You’ve previously published a novel and a collection of stories. Down Time is somewhere in between. How did you land on its form?
Ha, I figured I’d just do the hardest possible thing — write a full-length novel but give each chapter the plot arc and precision of a short story. The first two chapters began life as stories, and they led to a vision of a book that would track a full year, month by month, following a different character in each chapter. But I quickly realized that it would be much more satisfying to follow these particular characters forward in time, and that developing their connections would turn it into, you know, a real novel. Structurally, it still felt right to do it episodically, to check in on these characters at different intervals to track the way they’re dealing with crises in their lives. Given that much of the book takes place during the pandemic era, I liked the idea that these different chapters mirror the characters’ geographic isolation from each other. Alan Hollinghurst was a big formal influence, though my version is more chopped up than his books usually are. I have a shorter attention span than him, I guess.
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