Your story “This Is How It Happens” revolves around a young Scottish man in the early nineteen-eighties, who is befriended by some followers of Rajneesh and travels to Oregon to join the commune there. The story was inspired in part by the experience of two of your family members. Can you tell me a bit about them and what you borrowed from their lives?

My uncle and my grandmother moved from Scotland to join the Rajneesh commune in Oregon in the nineteen-eighties. I don’t know much about their experience there. It all happened before I was born. What I do remember is a photo my granny had of Osho, the guru, dead and laid out to be viewed. I remember other photos, and her referencing the guru with affection. In a way, it was just part of the fabric of my childhood, and because I was a young child I can’t even vouch for how accurate these memories are. No one ever explained the family ties to the Rajneesh to me. Not because my family wanted to keep me in the dark but because it was just normal for them. Normal doesn’t need an explanation.

It was many years later, when I was in my twenties, that my sister phoned me, and said, “There is a Netflix documentary that explains everything.” That documentary series was “Wild Wild Country.” I found it shocking. For me, the Rajneesh had just been a quirky experience of my family, not the sensationalized cult portrayed onscreen.

I didn’t use my family’s history in “This Is How It Happens,” really, because I still don’t know it completely, and I never will. Some of my family’s stories are so bizarre they would not be believed if I put them in fiction anyway. I also did not want to sensationalize the story. I wanted it to be personal, and small, close to Malcolm, the main character, so that the reader would be present for his intimate experience. So for these reasons, the narrative is my own. The story is an attempt to understand why a person might join a group like the Rajneesh. It’s also about the love I had for my grandmother, and the hole she left when she died. Many people are described as larger than life. She really was larger than life.

The protagonist of your story, Malcolm, is not a natural convert. He’s straitlaced and inexperienced, reeling from the turbulence of his family life and in search of stability. Why is he so easily pulled out of the existence he’s been struggling to establish?

It is funny that you say Malcolm is searching for stability, because he does find it with the Rajneesh, who, to many, would probably be judged as unstable. Malcolm is feeling disconnected from his community and his father, and, without being very conscious of it, is searching for meaning. This is possibly why he adopted a cat. His life is mundane, but, beyond that, he is grieving. The Rajneesh offers him a way to exist in his body that is grounding. They offer physical intimacy, friendship, and a life that is more aligned with nature and with other people. In some ways, I disagree with the term “natural convert,” because I think most of us would be natural converts if a group found us in a state of vulnerability and provided comfort or answers when we needed them.

One thing that has been missing from Malcolm’s life is physical affection from his father. He feels that kind of love from and for the other men at the commune. But again his contact with the paternal figure—the guru—is unfulfilling, impersonal. Is this journey of his, in a way, a quest for a father? Or a better family?

It is my impression that the men of my Scottish grandfather’s generation were not physically affectionate—although I do remember my grandfather giving me a lot of wonderfully beardy kisses on the cheek. My grandfather fought in the Second World War. Understandably, he never talked about it. The story doesn’t reference it directly, but Malcolm’s father is from this generation of men who went to war, many of whom were barely men when they left. For me, Malcolm is trying to heal some of his father’s pain, and by proxy his own, through his relationships with the men at the commune. It was important to me that these relationships remain brotherly and sweet. You are right that the guru’s distance is disappointing, in a way that Malcolm can’t articulate and that reverberates with his relationship with his father. In my mind, although Malcolm is not aware of it, he is searching for a deep human connection. He gets it, to an extent, with the men in the commune, and fleetingly with the women he has sex with. Perhaps also with the children for whom he provides some care, and who are even hungrier for connection than he is. I don’t think the story gives a definitive answer as to whether he will get the lasting intimacy he is seeking. He gets it in short bursts from many people, and in the end, briefly, from his father.

It’s interesting that his own attempts to be paternal—to the cat he adopts—are also rejected, or met with hostility, in a way that feels unjust to Malcolm. Was the cat always a character in the story?

I never planned to have a cat in this story. He just appeared and would not leave. At one point, I attempted to cut him out of the narrative, and the story felt flat, almost without depth or meaning, which is a lot of responsibility to put on one angry cat. Incidentally, Malcolm’s cat is based on one that my sister adopted. This cat grew up in the dodgy Leith highrises. To avoid being scratched, I, like Malcolm, had to take flying leaps from my sister’s bed when I was cat-sitting. We were all fond of this cat, because she engendered so much chat among us. My brother-in-law affectionately called her Feline Hitler.

We know that the commune in Oregon came to an ignominious end. Have you imagined an afterlife for Malcolm?

For me, that final contact between him and his father felt like such relief, such completion, I was incapable of imagining anything beyond it. In that one sober moment of touch, I felt as though I had resolved some of the male struggle with lack of intimacy. I could not possibly move past it, and nor could Malcolm. Yet nothing is really resolved for them, so I wanted to let that moment last, in a way it can only in fiction, never in real life. If I don’t imagine a future, Malcolm can stay in that brief instance of getting what he needs.

You told me that you put off writing this story for a long time. Once you started, did you write it quickly? And what made you choose to write it in the second person and in the present tense?

This story was brewing in me for about five years, but, once I sat down, it took me only a few hours to write the first draft. I always knew that it would be in second person and present tense. I chose present tense to make Malcolm’s experience feel immediate—as much as that is possible in fiction, anyway—to make the reader, and myself, stay present for Malcolm. Second person was a similar choice. I wanted the reader, and myself, to feel entangled. A lot of us judge people who join groups like the Rajneesh, but we all want community and friendship and love and excitement. To me, the Rajneesh encapsulated so much of what seemed free and hopeful about the nineteen-seventies and eighties. A possibility of living differently from the previous generation. I think I would quite likely have joined, and suspect that many readers would have, too.

You’ve written two historical novels—one set in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Ireland and one set in the mid-twentieth century. “This Is How It Happens” also takes place before you were born. What is the attraction of setting your fiction in the past?

When I wrote “This Is How It Happens,” I sent it to a writer friend with an e-mail saying, “See, I can write contemporary fiction.” She disillusioned me. The eighties are pretty much as close to the present day as I have ever reached in my prose. I think that what draws me to writing fiction set in the past—aside from my love of history and the power of fiction to allow time travel—is the ability to hide myself. I can pour my rage into a medieval Irish “witch,” as I did in my novel “Bright I Burn,” and no one can accuse me of being shrill. I can immerse myself in research, and imagine day-to-day lives that are wildly different from my own, and not recognize myself in these stories until I am finished. “This Is How It Happens” is probably the closest I have ever come to writing anything that obviously touches my own life, and really my life was only marginally touched by the Rajneesh. Even so, the story feels quite exposing, especially given where I am publishing it, but perhaps this is a sign that I am becoming braver. Perhaps next time I will write a story set in 2026. ♦