“Precious Rubbish,” a début graphic novel by Kayla E., a book designer turned cartoonist, delivers an unflinching look at the author’s coming-of-age in a rural fundamentalist community in Texas. “Li’l Kayla,” who divides her time between her estranged parents, grapples with her identity and sexuality.

Composed of comic strips, paper dolls, activity-and-game pages, comic-book advertisements, and more, “Precious Rubbish” is disarming and disturbing. The clean lines and primary colors, grounded in mid-twentieth-century commercial art, evoke Chris Ware and Ivan Brunetti. The connection is as much in the content—using humor to explore the pathos of a sensitive child growing up in a cruel and indifferent world—as it is in the form. Brunetti praises Kayla E.’s work as “a triumph of pure resilience―a psychic thick, dark syrup of personal pain, humiliation, and suffering. And it will make you laugh inappropriately (and guiltily), which is the highest praise I can give.” Kayla E. uses her medium to striking effect: her wry portrait reveals a fresh eye, at once vulnerable and undaunted.

In the excerpt below, wide-eyed Li’l Kayla wanders through her world, trying to make sense of the dysfunction around her and blaming herself for the chaos she encounters.

—By Françoise Mouly & Genevieve Bormes

This is drawn from “Precious Rubbish.”

This week’s story, “The Spit of Him,” is about a boy named Kevin who ventures out to a neighboring village and, in the process, may or may not discover a dark secret about his father. How did the idea for this story come to you?

I began working on this story one night in my apartment. I was sitting at my desk and had just spent a long day working on quite a different story when an image appeared to me out of the blue. A boy, about ten years old, walking along a road in the rain, unsuitably clad in a pair of baggy pajamas, a laptop bag slung across his shoulder. That was what came to me—nothing else. But I was interested in knowing what was going to happen to him. I had to stay at my computer that night and try to put that image into words.

I remembered, also, being a young teen-ager preparing for my confirmation. I phoned the local community center to ask if my family could rent the place for the celebration that was going to be held after the church service. I told them who I was and why I was calling, and then heard the woman at the other end, presumably covering the receiver, say to her husband who ran the place, “It’s his son.” There was a muffled exchange between them, before the man said, “If it’s him, then tell them we can’t.” The woman then fobbed me off with some excuse. They didn’t seem to realize that I’d overheard them. I never mentioned it to my dad—I didn’t want him to know that we’d been snubbed like that.

At the heart of this, I suppose, lies the question: How can you ever be yourself when others have already decided who you are? I’m sure that the kind of rejection that Kevin and his dad experience in my story happens wherever there are people. The two are made the object of a kind of vigilantism on the part of the surrounding society; it’s an instinct that is very human, I suppose, but also a part of us that contributes to unrest in the world. Kevin’s dad has done something that’s very easy to denounce, perhaps even to hate him for, but I felt I had to find something about him that was redeeming, something I liked about him despite what he’d done—and I was able to find that by spending so much time with his son, Kevin.

A lot of readers probably think of Denmark as a utopian, egalitarian society. In your story, however, Kevin and his family seem to be outcasts, ostracized by their peers and, in his father’s case, resentful of their dependence on the government. Is there another side to Denmark that you were trying to depict?

My story about Kevin takes place, like my own childhood, far from the cities and the major towns of Denmark, in a small place of fields, fields, and more fields, where for better or worse everyone knows everyone else. Although Denmark is a small and wealthy nation, there’s still a wide gap between the well-to-do urban population and those in the rural districts whose lives are under pressure and who feel forgotten by those in power. Very few authors in Denmark write from that kind of perspective, and there are even fewer whose work finds its way outside the country’s borders. Denmark is a welfare society with a large and prosperous middle class, and our literature tends to reflect that, which is fair enough, but there’s another side to our country, too, and a growing underclass that literature should be giving voice to. Too many houses in rural areas stand empty and deteriorating: windows boarded up, yards littered with junk, brickwork greening with algae. If I happen to drive past one of these places with friends from more prosperous backgrounds, they’ll often say something like “No one lives there, surely?” And I’ll tell them, “Yes, someone probably does”—and, if it’s back where I come from, I might even know them.

