“Rate Your Happiness,” your story in this week’s issue, opens with the protagonist, Louise, having a health emergency while on a flight from New York City to San Francisco. Why did you choose to introduce the character mid-crisis?

Crisis often feels like the natural starting point for a story, and medical emergencies in particular have a way of stripping a person down to the nerve. Anyone who has ever been an E.R. patient knows this. Being physically helpless—dependent on whomever is around you to maintain your vitals or inject you with medicine—is the kind of experience that dissolves almost everything you think is fixed about your adult self. Something more particular and tiny and human emerges in its place. I remember a nurse giving me a glass of juice after a minor surgery, many years ago now, and it almost felt like she was the only thing standing between me and oblivion. Moments like that feel like openings, like portals between the invented, fragile certainty within which we spend most of our time and the profound confusion that we are almost always trying desperately to avoid. I’m usually more interested in a character enduring a crisis of some sort, in who they are in that moment, rather than in a character existing in their element.

I think, also, that I write stories and novels out of a feeling of some kind of subterranean, nearly imperceptible, internal crisis that somehow does get resolved (at least temporarily) through the various metaphors and play of the narrative.

The story is told in the close third person, mostly aligning with Louise. There are brief moments, though, when the narrative veers closer to another character: Bruce, the nurse who helps Louise on the plane. Why did you decide to take in his perspective?

“Properly” constructed fiction tends to pick a lane—whether it be the first person, or a close third, or an ambient third—and stay in it. Often, this is a useful guideline, and limits, in general, are very much the friend of the fiction writer, but there are certain stories that benefit from a sense of instability.

There’s a school of dream interpretation that suggests that everyone in the dream represents a different side of the dreamer, and I think a short story can work along similar lines. There is a longer version of this story that takes a few more leaps into a few more characters’ points of view, but every time we step outside Louise’s perspective, I think it’s still somehow tethered to her. It’s a glitchy, imperfect gesture, but one I find myself making when the story allows, and I’m fond of such glitches in other people’s work. Denis Johnson did this occasionally in his short fiction, and I think Joachim Trier’s film “Sentimental Value” arguably flickers between different points of view.

Whatever your philosophical or religious ideas about the self, it’s clear that we have to live with and contend with the limits of an identity in our everyday reality, but I’ve always felt that art and literature provide a wonderful opportunity to escape or distort the self.

It turns out that Bruce used to be involved with Louise’s estranged father, and that both she and Bruce are staying in the same neighborhood in the Bay Area. Later, Louise runs into Bruce not once but twice. How do you think about the relationship between coincidence as a plot device and coincidence as an everyday phenomenon?

One thing that will happen to you if you become a novelist is that when unlikely things occur in life—as they often do—someone might say to you, Oh, you couldn’t write that, and perhaps for that reason I find myself sometimes wanting to include those things in my work, coincidences that happen all the time yet still seem unlikely or too tidy for fiction. This also relates to the earlier question about the choice to allow non-Louise perspectives to intrude in the story. The narrative follows a woman through her confusion about what she should do with her life, whether she should stay with her girlfriend or not, whether she should have more of a relationship with her father or not, and it’s almost as if the world is laughing at Louise’s confusion, surrounding her with absurd things like coincidences and strange children and Bruce and that influencer. Maybe the world of this story is more a reflection of Louise’s character than it is a reality external to Louise’s character.

Louise, as you’ve indicated, contends with ambivalence throughout the story: she thinks she should end things with her girlfriend but can’t bring herself to do so; she feels compelled to share a bit of herself with Bruce yet regrets not keeping him at a distance; she identifies as a techno-pessimist though she’s somewhat defensive of her friend’s techno-optimism. Is this emotional state of particular interest to you?

Years ago, a friend’s husband told me he was “never of two minds about anything,” and perhaps he was just trying to prove a point, or perhaps he was just feeling quite clearheaded that day, but the very idea of living in a state of permanent, seamless single-mindedness has haunted me ever since. Of course, there are some things that I can be comfortably (or functionally) certain about, but it was the “never” in that statement that has stuck with me. Is that really a possible human experience? Am I actually trapped in some kind of permanent open-mindedness limbo? Is this the difference between being a creative person and having . . . I don’t know, a “real” job? Or is it the difference between what we call adulthood and what we call childhood? I find it almost impossible to inhabit a character or a fictive voice that isn’t conflicted about nearly everything.

In bed one night, Louise, unable to fall asleep, recalls something strange she had witnessed years prior: “Hundreds of ants on a concrete porch had lifted the corpse of a cockroach as if they were going to carry it home for dinner, but their communication must have broken down, because instead of hauling the roach away, they spun the roach in a circle while Louise filmed the scene on her phone.” What came to you first, this image or the idea for the story?

This image has been with me much longer than the story. I witnessed just such a spectacle many years ago, and after watching the ants spin the roach corpse for a while, I made a short video of it. I was amazed by the scene, the spinning, how mesmerizing it was, and I wondered if someone more mystical than me might see it as a kind of omen—but of what? In general, I am fascinated by the coöperative efforts and determination of ants (I never had an ant farm as a child but probably should have), and this moment was just as baffling to me as it was beautiful. If there are any entomologists out there who could explain what I saw, I would welcome an e-mail.

This story, I must admit, spent at least two years in a mostly unfinished state. It was only in late December of last year that it all rushed together, and it was then that the image of the ants and the cockroach entered the story. The power outage and ensuing driverless-car melee in December in San Francisco reminded me of it. I wasn’t there for it, but I have friends who were very much in the middle of it.

At the beginning of the story, Bruce asks Louise to rate her pain from one to ten—something that medical professionals are trained to do. In San Francisco, Louise encounters an influencer who asks strangers on the street to rate their happiness on the same scale. What made you want to invert an otherwise routine question?

This may seem crazy, but it was not a conscious decision. I didn’t even realize that these two moments mirrored each other until long after I’d finished the story and was reviewing your edits. When I first began working on the story, I started with Bruce and Louise, but they were in a totally different situation, and though I kept trying to work on it, the narrative resisted me until I set it in San Francisco—a city that’s home to several people I truly adore, but one that’s also absolutely saturated with some of the most ridiculous and annoying aspects of our modern culture. Looking at that choice now, I can see how the setting naturally reflects Louise’s ambivalence about her life in general, but none of that was intentional. As is the case with a lot of writers, a story usually does not want to coöperate with me when I have particular plans or desires, and it tends to congeal the more curious and confused I become. ♦