But I met her by way of an early read of her second novel, On Sal Mal Lane, which debuted May 14. The novel begins in Sri Lanka — Freeman’s birthplace — in 1979 and chronicles the years leading up to the country’s two-decade civil war.

I came to the novel knowing, vaguely, where Sri Lanka was on a map. I also knew something about a civil war. But beyond that, my experience of the country, its culture and people, was limited.

That didn’t matter.

A mere page and a half in, I was swept onto the verandas of Sal Mal Lane’s homes, caught up in the games of French cricket children played and hearing the tinkling of a piano drift through an open window. I was, also, all-too aware of the mounting political tension surrounding this small dirt lane and its inhabitants.

I finished the novel — and not without a few pauses to collect myself — with a deeper respect for the human spirit, despite what politics, violence, and loss can do to it.

Here’s my conversation with Freeman on writing On Sal Mal Lane and also what it means to be a writer and activist.

The Millions: Publisher’s Weekly calls you a “social justice activist and freelance journalist.” What does it mean to you to be an activist, journalist and novelist? How do those worlds intersect (or remain distinct)?

Ru Freeman: Everything I write is immersed in everything I live, so in that sense there is no separation. However they remain distinct to the extent that the political journalism that I do is intended to further a cause or agenda that I espouse, whereas the fiction is an effort to create a safe bridge between what I think and what other people might think — a bridge both they and I can cross without fear.

As far as the activism — to live is, for me, to be engaged with the world around me. While I go away to write, tuning out everything, the inspiration for all that I do comes from that world and I am deeply, insanely, completely open to that world. I let it into my head and my heart in every way I can; it stands to reason then that I cannot help but want to assist that world along in whatever way I can, to nudge people this way or that, whether it is through writing or marching or simply having a conversation.

TM: On Sal Mal Lane was initially conceived as a magazine assignment. Though that didn’t ultimately work out, how did you begin to think about the novel as a result?

RF: The novel is much better and it accomplishes what that article never could have done: it brings people, characters into the light and it asks people to live with them for a while, to feel as they might have felt, to walk down that street with them, to be shattered and repaired the way they were. The magazine assignment would have been just another piece people read and forgot, too linear and simplified to ever convey the complexity of a time and place, or to allow a reader to look around them, wherever they are, and see that it is possible to end a war, that there is hope, that reconciliation and peace are possible and within grasp.

TM: You were born in Colombo and experienced the early years of the civil war. Was writing about your childhood memories/experiences of it always something you wanted to do?

RF: Everything a person lives is part of what shows up in writing. Whether it is written about directly, as I have done in this book, or obliquely, as I did in the previous novel, A Disobedient Girl, (Atria/Simon & Schuster, 2009), there is a part of a writer’s history, their evolution, in everything they write. That isn’t to say it is autobiographical, but that it would be foolish to claim that the autobiographical facts are not a part of what we write. I didn’t set out to write this book or the previous novel or the new one I’m working on now; the stories are just the ones that rise to the surface and seem to resonate with where I am as I begin to write.

TM: What was the easiest part of the On Sal Mal Lane to write? The hardest?

RF: Devi was the easiest to write; she is the quintessential youngest child, adored, indulged, often to her own detriment, but mostly to her good in terms of the way those kids grow up very assured of their place in the world, as able to break rules as they are to trust that everybody loves them. All the others took more work, Sonna more than them all. He is my favorite, and it was hard not to give in to the temptation to wave the magic writerly wand and bless his life. It was hard not to allow him to be no more and no less than what he was.

TM: Tell us how you chose the point of view. Were there any other options you were considering early on, or ones you tried?

RF: I had the prologue, and then I went on to write the story, so there was some essential element of that voice in the book from the start. But, it was in re-working that prologue that it became stronger, the voice that I wanted for the whole book. I wanted to have some distance for myself, as the writer, from the events that I was describing, since I had lived through that time in Sri Lanka, but I also wanted the intimacy of being right there with all those characters. This voice, of the street, worked really well for that.

TM: How did you balance writing the story with the need for some historical/cultural context for readers who may be unaware of Sri Lanka and its history?

RF: I really do not like novels that give us the political-events fillers, that pause in order to point to this or that historical moment in its entirety. I always want what I write to reflect the consciousness of the characters. I feel that if I can tell the story of how a certain time affected fully-realized people, then the reader will go do their own research about the background. There is some detail in here, but it is organic to what is going on, to the interplay of relationships — between Mr. Herath and his children, between Mr. Niles and Nihil, between the children themselves — rather than as A Small Treatise On The History of Sri Lanka’s Ethnic Conflict.

TM: Wallace Stegner has said a writer is a (wo)man in search of an audience. Did you have a particular reader or audience in mind as you wrote On Sal Mal Lane?

RF: I have a responsibility as a Sri Lankan writer, to tell the stories of my country with a clear understanding that mine may be — for many people in the United States certainly — the only voice they hear with regard to those stories. I keep that in sight when I write. I have no wish to whitewash the mess of things, to portray my country as the jewel that it is to me, but rather to say here is a story from this place, here are the people who lived there, here is one tale about what happened to some of them. I also have Sri Lanka herself in mind, what is good for my country, what is good for her people. My words, written or spoken, are always in service to the greater good of the people of my country. To what they have lost, to what they may yet have again.

TM: Were there certain works you read while working on On Sal Mal Lane that helped you with character development, the overall story or, simply, moved you?

RF: There was a moment when I was thinking about this book that another writer suggested I read Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. I don’t know so much that I used any technique or related things from that book, but rather that there was an immersion in a moment in Biafran history that captured my imagination. I felt an “it can be done” sense when I finished reading it. The other books that I read were My Brother, by Jamaica Kincaid, and those on technique: Robert Boswell’s The Half-Known World, (Graywolf, 2008), and Charlie Baxter’s The Art of Subtext (Graywolf, 2007). If there was something I was grappling with, I’d turn to these texts and read through some relevant section, take notes, and, each night, think about if/how it might apply. The next morning, I’d go back to work.

TM: You’ve talked about how “the exercise of writing both fiction and opinion is reflective of a passionate attempt to contribute to our common human enterprise whether that is quiet, personal, public, political or all of these.” Why is this important to you?

RF: I write and my writing comes from being a human being, from inhabiting my very human, socially inter-connected, inter-dependent world. What else should I be engaged with? To eschew human experience — by turning into a recluse, by hiding from the world, keeping physical, emotional distance — but then to ask that world to read what I have written, hear what I have to say…this isn’t an equal exchange to me. If I lived that way then I fully expect you to consider my take on things to be entirely irrelevant.

I don’t like hierarchies, I don’t like the notion of the exalted thinker/writer who gazes from a distance. I don’t like people writing about worms without spending some time taking in the worm’s view of life.

How do you know what things look like to ordinary people if you don’t immerse yourself in that ordinariness? If you can’t acknowledge your own ordinariness? And if you aren’t putting yourself in service of furthering the well-being of such people, our people — whether it is through health care or a meaningful education or a living wage or access to the arts, or telling the stories of our experience? That is why it is important to me.

Ms. Silver was kind enough to answer my questions via email.

The Millions: With a novel like this, with three different characters and story lines, I am always curious how it was put together. Was this a case of what Madison Smartt Bell calls “modular design” where you fit these pieces together, mosaic-like, discovering, as you went along, how they fit, working not off of linear cause-and-effect, but something more thematic and intuitive? Or did you always know what order the stories would be told in, and did you write them in that order? How did the shape of this book emerge over time? What are the benefits and challenges of this kind of storytelling?

Marisa Silver: Structure is both an intuitive and an intellectual preoccupation for me, a tool of narrative propulsion as well as a fundamental aspect of the story itself. If I construct a piece of fiction correctly, the structure should, in a sense, tell the story. The three intersecting stories in Mary Coin, the story of Mary, the subject of the photograph, Vera Dare, the photographer, and Walker Dodge, the modern day historian, had to be interwoven in ways that not only created tension and movement, but that also reflected the overarching theme of the book, which has to do with how the historic moment changes over time, and how it is reinterpreted and repurposed to serve contemporary yearnings for the past. So, as I played around with the structure, I thought first about allowing the reader to settle into a story line so that he or she would feel invested in the character and in the drama. Then I thought about how to step away from that story at a moment when the reader would want to know what might happen next and yet not be disappointed to switch gears and points of view. And then I thought about how what comes before will impact the understanding of what comes next, even if what comes next takes place 50 years later or a 100 years before and focuses on a set of characters that might not be obviously related to those the reader has just read about. So it’s a question of collage — two things contain their independent meanings when viewed separately. Yet when they are juxtaposed, something new is created, new emotions are stirred, and, hopefully, something greater than its component parts is created. Structure in and of itself can be used to create suspense and a sense of urgency on the part of the reader. What is left out is as powerful as what is left in. The tantalizing sense of absence can draw a reader through a novel just as much as a pounding plot might.

Since the book is so much about history, it is also, necessarily, a book about time and the emotional ruptures created when time is broken up, when things are forgotten. A photograph captures a moment of time, but then time itself moves past that moment into the future. When we look at a photograph, we are looking at time stilled, at a moment that has died. And we are also looking at the space between things, between a moment past and the present moment we live in. And so a kind of emotional yearning is part of that experience, the deep desire for something that cannot be fully possessed. In the same way, a structure that moves around in time tells the story of that rupture and creates the experience of yearning that is also the subject of the text. My hope was the structural choices I made would be part of the experience of the novel’s central ideas.

TM: How much of this book is based in the real-life stories of Dorothea Lange and the woman she photographed? I am curious about the research that went into the book, and how that balanced with your imagined versions of these lives. The book wrestles with  notions of representation and exploitation in photographs, and Mary Coin and her family never benefit financially from the image Vera takes; it’s both Mary and not-Mary in that image. I wonder, did you struggle with similar questions of representation in creating these fictive depictions of real-life people? What do you owe a real-life person, when creating narrative?

MS: The issues surrounding appropriation and representation are central to the book itself and were, as you suggest, ideas I wrestled with as a writer. I began the process by doing a lot of research into the lives of Dorothea Lange and Florence Owens Thompson, the woman in the photograph. And, of course, I did more general research about the various time periods the book covers, wandering off into the eddies of subject matter that writing always leads me to explore. How was lumber cut and milled in the 1920s? What might a person’s hands look like if she pulled cotton eight hours a day? But I knew from the very beginning that my interest in taking on this subject was not about faithful recreation of the lives of the women who inspired the book. Rather, I was interested in the very idea of appropriation and how my own handling of the material would address that subject. I recognized early on that in fictionalizing this story, in layering onto the facts a kind of lyric inventiveness, I was doing exactly what any viewer of that photograph does: he brings his subjectivity to the viewing, along with the mores of the time he or she lives in, a social ethics and point of view that are formed by the now. In this way, the image viewed has as much to do with the actual documented moment as it does with reinterpretation and reinvention, the space fiction occupies.

What do I owe the real people upon whom I based my characters? I think I owed them the seriousness of my purpose, a deep consideration, and clarity, suggested within the work, about the fact that I was not endeavoring or presuming to write their lives, but that I was using their fascinating examples as inspiration for fiction. And I think I owed them affection, which I felt and continue to feel.

