Well, I love painting. I absolutely love painting, though I’m personally not very good at it. I minored in studio art in college and have an ongoing studio practice (drawing and ceramics) that is personally satisfying, although definitively noncommercial. Beyond my own base knowledge, much of the research for this book was conducted by going into artists’ studios, often tagging along with my husband, Ian Bourland, for his magazine writing (he teaches art history at Georgetown, and writes extensive history and criticism, though mostly about photography, not painting). I thanked the artists whose techniques and material habits I stole from most egregiously in the acknowledgments. As for how I made it come alive—I think the key is materiality. I tried to avoid compositional description because I don’t find it to be imaginatively connective; it’s boring and almost surgical to say, “It was a painting of a horse.” That’s all fine and good for catalogs and wall text, but for a novel I think it’s far more evocative to focus on materials. I.e., instead of, “It was a painting of a horse,” you write, “It was a painting, two inches thick, made from beeswax and pine sap.” With the latter, I think your imagination can really go somewhere.

Your characters operate on a plane beyond simple “likability,” where the idea of their needing our approval, as readers, feels beyond the point. Yet these are also very real people who crave acceptance, love, and acclaim. Can you talk a little bit about what your process is for writing such deep humanity into such complex people?

I love this question because it’s a compliment, and I really wish I had a better answer for you! To be honest, it’s neither choice nor process. All I do, as a writer, is sit down and throw out line and see what comes back. If I catch something real enough, I keep it.

This is a literary novel about the New York art scene that reads like a thriller. Did you start out intending to write one kind of book, or the other? How did the novel come together?

From the beginning, I hoped to follow the creation of a body of work alongside the narrative pursuit of an actual human body, without being too clumsy in one way or the other. The edit process was fairly long, but I think it was for the best—we shaved each chapter down, bit by bit.

Has there ever been a Carey Logan–like figure in your own life?