I like Abe. I like his beard and his penchant for dominoes. I like that he often thinks of other people. I like that he is willing to love damaged people without glorifying their damage.

The image of the closet appears frequently throughout the novel, first when Stella describes her apartment and later when Tilly is drinking. Describe the importance of the closet and why you chose to use it as a motif of sorts in the novel.

For me, one of the important themes of this book is the function of addiction as a form of isolation—and, ultimately, an examination of this isolation as its own mythology, how impossibly relational addiction becomes in its impact and its wreckage. The closet is our classic architectural trope of secrecy, and here I imagine it as a symbol of the desire to take our darkest selves and hide them—hide them in cramped urban apartments or gin-soaked closets or the bony cages of starved bodies. The mythology lies in any sense that the closet can grant integrity or autonomy or true seclusion; addiction always leaks under the door, hurts beyond the perimeter, draws other bodies into the darkness.

Someone once told me the story of a very successful businessman whose alcoholism had gotten so bad he resolved to drink himself to death. He found an empty old barn and camped out there with enough whiskey to do the trick. This impulse is exactly what I’m trying to dramatize in the book: a sense of loneliness and self-loathing that runs so deep it seeks absolute isolation from the care or vision of the world. The businessman made it, by the way, and made a full recovery—despite his best intentions. I make myself remember this part too. Not every story has the same ending. There is no inevitable horizon point for trajectories of addiction.

What do you consider the major theme(s) of this story?

To put it bluntly, and a bit simply, I tried to write a book about the difficulty of intimacy. People are self-absorbed and self-pitying. They hurt other people in ways they can’t explain or justify. They hurt themselves. They want to heal other peoples’ wounds, or else they want to crawl inside these wounds and taste them. They treat each other with tenderness sometimes, and then recoil from this touch or the aftertaste of its long-fled ghost. People find a thousand ways to injure themselves with closeness, even as they crave it, and my characters are no exception. Stella carries around crucifixes she can’t explain, and Tilly turns other people into crucifixes she can martyr herself upon. They both turn their bodies into walking ledgers of their pain and find visceral vocabularies for their desperation: drinking and bingeing and starving and sex.