Claire Nicholls

And ultimately, I kind of realized that what I'm writing about essentially, or my beat, is just kind of like the human mind and why we behave the way that we do.

And I realized that there is this kind of explanatory gap between what we know and what we can't know about ourselves.

And another way to put it is the book's kind of about the opaque nature of self-knowledge.

And I decided to do that through the character of Russell Wilson, who's my character, and I wanted to do it over the course of one year.

So he's having a very bad, a very strange year.

The book begins in the middle of this quiet collapse.

I mean, after the prologue, we sort of jump...

sort of 40 years or so into the future.

And his job, his marriage, his relationship with his parents is all coming apart.

He's a former therapist trained to understand other people's minds who turns out to be almost completely blind to his own.

He's kind of pushed into this sort of forced solitude.

And from there into this kind of uneasy search for purpose, sort of a form of self-discovery.

I always loved novels and I wanted to write a novel, like one of my favorite novels, Steppenwolf, where, you know, someone discovers their personality might not be stable and the rest of the book is them trying to just survive that realization.

Well, they were never great parents to begin with.

First of all, his father obviously lost him in a game of dice and then disappeared out of his childhood, sort of coming back sort of, I think, when he's probably late 20s or something like that.

And then his mother had a kind of standoffish relationship with him anyway.

And, you know, he grudgingly goes and visits them once a month.

Yes, he basically visits them exactly once a month on the same day, visiting his father maybe about 10 minutes before visiting hours are over at the nursing home.

And that's where they are when they announce that they never want to see him again.

Well, the mother does it first.