Amanda Lohrey

Well, that's good.

I'm pleased about that, because as the writer, I want you to be at least open to the possibility.

Otherwise, there's no point in reading the novel.

You know, I want you to have to think about it and wonder.

Wonder's a wonderful quality in narrative.

If there's not some of it there, I think the story goes flat, the telling goes flat.

But also the accounts by these people, experiences as they are known, are interweaved with dialogues between the psychiatrist and his research assistant, Lucy Cheng, young single mother with a degree in the history of anxiety.

And those conversations they have in a local cafe are meant to highlight really a lot of the bizarre elements of life in general, not just aliens, but the way we live now.

Well, so much.

Partly our relationship with technology, our fears and anxieties around technology, our response to various crises as we perceive them.

I mean, there's a part of the novella deals with the question of are we overpopulated or are we underpopulated?

Yes.

Some of our responses to current dilemmas verge, I think, on almost clinical insanity, if you look at them objectively.

And some of our political movements, I think, make people who claim to have been abducted by aliens look rather moderate, I think.

Um, so I wanted to juxtapose a whole lot of what's going on now, which I find endlessly fascinating, of course, but also to follow this character through to the end.

And the critical question is, how does he judge these people?

How does he judge what's before his eyes?

And how does this affect him personally and his idea of himself?

I couldn't resist that.

I think 70% of novel readers or fiction readers are women, as estimated by research.