During his outing, Kevin pays close attention to everything he sees, including advertisements and signs posted on houses and scratched graffiti inside a bus shelter. His observations feel representative of the experience of childhood, which is both to notice certain things in excruciating detail and also not to notice other things at all, like what people are telling him about his father. How did you navigate this dynamic?

Children see and notice a lot more than we grownups care to realize. On the other hand, everything appears new to them. A child doesn’t think much about whether they could be living a different life under different circumstances. Kevin doesn’t think of himself, for example, as poor and underprivileged. Far from it. There’s both enthusiasm and pride in him, which is nevertheless damaged by the perceptions of those he encounters.

My own childhood was fairly O.K. to begin with, but went off the rails when my parents suffered unbearable tragedies and were given no help in dealing with them. That made me a child who was afraid to be at home. I had to survive on my own. One of my strategies was mentally uncoupling myself from my family and pretending they didn’t concern me. I related to everything around me as if it were a film I happened to be in. Or else, I was the camera operator; I made myself an observer of the world around me. It’s a perspective I’ve maintained, and, even though it was born of traumatic events, it benefits me as a writer today; it’s that attention to detail, I think, that brings my writing to life.

But of course there are things that Kevin doesn’t see, or, rather, chooses not to, and I think that has to do with the desire to protect oneself. Sometimes you have to bow your head and lower your gaze so reality doesn’t break you. Kevin knows that. The problem is that you then risk crumpling up and becoming invisible if it’s a posture you keep for too long.

Much of the story takes place in dialogue, in a conversation between Kevin and a couple, Birgitte and Henrik, with whom he is unknowingly linked. Did you always know that much of the story would take place through this conversation, or did it come about in the course of writing?

Your story “On the Night of the Khatam” takes place primarily at a gathering of Afghan refugees who are living in Sacramento, and who meet to talk, gossip, eat, and pray together, although their histories, political views, and affiliations in Afghanistan are all quite different. Did gatherings like this take place when you were growing up in Sacramento?

Sure, and it’s funny because, when I was growing up, I would do whatever I could to escape these gatherings. It was only as an adult that I began to appreciate the stories that were told at khatams or parties. Many of our family friends were also fantastic storytellers. Sometimes, you had to wait a few hours for them to finish arguing about gardens or masjid politics, but, if you were patient, you might hear some sweet old gray-bearded man tell the most harrowing (or sorrowful) story you’d ever heard, and you’d drive home at night thinking about how you had known this man for decades, had grown up with his children, could distinguish his chuckle in a room full of laughing guests, and still never would have guessed the immensity of the suffering he had experienced.

The host of the gathering, Hajji Hotak, is a character who has appeared in many previous stories of yours, including the title story of your collection, “The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories.” What keeps you engaging with Hajji Hotak and his family in your fiction?

I believe James Baldwin once said, “Every writer has only one story to tell, and he has to find a way of telling it until the meaning becomes clearer and clearer, until the story becomes at once more narrow and larger, more and more precise, more and more reverberating.” And I think there might be something about Hajji Hotak and his family that I haven’t figured out yet. A clarity, or a reverberation, I have yet to uncover.

In the story, we’re thrown into a number of long-term disagreements and disputes that aren’t always easy for those without a detailed knowledge of Afghan history to follow. What effect do you want the litany of half-finished sentences about that history—which come when the men argue partway through the story—to have on the reader?

Though this wasn’t a conscious decision, I suppose I may have wanted my reader to experience these disputes and historical tensions in a similar way to how I experienced them as a child. The stories, the historical narratives in my community, were always fragmented and unfinished. There were constant omissions and contradictory accounts. Though the Soviet war and the subsequent wars that emerged as a consequence of the Soviet war have ended, the battle over the memory of these wars continues to be waged to this day.

An unexpected guest arrives at the gathering—a man named Fahim, who has been more or less ostracized from the community because of his alcoholism and bad behavior while drunk. He is welcomed in and allowed to reconcile with the other men. Later (spoiler alert), we discover that he may have been guilty of many far more serious betrayals. How did the character of Fahim come to you? Do you feel sympathy for him? Ambivalence?