TM: All three of these story lines explore the pain, struggle, and rewards of parenting. Mary Coin has seven children to care for as a migrant farm worker and widow. The choices she makes in the book are heartbreaking — and are they even choices? For years, Vera Dare puts her family before her work, and then, when money is tight, she and her painter husband send their two young sons to live with a babysitter so that they can continue to work to support them. Later, she travels to photograph poor farmers and doesn’t see her sons for long stretches. Throughout, the making of photographs, and the life of a photo, are compared to parenting. In the modern-day storyline, Walker is a divorced father who struggles to see his two children for who they are, for who they’re striving to be. This novel succinctly depicts the sweet pain of parenting, which I really connected with. I was also struck by how money and the harsh reality of the economy dictates parental choices in the novel. Can you talk a little bit about these themes?

MS: The Lange photograph, “Migrant Mother,” is powerful for many reasons, not least of which is the fact that it evokes an image so embedded in our collective consciousness: Mary, the maternal ideal, holding infant Jesus while two angels look over her shoulders. I am fascinated by the tenacity of the ideal of the “good mother.” Despite the obvious ways in which a woman’s place in society has changed over the last half century, I think we still have a knee jerk notion that if a mother isn’t all-loving and all-caring, and if her decisions don’t always prioritize the child, then she is worthy of our judgment. When I started to engage with my characters as parents, and particularly Mary and Vera as mothers, I wanted to suspend judgment and simply look at the facts of their lives. Mary has seven kids. One could say that she is irresponsible having so many children when her situation is so dire. But it was less interesting to me to judge that choice than to think about why she makes that choice, and what her relationship is to her kids and to her idea of herself as a mother. In the same way, Vera sends her children to live away from her home so that she can work. The choice is a complicated one for her and I wanted to explore the ramifications for the character and for the story from her very subjective standpoint. All three parents in the story, Mary, Vera, and Walker, deal with the fact that, in various ways, they abandon their children. I think the idea of abandonment is central to the idea of parenting. Even if a parent doesn’t literally leave her child, there are other sorts of abandonments, ending with the final abandonment, which in most cases is the death of a parent. The idea of the missing, in both the sense of what is absent and what is longed for, is an underlying current that runs through the book.

TM: I want to describe the prose in this novel as “clean,” but that seems to barely capture what makes it so pleasing to read. The other word I want to use is “unsentimental.” There is something so spare and well-here-it-is about your depiction of the world, particularly when describing Mary Coin’s life of hardship. The moment when she tells Charles Dodge that she’s pregnant is a great example: “She could tell by his reaction that although he was curious about the particulars of her past, he would not be interested in her future.” The chapter ends there, like a knife in the gut. Can you talk about sentence-making and how it relates to the development of the story and your characters?

MS: Writing a good sentence is having to hit the bull’s-eye each and every time. A sentence has to serve so many purposes. It has to provide forward momentum. It has to tell us what we need to know. It has to suggest character. It has to stand at a correct distance from the characters in order to let the reader know the authorial attitude. It has to have within it a kind of kinetic energy that reflects the book’s or a character’s tone. Its construction has to illuminate the larger preoccupations of the book. It has to be disciplined and cannot be beautiful for the sake of beauty. The rhythmic interplay between sentences determines length and sound, smoothness versus percussiveness, which words end one sentence and which begin the next. I think it is my nature to subtract, to try to boil something down to its essentials so that only what needs to be said is said. I want to provide enough space around important words and ideas so that they have the impact I want them to have. I also think about a character’s behavior, or his actions, as being part and parcel of the sentence, and not simply because the sentence describes that action. In other words, what a character says and what he does have to be in dialogue with one another, hopefully a kind of itchy, incongruent dialogue. Then things get interesting.

Do I write spare, unsentimental prose? I always remind myself that what I am doing is reporting on what is happening in my imagination. The facts, ma’am. Just the facts.

TM: There’s a lot of rich material in the novel about photography and the power, posterity, and myths of an image. You were a screenwriter and a director before you published fiction. How does that background come into play with this book?

MS: When I was 20 years old, I made a film with the great documentary filmmaker, Richard Leacock, for PBS — it was my first real job. We made a film about a family of fundamental Christians who lived in Indiana. The people Ricky and I filmed agreed to take part, and we tried to be as true to them as we could, but I understood that both of these propositions — their agreement and our desire to film the “truth” — were fraught. I think it is very difficult for anyone to understand just how exposing it is to be the subject of a film or a photograph. And the minute a filmmaker or photographer puts a frame around reality, chooses a particular composition, and makes editing choices of what to show and what to leave out, the truth becomes a casualty. That experience made me think about what both my characters, Mary Coin and Vera Dare, might have felt as the subject and maker of the photograph in the novel. Ricky died during the time I was working on the book. I thought so much about the film we made together and about the impact he had on my creative life. We’d be filming a scene and suddenly, I’d look over, and Ricky’s camera would have strayed from the overt “subject” of the moment in order to film something seemingly inconsequential that was happening “over there.” And that thing, whatever it was — a cat dozing in the corner, or a kid stringing a lanyard — would become the shot that exploded the scene and gave it dimension and resonance. He taught me that it was as important to look at what was within the frame as it was to look outside it, that what I think is the point of a scene may not be the point at all. He taught me to look askance.

TM: Since this is The Millions, I must ask: What was the last great book you read?

MS: The last great book I read was The Flamethrowers by my friend Rachel Kushner. Oh, and The Scarlet Letter. I read it again. I was amazed by it again.

In her latest book, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal, Mary Roach finally explores all that happens after you take that bite — not as an entertaining sideshow, but as the focus of 17 entertaining and occasionally bizarre chapters. Megacolons, stimulated saliva, death by constipation, and of course the scientists who study this stuff with aplomb (and an occasional apology): it is, as it were, all in there.

I interviewed her while she was in Seattle for her book tour.

The Millions: Your past work has focused on bringing topics that are creepy or lurid or awe-inspiring back down to earth. This one’s primarily about overcoming disgust. Did you find it challenging to make digestion and excretion palatable for your audience?

Mary Roach: Well, I think digestion is another lurid, taboo subject — particularly from the navel down. But even what goes on in the mouth is an unthinkable, revolting thing that no one wants to think about. There was a sense that this was right up my stinky little alley.

TM: Packing for Mars came out the same year that NASA retired the Shuttles and the Opportunity rover broke records for the longest Mars mission. Stiff came out around the same time that shows about forensic science became the hot new thing…

MR: And Six Feet Under.

TM: Right. Was there something that made you decide: yes, 2013 is the time to publish a book about the digestive tract?

MR: You know, I think the whole obsession with food had hit an unprecedented level, in terms of people photographing every meal and posting it on Instagram. Food has moved so far away from just a way to stay alive and take in sustenance to a point where it’s now almost high culture. So it makes sense to look past the borders of the lips and take a peek at what goes on after the food leaves the plate.

On the tour, my publicist set up events with people like Chris Kimball and Ted Allen, which makes for a really interesting conversation. We tend to elevate food to a sensual, cultural place, but for someone like Chris Kimball, he’s looking at food as chemistry. And eating is biology.

TM: Two of the most memorable people in your book were William Beaumont, the physician who made a career out of his patient’s stomach fistula, and Andries van der Bilt, the chewing scientist at Utrecht who will probably be the last researcher of his kind at the university. In other words, in the book you go from the early days of science virtuosos to very specialized people doing narrow and admittedly gross stuff. Is that how the field of gastro-intestinal science looks right now?

MR: It’s really hard to get funding for pure science just for the sake of figuring out how things work. It’s a lot easier to get funded if you have a practical application for things. Also, a lot of it’s been figured out.

I’m not a scientist, so I’m going out on a limb here, but I do get the sense that the more you know, the more you realize you don’t know very much, and there isn’t an end point. So there’s always more to be done — there’s just not as much funding for it anymore. It’s more science in the service of the food industry.

But even in that world, there are characters like Erika Silletti, who are so awed and amazed by what they’re discovering. She has this infectious enthusiasm for…spit!

TM: You’re in the middle of your book tour now. What do you like to present at your events?

MR: I don’t do a lot of readings when I do talks. Some of them are billed as readings, but I wouldn’t call them that, really. I find that if you read to non-fiction to people for more than a paragraph, people will glaze over. So I’ll read footnotes.

Once of my favorite footnotes in Gulp is where I’m talking about per anum, which is through the anus, and per annum, which is yearly. And I did a Google search for instances where people meant per annum but wrote per anum, and that’s one of my favorites. How many childbirths occur per anum, that sort of thing.

TM: Do you find that people are more squeamish to ask you questions about the digestive tract than they were on your earlier book tours, when the topic was the afterlife or space?

MR: Oh no, no. Once you open the door for them, people want to know all kinds of things. Sometimes people want to know, “I have a mucoid plaque, can you tell me what to do,” and I have to say, “I don’t have an M.D., I can’t dispense medical advice — nor do I really want to.”

But people have great questions. The other day I was doing an author lunch at Google; people had a lot of questions about rectal smuggling.

TM: Early on in the book, you find out that your palate isn’t developed enough for you to be on a professional olive oil tasting panel. Any other potential avenues of research that never worked out?

MR: I wanted to go to Food Valley when someone was actually involved in an experiment, but I couldn’t seem to time it right. There were a couple subjects, but most were not particularly interesting. There’s someone there with a tube hooked in mouth, and it squirts in something that they’re tasting, and they make a note of it. It’s not particularly scintillating, and it didn’t make it into the book.

There’s a woman who studies pica (people who ingest non-food) and she studies in Zanzibar with women who eat a variety of clays. I wanted to do that, partly because I really wanted to go to Zanzibar — that really lies at the bottom of a lot of what I do, I really want to go there, what could I find there? — but it felt a little…off unto itself. When you go all the way to Zanzibar, you want to spend a lot of time on that subject, not just a few paragraphs.

TM: When you first started writing, I think one of your pieces was about the IRS. Then you moved on to the afterlife, cadavers, space travel. What sort of writers made you think, I want to write about things that are kind of out there, or that people might not think about all that often?

MR: The writer who I glommed on to and loved his style was Bill Bryson, when he wrote The Lost Continent. This was before A Walk in the Woods, before he started going huge. I remember reading his books, and I admired his ability to combine information and humor and character. It was inspirational. Every now and then I put a little homage to passages that really got in my head from writers like him, inside jokes to myself.

When I was writing Gulp, I had just read Patti Smith’s Just Kids, and when she did something outrageous or pathetic, Mapplethorpe would say to her, “Patti, no.” And when I was with Sue Langston, who’s a sensory analyst — the nose woman — and I asked her, “if you had to choose between a Budweiser and an IPA right now, what would you choose?” and she said, “I would take the Bud,” and I said, “Sue, no.” That was my little homage to Mapplethorpe and that book.

TM: In 2011 you edited the Best American Science and Nature Writing, so I’m hoping you might pontificate about science writing in general for a second. When you write your books, or when you evaluate science writing, what are you looking for — what should a good science piece accomplish?

MR: I don’t know if the genre of “science writing” should really exist. We don’t classify “religion writing” or “political writing” as an entirely different register of writing. There’s such a wide range — material that simply explains, others that are strongly narrative. In The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, you learn a lot about cell culturing, but it’s still primarily a story.

For that collection in particular, I tried to do a mix. The Atul Gawande essay, I thought, was beautiful. For someone in that community to stand up — or I should say, sit down and write — about how far the discussion about end-of-life care needs to go in order to really help people. And then the Oliver Sacks piece about prosopagnosia, he’s just a wonderful thinker/writer, he’s more reporting rather than recommending.

For me, there are a lot of valid ways to write about science, and when I was judging that book it was really just what pulled me in and kept my interest and taught me something. There are so many ways to do that.

