Claire Nicholls

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.

And her idea is that she doesn't want him to witness her decline.

She can feel that she's a bit of a burden.

She also might be just doing it to spite him.

It's a little unclear.

I've kind of always been writing about the four, like, central concerns of loneliness.

Existential thought and existential psychotherapy.