Years ago, there was an old Afghan man who used to come to our local mosque a little tipsy, or sometimes high. He always cried during prayer and wore the same old bell-bottom suit. Something from the seventies, I thought. I imagined him strolling around Kabul before the wars. And, out of this image, the whole story unfolded, and Fahim became the center of it. And, yes, I not only feel sympathy for Fahim, I care for him.

What makes the other men accept him back into the community and then go to great lengths to honor him after his death, with the founder of the community offering up his own burial plot?

I think that, despite his flaws and self-destructive habits, Fahim is charming and vulnerable in a way that the other men in this story find both unusual and endearing. He is the sort of person who is so nakedly flawed that, on meeting him, you begin to see yourself differently. Your secret defects and weaknesses may suddenly seem less monstrous, and I think that might be why Fahim is still loved in the end.

In this world of shifting allegiances, political disagreements, muddied history, and the basic struggles of integrating into another country’s very different culture, what are the ties that bind these characters and keep them coming together in this way?

Oftentimes, I think it can be something rudimentary, like language. It’s not just that they speak Pashto or Farsi (though that, in and of itself, is important) but also that they share a cultural and historical language. The language of exile. Of war. You want to speak. You want to be heard by others. You want to be at least briefly understood. It can be as simple as that.

In a couple of other stories of yours that appeared in The New Yorker, you used a second-person narrator. Here, it’s a collective first-person. “We” attend the gathering—and we, the readers, never learn anything specific about the narrator. Why is that?

Initially, I tried writing this story in a singular first person, from the perspective of Hotak’s son, the unnamed Ph.D. student, but I found that the more I wrote the more the narrator disappeared into the story, into this chorus of other voices and opinions, and so eventually I just decided to let the singular first person evaporate into a collective voice, and it turned into this roving, bodiless, almost omniscient presence that is attempting to speak for (and about) the men in the story but, I think, is failing in the process.

You know, it’s odd, because at a gathering like this you may find yourself witnessing intense moments of vulnerability. One man might describe how he was tortured as a prisoner of war, or another might recall the day his brother was hauled away from their home, never to be seen again. But, even amid these memories, these recollections, so much is left unsaid that you can leave the encounter feeling that you know even less about the person, or the community, than you did before. We speak and speak, we narrate, we attempt to communicate, and yet, the gulf widens, or, at least, becomes more mysterious. ♦

In your story from this week’s issue, “That Girl,” a bookish teen-ager named Theo finds herself increasingly attracted to Shirlee, a more rebellious girl from her neighborhood. How did these two characters come to you, and what do you think makes them so drawn to each other?

This story represents a snapshot of millennial Black Southern girlhood. The characters, though figments of my imagination, also resemble people I knew, characters I’ve always been hungry to read. I think the girls are drawn to each other because each one sees the other as a sort of missing piece. The self-reliant and self-possessed Shirlee is looking for the routine and regulation that she was never provided, while Theo is in search of self, and a freedom to be that self.

Were you thinking of a specific time and place while writing the story?

Yes, I was. The story takes place in the early two-thousands, in the Memphis area. It was important for me to portray the type of close-knit neighborhood I grew up in, especially in the era before the mass adoption of cell phones and social media. I wanted the piece to evoke something simpler, rawer, more authentic than the cyber bonding and social feeds that we encounter now. There was simply something different about running the streets back then, feeling the heat of summer and experiencing the exhilarating first taste of freedom and independence; tethered not to devices, but to the adventure of becoming and discovery.

Music helps shape some of that atmosphere; the girls listen to Total together, and songs like “This Is How We Do It” play on the stereo. How did you decide which songs to include?

The music I featured in this story is slightly before the characters’ time; I think I subconsciously did that because, even in their naïveté, these girls are aware of worlds that are larger than they can even comprehend. It was hard to decide on which specific songs to mention because I love music so much, but mostly I wanted them to be fun and memorable.

Much of the story hinges on the complicated relationship between Theo and her mother, Jane, who has her own patchy romantic history. Are there aspects of love that Theo is learning from her mother? Or actively willing herself not to learn from her?