Elizabeth Winder’s new biography, Pain, Parties, Work, documents this crucial time, drawing from new research and bringing a fresh, almost sunny perspective to a subject whose life is usually painted in shades of gray. The Plath we meet in Winder’s book is a frivolous, fashion-forward girl; a girl addicted to tanning and Revlon’s new Fire & Ice lipstick; a girl for whom “a shopping list was a poem.” To uncover this new version of Plath, Winder interviewed her contemporaries, the 19 other “Millies” who lived and worked with Plath. To these women, Plath was just another girl trying to make it in Manhattan, not a tortured, soul-bearing artist. “I could never have imagined the life she had ahead of her,” one Millie told Winder. “She seemed just like me.”

I spoke to Winder by phone a few weeks before her book’s release. We talked about getting to know the Millies, eating 1950s diner food, the joys of researching perfume, and the virtues of composing sentences on index cards.

The Millions: What inspired you to write this book?

Elizabeth Winder: I’ve read everything that Sylvia Plath has written and everything’s that’s been written about her. And I was always surprised that this time in her life is skimmed over, even as it’s always mentioned as the month that leads to that breakdown. And also, the whole Sylvia Plath life story has been approached in a reductionist way. I wanted to do something different. Because when I read her journals I see someone who’s so lively, so hungry for life, and really engaged in the world in a relatable way.

TM: How do you think she’s been unfairly portrayed?

EW: Depressed, pathological, humorless. Neurotic — well, she probably was neurotic. Competitive. Delusional — ambitious in a delusional way. And then later on, as sort of like a nagging wife. And then on another level, I think that she’s also diminished because of the way she looks. It’s not like she was some great beauty, but she fit in with the cultural standards of the time. Somehow, we always have a problem with a woman who’s a writer who also wears make-up and likes lipstick. That’s always been included as part of her pathology. People pathologize everything with Plath and that’s always rubbed me the wrong way.

TM: Tell me about the Millies. Did you know, from the get-go, that you would get in touch with them?

EW: No, I didn’t. I wrote the proposal and then I got the book deal and it overwhelmed me. When I sat down to do the research for the book I thought, oh my god, what am I going to do? Sylvia didn’t even write about this month in her journals! And I just started googling the names of the women — because they had been listed in biographies — and I wrote them letters.

TM: What was their reaction when you told them about your project? Did anyone refuse to meet with you?

EW: They were really interested for the most part. Excited, curious. They had so much fun going back to the past and reliving that stuff. Most of them I talked with on the phone or corresponded by letter. I was really careful. For me, the absolute most important part was being respectful and courteous with those interviews.

TM: What was most surprising thing about talking with them?

EW: I know the thing that I liked the most…they were just so smart and so funny. Some of them talk like writers, like really good writers. Well, some of them are. The way they remembered the month and all of the wonderful details, like the clothes that they wore. And what they were eating and the way the carpet felt and the little scenes that happened in the office. It made me feel like I was there and it just brought everything to life. In the process of writing it, I just sort of left the world. I felt like I was living in some Technicolor dream of the 1950s. And it was because of them and their generosity that I was able to completely enter that world.

TM: Did you have any other source materials? Did you get old magazines or watch movies from the period?

EW: I got a copy of the original magazine that they worked on. Neva, one of the Millies I interviewed, sent me one of her copies. I also went on Ebay and bought some other old magazines from the period. I got a Mademoiselle from 1952. And I went to some archives and looked at the magazines I couldn’t buy. I love fashion history, it’s always been an interest of mine. I learned a lot from looking at the advertisements, and I got a book on the history of make-up. Immersing myself in that period was so interesting. I got samples of some of the old perfumes. Sylvia wore Tigress. I tried on Youth Dew, too, which I think is kind of repulsive. I even started eating 1950s diner food. Like the salad with all the mayonnaise and frozen peas and things like that. Maraschino cherries. I was sort of method acting, I guess.

TM: As you reconstructed that month, were there gaps in the narrative that you were unable to fill?

EW: There were gaps, there were tons of gaps. But I’m kind of detail-oriented — at least in this way — and I considered it a gap if I didn’t know the exact shade of the carpet. I mean, I spent days figuring out what perfume Sylvia wore. I wanted to know what she was wearing every single day, I wanted to know what everyone else was wearing. I kind of kept researching until there was nothing left.

TM: This book is full of sidebars, describing different products from the time period, or interesting tidbits from Sylvia’s life and journals. Why did you choose to structure it that way? To make it more like a magazine?

EW: I didn’t, but I hope it kind of looks that way. I did that because I’m not too fond of just straight narrative. I like little asides. And because I wanted to get into all the details of the culture that she was so steeped in, because Sylvia Plath was so much of her time. She wasn’t backwards, she wasn’t pushing forward, she was just right in it. How do you fit the details of Halo shampoo, how do you fit it in? You have to reduce it and squash it, and I wanted all those products, all those glittery details.

TM: What you just said about Sylvia being so much of her time strikes me as true, but yet people think of her as a contemporary. Why do you think that is?

EW: First, because her poetry is so contemporary. You read it and it kind of exists outside of time. Somehow it’s so fresh to the point of being scary. Anytime I read her poetry, I feel it’s happening right now. So that’s one reason. The other reason is that she died when she was so young. And when your image is of someone being thirty years old, I think you can be inclined to think that they still exist in some way. She died when she was younger than I am right now. So I guess you kind of think, she’s still thirty, she’s still here. If she were alive now, she’d be eighty years old.

TM: Did your reading of The Bell Jar change after researching this time in Plath’s life?

EW: I think it made The Bell Jar more real for me and this kind of goes back to my experience interviewing all those really great women…when you ask two different people about something you get two different stories. More importantly, if you ask the same person on two different days, you get a different story. I guess what I mean is — and this has to do with being 32 versus being 15 and reading The Bell Jar — what talking with those women brought to light was how a really intense experience can be so thrilling and just so heartbreaking at the same time. It was so important to Sylvia to make the most of her life in that classic sort of post-World War II way, if you know what I mean. To make every moment shine.

TM: You write in Pain, Parties, Work that some of the Millies felt betrayed by The Bell Jar. Did you think Plath betrayed them?

EW: No, I don’t think so. Because…well, because it’s fiction. And because she changed their names. And also, when I read The Bell Jar, the character that I completely fell in love with wasn’t the narrator; it was Doreen, who was Sylvia’s best friend. She’s so glamorous and cool and she knows exactly how much to tip the bellhop. So I feel like the portraits that she did of the women were kind of flattering. If anyone would feel betrayed it would be Aurelia Plath, Sylvia’s mother. But Doreen is still the best thing about the book for me. She’s so glamorous in the coolest way possible.

TM: You’re a poet. What is your relationship to Plath’s work?

EW: She’s one of the first poets I started reading seriously as a young teenager. That really sharp and fresh way she uses language is so deeply personal and so vivid. And every time I read her poems I feel like I’m in some crazy movie. That’s exactly how I want to feel when I read anything. She’s been a huge influence on how I perceive language. She lived and breathed words. She didn’t treat them delicately or with some kind of academic reverence. She just dove right in, like they were a bathtub or food. That’s the first thing I noticed about her writing.

TM: I think your book portrays that, actually. The way you describe her world and her love of fashion, of food, of the feeling of fabrics or the smell of certain perfumes. I can see how that translates into her work.

EW: That’s the most important thing to me. It’s that deep, deep love of beauty. And that ability to spot it and to play with it.

TM: This is your first piece of nonfiction. How was writing it different from writing poetry?

EW: Before I wrote this book I barely wrote complete sentences. When I was an undergrad, I was the worst English major in the world. I loved reading the books but I just couldn’t write about them. And I’m sure I could never write fiction. I had zero experience with prose. The part that was excruciatingly hard was piecing it together in a way that makes logical sense. The way I wrote it was the way I write poems, which was writing words, and then writing words around them into phrases, and then writing sentences. But I don’t write any of these things in any kind of order. So then I just had like, a hundred typed pages that I had to arrange. And then at some point I was just in a room with a bunch of index cards…because that’s the only way I know how to write. So it was a piecing together.

TM: There is so much written on Plath; were you at all intimidated by the amount of previous scholarship?

EW: No. Maybe I should have been. But maybe I wasn’t because I knew from the very beginning that I wanted to do something so different. I wanted to write a book that was very intensely feminine. I think that there’s this impulse in society to kind of neutralize women who write and take away their femininity as if that detracts from them in some way. And I don’t like that.

TM: Why do you think it matters what Plath looked like?

EW: If you want to read a book about someone’s life, you want to know how they experience the world. And the physical world is a huge part of that, for so many different reasons. Especially for women, the way that we look hugely determines certain aspects of how we move through the world. My personality would probably be completely different if I were five inches taller. Or if I had different color hair. I actually think that’s true. I get mad at books that don’t give me more physical details. Because if I’m interested in a subject, I want to know the color of the wall, exactly what they’re wearing, what they had for lunch, I want to know all that stuff. And physical appearance fits into that. You can’t bring someone to life without describing how they look. You’d just be dealing with Slyvia Plath the name, not Sylvia Plath the human.

This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

My assumption was that Rideout had found something new in the love letters between Mallory and his wife. I wanted to interview her to learn about her findings. What did she uncover in those letters that made her account seem credible?

As I interviewed Rideout, first by email and then in person, I came to realize I had it all wrong. As an author, with two collections of poetry, Delineation and the forthcoming Arguments with the Lake and a role as Poet Laureate for Lake Ontario, she puts the story first. In Above All Things, the historical figure of Mallory leaves the realm of fact and becomes hers. That’s why he feels so true.

The Millions: What do you write about?

Tanis Rideout: My three books fit well together, though I didn’t realize that when I was working on them. I look at them now and think, “here are my issues I’m working out.”

I’m particularly interested in obsession. Prior to Above All Things I wrote a collection of poems, Delineation, about comic book superheroes and the women that love them. What ran through that was certainly obsession – romantic obsession, obsession for revenge, for justice. There’s a line in it that: I have become obsessed with obsession. That describes me.

George Mallory and Everest, in my novel, are a good repository for this “obsession with obsession.” So are two main characters in my next book of poetry, Arguments with the Lake. It is the imagined relationship between Marilyn Bell, who was the first person to swim across Lake Ontario in 1954 and became a hero, and Shirley Campbell, who failed to do the same and her life spiraled out of control. They had such different outcomes from the same attempt.

TM: This is another theme in your writing, differences in perception or point of view?

TR: Yes, I got interested in this when I worked for an organization called Literature for Life where I led reading circles in shelters and youth homes. We would read a book together and discuss it. I’d ask things like, “what would you do in those circumstances?” Why did a character make this choice? The idea is to engage with literature to help develop empathy. If you had a fight with someone, how did they see it from their side? It was like narrative therapy in that way.

TM: You mean the idea that life is a story you tell yourself?

TR: Exactly. Are you a victim in your story or how do you position yourself? I have a story of my life that I tell myself in which I don’t win things. I’ve never won a raffle or a draw. One time I had a friend buy me a ticket and then I won. And that’s my narrative.

I’m sure that it’s not true. I probably have won things, but I’ve just decided to ignore those instances. That’s the story that I tell, that I don’t win. It’s a small example, but we can do that on a much grander scale. I like to think that we can go back and revise the story. We can find the parts that don’t support a narrative and rebuild a story. It can be the start of a new outlook on life.

TM: Is that why you write?

TR: That is something I am interested in. There is a story in the novel about George and Ruth’s first meeting, which is based on my first meeting with my now husband. He swears that I was wearing a red dress. I swear that I didn’t own a red dress. One of us is clearly wrong.

