“Quarantine,” your story in this week’s issue, opens with a twenty-three-year-old who is more or less couch-surfing in Barcelona while waitressing, drinking too much, having sexual adventures, and detailing it all in her journal. You capture that early-twenties period of looking for experience—as a way of looking for oneself—so well. Is there anything of you or people you’ve known in Bridget?
The story was first sparked by my reading someone else’s reminiscences about youth, on Facebook. The person who wrote the post was a casual acquaintance I hadn’t seen in twenty years. The post reminded me of some of my own behavior at that age, but I was also intrigued by the action of reading some pretty personal memories shared by someone I only ever knew glancingly. The casual, partial, but also genuine intimacy of social media and the way it weaves us in and out of others’ lives are part of what I wanted to play with here. Bridget and Angela start out as members of this loose community in Barcelona and later reconnect online, and I was interested in how each woman’s life keeps bumping up against the other’s.
For Bridget, her friendship with Angela in Barcelona was a casual one, one of convenience, which she didn’t expect to last. Why do you think Angela read the friendship so differently?
I don’t think it’s unusual for a friendship, or any relationship, to mean something different to each person in it. Our investment in relationships can vary over time, too. For a friendship to last, you need to have things in common, but, maybe even more important, you need at least one of the people involved to be persistent and doggedly committed to it, and Angela is that person.
Angela develops mysterious symptoms that may or may not be caused by some kind of allergy to electricity. What do you think is going on with her? Is she truly ill?
To me, there’s no question that she’s ill. But whether electricity is the cause of her symptoms is less clear. Angela’s body is telling her that something is wrong. Maybe that thing is electricity, or the urban environment, or maybe it’s heartbreak or depression; maybe it’s all those things. I think about the character of Asbury in Flannery O’Connor’s story “The Enduring Chill” and how his cravings for a different life than the one he grew up in manifest as illness. Angela is not like Asbury in her desire for moral superiority, but, as with him, her emotional reality is enacted on and by her body.
Her plight reminded me a little of the Todd Haynes movie “Safe.” Was that an influence on the story?
I saw and loved that movie when it came out, though I haven’t seen it since. I’m sure it haunts the story, as does the story of an aunt of mine who had electromagnetic sensitivity and eventually retired to a remote island, as well as the lives of other friends who have suffered chronic and undiagnosed pain. To me, there are two movements in the story: one is the advance of certain connective technologies—e-mail, Pinterest, cell phones—and the other is a retreat from technology, a profoundly felt unease with it.
Bridget’s journey into the woods toward the end of the story feels a little like a fairy tale, especially when we discover this eerie, almost ethereal being living in a cottage in a clearing. It’s very far removed from the world of Barcelona hookups and hangovers. Do you intend for us to read those final scenes as realistic or almost fable-like?
I’ve always loved stories that hover in a kind of middle space between the real and not real; Stuart Dybek is someone whose work does this so beautifully and whose stories I really admire. For me, the final scenes do evoke a fairy tale, and they also underline the notion that Bridget and Angela’s relationship is a romance. Bridget bushwhacks through the woods to find Angela almost in the way the prince goes looking for Sleeping Beauty, although she doesn’t succeed in rescuing her.
You’ve published two novels and two story collections. Are you working on a new story collection at the moment? If so, does “Quarantine” have a thematic relationship to the other pieces in it?
I’m working on a collection of stories about women in trouble. A lot of the stories are about pairs of women—friends, sisters, workmates—whose relationships are complicated and intense. I’m always drawn to that intensity.