This story is part of a larger piece that I’ve been sporadically working on, and I think the theme of that work is relearning to love, safely and correctly. The same theme is reflected in “That Girl,” as well. Theo, the astute teen-ager that she is, already understands her mother’s type of loving as precisely what not to do. Through her relationship with Shirlee, she attempts to create the kind of love that she wants, on her own terms—something her mother has never done, nor known to want to do.

Food is an important love language for both Theo and Jane: Shirlee brings Theo pilfered snacks, such as Kool-Aid and sour pickles, whereas Jane’s new husband, Roger, is a good cook (unlike his predecessors, and also unlike Jane). What is each of the characters trying to say through these offerings?

My grandmother always said, “Ain’t no such thing as empty-handed love.” As such, I’ve always regarded those platitudes expressing love as this free thing that doesn’t demand anything—let alone reciprocity—as crap-coated recipes for being used. Love, for me, is like an altar for your offerings. I think the characters are using food to say, I love and care for you, and I want you to have something delicious to your senses because that is what you are for me. I think it occurs to Shirlee to act in this way because of the lack of that kind of nutritive love in her own life, whereas I think Roger performs love in this way in recognition of Jane’s lack of that kind of love in her past.

After she discovers Theo’s relationship, Jane grounds her, sending her off to volunteer at an adult day-care center and attend a Bible-study group. Although Theo initially resists both, she comes to accept her situation, and even finds something of interest in both experiences. Why did you want to put Theo in these situations?

Extra church always factored into my punishments as a kid, but I have zero idea where it came from to put her in the adult day-care center. That said, I think that, through these experiences, Theo is prompted to try to understand herself and relate to the world around her in different ways.

At the end of the story, Shirlee says to Theo, “You couldn’t hang with me in the first place.” When you were writing this story, did you always envision the two girls’ fate as that of star-crossed lovers? Or is there a world in which they end up together?

I always knew they would be star-crossed lovers. I guess that’s because, unfortunately, it’s the nature of most of our first loves. The romantic in me stubbornly insists, though, that they end up together and, ultimately, get to right the wrongs that have been perpetuated on their bodies, through love. ♦

In “Life with Spider,” your story in this week’s issue, a young man named Fletcher encounters a creature with six legs, jet-black skin, and no eyes, ears, or mouth. This is Spider, and Fletcher finds that Spider is everywhere he is, in increasingly menacing and forward ways. But Fletcher is less surprised than he might be, because he recognizes Spider. And yet Spider terrorizes him. There are lots of ways that Spider can be read as a metaphor—for depression, terror, self-hatred—but this is a story with a lot of very concrete action. How did you go about balancing these two modes of storytelling?

I should mention at the outset that I find a lot of what happens to Fletcher very funny. It’s horrific, too, of course; that tension is at the heart of the story. If there is comedy there, I think it also points to the two modes you identify, and how they relate to each other within the text. However unsettling, icky, or frightening the reader finds Spider, they will, I am sure, recognize it for what it is: a literary device. Fletcher is not so lucky. He is familiar with Spider’s weight and texture, the click of its legs on his kitchen floor, how the light bends when it touches its skin. Perhaps above all, he knows, all too well, the mood that comes upon him whenever Spider is there—not a physical quality, exactly, but a felt sense of its presence.

From the beginning, I decided that I was going to treat Spider with the rigor I would afford to a human character. Since thought and speech were unavailable, this meant exploring how it morphed and moved. While writing, the two modes you describe seemed at points to converge. To say of Spider that it “trips Fletcher up” or “weighs him down” is to state the material case using figures of speech. This doubleness or blurriness hedges against the idea that Spider “represents” any one thing. Spider booby-traps Fletcher’s life. Hopefully, while doing so, it wriggles free of any neat definition.

It’s interesting that this story isn’t told by Fletcher, or by a third-person narrator. There’s an unnamed person telling it, a friend of Fletcher’s. What does that slight distance, that as-told-to mode, allow you to do, as a writer?

Having a teller who is implicated in the tale, who first conceals and then confesses to a betrayal, lends “Life with Spider” a moral dimension that it would otherwise have lacked. When the story first came to me, it was a third-person account of a dark time in Fletcher’s life. It only really clicked when I struck upon the idea of the reluctant confession. The as-told-to mode brings shame and loyalty into the picture. In doing so, it heightens the ambiguity of perspective.