Ultimately it doesn’t matter for us, but things like that split an experience. It interests me and is why I write. Is there a truth and does it matter? Or is it just about story? I tend to err on that side. It’s just about story.

TM: Is that the first responsibility of a fiction writer, story?

TR: Absolutely. Other people would argue that you could write good fiction and stay within the facts. Maybe it takes a better writer than me to do that? Hilary Mantel recently said, “I will make up the thoughts of a man’s heart, but I will not make up the color of his wallpaper” Her idea with the Cromwell books, Wolf Hall and Bringing Up the Bodies, is that she stuck to what is known.

I think that is hugely admirable, but as a fiction writer that isn’t of interest to me. I always assume everything that I read is fiction, even if it’s in the non-fiction section. The very notion of putting something on paper means that you are creating a narrative.

TM: Do the true facts behind a story change an experience for a reader?

TR: Is reading something “true” more emotionally valid? I don’t see why.

Either the story moved you or it didn’t. You went with the author or not. Learning if the facts of a story are true or not after the fact doesn’t need to make a difference to how you were moved.

TM: So you changed Mallory’s wallpaper?

TR: I changed Mallory’s wallpaper and then some. I renovated his house.

TM:  That is brave?

TR: I could have changed the names and had cart blanche.

TM: Why didn’t you?

TR: It didn’t occur to me to be honest.

TM: Maybe we live in a time where we believe less in the rational mind? Even economists have given up pretending that people make rational decisions. Perhaps collecting facts doesn’t necessarily get us to the truth?

TR: My version of Mallory is not the historical figure. I disregarded things that other people might think are important. That was in service of telling a good story.

I wanted to tell a story about a woman, a man, and a mountain and the tug of obsession. The facts of what happened are beside the point.

TM: But you did use the real love letters written between George and Ruth Mallory to write the story?

TR: I used them less to write the story than to color the story. The letters gave me language, gave me small incidents and events, gave texture to the world, the space, the time, in a way that is harder to gather from secondary sources – it’s a turn of phrase, it’s even the physical shape and size of letters – how someone has crammed in writing on every last space, or used an extra page for only a line or two.

They are less the big picture defining of the world – I already had the shape of that, the shape of the story – and more a way to shade the story in, to make it whole.

TM: So reading the letters helped you breathe life into the characters?

TR: In a weird way, reading the letters was a fantastic experience, and really did allow me to let go of the “facts” far more than just reading books, watching movies, etc. had. Suddenly I was able to imagine these characters more fully and as characters, as opposed to the characters that had already been built by previous researchers. They became a tremendous jumping off point to imagine beyond the letters. What wasn’t in them, etc. It really was a letting go – because there was so much color in the letters, etc.

TM: Did using the letters give you a responsibility to the people who wrote them?

TR: I’m a fiction writer, first and foremost – what matters to me most is story. I didn’t set out to write something historically accurate – those things exist, the world doesn’t/didn’t need it from me.

These are real people, real lives that I decided to fictionalize. I don’t think, personally, that fiction writers have a responsibility – which isn’t to say that sometimes there isn’t some discomfort around that – but I think I certainly fall on the Wayne Johnston side of the spectrum – in that he doesn’t believe there’s any obligation to the “factual” truth.

TM: Mallory’s death is a mystery. Did the letters help you find any truth about what happened?

TR: The “truth” of it largely comes out of my own experiences – the way I am in the world. I think they help lend veracity – I’m not sure that’s the same. Details can often cover lies.

TM: So do you write about yourself or other people?

TR: It’s absolutely about you as the writer. There’s no way to get around that. When I first started thinking about writing this novel, my life was so vastly different than now. I could chart my life in the different drafts of the book. This is what I was working through in this section, so therefore there is too much of whatever.

The relationship between George and Ruth changed so much because I went through a terrible break up and I finished the first draft the summer that my husband and I started seeing each other. I moved into a positive, good relationship and that shaped the novel.

TM: Then what can a love letter tell you about a person?

TR: Any letter – love letters or otherwise – betray so much I think. So much of it is in the language, or even in how the paper is used – is it cramped and tight fitting in as much as possible – empty and blank? What kind of language is used, do the same addresses occur to multiple people? It’s reading so much more into it than just the simple words. I think it opens up a lot about people, opens up a window into desires and hopes and disappointments.

TM: Did reading the letters make you feel like a snoop?

TR: At first – yes. It’s a very strange thing to sit there and read someone else’s letters – but as a writer, I think we’re snoops anyway – we eavesdrop and steal and borrow – I got over it pretty quickly.

TM: Will letters always play a significant role in your work?

TR: Letters are such an interesting window in to characters – or people, depending how you want to think of them. I prefer to think of them as characters.

I’m already planning a research trip to get access to some archives for work I am beginning, to just be able to “hear” more of the characters own languages.

Letters are a throwback – but receiving something written, in the mail – always such a lovely thing.

TM: So are you now more self-conscious when writing letters or emails?

TR: Ha, it is true! I had a friend years ago swear that if I died tragically she’d burn my old journals. Something I still think of doing. It’s strange in the days of emails – we certainly don’t hold on to our everyday correspondence in the same way. But yes – I would worry about someone reading my personal secret thoughts and sharing with the world. I know that’s hugely hypocritical, but it is true.

Orange is a journalist and film critic whose writing has appeared in a variety of publications including McSweeney’s, The Nation, The Village Voice, and The New York Times. I met with her at a Brooklyn coffee shop where we talked for the better part of an hour about movies, deadlines, discipline, Facebook, and of course, her new book. The below interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

The Millions: Tell me a little about your career and how you came to write This Is Running For Your Life.

Michelle Orange: I turned to writing full time seriously after moving here [New York City] in 2003. I’d been writing before that since I’d graduated and getting paid intermittently. I’d been doing stuff for McSweeney’s when they were just sort of setting up their website, and that intrigued me and was rewarding to me. When I decided to move here to go to graduate school to study film, I kept up as much writing as I could. And then after I graduated I really tried to make a go of being a freelancer. Because of a couple connections I made at school, that meant I was writing a lot about film — but always keeping in mind that I had these other ambitions.

I don’t think I had a full sense of my ambitions until quite recently, actually. I spent a few years really just trying to make a living. And I felt time passing in a way that was really sort of alarming. I graduated in 2005 and around 2008, 2009, it just seemed like I could keep…spending all of my time writing about film. And that wasn’t something I had ever decided to do…so the book really was an effort to pivot and really concentrate for a while on what it is I like to write about and how I like to write about it.

TM: Some of these essays were published in different forms before they made it into the book, right?

MO: Two of them started out as essays for The Rumpus, around late 2009. Steve Elliot was starting up the site and he was asking some of his friends for ideas and help and I’d been in the recession for about a year at that point, so I had a lot of time on my hands…Steve said, “Do whatever you want” so suddenly I got my brain back in do-whatever-I-want mode. So, two of them started out as Rumpus essays and then one was in the The Rumpus book they put out, Rumpus Women, and one of them was in the VQR — so, four were published.

TM: And when you were structuring the book, were you structuring it around those essays that you’d already written?

MO: I had a bunch of ideas. Steve wanted me to do a column for The Rumpus, so the third one, which appeared in Rumpus Women [“Have a Beautiful Corpse”], actually started out as an idea for the web column, but it just kept growing and wound up becoming too big for a website. But I had a lot of other ambitions and ideas in that vein and my sense was that they were connected. I wasn’t sure exactly how but that’s what I wanted to explore. I wanted to cut myself out some time and figure it out. The structure, interestingly — in terms of just the order of the essays — came very late in the game, and even two of the ideas, two of the essays, were swapped in after I had a contract to write it. When I realized that they were really going to let me do whatever I wanted to do, I was like, “Well, shit, let me rethink this…”

TM: When did you realize that you had free rein?

MO: Well, I mean it’s so weird trying to put a book together like that as a proposal… But once I met the FSG people — and they were really the only ones who not only liked it as it was, but were also interested in whatever I was interested in — I just had the sense that it would be okay if I did it. So I booked the flights to Hawaii and to San Diego and I thought, I just really want to try this. After I’d made the trips I sort of said to them, “So…I have these other ideas.” And they said, “That sounds good — yeah, do that.” So, it feels like a unique experience.

TM: Well, those essays in particular were very strange — in a good way. When I reading them, I thought, “I don’t know who would publish these.” Especially the one in Hawaii, [War and Well-Being, 21° 19’N., 157° 52’W] because it wasn’t like you were taking a stance for or against the new DSMV and it was more interesting because of that.

MO: That’s the thing, that’s how I tend to think about things. I don’t have a lot of magazine writing experience, I guess is the thing, so I don’t really know any other way other than the story that kind of works for me. So yeah, they’re weird. They’re definitely weird.

TM: In a couple essays you write about your ambivalence about writing for a living. Is it just that you get caught up in meeting deadlines and you don’t have time to stretch out and do something weird? Or is it more complicated than that?

MO: No, I think that’s really just it. It’s kind of an obnoxious thing to be ambivalent about, I guess. But it’s what I mentioned before, my sense of just not having decided that this was what I was going to do…especially writing about movies, movies were something that I had a very natural love for, but I’d never had an ambition to be a critic or to write about them on a week-in, week-out basis. So, yeah, it was just a feeling of coming to a moment in my life — I needed to just make a decision. To not just be carried along by the tides. That was probably the bigger part of my ambivalence. But there’s also just feeling burnt out. You know, when you’re hitting deadlines three or four or five times a week… I don’t feel like I’m that kind of writer. I’m not good at that. I didn’t feel like I was doing the best work I could be doing.

TM: While we’re on the subject of movies, I really liked your essay “The Dream (Girl) Is Over” which traces the cinematic feminine ideal from Marilyn Monroe to the “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” as embodied, most recently, in Zooey Deschanel. After reading it, I have to know what you think about Jennifer Lawrence in Silver Linings Playbook. Does she function as an MPDG in that movie?

MO: You know, when I saw the trailer, I was really nervous. The thing about her, though, is that she’s a star. So, I think the specs of the character, you could easily put her into that archetype, but I feel like as an actress she has so much of her own charisma. And the movie was such that it transcended it somehow. I don’t think she fits exactly.

TM: How did that essay come about?

MO: That’s the one essay in the book that was not my idea. It actually came out of a conversation with my agent, who is also my friend. We were at a bar one night or something and I went off on a rant about this phenomenon and she said, “Oh you should write about that.” At the time I was still working on the proposal. And I said, “Really, I don’t know that I have much more to add. I think my two-beer rant was pretty much it.” I was actually pretty reluctant to do it. I thought, “Well, once I get it in there, I can get rid of it.” But then, they were excited about it, too. So suddenly I had to write this thing. And ultimately it was sort of a matter of finding a story and then persuading myself of it. And it wound up being — although I really did not enjoy the writing of it —it wound up being rewarding in that sense, because I did actually persuade myself of it.

TM: Your essays are a mix of memoir and criticism, which a lot of young writers are publishing right now. How did you come to that format? Do you notice that as something that’s happening right now?

MO: I guess I have noticed it, a bit more. But, it felt like a more honest way, for me, to make sense of things, to think about things, was to think about how I experience the world and things I’m exposed to, and the way that they manifest in my life. And I felt like I couldn’t be alone in that. I felt that other people might have those same feelings. It just felt like a natural way to think about the culture that I live in.

TM: You write a lot about time and the way technology changes our relationship to time. I’m assuming you didn’t grow up with the internet or digital photography. Do you think not having that as a kid makes you a better judge of technology now, or do you think it makes you a worse judge?

MO: Probably both. You mean a judge of the impact?

