In “Understanding the Science,” your story in this week’s issue, a group of friends are sitting around a dinner table in Chicago, celebrating the fact that Maria’s cancer is now in remission. The conversation is general, and maybe a little boring—Maria, certainly, feels a bit disaffected. A spark comes when Katherine’s boyfriend, Adrian, enters the scene, because he’s a famous actor. Though the story begins in Maria’s point of view, it starts to subtly shift, and ends in Adrian’s perspective. How did you think about who is telling this story, and whose voice—or voices—we should trust?

As is always the case when I write anything, I didn’t know what problems the story would pose until it started posing them. I truly believed that “Understanding the Science” would focus on Maria, and that we would get to know more about her brush with death and get access to her wisdom (or her disappointment at not having gained more of it, maybe), but then her character kept resisting me. She didn’t want to be known. She became a sort of Bartleby-like figure, and I felt I had to respect that. I was treating her the same as her friends in the story were treating her, a little bit too reverently. I expected everything she said to have deeper meaning just because of what she’d been through, and it was an unfair weight to put on her. So, I let her be herself: not a saint, a little judgmental, and mostly quiet. She thinks her friends’ conversation is boring, for example, but she doesn’t offer a change of topic. When Adrian comes in, though, things start shifting, as you said. He captures everyone’s attention—Maria’s included, even if she would be reluctant to admit it. When the energy of a story starts morphing like this, I think it’s always a good idea to follow it where it wants to go. Especially since, as a reader, I tend to like it when stories and novels don’t behave the way that they should.

The people at the dinner party idly talk about conspiracy theories and rumors before the story shifts into a more philosophical mode, with questions about hope and meaning. Was the dinner-table debate always central to the story, or did it evolve as you wrote?

I think the initial impulse for the story was to try to stage the difficulty many of us encounter when it comes to speaking about big topics (death, fear, faith, etc.), perhaps especially with the people we’re close with. Maria went through cancer, but all that her friends can talk about in her presence are problems at work or new trends in self-care. I like writing that kind of dialogue. I like an elephant in the room. I thought most of the story would be this dinner conversation. I saw the discussion around conspiracy theories as a step toward touching on more personal things without seeming to, though, because, in the process of breaking down another person’s beliefs, you accidentally (or not) shine a light on some of your own. So that was fun. And then Adrian comes in and kind of blows things up. He’s less afraid to dig into certain topics. There is a question of how honest he is, though. Is he being himself, or, as a trained actor, playing the role of outsider shaking things up?

In the final scene, Adrian prepares for a role in a movie whose script—with the Earth spinning faster and bodies becoming “bloody confetti”—seems to echo the story’s focus on mortality. What was it like to play around with those parallels?

At first, I thought that last part would be real: that in the reality of the story, on the day following the dinner party, the Earth would actually start spinning faster on its axis, throwing everything off balance. But then I had Adrian, who is an actor, and it felt more interesting to make up the movie he starred in. More fun and less morbid, too. If it was all a movie, I could spare the rest of my characters, have Maria, Katherine, et al. safe at home while Adrian prepared to tackle the end of the world once again, for work.

This story comes from “One Sun Only,” a collection, which comes out early next year. How does “Understanding the Science” fit into the collection’s preoccupations?

When “Understanding the Science” starts, we’re at a polite dinner party among old college friends in Chicago—we don’t expect to end up on a big-budget movie shoot a few pages later. At some point, the axis of the story shifts. I think every story in “One Sun Only,” in different ways, tries to capture these moments where the ground moves beneath our feet.

Although the stories in the collection are distinct from one another (different narrators, different places and perspectives), many also share a number of concerns—about work, language, grief, the mystery of time, the mystery of family, which only deepens over time. Beyond that, none of the stories seeks to simplify the experience of life. None offers lessons on how to live. . . . I’m a reader before I’m a writer and, as a reader, I want to be moved and surprised by how other people think, how other people talk, and I’m always hoping that some kind of magic will operate on me. I want to experience and later be able to point to a moment or remember a line that stopped me in my tracks. That happens with my favorite J. D. Salinger stories, and with Harold Brodkey, José Emilio Pacheco, Don DeLillo . . . I don’t know if it happens with my stories (as their writer, it’s impossible to know), but I try my best to make it happen, to make room for that kind of thrill, that electricity. ♦