I mentioned earlier that I find what happens to Fletcher funny, but it’s important that he is both an object of comedy, hence the nod to the cartoon violence of “Tom and Jerry,” and one of compassion, perhaps even pity. While writing, I was reminded that Buster Keaton was one of Samuel Beckett’s favorite actors—that face!—and thought of Beckett’s cruelly hilarious aphorism, in “Endgame”: “Nothing is funnier than unhappiness.” I don’t always agree with this sentiment, but he’s right to suggest—his work demonstrates—that humor and pathos are often inextricable.

Fletcher embarks on a quest to get rid of Spider, trying to drown it, burn it, even microwave it. Nothing works. In narrative terms, how do you deal with this kind of dead end? Did you see a way out from the beginning?

That the story presented me with an apparent dead end gave rise to its antic propulsion. If all you see is walls, then, sooner or later, you’ll start to bounce off them. Fletcher’s life with Spider first came to me as a succession of semi-tragic, semi-slapstick vignettes, a catalogue of all the energetic ways in which he struggles to defeat a foe that is—will always be—maddeningly indifferent to damage. Spider makes a Sisyphus of him. To see no way out was the beginning.

The narrator fails Fletcher, abandoning him when he’s most needed. By contrast, Spider is always there for and with Fletcher. In what way is this an optimistic conclusion?

On the one hand, it’s not optimistic at all. There is no exorcism, no remedy, no uncanny extermination. The narrator fails Fletcher, who himself is flamboyantly failing. On the other hand, if this story had concluded with Fletcher “succeeding,” with the triumph of violence against himself or Spider, it would have been too bleak, and too neat. What it resolves on instead is a form of acceptance, a détente. Out of this emerges what, to me at least, is a complicated hope. Fletcher looks forward to a time when Spider can be coaxed into performing with him while it wears a porkpie hat. At the end of the story, he’s still in the dark, but at least he’s laughing. ♦

Your story in this week’s issue, “Chance the Cat,” is, as the title suggests, about a cat called Chance. When did this cat first come into your mind as a possible fictional character?

I based the cat in the story on a real cat. His name is Baudelaire, and he was found on the street in Chicago, not far from the Obamas’ house on the South Side. He lives in Boston now, but he was at our house recently and we spent some time together. So I’d had him in mind for a few years before I began writing the story.

Chance is discovered on the street by Kayla and William, two students at the University of Chicago who have just started dating. Kayla is Black and William is white. When you started writing the story, did you know there’d be an interracial relationship at its heart?

I began by imagining the cat and the landscape—not only that part of Chicago, the physical landscape, but the historical landscape—and, of course, my own limitations, when it comes to knowing what it’s like to be a cat. And then, early on, I saw Kayla and William bumping into each other and then, as I was writing, I was listening to them talking at the café. I knew early on that they were going to rescue the cat and make up stories about him. I didn’t know there was going to be this interracial relationship at the heart of the story, but it appeared as soon as they bumped into each other and shared information about what they were researching—and then they rescued the cat.

William is studying Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and writing a thesis on the theory of signification. He tends to lapse into lecture mode, which Kayla seems to tolerate. She’s studying Foucault, but doesn’t appear to be quite as assertive as William in discussing her theories. What did you want to convey about the day-to-day nature of their interactions? How important a role does Chance play in keeping them together?

I’m not sure if Kayla really tolerates William in his lecture mode—at least she doesn’t in the long run. William imagines the life of Chance on the street in one way, and she imagines Chance’s survival in other ways. There’s a certain point, and perhaps this is true of all human relationships, where one is tolerating the other, where the balance isn’t perfect. Sometimes love—I mean really passionate eros—is powerful enough to override this imbalance, but I’m not sure if they were really in love. That’s for the reader to tweeze out.

Kayla’s apartment, which William moves into, is near the Obamas’ house in Hyde Park. There are always Secret Service agents guarding the property. Partway through, the perspective of the story shifts, and we see events from the point of view of an agent called Dwight. Did you do any research on the Secret Service, or did you rely purely on your imagination when considering how he’d approach his job?