TM: Yeah, I mean can you be more objective about it since you didn’t have it at one point?

MO: When you think about my parents, it was the same with television, and the generation before that, it was the same with the movies. It’s just a question of quantity, I think. But I don’t feel like the internet and television can even be compared because the scale has just expanded a million times over…I feel like it is a very interesting position to be in — having that sort of before and after feeling. And I think it may give you a better feeling of what the impact has been. I think that would have to be self-evident, whereas someone who grew up with it literally doesn’t know anything else. But, they also don’t have the same qualms or reservations, which is sort of a necessity…although I do get the sense with younger people and even with teenagers that they do feel some alarm. It can be overwhelming to most people. Do you feel like you have a better sense?

TM: Well, I notice that people just five years younger than me do not have the same hang-ups that I do.

MO: That is really weird. I recently heard someone refer to someone literally five years younger than him as from a different generation. It’s like, can we at least just agree on what a generation is? I’m imagining it’s like 20 years, but suddenly there are these crazy little micro distinctions. And they’re real…I will be really interested as the next generation of young people moves into their thirties and gets a little older — how their relationship to technology changes. I have a friend who has this theory that the internet culture will wend all the way to one extreme and then there will be a correction like, en masse, and we’ll become a little wiser…a little more judicious about the place in our lives almost naturally. I don’t know if I believe that. But it has been my experience, at least with something like e-mail. When I was in university, that’s when e-mail came out. Everyone just gorged on it. We would just e-mail all day. For years. Writing books. Writing these epics poems to each other. And for me, it really did just reach a point where I was like, I can’t do it anymore… Maybe in order to get a sense of where the balance is you have to take a measure of the other extreme.

TM: What is your balance? Do you only answer e-mails certain times of day?

MO: I wish I had more of it, honestly. My schedule is to get up, try to answer e-mails in the morning, go for a run, make lunch and then start working for the afternoon. I have to get better about just turning the internet off. I did it with the book, I did it religiously because it was the only way to get things done. But it’s so easy to just slide back. I have a smart phone. I don’t like the fact that I have it. But it was sort of given to me as a gift and then I didn’t give it back, so I can’t really pretend that I have no interest. I went and got the plan. But I’m not on Facebook. I don’t engage in long drawn out e-mail correspondences anymore. That might sound a little stupid, but it was a really big part of my life. And I feel like with writers especially, that was not uncommon. It became a real thing for a while there. So I really avoid that…the way it can suck up time is alarming. It really is a lesson in discipline. I’m so undisciplined when it comes to the internet. It’s terrible.

TM: That kind of brings me to your last essay “Ways of Escape,” which is about discipline — well, it’s about a lot of things, but it’s partially about running and discipline. To me it read like a coming of age story and I wondered if you thought about fictionalizing it. You wrote at the beginning of the essay that you had struggled a long time with this time in your life — how to think about it, how to write about it.

MO: Yeah, I hadn’t thought specifically about fictionalizing it because I really avoided thinking about it at all. I really did. And so, I guess with this book I felt like it would be an opportunity to try to figure out that period of my life. And give myself a story at least, that I could hang onto. But I actually was quite reluctant to do that. That seems to be a pattern for me. It’s like, why did I propose writing about it? But I did. But when it came to actually writing it, it turned out much, much different.

TM: What was your proposal for it? How did you describe it? As an essay about being obsessed with running?

MO: Yeah. It was about four paragraphs. It would be interesting to look at it again because it didn’t have anything to do with the person I ended up writing about and only a little bit to do with going to the movies obsessively and alone and nothing to do with my relationship to my faith or anything like that. It was sort of like a big gulp moment when I realized that if I was going to write about that time, then I had to write about all those things because those were the things that started coming out when I was thinking about it and writing about it.

TM: Did you write that essay last? Is that why it comes last?

MO: I think I did write it last because I didn’t want to write it. And then, in terms of the order, I obviously had a better sense of what the book would be and particularly with the first essay, I thought they made an interesting frame — dealing with time and my changing relationship to it. And struggling with it to a certain extent. So I thought it would be a good final one. And also because it’s the most personal one, for me. It just seemed like an intuitive place for it.

TM: To me the first essay is about an older person talking about how quickly time goes by and then the last essay is about a younger person with so much time on her hands she doesn’t know what to do with herself.

MO: Exactly. It’s like, how did that happen? At least there’s a book in between. But yeah, that’s how it feels, right? It’s not a new feeling and yet no one seems to anticipate it happening to them.

The Millions: Schroder is receiving positive reviews and even being described as your breakout book. Does that have any meaning for you as a writer? Was the experience of writing and publishing Schroder any different for you than it was for O My Darling or The Folded World?

Amity Gaige: Breaking out sounds wonderful. If it means that lots of people read Schroder, then I will be happy to call it my breakout book. My other books were written with the same goal as Schroder — to write as well as possible about deeply felt themes. But maybe it’s significant that I wrote Schroder very quickly — it felt “channeled.” If you want to talk about the publishing side, that’s been a very different experience, too. I have an editor and publicist at Twelve who’ve been focused like assassins on each stage and challenge of bringing out a book. They responded to the book with gut responses, they hand-delivered it to people, they approached everything creatively and passionately. As for reviews, critical reaction is and always will be something I value highly as a writer — somebody serious and intelligent talking back to me after a long writerly confinement, if you will. But I also value hearing from readers, booksellers, librarians, total strangers. I’ve gotten some interesting emails asking for help with parenting or custody arrangements. I don’t mind. I get energy from the feedback.

TM: Along the same lines, how do you see your writing evolving over the course of your career? In what ways are you a different writer than you were in 2005 when O My Darling was published?

AG: Writing O My Darling felt like chiseling stone — hard and painstaking. It took me a long time to realize that I was simply learning how to write a book, an activity that isn’t inborn. I say while knocking on wood that each book has been easier to write than the next. My 30s have been a heady time personally. Having children, losing loved ones, coming to larger understandings about life; if these things change me, then I hope they change and broaden my writing.

TM: In your novels, a recurring theme is the strength of relationships and the ways they are tested. You recently described Schroder as “a pro-marriage book; a balled-up and then uncrumpled valentine.” Can you talk a little about the importance of this theme in your work and how your take on it in Schroder is different than in your other novels?

AG: A smart piece of recent criticism said that the book does not use the 19th-century marriage plot but the “twenty-first century divorce plot.” Schroder concerns what happens after love is over — or in this case, discredited. I’ve always been preoccupied by the transience or ephemerality of experience, good and bad. As a minor character in the book says, there is the temptation to try and “box up” experience and “keep it.” But happiness — and love — cannot be possessed, controlled, quarantined…In Eric’s case, he’s dealing with the unwieldy fact that he still loves his ex-wife even though she has completely washed her hands of him. She thinks that because he’s a liar, he lied about loving her. But I don’t think he lied about loving her, and I guess that’s the uncrumpled part of the valentine.

I didn’t really answer the question, though. I’m not sure why I keep writing about marriage. Marriage is just a metaphor for human relationships in general. It’s the relationship in which we live or die in terms of our own self-concept, in terms of our reputations with ourselves.

TM: Let’s talk about Erik Kennedy/Schroder. You’ve said you feel “a lot of ambivalence towards him” and certainly navigate between his good qualities and his terrible qualities when portraying him to readers. Was this a difficult balance to achieve? A lot of importance is often placed on the “likability” of characters. Was this something you thought about as you were writing Schroder?

AG: Well I find Eric likeable, but in the way you love a classic naïf. The narrator of Updike’s “A & P” or Dowell in The Good Soldier. You think, wow, what a limited person, but at least he cares about something. If I had to choose between the extremes of sentimentality and cynicism, I’d always choose the former.

But yes, I do feel ambivalence towards Eric. What he does in lying to his wife is unconscionable. And I think part of the poignancy of the father-daughter relationship here is that his daughter is fated to wise up, and to eventually be really furious at him. She loves him now because he’s all she knows. But how messed up would Meadow be as a grown-up? Schroder suggests, I think, pretty messed up.

TM: Was it difficult to write Erik’s young daughter, Meadow? What are the challenges you faced portraying a child?

AG: My son was probably about four when I started writing Schroder. I poured all the love, amusement, and self-doubt I felt on a daily level as a parent into the characterization of Meadow. Also, my son just said a lot of fabulous things, and I wrote them down word for word and gave them to Meadow.  When people cite their favorite lines from the book — and these are often Meadow’s lines — I have to laugh and say, Let’s face it, the best lines in this book were written by a six year old.

TM: You’ve said the book was in some part inspired by the Clark Rockefeller case and what he said about some of the happiest moments of his life being spent with his daughter after he abducted her. How did the idea for Schroder come about and evolve as you wrote the novel?

AG: As you mention, Schroder began with the seed from that now-infamous ripped-from-the-headlines story, one I deliberately never followed. But that story was relevant only in that I was already preoccupied its themes: identity, parenthood, immigration, self-invention…Can you be a fraud and still love others sincerely? Can you be a troubled soul and also a loving parent? I am of the Chekhov school in regards to literature “posing questions correctly” as opposed to answering them. Wondering now if I have — even privately — answered these questions — I think no, not conclusively. Eric is still new to me, and as I travel around reading from the book, my attitude towards him alternates between compassion and bitterness.

TM: Schroder functions as an apology/confession from a man with an elaborate false identity. Both of those elements have a rich literary history. How does your novel fit into that literary landscape?

AG: I am sure there is a buried influence of Dostoevsky, even Poe, both of whom I read at a fairly young age, probably assuming these men were describing the inevitable lunacy of adulthood…I loved the hair-tearing confessions of deeply inconscient madmen-narrators, driven by guilt to confess. But Schroder is probably my agon-with-Nabokov book. Nobody writes like Nabokov; nobody ever will. What I would give to write one sentence like Vladimir! I adore Lolita, but I am more conscious of the influence of Pale Fire. Maybe it’s a minor point, but the fact that Eric’s document is “written” is so important to the novel, just as “written-ness” is central to Kinbote’s confessions in Pale Fire. This is where I saw the need, in Schroder, for footnotes, playlets, questionnaires…But of course all these examples I give were written by men. I think it’s true that I simultaneously “honor, update, and reject” some of these literary antecedents with Eric Kennedy/Schroder. (I’m referring to a statement here in Kathryn Shultz’s lively New York Magazine review.) I think I give Eric a softer side than most of these men-written-by-men. My gender seeps in between the lines, in the ways I judge him or his effect on the women in his life, in the sadness I feel about what remains an essential otherness…

TM: The writing of female authors — particularly those who write about relationships — is often marginalized into two categories: “chick lit” or “women’s fiction.” As a woman and author of literary fiction, is this something you ever think about when writing? Do you think the perception/reception of novels by women is changing at all?

AG: No, I never think about it in regards to my own work. But do I think the perception/reception of novels by women is changing at all? Not sure. The contemporary woman novelist still faces some troubling assumptions when she tries to publish. However, I was recently on two different panels with extraordinary women writers (Claire Messud and Victoria Redel, Karen Russell and Claire Vaye Watkins). All of these women are acclaimed writers, not to mention inspiring speakers. I like to think of their confidence — and success — as a bellwether.

TM: You once advised “stay[ing] true to your artistic vision, even if you fail in other ways” — also noting a quote from Mario Vargas Llosa: “That is what authenticity or sincerity is for the novelist: the acceptance of his own demons and the decision to serve them as well as possible.” Can you talk about how accepting your demons/decisions and staying true to your vision has served you over the course of your career?

