In “Light Secrets,” your story in this week’s issue, the narrator has lunch with his friend P. A nasty rumor is going around about P., and the narrator will not mention this to him. At lunch, P. himself says that everyone has something to hide. But then he mentions the flip side: “Everybody’s done something good that’s hidden”—a light secret. Is the concept of the light secret something you’ve held in your pocket for some time? And how did it evolve in your mind during the writing of the story?

It recently dawned on me that there exists the opposite of the dark secret—the good action that never sees the light of day, never receives recognition, perhaps not even from the actor. Why this dawned on me I can’t say. It’s certainly not autobiographical—I’m not secretly a saint. Maybe I was trying to counteract the ever-strengthening tug of misanthropy, trying to tune out the morally deafening cacophony (from the Greek, meaning “evil sound”) of defamation and self-congratulation that is the soundtrack of our times.

The story never reveals the nasty rumor about P., and this is just one of several bits of withheld information in the story. Disclosure, or its lack, both shapes the story and is the subject of this story. Were you worried that too much might be withheld?

I gave some thought to what P. might have done, turning over in my mind the various nasty stories that all of us hear, but, in the end, I worried that to reveal the nature of P.’s misdeed would undermine the logic of the story. It’s more damaging, I think, to provide an overly disclosive or illuminating detail than to leave the reader slightly in the dark, as in life. Speaking for myself, I dislike the feeling that I’ve got to the bottom of a story and fully lit up its depths. A short story, like a poem, should always retain an element of mystery.

The narrator, who went through a divorce during the pandemic and is currently single, wants to surround himself with “fine souls.” Do you think he has a good sense of what that means?

I suspect that he’s like the rest of us: we can’t define a fine soul, but we believe that we will recognize one when we see one. Of course, the narrator believes that his old friend P., a person of poor reputation, is a fine soul. I think that it’s to his—the narrator’s—credit.

The narrator is going through several forms of scrutiny simultaneously—a background check, dating, and the social fallout from having lunch with P. How did these parallel pressures shape the story’s architecture?

This story came together, as my stories tend to, like an Italian ice cream. I take separate ideas and, instead of writing one story per idea, I lump them together in a single story like scoops of chocolate and pistachio and cherry in a cornetto. This happens intuitively. Once the elements are in place, you begin to see patterns—and sometimes you begin to understand how your unconscious has worked. For example, it was only after I’d finished the story that I realized that the Simon Morgan character had grown out of someone I knew many years ago, a friend of mine who died as a young man and who, for various reasons, believed himself to be a far worse person than he was. His name was Simon Morgan, I think—he used several surnames—and this story is informally dedicated to his memory. ♦