What would you say is the organizing principle holding together the stories in Don’t Ask?
The collection is really about the small moments of life that ultimately do define who we are—moments we tend to overlook or forget: the dissolution of relationships piece by piece, how they start falling apart; lying to someone in order to impress them even when it goes nowhere; family drama that is only just comprehensible, perhaps, as you lived through it, but now, older, it seems far greater, far more meaningful than it did at the time; our interactions with people who may not be in our lives any longer and were only in them briefly, but how those, all of those moments, help build us up to who we are now. I’m fascinated with relationships, with how we interact with people, and I’m doubly fascinated by how these intersect with memory and nostalgia and how we humans tend to either completely mind-wipe things from our heads, or remember only selected parts of things rather than the whole, and this collection is my exploration of this—how we’re molded by the small moments in our lives and taking stock of them.
Thanks to Rachel for asking me to do this and engaging me in some really fun/poignant discussions.