AG: I think many writers write out of a longing to be understood — to be heard, legitimized, respectabilized. So if you’re not staying true to your artistic vision, what good is it for that vision to be legitimized? It’s not going to be gratifying. Of course, in some ways, you don’t have a choice about sticking to your artistic vision. Llosa says this, too — that writers don’t choose their themes, but rather that these themes are foisted upon them by personal history; Updike even said the same thing about style, that a writer’s style is inherent to him, simply the written equivalent to how the world “hits his or her nerves.” I don’t mean to say you should ignore criticism, especially when it’s made repeatedly, nor should you cling to some unbending, macho notion of integrity. For some people, compromise is radical. I say, surround yourself with trustworthy people, put your knife between your teeth, unplug, stop talking, and write.

TM: What are you working on now?

AG: Playing with my baby daughter. Wondering what her future will be like for her.

The Millions: The epigraph for Promising Young Women contains three quotes; I’d like to focus on the first two, by Clarice Lispector and Ariana Reines, that allude to the inevitable interdependency of literature and life. Lispector’s quote, “She wanted to explain that that’s what her life was like, but not knowing what she meant by ‘that’s what it’s like’ or ‘her life’ she didn’t answer,” implicates language and all of its inadequacies (an idea you return to throughout the book) while Ariana Reines’s asks if a book can sufficiently construct other worlds and transport the reader between these worlds: “Can a book carry you into the world you have to pretend doesn’t exist most of the time, can a book carry you back out into what first made you alive.” With this in mind, how do literature and life intermingle for you as a writer, and also in what way does this interaction speak to your vision for Promising Young Women?

Suzanne Scanlon: I’m not exaggerating when I say that much of my identity has been founded or invented or re-created on the books I’ve read. I’ve always read that way — for instructions on how to live, as Flaubert put it. There have been times in my life when the worlds/ideas offered within a book — Virginia Woolf or Marguerite Duras or Shakespeare or Erica Jong — were immensely comforting to me — a balm, a relief from the limitation of the worlds/ideas most present in so-called real life. I guess I’m also very influenced by and interested in writing that, as Ben Lerner put it in an interview, recently, “collapses the distinction between art and life.” I wanted the referenced literature to be central to the life of Lizzie, she has collapsed this distinction in her mind (for better or worse), such that while she’s lying in the quiet room, having been administered a shot of Thorazine, she’s thinking about Virginia Woolf. That’s funny to me, and problematic and true; it might be as dangerous to her as it is her salvation.

TM: I’d love to hear you talk about the performative aspects of writing as an actress and theater critic — how does writing character in fiction compare to taking on a role as an actress? What inspiration does your writing draw from theater and acting?

SS: As a theater student, I was very early educated on a voracious reading of plays, of going to the theater — part of why I went to college in New York. Theater has been a passion of mine for as long as I can remember and I think the world of it is great training for a writer. I recall very well the excitement of my first exposure to Beckett, Ionesco, Chekhov, Caryl Churchill, Wallace Shawn, Karen Finley, to name only a few playwrights — it was simply magic to discover these writers. And in a contemporary sense, I think some of the most interesting writing these days is happening for the theater (Young Jean Lee, Annie Baker, my dear friend David Adjmi, to name a few); there’s an attention to language, to rhythm, and an openness to experimentation that isn’t always valued in (mainstream) fiction. There’s also a playfulness, an awareness of the futility/absurdity of language, the artifice — but with a persistent sense of hope, which is taken for granted in the theater. Erik Ehn once said that the theater is about “the impossible trajectory of hope” and I never forgot that. I suppose that’s what I think all art should be.

TM: You touch on the power of spoken language in your story (or is it an essay?), “How I Lost My Dictionary,” where the narrator is carjacked by a boy claiming he has a gun that he never reveals: “This is a stick-up. If you say something, does it make it true? If you call your finger a gun, does it make you powerful? Do the words matter?” In Promising Young Women, it seems that the psychiatrist’s diagnoses function in the same way — if Roger says Lizzie is sicker than he thought then this becomes truth. In what way do words matter, especially in the ways they define identities and catalyze interactions? In what way is life a performance?

SS: Thank you for reading that piece! Yes, that’s long been a concern and, at times, obsession of mine. The way narratives get codified and repeated to create meaning. There was a time when this terrified me — the way that naming, labeling, delimits identity. As a parent, I see it anew: how a child may take to a label s/he is assigned (shy, smart, naughty, etc.) and then live up to it; the way families begin very early to assign, and repeat narratives (the lazy one, the difficult one, the responsible one). When Roger uses the term “Designated Patients” this speaks to the same idea — there is always a scapegoat, one to play the role — we like to limit identity and are less comfortable understanding the self as a fluid, multivalent thing. If we did accept that, we might see that we are all more alike than we could bear.

TM:  Many reviews of Promising Young Women have remarked on the number of literary allusions folded into the relatively short novel — from Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and Ariel, from Joyce’s “The Dead” and Ulysses,, from Tolstoy and Melville, too. You’ve also borrowed scenes and structural devices and integrated them into Promising Young Women, and specifically scenes from The Bell Jar. This strikes me as a form of acting, perhaps in the sense of adopting roles of other novels and acting them out within your own. It also seems like an intriguing, fresh take on allusion. Could you talk more about the literary ancestors and allusions and borrowing, and how these play into the novel for you?

SS: Well, you know David Foster Wallace, who was my teacher at one point, does this throughout his work — he samples, alludes directly and indirectly — this is something I learned reading his work, and also through things he said. Reading him was mind-blowing: Wow, you can do that?! It was as if he gave me permission. I didn’t realize what fiction could be. I can say that about many writers, I guess, but for someone alive at the same time as I was — it felt huge. I remember reading “The Depressed Person” for example, and thinking, wow, so you can take that language and turn it around, make it do something else? Perform it, yes. I think his work is very performative, hysterically shifting, constantly referencing other works, other writers, while becoming his own.

Taking on the role of Plath, of course, using her words — well, it is easier in a novel than it is in real life. Just as Lizzie plays a woman who puts her head in the oven, I can play with Plath’s novel. I feel quite privileged, in fact, to be able to learn from Plath — to recognize her genius and the truth of her writing — and yet to have lived in a moment which has allowed me to approach it as one voice among many, one within a dialectic.

TM: The artist/writer Alexandre Singh recently laid out his own beliefs on the simultaneity of art-making by referencing Borges’s idea, that “every new artist causes the past to become deeper and richer. The past isn’t a dead, fixed place but one to which we’re constantly looking back to, discovering things, seeing things anew.” How do you envision this playing out within your writing? (Or do you?) To what extent do you see literature as enabling a dialogue with writers past and present (and future)?

SS: I do love the idea of the past as a shifting place, open to revision — and I like his idea that interviews are fictions! Yes, I feel like various dead writers are dear friends of mine — from Woolf to Plath to Duras to DFW — their lives and lessons and warnings and urgings are constantly informing my own, challenging my own. In this book, in writing in part about my mother’s death, I was both performing her life (which is supposedly fixed in the past, a space we are meant to leave behind) and her death. I was inventing a mother and then finding a way for her to die, to allow her to die. To move her to that place so that I might move there. I don’t know if that was conscious, but that’s how I see it now. For years I longed to speak to her, to get her advice, and I suppose a comfort in writing is being able to create her as much as I create a self.

TM:  I was impressed by the verve and tone of the narrative voice — from the striking opening line, “Ever since I heard Don Reakes say that the beauty contestant deserved to be raped by Mike Tyson, I wanted him dead,” to aphorisms like, “There is a kind of loneliness that comes from being with people.” Much is said about the failure of communication, about the gaps between what is said and what is conveyed, about distances that cannot be bridged, about the utter failure to find the words, to convey messages. Very few writers who attempt this are able to communicate this breakdown so well. And yet this focus on the failure of language, its limitations, this occurs with a novel that, of course, relies on words. Would you speak more to the general weariness here, and also specifically the weariness towards language — the gaps and spaces?

SS: Well, yes, a general weariness. But I think the joy of writing is the feeling of reaching across or through those gaps. I love this essay by Susan Griffin where she states that her favorite moment in writing is “when the writing falls short.” I, too, find that exhilarating — that even at times the awareness of its limitation is comfort. This essay is in John D’Agata’s Next American Essay which also contains an essay by Annie Dillard, who is always working toward and around and through these gaps. I am not wearied when I read a line, a paragraph of hers or a line of DFW’s. I’m regularly thrilled by the movement toward or across that impossibility.

I suppose there was a time when I felt like Lizzie the narrator — that it was a waste to even try. The older I get, the more grateful I feel to have the chance to try, to work within and against a tradition.

TM: One of the things that Lizzie says she learns on the S.S. Roger — the psychiatric ward for super sensitives where Lizzie is a patient — is that she’s a cipher: “I am an empty thing. A fragmented mutating subject.” This is central to Lizzie’s desire to try on identities through acting, and is echoed through the novel’s structure. The novel, too, is a fragmented mutating subject, told from various overlapping perspectives. I’m wondering if you could talk about the role of this structural system in Promising Young Women (or other structural systems you were/are drawn to). Did you consciously define the novel against the traditional male bildungsroman, with its phallic Freytag triangle and climax? Also, in this sense, are there other literary influences to this novel/your writing, that aren’t as conspicuous as, say, the Plath?

SS: No, it was not consciously defined against the bildungsroman, though I have been interested in what I read as female bildungsroman (like The Bell Jar or Kate Chopin’s The Awakening) and so in that way it’s a subversion. Many of my favorite books are fragmented in structure, resisting linear plot or redemption — perhaps especially work by women — Lydia Davis, Claudia Rankine in Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, Maggie Nelson, also The Lover, Jesus’ Son, Beloved, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. I think that while revising certain sections of PYW I was rereading both The Bell Jar and Infinite Jest. These novels might seem dissimilar but both are kind of anti-coming of age stories and both, of course, contain descriptions of depression that feel inspired, true.

Also, my editor, Danielle Dutton, is a brilliant writer and reader and her vision for fiction and this book truly made these fragments cohere, essentially made this a book. There was a time when I saw these as a collection of linked stories, but she saw it as a novel.

TM: The phrases “Promising Young Women” and later, “Girls with Problems,” are such taglines for the ways that young, attractive, women are romanticized, and even exulted, for their dependencies, their great sadnesses and weaknesses, and who become projects for the men, like the psychiatrist and like the boyfriend, who want to or need to help. While the book exposes these clichés (much like it maligns Friends, whose laugh track and faux cheery camaraderie alienate Lizzie) does participation in this system become a self-fulfilling prophecy? How does one break from the loop, and where does Lizzie and the SS Roger fall into this?

SS: Honestly, I don’t know how to break from the loop, save from becoming an artist who is both outside and inside. I think getting older helps, too. It’s much easier not to be a young woman, though everywhere you go you’re told to feel bad about getting older. I think Lizzie wants to be part of this system as much as it wants her. I think it is a mutual dependency. I don’t see it in black and white terms; one can be exploited and helped all at once. But yes, self-fulfilling prophecies abound — as with the naming of someone ill or sick; she lives up to this idea of herself, which is an idea that she, on some level, wants/needs to believe at this point in her life. Part of her breakdown then becomes a gift, a breakthrough — a total embracing of an identity in order to exhaust it, perhaps, to wear it out. If that makes any sense.

The Millions: The title Blueprints for Building Better Girls comes from a vintage etiquette book that the character B and her beau read for kicks in the story, “Aren’t You Dead Yet?” B thinks, “It was hilarious how clueless these women, teetering in heels, on the cusp of the sexual revolution were.” You’ve confessed that you share B’s fascination for etiquette books, and yet your stories are far from being proscriptive, cautionary tales. What role does the idea of the etiquette book play within your collection? Do today’s women need new guideposts for contemporary living?