I had a family member who lived in that neighborhood, right down the street from the Obamas’ house, and when the President was in town the Secret Service personnel stopped everyone and checked their names against a list. I didn’t research the Secret Service, although I did see a video on Japanese trains and how operators are taught to say things out loud, to repeat operational instructions out loud even when they’re alone, and that got me thinking about these jobs people have—standing, watching, guarding—and the history behind that type of work.

Early on in their relationship, Kayla and William take a train to Michigan City, Indiana. Kayla, thinking back about this time some years later, is still a little troubled by the interaction they had with a white conductor. In Chicago, whenever Kayla and William are stopped by Dwight, he seems to give William a harder time. Is it difficult for Kayla and William to articulate their feelings about these encounters?

I imagine that Kayla can articulate what she felt in those encounters, because she’s writing something that will clarify the dynamic—and she’s had to think about this kind of encounter her entire life. With William, I’m not so sure that he’ll ever really be able to articulate what was happening to him, and of course he’s the one who talks the most. I saw William as someone who can easily talk himself into a corner, using academic jargon, and then just sit there for the rest of his life, perfectly content.

As the story unfolds, it seems to be Kayla’s story more than anyone’s, because we learn that she’s writing an essay that draws on this time in her life. But it’s also the cat’s story; this is the creature that embodies the narrative. Toward the end, though, an authorial “you” emerges more distinctly. Whose story do you think it is?

In a way, all stories, all art, are a confession of limitation, and that’s inherent in the fact that a story has to begin somewhere and end somewhere else. Personally—and this is just me right now, thinking about it—I want to believe that it’s Kayla’s story, but I also want to be honest enough to admit that it isn’t. I felt a call-and-response as I wrote and revised, a sense of wanting to pin down what mattered—I guess that’s obvious—but I also wanted to expose my limits, and let the cat take over.

Nearly every section of the story opens with a question or an answer about what matters. Were those opening refrains in your mind from the beginning?

I just let those questions and answers, which are the questions all writers ask as they create, or as they revise, into the narrative. Does this particular thing matter in the wider story I’m imagining? I let those bones stay on the surface. It’s the fundamental question we ask, or should be asking, all the time: does this matter? Doesn’t everything matter? Does that glance mean what I think it means? What can I imagine? What can’t I imagine?

In “Crown Heights North,” your story in this week’s issue, a dead man downloads a running app—that’s the setup, both simple and deeply complicated. The man was in his mid-fifties when he died, and he now finds himself in an afterlife that bears a strong resemblance to the world he knew prior to his death. What appealed to you about an afterlife that didn’t involve bliss or damnation?

Bliss has always creeped me out, and damnation doesn’t sound very compelling, either. That said, my own afterlife preferences were outweighed by other emotions and experiences, at least one of which is the intimacy and privacy of moving through a landscape with a voice in your ear that nobody else around you can hear. That really is like being in an alternate world, while still being in the same one. Or it is for me! Many other contemporary humans have been walking around with recorded voices piping through their headphones for years, but I never went around much with my own private soundspace until I started to go on runs with recorded coaching voices.

And perhaps a stronger factor was that this story was written very much under the spell of the odd, wondrous, perfect opening of Paul La Farge’s novel “The Artist of the Missing,” in which a dead man is visiting a new city, and negotiating repeatedly for more time to explore it before having to return from whence he came—which also seems like a place where he is alive, in the sense of still having thoughts, actions, a community.

There’s a mordant irony to his taking up running after he dies. Typically this is an activity we do in the pursuit of health. What other objectives might he have?

I remember reading an interview once with a professional runner who said of himself something to the effect of “I don’t think happy people run miles under four minutes.” That said, I suspect that the runs are more than a simple escape from pain, boredom, loneliness. While you’re running, your inner life does change pretty dramatically. It’s a whole other set of thoughts that start surfacing. And this is a person whose imagination is central to who he is, to what is meaningful to him about being alive, or at least that’s how I think of him. While in the I.C.U., he has to spend time with parts of his imagination that are overwhelmingly hostile. The runs might bring him to a new space in his imagination?

