This is your debut novel. Describe how you came to write this story and why you think it is important. What inspired you? Were any of the characters based on people you know in real life? On yourself?

When I was a 23-year-old living in New York, trying to temp enough to pay my West Village rent, most of my writing happened in early-morning sessions at midtown coffee shops. I was plugging away at an ambitiously (misguidedly) conceptual novel about a museum. It was full of intricate ideas about aesthetics and imagination, but I couldn’t have told you what the characters wanted from their lives or what they ate for breakfast. The novel was going nowhere. And I wasn’t happy writing it in chunks of time scraped from the edges of my cubicle life.

When I finally decided to move back to Los Angeles so I could devote myself more fully to writing, I felt like I had failed at the test of young urbanity. I moved back to the house where I’d grown up and spent my days tutoring students from my former high school, trying to help care for my ailing grandmother, and generally feeling lonely. I realized that I couldn’t bring myself to write about anything but the gravity and fear of living with a dying woman I loved.

When my grandmother died, I realized the only novel I wanted to write would be a novel that sprung from her death. I have an aunt, like Tilly, who has been estranged from my family for many years. I wanted to explore what that kind of rupture can do to a family, and to probe my own sense of loss at my aunt’s absence. I abandoned my museum novel and spent several months doing little but writing the first draft of this one.

As for Tilly and Stella, the boundary between myself and these women is a porous one. My life looks more like Stella’s—we’ve both experienced disenchantment with the terms and rules of young urban posturing—but in many ways I identify more with Tilly. Sometimes I think I made her life “exotic,” removed from mine by age and money, in order to shield myself from our psychic common ground. There was a kind of deluded geographic logic in this refuge: she felt too close, so I banished her to a trailer far away.

How did you come to be a writer? What is your background, and who are your influences?

I started writing before I was literate, which made things tricky in the beginning. I have two older brothers to whom I would tell stories (usually about princesses) that they wrote down. Whenever my brothers got tired of transcribing, my characters usually met with premature deaths—so I learned a sense of tragedy early.