Elissa Schappell: I liked the idea of the book being an anti-etiquette book. Because etiquette books reveal what a culture values most. They clearly delineate the behavior one must exhibit to be considered an acceptable member of society. My book pushes back against that in that it’s not proscriptive — and there is a book group in Arizona that is really pissed that wasn’t the case — it doesn’t tell you how to behave, but shows you how the reality of women’s lives are at odds with the labels the culture has slapped on us and the narrow roles the culture lays out as acceptable for women. As we know women who don’t conform to the dictates of society pay a much higher price than men. I wanted to show you the price women pay for not choosing to conform or being unable to conform.

Because of that I would argue that yes, women need new guideposts. (Let me crawl up on my soapbox here.) And they should create them for themselves. Because women have to stop letting people tell them who they are, and decide for themselves who they are, who they want to be.

For too long women have let the patriarchy dictate the rules, assumed the daddies would always be in control, always make all the decisions, when things are changing. Women are taking over the work place, becoming more educated than men, assuming more positions of power. (One only hopes we’ll soon be paid equally for our work.) Why shouldn’t women remake the world in their image? Men have had their shot, and they’ve left a hell of a mess. Thankfully, women have been cleaning up the messes men make since man first set fire to the hut by lighting one of his farts.

I don’t know if it’s Stockholm Syndrome or if in some way a lot of women feel inferior to men — our achievements always measured against the baseline of men, our work literally of less value to society, and to call oneself a feminist is to align oneself with a shrill and hairy and man-hating stereotype, when in reality — when you consider the definition of a feminist, “one who thinks women should be the accorded the same rights as men” — most women and men are feminists.

Short answer: Yes.

TM: Throughout the collection, the characters’ lives intersect in subtle, often tangential ways. I found great pleasure in connecting the dots. Kate, who had difficulties getting pregnant in “A Dog Story” makes a cameo as Charlotte’s uptight, inconsiderate, and childless boss in “Elephant.” Charlotte makes the most appearances, with each story providing a slightly different perspective on her character. The network of connections within your stories emphasizes not only the many roles that a woman plays over the course of her life but also underscores that she exists within a community of women — made up of mothers, sisters, friends, and daughters. Your stories begin in the late ‘70s, span over twenty year’s time, and deal with multiple generations. What was it about depicting a community of women that intrigued you? Was Grace Paley an influence?

ES: I wanted the book to depict a broad population of American women. Showing the universal experiences this community of women share but don’t necessarily talk about because we feel ashamed, fear being judged, or simply can’t articulate. How the rules society has laid out about how a woman must behave in order to be accepted by the culture have shaped this group’s identity.

I chose to write the stories from a range of point-of-views — some younger women, some older — because I wanted to show how what was considered acceptable behavior for each generation influenced the way each of these women defined themselves, and how wittingly or unwittingly these messages are passed along like a gene through further generations. How we can inherit the prejudices, beliefs, politics of previous generations, just as you might inherit blue eyes.

I also wanted the book to get micro. To show the more intimate connections — sometimes tenuous, that join a cast of female characters, in order to show how whether connected by friendship, acquaintance, memory, gossip — we live in other people’s lives. I wanted the reader to get various perspectives on these women. To have the experience of meeting a character, and — as in life — form an opinion of them. Judge them. I wanted to give the reader access to the interior life of a character, as well as show them how she exists in the stories of other characters we know. The varied points of view allow the reader to see the characters as others see them, view their personas, even as we have our own intimate knowledge of their lives.

I didn’t want the connections to be too tight because my desire was to illustrate on a broad scale the connections between the women who occupy this level of society and how despite the ways they might perceive each other they share a lot — sometimes it’s a landscape, sometimes it’s a body issue, other times it’s as slight as digging the same music.

At the end of the day all of these women’s lives are at odds with the scripts the culture presents to define them, and all of them pay a price for not choosing, or being able to conform to that ideal.

I admire Grace Paley enormously. She’s been a role model for me on and off the page. The way she combined the personal with the political in her work, as well as in her life, is inspiring. She was very sane about her career.

I thought a lot about her when I had kids. As you know the prevailing idea has always been that a woman must choose between being a first-rate writer and a mother. Which is of course bullshit. But at the time my kids were born I feared that I might have screwed myself out of a career (as it were) and it killed me. Then I read that Grace Paley wrote with her kids in a playpen by her desk. She has this great quote, “The word career is a divisive word. It’s a word that divides the normal life from business or professional life.” She rewrote the rules. Which is what women need to do.

You can’t imagine the level of focus it takes to write where there is a child next to you doing god knows what — I’d like to see Philip Roth do that — but she was passionate, the work mattered, and so did being with her children, so she made it work.

And she was a boots-on-the-ground political activist! When she said, “Let’s go forth with fear and courage and rage to save the world,” she wasn’t just talking about marching and protesting in the streets, she also meant on the page. That sort of fierce optimism sets me on fire.

TM: In “Elephant,” Paige asks how a woman could not want children — it’s “creepy” — and yet she’s ambivalent about whether motherhood is worth the sacrifices she’s made, including the toll on her marriage, the setbacks in her career, the lost sense of self. She gives voice to the verboten, a sentiment that Charlotte understands but also fears to admit. (The story’s title seems no coincidence.) Paige asks, “Is this what you planned on? Is this what you wanted?” She’s not the only female character left wondering. What is it about the contemporary blueprints for women’s lives that set these women up for something different than what they experience?

ES: For one thing there are only a handful of culturally approved blueprints distributed to young women. Not figuring in that each woman is an individual and each woman has different dreams and expectations for herself. “How to be a Good Girl” is the big one. It covers how to be good sport, how to remain chaste (and like it!), and how to be a good victim. There is also, “How to be a Good Friend.” This includes a list of acceptable friends (short) and unacceptable (long) friends, as well as appropriate topics for discussion, how to get rid of undesirable friends. The “Good Wife” includes ways to bolster your husband’s self-esteem, put his career first and 101 things to do with chicken thighs. Top of the “Good Mother” blueprint: Family First. Forget any aspirations you may have had beyond pleasing your husband and children, how to get your family to eat healthy, plus 100 ways to swallow your rage. The other blueprints: “How to be a Troublemaker/Revolutionary/Free Thinker/Artist or more simply, How to Be a Person — can be found in books, art, music.

For my generation, women who grew up in the ’70s and ’80s, the blueprint had a rainbow on it. You’ve come along way baby, it said. And it said that a woman can, nay, should, have it all. To not have it all is to be a failure. It’s Ginger Rogers doing everything Fred Astaire does, but backwards in high heels, with a baby strapped to her chest, a Bluetooth in her ear, and a pot roast balanced on her head.

For a woman to admit that she can’t do it all, or doesn’t want to do it all is to invite criticism from both sides. “You’re the ones who wanted library cards in the first place!” Or, “We fought for your right to have a career so get in there and work!”

This is frustrating. Feminism was about giving women choices, and some women choose not to work outside the home. Not my choice, but it’s a valid choice.

Any woman who doesn’t cop to having had some second thoughts — felt the shadow of ambivalence or resentment pass over them is either brain dead or lying.

One thing all the women in my book have in common is the imperative to put the needs of others before their own. They all want at some point to please someone they love, but to please others requires them to betray themselves in some fundamental way. It’s reality.

TM: Your wit dazzles me. The stories in Blueprints are not “happy” stories. There’s  a wealth of sadness dealt out in the form of rape, eating disorders, ambivalence, loneliness, abandonment, and death, and yet the quick wit and levity make the stories so pleasurable to consume sentence to sentence. What role does humor play for you in writing? In life? What comic writers do you channel?

ES: You’re very kind.

Oscar Wilde said, “If you want to tell people the truth make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you.” That’s all I want to do. Tell the truth and not die.

My characters use humor for protection — to deflect pain, diffuse awkwardness, beat back their demons. They use it like a shield and a sword. It’s no different for me as a writer. I use the humor to protect and expose both my characters and the reader. I use it to disarm the reader into letting down their guard. The laughing reader doesn’t feel the knife until it’s in his chest. The reader who is laughing at something they don’t think they should be laughing at, but wants to, needs to laugh about, experiences a catharsis. I’d argue that’s more valuable than providing someone with an orgasm. It’s much harder to provide a catharsis for the reader. The ability to laugh in the face of terrible trauma and pain is empowering, and you know what, it’s human. We all do it. I want readers to feel like they’re not alone in that.

As to channeling, I love Lorrie Moore and Amy Hempel’s work. The way they spin humor and tragedy — and the economy of language. I’m in awe. And I love to read P.G. Wodehouse because he’s so witty, but clearly I’m not channeling him, just enjoying him.

TM:  Last winter you wrote about the abundance of recent genre-bending novels in your Vanity Fair Hot Type column, and specifically, Ann Beattie’s Mrs. Nixon. It’s such a curious book — part biography, part fiction, part memoir, part writer’s manual. It seems like the internet may also contribute to the growing plasticity of forms and mash-ups of genres. Do you think the ways that we read and write fiction is changing due to the internet, and/or a cultural obsession with nonfiction? In that sense, what are some of the biggest challenges facing contemporary fiction? And, to counter the inherent pessimism of the previous question, also what are the most enticing developments?

ES: Good questions.

First, to my mind, anything that is pushing the form, reinventing the way we tell stories, use language, process information, is fantastic, and should be encouraged.

As to how it might be influencing the way we write, judging from the stories I see teaching workshops and coming into Tin House, I’d say that the internet is definitely informing the sensibilities of new writers, in relation to subject matter. They seem to find their lives less interesting than what they see on their screens, and that’s unfortunate because the tendency then is to take someone else’s experience and in my experience, in the hands of someone who can’t make the material their own, the result is always flat and phony. You can smell the shit on their shoes. It’s unfortunate too because too often the writer is not as engaged with this story they found on the internet, as they are when they’re tapping into their own life. For as narcissistic as writers are, too many of them aren’t willing, or maybe it’s confident enough, to dive down deep enough in themselves to pull up the truly original and authentic material lurking on the bottom.

I know that the obsession with nonfiction and memoir has certainly had an adverse effect on readers of fiction. Many readers seem unwilling or incapable of imagining a writer is capable of creating a fictional world. It’s really sad because the pleasures of reading fiction and the pleasures of reading non-fiction are very different. In non-fiction the writer creates a world that already existed, there is safety in that. The reader is not the subject of the book, and thus there is a wall between them and the story.

Fiction is dark magic requiring a willing suspension of disbelief. The author casts a spell and vanishes. The reader forgets themselves, they enter this world the writer has conjured and become part of the story, they identify with the characters, experience what the characters experience. There is some risk in that. You don’t know what will happen. You don’t know what your reaction may be. Maybe worst of all, the fact that memoirs make more money than fiction has lead some good writers to publish lousy books.

TM:  You, like the women in your stories, juggle many roles. You’re not only a fiction writer, but also the editor-at-large for Tin House, a  teacher, a mother, and you pen the monthly Hot Type column for Vanity Fair. How do you juggle it all, and do you ever have time to read merely for pleasure?

ES: Not very skillfully. If I were juggling torches, my hair would be on fire. I find that the only way I can succeed at all is to compartmentalize as much as possible. Meaning, on days when I teach I only teach, on days when I have Vanity Fair work to do, I only do that. And, no, I am not able to read — at least at much length — for pleasure as much as I’d like. Although I try.

