Your story in this week’s issue, “Safety,” is about two childhood friends, Nicole and Yasmina, whose lives diverge, converge, and then diverge again, and it’s set against the backdrop of our increasingly precarious political moment. Did one of these elements come to you first?

I travelled to Uzbekistan last spring, and before I went I read that Stalin ordered the evacuation of millions of Soviet citizens to Uzbekistan in the early years of the Second World War. The great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, for instance, lived in the capital city of Tashkent for about two years. When I read about the families who were separated in the chaos of train stations, I knew I wanted to try to use this in a piece of fiction. Thinking of a lost small child, I calculated the age she would need to be for the story to be contemporary; I brought her to New York (my city), and gave her a family I could describe. I didn’t know, at first, where the story was going, but I knew I wanted this family to have another encounter with history.

Yasmina and her partner, Abdul, are both comedians. Why did you give them this profession?

I was so happy when I invented this. My neighbor runs a monthly comedy night at a beloved restaurant on the Lower East Side, and I’ve watched the performers she has brought in. At first, I made Yasmina and Abul comedians just as a way for the two friends to run into each other again, and I already had the girls making sex jokes to each other as teen-agers. But I also knew that something darker was coming in the narrative, and this provided a very unsentimental form of preparation and contrast.

The story is told from the perspective of Nicole, but it hinges on a development in Yasmina’s life. How did you decide to build in this degree of narrative remove?

I needed some remove. For one thing, I’m not Uzbek, and I didn’t feel comfortable wielding Yasmina’s knowledge; for another, I like having a narrator observe events from a degree of distance, making guesses and changing assumptions. That degree of remove echoes, also, the very crucial feeling at the end of the story, of being in two worlds at once. This is my actual feeling right now. Every day unspeakable things go on around me, and I go on with my ordinary, pleasant life.

Yasmina’s family is from Uzbekistan and Abdul’s from Bangladesh; both countries play a significant role in the story, and you’ve spent time in each. What inspired those trips, and when did you start thinking about incorporating these places into a story?

I went to Uzbekistan on vacation because I had seen pictures of the spectacular Islamic architecture—buildings covered in gold, turquoise, and cobalt mosaics—from the country’s years of Silk Road prosperity. The reading I did in advance had already got me thinking about using Stalin’s evacuations in a story, and, on my last day, I made sure to see a famous statue in Tashkent of a blacksmith, his wife, and the children they adopted during the war.

I went to Bangladesh in 2022 to teach at the Hermitage Residency for fiction writers, which is run by the Bangladeshi-Canadian writer Arif Anwar. We were in Sreemangal, deep in the countryside. When I decided that I wanted Yasmina to have a partner from a Muslim country, I thought fondly of Bangladesh.

As in “Safety,” a close friendship is at the heart of your new book, “Mercy.” What draws you to this type of relationship when writing fiction?

I love writing about friendship, and I’m very happy to be identified with the topic. Romantic love might have more inherent drama, but friendship has its tricky continuities and its loyalties in the face of a difficult and dangerous world. I chose “Safety” as the title because I kept seeing the ironies in the story: Yasmina’s family is drawn to the safety of the U.S., our government claims that arresting immigrants keeps the rest of us safe, Stalin sent industries and citizens away for their safety. Your question makes me think that for many adults—certainly for me—friendship is the abiding safety in our lives. ♦