The app is motivational in nature—a Global Head Coach exhorts and encourages the dead man through his runs, trying to help him reach a kind of transcendence. Can you talk a little about what could be some convergences between this kind of wellness culture and a more eschatological focus that we typically find in discussions of death and the afterlife?

I do think exercise is magical, and more transformative than any sermon or therapy or chant. It might be the most benign religion out there. It’s a mystery to me why I don’t run or swim for an hour every day, given that it would obviously make me happier, nicer, and more imaginative. Wellness culture is a degraded look-alike of the religion of exercise, sure, for all the reasons we all already know, but most religions have zombie look-alikes. I find myself in a tangle when I try to think about how this story relates to visions of death and the afterlife, even as it clearly is centered on death and the afterlife. This story was written in a more intuitive, emotional way than most of my stories, and was probably knit out of all the stories I associate with Paul La Farge, stories by Poe or Lovecraft or Ocampo or Cortázar or Morrison or Wharton. Lots of ghosts, a fair amount of goofiness, like a reading list put together in collaboration with Borges.

The dead man recalls being in the desert near the Red Sea, a place of great spiritual significance, and seeing a woman cross “the vast, shadeless sands”; she was hawking wares. The dead man seems to find some comfort in that. How do you think about this memory?

I suspect he likes being wrong, or having his imaginative interpretation undermined in some way. There he is in this landscape that feels otherworldly—and then it reveals itself as very this-worldly. And, you know, sometimes, but not always, one does want to be reassured that we are still in this world, our own fallen world and not some other one. ♦

In “Keats at Twenty-four,” your story in this week’s issue of The New Yorker, a nameless middle-aged writer seems to have come to something of a halt. Let’s start with the title. You quote a line from Robert Lowell: “Every writer, every journeyman, / past the halfway, is Keats at twenty-four.” How do these lines give impetus to this story? And does it mean anything to you that Lowell eventually deleted them?

I think every writer is susceptible to the grandiose, urgent, doomy mood of those lines. Is it all over for me? Just when I’m getting started? And writers remain susceptible even when, as with Lowell and the character in my story, it’s been a long time since they were twenty-four. Nobody does grandiose, urgent, and doomy quite as thoroughly as Lowell. I think he puts in the word “journeyman” to offset the grandiosity a little—to remind himself that at any age and whatever her stature, a writer is always someone who’s still figuring it out—and I’d like to think he intended for there to be at least a touch of irony in the comparison between old himself and young Keats.

The lines come from an early draft of Lowell’s book “The Dolphin.” The draft upset people because in it Lowell borrowed heavily from letters sent to him by his former wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, herself a formidable writer; attributed to the poem’s version of Hardwick statements the real Hardwick hadn’t made; and reordered the sequence of events in their divorce. Several friends told Lowell he’d gone too far; famously, the poet Elizabeth Bishop even declared to him that “art just isn’t worth that much.” Lowell revised extensively, in an attempt to, in his words, “blunt and angle” what he had borrowed. Unfortunately, he succeeded. When I read a facsimile edition of an early draft, published by FSG a few years ago, many of the unrevised poems seemed sharper and more vivid to me.

The narrator is gay, and he thinks about writing a story about a gay widower who sort of recedes from life, hiding in a bare hotel room. These thoughts come after a meditation on the meaning of a folk song for a little boy realizing that he’s gay. How does the narrator’s queerness interact with the sense of solitude, or retreat, in the story?

Walt Odets writes, in “Out of the Shadows: Reimagining Gay Men’s Lives,” that isolation can feel like safety to many gay men, especially those of an older generation. The character in my story grew up in a time and place where it could be dangerous, if you were gay, to let anyone get to know you well enough to figure out who you were. The character has long thought of himself as preferring solitude, and he wants to believe it’s merely fortuitous that he both has this preference and has chosen a vocation, writing, that has to be pursued alone. But what if solitude is a defense that has turned into a trap? To a person who has lived with solitude as long as he has, it’s always going to feel like a refuge, but he’s starting to have doubts, and they’re surfacing in his dreams and memories.

At a literary party, the narrator tells an older writer that he’s having trouble finishing a novel, partly because he “stole from life.” How much is that a cheeky reference to the story we’re reading?