TM: And last, but definitely not least: Tom Wolfe once wrote an essay, “Tom Wolfe’s New Book of Etiquette,” that provides a tongue-in-cheek etiquette “update” for New York society that included instructions on topics of import (circa 1968), such as The Cocktail Party, The Social Kiss, and The Etiquette of Pot. If you were to write your own Elissa Schappell book of etiquette, what would make your list of critical updates, and also, worst contemporary faux-pas?

ES: Off the top of my head:

The Google. Is it appropriate to google a person before you meet them? Are you obliged to tell them you googled them? Is it acceptable to ask someone if they googled you? Should you be offended if someone didn’t google you?

Children’s Birthday Parties. Under what circumstances is it appropriate to drop your child off at a birthday party when other parents are staying. Is it wrong to ask if the host is serving booze and could you please have some. At parties where alcohol is provided for the parents, how drunk can you get?

The Millions: The thing I was most impressed by in the book is the way you read this situation, this awful ongoing situation of being stalked and harassed, from a variety of conceptual viewpoints. In particular, the way in which you arrange this reading around a cluster of literary texts – TinTin, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Plath’s poetry and so on. Was this something you intended to do from the beginning, or did it just sort of come about as you worked your way into the subject?

James Lasdun: I didn’t plan very much, partly because the book didn’t exactly begin its life as a book. It began as an attempt to write a sort of neutral document that I would be able to post somewhere in my defense. It began as a strange sort of personal necessity. And then in the course of doing that I began to see that it wasn’t going to work in that way, because it kept looking as if it was written by a crazy person. But then, I began to feel that there was a more interesting thing to be written. And I just sort of plunged into it and wrote it without plotting and planning. I think I felt quite early on that I would be wanting to pursue some ideas that would enlarge the resonance in some way, and one of those directions was going to be through some things I had read that were very close to me. I think anyone who writes and reads always keeps a few texts in their heads through which they read the world, and read what’s happening to them. Gawain has always been something that I’ve had in my mind, and I knew that I was going to be writing about a particular kind of psychological combat, and that I might be able to find a way of telling my story through that story. And I started doing that and found it kind of interesting to do. From there, other literary interests of mine began to cohere around it.

TM: Let me just return to what you said about the book starting out as a document of self-defense. That’s a very fascinating beginning for a literary work to have.

JL: Yeah. At a certain point I felt I was going to need to create this kind of document, because she was contacting employers, and people were coming to me and saying “what the hell is this all about?” And it’s such a bizarre story, and such a kind of uncomfortable one to have to tell people, that I felt that if I set it down and posted it on my website, then I could direct people to it. It turns out to be very difficult to write a sort of defense of yourself for general consumption when in general people aren’t accusing you of anything. So if you present them with a defense of yourself, it already looks like you’re nuts. When I first tried to get the police involved, I could tell that they just weren’t convinced, that they just thought I was crazy. But I felt that it had become incredibly damaging to me, and it had accumulated over time, with her writing to my boss and things like that. I felt very, very vulnerable, and very much in need of this kind of document. But it turned out that I just couldn’t write it in that way. And another part of it was that I was completely unable to write anything else, because this situation was just absolutely consuming me. It doesn’t anymore to that extent, even though it’s somewhat ongoing, but it did for a long period. To the point where I couldn’t write anything else. So I thought I might as well go at it.

TM: So in a sense you had to write this book in order to clear a path for other subjects?

JL: Well, yes, in way. But really, I wasn’t even thinking about moving on. Literally all I could think about was the situation I was in. It really had absolutely invaded my consciousness. And that in a way, the way it took over my head, was almost as bad as the sense of damage that I felt was going on in the outside world. I’d never experienced these things that you hear about, with people who suffer from post-traumatic stress, where you actually can’t control your thoughts in any way at all, and you can’t stop yourself from thinking about something. I just became very obsessive, in a way that I’m not usually by temperament. And I did find when I started writing about it that I was very quickly improving on that front, that I was able to feel less consumed by it, just in normal daily life. But I don’t even know what I was thinking at the beginning, as to whether this book would be even publishable, or whether I would want to publish it. Initially just to write was what interested me. It wasn’t something that I told my publishers I was doing, or asked them for an advance or a contract or anything like that. I just wrote it. I wrote a draft quite quickly, a much longer draft than what was eventually published. And I just cut and cut and sort of found what I felt was a book that would express what I wanted to express, but also mean something to other people. I mean, it was all very private stuff, very personal, and so there was a question of how interested other people are going to be in your own problems. And I wanted it to have a balance of telling the story as it was – because I do think it’s inherently dramatic, and so weird. I knew that that would be the spine of it. But I felt that it also needed to be as resonant as it could be, and that seemed to lead me to write about all kinds of things that interested me. Literary texts, but also political things, cultural things, personal experience, memory, travel and things like that. I’d never written any extended non-fiction before, and never thought of myself as that kind of writer, but I found that I’ve enjoyed doing it. If “enjoy” is an appropriate word to use there. It’s opened up possibilities in terms of how to write.

TM: I was wondering whether you thought about turning this material into fiction. Because it struck me while I was reading that, as a novel, it would be much more problematic. That this material would seem much more ethically dicey if it were presented in the form of fiction.

JL: Well, as a fiction writer, I was always going to be turning that over in my mind. And some of the fiction I was working on, or trying to work on, was headed in the direction of being a fictionalized version of what was going on. But as you say, it was all wrong. It wasn’t the right way of dealing with it. Also I was still in the thick of the experience. This isn’t a book that comes out of emotion recollected in tranquility or anything like that. This was written right from the thick of the experience, which is a rather strange thing to be doing. And I realized pretty early on that it had to be absolutely truthful. And one of the things that I was aware of was that it might be impossible to publish because of that. And I knew that what I produced, that no publisher would publish it without having it okayed by their legal department.

TM: And you must, throughout the process, have had misgivings, in terms of whether publishing it would exacerbate the situation. This must have been a troubling question for you.

JL: Yes, well the question of whether it would exacerbate the situation – I felt that the situation could not get any worse. I mean, I’d been threatened with death; she was basically threatening to kill me, threatening my children, and I didn’t know how much worse it could get than that. When someone does that, they’ve pushed things as far as they can go. So I felt at that point that the more public I could make this, the safer I would be in fact. I suppose there were times in between my having finished and it coming out, where she’d gone relatively quiet. She does go quiet for periods. And I would sort of think, well, why am I risking stirring up another round of this unpleasantness. And then suddenly out of the blue she would start up again, more violent and more terrifying than ever. And I would think, well, I’m glad I am doing it, because I need to do it. So that’s really where I’m at. You know, it is ongoing, and she has become even worse and now the whole matter has entered a new chapter. It’s in the hands of the hate crimes unit of the NYPD. They’re still not able to do all that much about it, but she has been visited by cops. She’s sort of graduated to phone stuff. So in terms of whether of it would exacerbate the situation, my feeling was it was already as bad as it could be. Being threatened is… I’ve never been threatened before, and it is so deeply unpleasant. You so want to do something about it.

TM: Were you troubled by issues around the ethics of writing about this topic in the first place?

JL: I talk about this a little bit in the book. I’ve never seen a book that’s quite like it, in terms of being about a real situation, with real people, that has not yet resolved itself, and that involves using emails. The book wouldn’t have worked unless I could use the emails verbatim, and I deliberately didn’t find out whether that would be okay or not until I finished the book, because I didn’t want to do a book that couldn’t use the emails, and if it turned out that wasn’t going to be possible, then I was resigned that I just wouldn’t publish the book. I don’t feel personally ethically compromised in any way at all. Partly because this is not an attack on her. I’m not pursuing any kind of vendetta; in fact I bend over backwards to try to understand the situation from her point of view. I acknowledge that she was someone who really interested me. I really admired her writing, and wanted to encourage her. I liked her. I was interested in being in touch with her, and all the rest of it. It’s not in any way me attacking her. Her words are very damning, but those are her words.

TM: I should say that, from a reader’s perspective, it’s very clear how concerned you are with being as evenhanded and unsensational as possible in trying to come to some understanding of why this person is tormenting you in this way. In fact, one of the things I found most interesting about the book is the fact that at its center are two novelists who are, in different ways, trying to create each other as characters. “Nasreen” is very much trying to shape you into a sinister, exploitative figure in the public eye, and you’re trying to understand her actions, to make her make sense as a character. If the book were fiction, this would be a very clever and perhaps excessively convoluted metafictional conceit.

JL: I think that’s a very good description of it. It’s a story about two fiction writers trying to understand each other, and creating characters out of each other. And one of the main themes of it is the idea of what we are in other peoples’ minds, the constructs people make of each other. What I made of her, what she made of me. And that just seemed to be so much a theme of the whole thing, and the question of reputation is very bound up in that. That’s another sort of layer of one’s identity, and it’s one that can’t really be controlled; it’s in the hands of other people. And yet it is oneself. But it has become weirdly vulnerable again, I think, in the age of the internet. But yes, I think you’re right. And again that would have made it impossibly slippery for treatment in a work of fiction.

TM: For me the question that the book turns on is the question of why this is happening at all. And you allude at a few points to this almost Shakespearean question of motiveless malice. Do you feel that you got closer to answering that, or is it still a mystery?

JL: That was a big question that I was exploring, and I didn’t expect to come up with a simple answer. But in the process of that exploration, I had to deal with the question of what I might have brought to the experience. Because when something this extreme and prolonged happens to you, rightly or wrongly the mind looks for reasons. It’s very hard to believe it’s just a random occurrence, something that goes on for this long and so takes over your life, you just instinctively try to understand it in the context of your whole life. And so I was interested in analyzing my own role in it to the extent that I felt that I had one. And one of the things that I came up with that I hadn’t really thought about until I started writing about it was the effect of my silence on her. For me, that had just been what I needed to do, was stop answering her emails. I didn’t make the decision that I was going to stop answering her forever. It just sort of became impossible to start writing back again, because once they started getting obsessive they never let up, and then they turned to hate mail and then there was no question of responding. But I only ever experienced that one-sidedly, in the sense that I just wasn’t answering; I wasn’t thinking about the effect of my not answering. I wasn’t thinking about the effects of silence on someone who is obsessed with you, and with whom you have been in contact. So I was sort of interested in that. And I tried to approach the question of her motive from various different angles, but it could only ever be conjectural and speculative. I didn’t really have much of a model for this book, but to some extent I think Freud’s case histories and his analyses of historic figures like Leonardo and Moses were the closest thing to a literary model for me. You look at an experience, you try to kind of take account of every single detail that you can recall, and you look at it and feel your way into it, and test it for all sorts of associations, whatever resonances you can draw out of it, and you build your document like that. So that was another tack that I took. But you’re right, in the end I don’t supply any explanation. And obviously there’s the whole question of mental illness, and to what extent that answers it. And personally… Well, I don’t know. You know, I can’t pretend to be able to psychiatrically diagnose someone.

TM: Right, yes. And I think what’s most unsettling about the book is this sense that there is no explanation. The book makes it clear that really all that’s necessary for someone to make your life a misery is for them to want that badly enough. That’s all that’s needed. The Internet facilitates this, makes it so much more viable a possibility. And that’s frightening, the idea that all that’s needed is the will.

JL: Yeah, the will and the Internet. That’s a pretty deadly combination. But I mean, there’s mystery that’s total, and there’s mystery that’s informed by whatever little light one can bring to bear on it. And I hope by the end the book, the sense of unanswerable mystery is somewhat enriched or informed by these other things. But it is, ultimately, unanswerable.