This novel touches on many serious issues, such as eating disorders, alcoholism, prostitution, abandonment, abortion, incest, depression, and suicide. Describe how you came to include these topics in the story. Did you set out to write about all of them, or did the characters “speak” to you while you were writing? Was it difficult to write about some of these topics?

As best as I can tell, this novel fails many of the unspoken tests to which debut novels are subjected. It’s ambiguously autobiographical, for starters, and, at least in certain writing communities, there is a sense that writing autobiographical fiction is cowardly, aesthetically unambitious, or at least pretty tedious. So I was a bit horrified to find myself writing a novel about a jaded young woman whose family looked suspiciously like my own. Was I tedious? Was I a coward? I didn’t know. I only knew this was the novel I needed to write.

I’ve always been a bit self-conscious about my recurring themes. I often feel like a DJ mixing various lyrics of female teenage angst, these bald and melodramatic concerns. I write about food. I write about “being a woman.” I write about varieties of sadness that elude our practices of naming and reckoning. I write about the body, always. I can’t get away from it. A woman in one of my workshops suggested I title my first story collection Eating and Body Issues, and I was at a point in my writing—still am, actually—where I couldn’t tell if she was kidding or not.

I set out to write a novel about two women saving each other’s lives, and ended up writing about how they couldn’t. How could these women make their pain visible? It’s a terrible kind of privacy, despair, and I wanted to look at intimacy as the violation of that privacy—awkward and stuttering and often hurtful. The realm of the body becomes an essential vocabulary for suffering, and this notion—the body as language, as visceral utterance—is what connects many of the novel’s disparate “issues” in my mind: suicide and alcohol and anorexia. These women articulate pain by starving or drinking or selling themselves. I wanted to look at their physical damage as a kind of self-inflicted alchemy—something that could turn unseen despair into visible communication—and one of the biggest emotional challenges for me, as a writer, was to empathize with these self-destructive impulses without glorifying them.

Describe the research that went into the making of this novel. What was easier, doing the research or writing the story?