Down Time is a touching and very funny novel about a group of interconnected friends who spend their time fucking, fucking up, masking, and meandering around the era of COVID lockdowns. The novel alternates between four of these characters as POVs, although others recur. The novel also pulls off a move that I at least consider somewhat risky: switching between third person and first person. In this case, four of the POV characters are in third, and one, Malcolm, is written in first.
Can you talk about how you settled on these characters and this structure for the novel? And what inspired the decision to have one character in first-person POV?
I really stumbled backwards into the structure. The characters came first, slowly, over years of writing, originally, in some cases, in what felt like standalone stories, but increasingly in what I realized needed to be a sustained narrative. Once I knew I wanted all of these people to be together in a novel, I started improvising on the ways they could be connected, and on the order of their sections. There were early drafts that were looser about chronology and less strict about the rotation between characters. But ultimately, it seemed the most generous thing to not make the reader do all of this other work in addition to moving between four different POV characters.
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