This week’s story, “Intimacy,” is about a writer’s friendship with an older author and his wife. When did you start thinking about their interactions? Did you know from the outset that the author’s wife would play such a central role in the story?

Last summer, I was working on a lecture on the short-story form and found that I had very little to say about stories in general. I could only think about the individual experience of writing or reading one, but couldn’t extrapolate from these instances. So I decided to write a story in parallel to the lecture, to try and “catch” myself in the act. I told you in a past conversation that I always write short stories when I know how they will end. But for this one, I had no idea where I was going—I didn’t know at the start that Marian would enter the story and certainly not that she would play a central role. I wrote it paragraph by paragraph, trying to pay close attention, and I think this is why the story keeps changing at every turn.

Your first novel, “Walking on the Ceiling,” which was published in 2019, was about a young woman who forms a close connection with an older novelist, which unfolds over long walks and many e-mails. Did you have that novel in mind when you were writing this story?

I wasn’t thinking specifically about “Walking on the Ceiling,” however, the relationship between writers of different generations is one that continues to interest me. There is so much to explore in that space between imagination and reality—interacting with a person and with their works, the various hierarchies and hopes. There is also something quite old-fashioned in the particular setup I am drawn to, something like an apprenticeship, which I find so pleasing. So it’s not a surprise that I picked this trope when I began to wonder, “What can I write about?”

The younger writer is the narrator of the story, so we’re privy to her thoughts. She and her husband have small children, and they’re weighed down by the practicalities of parenthood. But she doesn’t want to share this kind of information with the author. Instead, she tells him about an idea she has for a novel, set in her father’s ancestral village. Does she think the author will be bored by her identity as a mother, or is it that she wants to forget it?

I think that it’s both of these things. We meet the narrator at a moment when her identity is in flux. She is holding on to an idea of what a writer should be, even though this model no longer seems authentic to her. At the same time, she is not very comfortable in her identity as a mother, or, rather, how this identity has merged with her life as a writer—that is to say, with her imagination. It’s easier for her to keep these two parts of herself separate, but it also means that her identity as a writer is not true to who she really is.

When she meets the author’s wife, Marian, there’s a warmth between them. Marian hasn’t forgotten the demands of early motherhood, and there’s a sense in which she’s intuitively able to understand the narrator’s position. Yet the narrator seems to chafe against this a little, too. Does she resent Marian’s empathy in any way? Or begrudge the fact that the author has had such a selfless wife to smooth out his life of art?

What is striking to the narrator about Marian is that she is so comfortable with who she is—she does not compartmentalize her different selves. The narrator does begrudge the fact that Marian has made her husband’s writing life very smooth, but, ultimately, I think that she is resentful about the various dead ends in her own life, the experiences that she tries to keep contained, without allowing them to merge or interact.

After the narrator’s daughter is injured at day care, she falls out of touch with Marian for a while. Usually, it would be easy to apologize for missing some messages, but in this case, the narrator discovers that Marian has become very ill. The narrator feels that she had become close to Marian, yet she’s also aware that she’s overstating that closeness. Why is it so important to her to assert this?

Because she has lost her internal compass for intimacy. The narrator plays at being intimate with the author and his wife, following some rules she has set for herself, and then one day discovers, almost to her surprise, that she cares deeply for Marian. It’s as if she is trying to correct her faulty compass by overstating the closeness.

Jhumpa Lahiri’s story “P’s Parties” occasionally came to mind when I was reading this, in the way that a relationship develops through a series of social encounters. They’re quite different stories, of course, but I wondered if you’d thought about this story at all.

I remember reading it very carefully when it was published in the magazine. What affected me most in Lahiri’s story was the sense of time passing, the way our obsessions seem meaningless in the aftermath of tragic events (or, rather, from the larger vantage point of a life). I also feel very familiar with Lahiri’s writing of social gatherings, especially of expatriates; how intimacies are acted out and measured on these occasions, and how these occasions can make up the majority of our friendships in adulthood.

You are the mother of a young child yourself. Do you feel close to your narrator? Do you think she judges herself harshly—or that the story judges her fairly?

I wish I knew the answer to that. I can’t say whether the judgment is harsh or fair, but only that it feels accurate to me. I feel close to the narrator’s split spheres of belonging, and I recognize that these spheres take time to harmonize, to encompass one another.

Early in the story, the narrator comments, “I should say, before I continue, that this isn’t a story about writing, about making art.” Do you want the reader to believe that?

The narrator’s past beliefs about writing and making art no longer feel true to life and she is aware of this fact at the start of the story. But writing and storytelling are still integral to how she interacts with the world; she can’t just cast them aside. One of her misjudgments at the beginning of the story comes from the fact that she sees generosity in life and generosity in writing as separate, but they actually derive from the same source. The story is ultimately about listening to others, about communication. So the narrator is mistaken: this is indeed a story about making art. ♦