This Week in Fiction: Tessa Hadley on Fiction as Anthropology

Your story in this week’s issue, “Dido’s Lament,” involves a chance encounter between two people who were once married but haven’t seen each other in years. As always, you’re so good at capturing character through small cultural signifiers—the fact that Lynette wears a bright-pink coat from a second-hand shop and is embarrassed by a department-store shopping bag, for instance. How much do you think can be conveyed through this kind of detail?