Susan Choi

The book was a novella.

of 150 pages called Visitation by Jenny Erpenbeck that's about 20th century German history and the most beautiful book.

And I read that book and I was just electrified.

And I thought, oh, this is what I'm going to do is I'm going to write this beautiful 150 page novella about other things.

And so I literally envisioned this book as a novella.

And it's the longest book I've ever published.

So the opposite of a novella in just about every way.

And I think it's hard to say exactly when I really did know that it was going to be that long, but at some point I started working with my wonderful, wonderful US editor who really made this book what it is.

And it was very long then.

I think it was longer, but also very different.

It was longer with different stuff.

And she read it and we sat down together and I don't know how this happened, but in talking together, and I got very excited because we'd never worked together before, but I understood right away, like in the way that when you meet someone that understands you, you know, and she understood the book and I thought,

She understands the book better than I do.

So we were talking excitedly.

And at some point we both began using this metaphor of brushing a dog that's too fluffy.

And we kept saying like, well, we just have to brush it out and get all the fluff away.

Like the way you would groom a dog and then it'll be perfect.

So that was the first thing we did was we brushed the dog.

But it turned out that she then also wanted me to add things.

Then the dog became large.