It’s terrible. In this story I’ve committed not only autofiction but also metafiction. And as a writer I’m supposed to be a staid realist with Jamesian tendencies. All I can say in my defense is that it’s not entirely unprecedented. I also slipped into metafiction briefly at a crucial moment in my first novel, “Necessary Errors,” when a grief so upsets the hero that the narrator admits it has torn the fabric of the novel.

Much of this story describes a kind of stasis. How do you insure that the writing itself—and the movement of the story—is not static? And do you think of other writers whose form cuts against the content of their work?

Plot-wise, not much happens in the novels in Rachel Cusk’s “Outline” trilogy, but reading the books is like eating candy for dinner because Cusk’s characters keep telling stories that seem to give their souls away. I think I was trying to steal that trick—that feeling she gives of being told secrets, of getting almost more than one deserves as a reader. One of my favorite books is Cyril Connolly’s “The Unquiet Grave,” which is in form just a collection of quotes from his favorite writers, in English and French, and little observations, mostly unkind, that he makes about other people, but Connolly puts his collection together in such a way that the reader can’t help but try to puzzle out who broke his heart, and why. The style of my story probably also owes a great deal to Sigrid Nunez and Jenny Offill, and their practice of telling stories in episodes interspersed with literary references and interpretive meditations. ♦

The narrator of your story “The Good Denis” (which was translated, from the French, by Jordan Stump) learns from her aging mother, who may have dementia, that as a young child she was cared for by a man she has never heard of, whose goodness was unrivalled. How did this premise come to you?

It’s always difficult for me to say where the idea for a story comes from. It’s a mixture of nebulous memories, dreams, random news items I’ve read in the papers. This story is not autobiographical, but I suppose it was in part (a small part!) inspired by the fact that my mother is now old and our conversations are stranger than they used to be.

Throughout the story, we’re unsure whether the mother is telling the truth or playing a manipulative game or simply too senile to know what’s true and what isn’t. Do you, as the author, know which of those possibilities is most accurate? Or are they all wrong?

I always make a point of not knowing more than the reader does. I’m not the kind of writer who knows the secret to understanding a story and chooses not to reveal it. What you don’t know I don’t know, either.

The story engages with the idea of saintliness and its effect on people who are not themselves saintly. It also questions our notion of morality: the narrator’s husband, who specializes in representations of the Virgin Mary, for instance, feels it would be immoral not to display images that are profane or blasphemous. Do you see Denis as a force for good in this narrative, or the opposite?

I don’t really know. Both, perhaps.

By the end of the story, the good Denis has become such an abstraction that the narrator starts looking for a reincarnation of his spirit in random people on Facebook. What is she actually searching for?

What she’s searching for is the idea of a pure, absolute goodness that could miraculously appear in human form.

The narrator has a mother who’s drawing close to death and a husband who is suicidal. By the very end of the story, Denis has become, more or less, another name for death—and she has begun to hide from him. Is it possible that the narrator is the one who’s actually dying?

The narrator senses that the good Denis may cause her death, which is why she protects herself from him while leaving her husband vulnerable. Her husband (who, in any case, thinks only of death) will perhaps become Denis’s prey instead.

I have the feeling that you want your fiction to ask questions, rather than answer them. If that’s the case here, what questions are you asking with “The Good Denis”?

How much can we trust our memories? Likewise, those of our parents? Why is our parents’ history—or, rather, what they tell us about it—so important to us? And how do we define goodness? Evil we know how to talk about, but goodness?

You started writing—and publishing—when you were still in high school. You’ve said that Joyce Carol Oates was an early influence. There’s a certain heightened energy, and a precipitous momentum, in “The Good Denis” that reminds me of some of her stories. Do you still feel an affinity with her work?

Yes, I am always and forever a great admirer of Joyce Carol Oates. I hope she’ll be given the Nobel Prize—she so deserves it. I discovered her work when I was ten, when my mother borrowed her novel “them” from the library. That book was a revelation. I said to myself something, like, “That’s what literature is.” ♦

Marie NDiaye’s responses were translated, from the French, by Deborah Treisman.