In your story “Family Lore,” a couple have just returned home from the hospital with their newborn baby. The husband notices their dog engaging with a possibly sick bat on their balcony, and this sets off a spiral of events, as he tries to figure out whether the dog has caught rabies, without alerting his wife to the danger. How did this plotline come to you?

I rarely draw direct inspiration from my own life for my fiction—that’s what other people’s lives are for!—but, in this case, shortly after my husband and I brought our first baby home, our dog really did get hold of a bat that then tested positive for rabies. This resulted in the dog being placed in a forty-five-day home quarantine, which, compounded by the isolation of the newborn trenches and the ongoing pandemic, created the most psychologically debilitating situation I’ve ever endured. I’ve suffered from contamination O.C.D. and responsibility O.C.D. since adolescence, and my experience of that month and a half was essentially staying up all night to either nurse the baby or watch the dog for symptoms. It was horrible. Plus, no one we knew had been through anything like it, so no one could offer us any real comfort. All we had was the wildly contradictory advice we received from the vet (who was not worried), the pediatricians (who were low-to-medium worried), and animal control (who were basically telling us to pick out an urn for the dog).

You began writing this story during that quarantine period but didn’t finish it until a month after the birth of your second child, almost four years later. Why did it take so long?

I actually tried to process the incident by fictionalizing it while it was still happening. When that failed, I tried writing it several different times over the years, always from the perspective of the wife. But it was too close to home, and it kept getting tainted by reality. Then, maybe a month or two before the birth of our second baby, my husband and I were reminiscing about the rabies scare, and he said, “If I’d known how awful those forty-five days were going to be, I would have hoofed that fucking bat off the balcony, and you never would have known about it.” That changed my whole approach to the story. It gave me a new premise and orientation, and enough distance from the actual events to see the humor and the madness of it.

Arriving home with a first baby—especially after a long stretch of trying and failing to have a child—can be overwhelming. In the story, it has been the wife’s role to worry about everything and the husband’s role to reassure her. Why do you think he goes so far off the deep end now?

Because his decision to conceal the incident with the bat isolates him from his wife. New parenthood is already isolating, but at least it’s something they’ve been preparing to face as a team. Now he’s ensnared himself in the situation with the bat, and everything he does removes him further and further from the domestic bubble and the new reality on which he is supposed to be focussing.

The story is both a comedy and a thriller: each time the husband makes a seemingly logical decision it pushes him farther into comic absurdity and ratchets up the tension for the reader—who, at a certain point, can no longer imagine this guy digging himself out of the hole he’s jumped into. How challenging was it to balance plausibility and ridiculousness, fun and genuine anxiety, when writing the story?

I’m not sure why, but more and more of late I’ve found myself drawn to characters who can’t stop making mistakes. It’s challenging, but it’s also incredibly fun to refrain from protecting your characters and let them just flounder. In “Family Lore,” I also wanted to capture the vulnerability of finding yourself catapulted into total responsibility for another human being overnight. Any sense of horizon disappears. All sense of balance and proportionality is obliterated. You don’t know if something is a mild threat or a serious one. You don’t know whether something is going to last an hour or a week. For me, so much of the tension in this story came from the husband’s inability to figure out what’s freaking him out the most: the bat? The Cesarean? The fact that the baby came early? His wife’s mental state? The fact that everyone around him seems to be a little unstable?

At the beginning of “Family Lore,” the wife has a premonition that something very bad is going to happen. It’s possible to read the conclusion of the story as confirmation of that prediction. But it’s also possible to read it as a happy ending, in which no serious damage has been done. Did you want to leave it up to the reader to decide which option to believe?

Throughout this story, the husband is unwittingly chasing a sense of relief. I think all he really wants is a moment to recalibrate, a moment to gather himself for the journey ahead, which, given that he is now a parent, is really going to last the rest of his life. And I think he does get that moment in the end.

The story is set in Austin, Texas, where there is, in fact, a very large bat colony. Neither of the characters is originally from Texas. What else made this city the right backdrop for the story?

Despite its takeover by ultra-rich ghouls, Austin has remained a kind of paradise of youth. All the things that would have made it irresistible to the couple once upon a time are incompatible with the early days of parenthood: it’s bawdy, irreverent, loud, hot, fun, and unpredictable. What the husband wants is quiet and calm. Instead, he is surrounded by strangers whose names he realizes he doesn’t even know, all gearing up for a wild Halloween weekend. None of them are in the same phase of life as him, and this amplifies his panic and makes him feel even more powerless and alone. ♦