Larissa Pham

But Christine's like, okay, here's my opportunity to reinvent myself as a person on my own terms.

And she wants to be that woman.

She wants to be this cool, composed, kind of removed figure who has it all under control.

because I think she's lost that sense of control before in her relationship with Richard, and she really doesn't want to repeat it.

And again, yeah, it's so important to Christine that nobody knows what she's been through.

And so she kind of steps into this image that she's created for herself.

But it's a very brittle image too.

It's very pristine, but it has that like, that quality that it could be shattered at any moment, which I think, you know, she kind of moves through in the book.

I love that question.

I enjoy thinking about names, which is kind of funny because I tend not to give my characters like very distinctive names.

I like kind of feeling for like the everyman name that suits them best kind of based on intuition.

And yeah, so a lot of the strangers that Christine meets

have names they introduce themselves to that to her and two of the characters who are closest to Christine arguably are her ex and the old painter as her mentor is known for most of the book and to me it's because neither of these characters are precisely real to Christine they're not like really allowed to be fully realized people for most of the book her ex kind of represents like this

this rupture, this failure in her life to adapt to this new self that she had so carefully orchestrated and it all falls through when she finally decides to tell the truth.

So calling him her ex is this way of keeping him at arm's length

And in the same way, the old painter is not really, he's just the old painter, which is like a very rude way of referring to a person.

And to me, it's Christine's attempt to assert a kind of power over him, to try to give him this moniker that, you know, is her way of kind of like pinning him down.

But once we get to know him better and once Christine gets to know him better, then she refers to him by his name and we learn his name and

it kind of mirrors the experience of getting to know this character better over the course of the book.

Like, he goes from being a villain to, you know, quite possibly a person.