mother’s, and his eyes were almost black under thick, dark brows […] In their own children, Victor’s genes had been very much in evidence, but in Cyrus it was as if her husband had been erased.”
What do these framing choices accomplish for the larger story? I would argue (my subjective take only) that a case could be made that there’s an undisclosed secret between Jamie and Nasrin that might indicate that Cyrus is not Jamie’s child.
I stress could, might…just that possibility, floating through the whole of the story, shaded my processing of what turn out to be very suspect “facts” in Betsy and Victor’s courtship. Having the idea of a dark family secret in the mix via Jamie and Nasrin made being confronted with a very real one in Betsy’s story more impactful.
Then there’s this:
“[Betsy and Victor’s] wasn’t a story that was likely to inspire confidence in the institution of marriage though, or help Nasrin and Jamie. In fact, [Betsy] was afraid it would suggest to them the reverse: how hard it was to know another person, even if you lived in the same apartment, ate at the same table, slept in the same bed for years and years.”
The most prominent theme in the story surfaces at the halfway point when Betsy introduces her grandson to an ancient Egyptian museum exhibit she’s a docent for. She describes a woman depicted on a scroll holding “her eyes and mouth in her hands.” The god Osiris restores the woman’s sight, Betsy tells him, saying “Give her her eyes and her mouth, since her heart is an accurate witness.”
Betsy’s history seems to argue against that accuracy. Nell Freudenberger calls on us to check on our own hearts in the face of the “facts” she presents. Facts which are often very subjective.
Maybe David Byrne is the authority to turn to here, when he sings “facts all come with points of view, facts don’t do what I want them to.”
Founded in 1892 by the teacher and critic William Peterfield Trent, The Sewanee Review is America’s oldest continuously published literary quarterly. Many of the twentieth century’s great writers have appeared in the magazine. SR also has a long tradition of cultivating emerging talent.
In 2017 the novelist Adam Ross was named Editor and under his tenure the magazine was redesigned for the first time in seventy-three years.
Check out Lit Pub News’ great interview with Ross and Managing Editor Eric Smith from last year, which included this info about their taste in submissions:
“So, what do these editors look for specifically? Adam named three criteria for selecting pieces: “stickiness,” “authority,” and “does it bring news?” Stickiness refers to the question of whether the story stays with the reader, as well as whether it has “integrity,” if it holds together. Authority addresses the question, “Does the writer have total command of the world she’s writing about?” And the question of whether the work brings news asks whether the piece offers something fresh, “newly mints the experience.”
Info on their 2026 Fiction Contest guidelines are available now on their Submittable page, and they’re taking entries through the end of July. General submissions for the magazine will reopen in January of 2027.
Check out more of Nell Freudenberger’s work, including her novels, at her website.
Many thanks to Nell Freudenberger and The Sewanee Review for the thought-provoking and very moving “Accurate Witness.”
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