Decapitated princesses aside, I was lucky enough to grow up with a family who supported my writing aspirations from the beginning. I think this is part of why so much of my writing is about family, and why so many of my favorite writers (everybody from Virginia Woolf to Anne Carson) find themselves reckoning, and re-reckoning, with family in their works.

I’ve always felt certain that I wanted to write. It was figuring out how to make money that gave me trouble. Along the way, I’ve worked a pretty wide variety of jobs: juice barista, coffee barista, clothing retail, dyslexia tutoring, SAT tutoring, travel writing, college instruction, temping, and innkeeping. I currently work in a bakery. The necessity of finding work to support my writing habit has actually served me quite well—kept me in touch with the world beyond my own head, for starters, and given me ample fodder for characters and dramatic mishaps.

You were born in Washington, D.C., and grew up in L.A., and have also lived in Boston, Iowa City, and Nicaragua, among other places. Did living in such disparate places help you write this book?

I’ve always felt my youth in Los Angeles as a strong part of my identity, even though, as a teenager, I felt very estranged from many aspects of its culture. I saw myself as bookish and homely in a world of beauty, which was very L.A. of me, looking back: I found the script synopsis that fit. I think we get attached to the first things we feel alienated from; they help us sculpt ourselves in opposition, thrust us into relief.

My own migrations have certainly given me a sense of the emotional stakes of location—how we construct ourselves around places, how I’ve done this over and over again—and place was certainly a huge part of this book for me. One of the novel’s many abandoned titles was This West, which spoke to my sense of two kinds of geography operating simultaneously for its characters: the geography of desire (the places they mythologize) and the geography of disappointment (the places they find). I wanted to write a modern narrative of disillusioned manifest destiny: Stella flees to the West in an attempt to disavow her old identity and claim a new one; Tilly keeps flunking the test of reinvention and returning to the desolate inland center.

Many of my characters feel torn between living on the margins and putting themselves inside communities. Tilly hides in a trailer in the middle of the desert, Abe finds comfort in the empty nocturnal streets, Stella finds herself taking a train out of the city. In a way, the novel is less about any place in particular and more about the impulse to keep moving between places—and the way in which this between-ness becomes a source of despair as well as refuge.