When I was fifteen, my aunt Marlene, who was visiting from South Africa at the time, told me a story about a couple in her city. In short: they’d found a squatter living in their closet, and the squatter had been there for months. I was less mortified than I was intrigued. What a great idea! Sneak into someone’s house and live there without them knowing! I wanted to be the squatter; I wanted to spy on the couple. I wanted to know what she saw and how involved she was in their lives. The story stuck with me and over the next twenty years I’d find myself revisiting the couple and their squatter until I decided to sit down and meet them. I did so in my mind, and I did not get what I was expecting.

What draws you to write about a complicated—maybe even doomed—marriage? Or family dynamics more generally?

I’m an introspective person. When I began writing seriously in my early twenties, I was exploring myself and my personality in a fictional world. I took my issues and my questions and my trauma to stories where I dressed them in characters and scenes. When I ran out of personal issues to write about, I began exploring human issues in general. Why do we do the things we do? Some authors write to beautify the world; I write to expose things in the crumbling of it.

How did you develop the character of Juno?

When I first moved to Seattle, I’d often write in coffee shops downtown. I befriended a handful of homeless men in the area who’d come sit at my table and chat with me. I met a homeless engineer, a homeless mechanic, a homeless musician, and a homeless vet during the three years I spent in the area. Their stories were told with painful remorse as they would recount the one mistake that derailed their lives. Juno mostly developed herself from those stories. I could hear those men in my head as I wrote about her. I knew she had to be desperate and I knew she wanted to make things right.

Juno’s and Winnie’s voices are so different, and yet they struggle with some of the same issues. Did one of them come more easily to you? Was one more of a challenge? What similarities do you see between Winnie and Juno? Might we say that they represent two directions stemming from the same forked path?

Winnie and Juno: different voices, same issues. They were separated by age and economics and yet they shared so many similarities. Juno was hiding in a crawl space; Winnie was hiding in her pretty house. One wanted to make amends for what she’d done and the other one wanted to forget what she’d done entirely. In the end, both were seeking peace, and they were both too dishonest about themselves to ever find it.