On learning to find clarity in your work

How long did it take you to write Nerve Damage and how long did it take you to edit it?

I had been working on a different book for a while, like a few years, but it just didn’t feel like it was coming together. One day mom was like, “How about you try something else?” I was very offended when she said that, then started working on Nerve Damage the next day. The first draft took me about nine months, which is not a wild amount of time for a book—it came out relatively easily. I finished the first full draft at Art Farm in Nebraska, then promptly threw up.

I took another year to do the second full draft. That’s when I started looking for agents. I did edits with my agent, Eloy. After Maris got it at Knopf, we really went through with a fine-tooth comb. We did probably three or four full edits, but it was mostly line level stuff, deepening characters, or needing to rework certain elements of a scene. The main structure remained. They bought the book in early 2024 and it just came out in mid-2026, so we had a pretty long runway. Maris is so artful and so smart, such an awake reader. By the end of the editing process it was stuff like…”You’re using the word ‘just’ too much,” and there was a pass for the word “just.” Had to justify each just.

It sounds like you had the structure figured out before the manuscript landed with your agent and then editor. Did you use any craft books, wisdom from your MFA, or did you just intuitively know how to structure the novel?

It had more to do with being a reader and a movie watcher. I’m less interested in plot than I am in voice and emotional questions. But I also know that plot is an important element to keep someone engaged. I wanted the plot in Nerve Damage to be simple, I wanted Clarice’s journey to be driven by her emotional weather and a relatively contained emotional question. I wanted those to drive the action.

When we switched timelines into the past, that was just the retelling of what was motivating the journey in the present. I decided on an idea for the plot and was like, “Okay, I know what the problem is and I also ultimately know what the end point is going to be,” and it was a matter of just taking her on this journey to answer that one question: “Did she see her ex-boyfriend/stalker, and if so, what is he doing here?”

It moved so seamlessly between the present story and the backstory. How did you manage to balance the backstory with the present?

I wrote the present story in one document and the past in another, in their respective tenses. Then, I wove them together. It was a collaging process. Because the whole plot drives on the reality that the past is extremely present to her, it didn’t feel like there was a huge leap between those two time periods. The reader gets more and more information, but it was necessary to the immediate action of what’s happening in the plot.

It wasn’t like, “She’s a high-powered lawyer, but now we’re going to see her humble beginnings in a tiny town in Kansas.” It wasn’t that. Everything described in the past was linked to her thought process and the choices she was making. I intuited when to break from the forward movement of the plot in the present to go a little further into the past, moments where I felt it fruitful to sink down into what’s driving her neurosis or get insight into why she feels what she’s feeling.

You mentioned earlier placing importance on the “emotional weather” of the book. Something I really loved about Nerve Damage was its atmosphere. Clarice’s East Hollywood Apartment feels so Lynchian with the strange objects left on her doorstep, the couple fighting downstairs, their squawking pet bird. What do you consider when working through atmosphere and setting?

I live in LA now and something I appreciate about it is its dreamlike quality. It’s such a strange place, especially the omnipresence of show business, all these real lives happening in this mythical American land.

A writer is ultimately an observer of life, and what I find most interesting to write about often comes from simply observing or interacting with strangers. An apartment building offers access to many different types of people, their lives are overlapping, everyone’s trying to have some privacy despite living on top or under other types of lives.

Clarice also goes to court and to a police station at one point. In these public places she’s having a personal crisis, around other people also experiencing personal crises, and it’s other people’s workplace. I like thinking about setting in terms of: anywhere you are, you’re sharing the stage, so to speak, with many other people and any one person is having their own experience. Any scene is an opportunity for many people’s stories to meet at once. It allows for poignancy, but also absurdity.

That reminds me of Kaveh Akbar’s blurb of Nerve Damage, that, “It feels impossible for a book so chilling to also be so funny.” How do you use humor in your writing?

I like to think humor can highlight someone’s humanity more than it can cloud it. It’s such a special type of intelligence. It’s a crafty way to show vulnerability, discomfort, an unconscious or conscious belief, or someone’s judgment or critical eye. For me as a reader, humor helps me trust the writer. It makes me feel more relaxed, it’s more pleasurable and alive to me. Humor is a real meeting place for the writer and the reader.

Nerve Damage is mostly a book about fear, and the long-term impacts of fear on somebody’s mindset, psyche, and emotional capacity. Fear can have such a profound, devastating impact on someone. But fear can be so funny, because it’s intense for the person who is afraid, but not necessarily intense for anyone else. That’s tragic, too, and partially why it can be so isolating. It’s like when you’re hearing a friend describe something they’re paranoid about and you don’t have the same immediate fear, so there’s some space to see the comedy. And Clarice has legitimate reason to be afraid and hyper-vigilant, so I didn’t want her to be the butt of a joke, I wasn’t intending it to be an irretrievable dissent into madness, but her fear distorts her ability to see. And to live freely.

I keep comparing her journey in the novel to somebody having a rash and looking up on WebMD and being like, “I’m positive this is a cancer rash,” then going to the doctor and they are like, “Uh, ma’am, you have psoriasis.” It’s not cause for celebration to have psoriasis, but it’s not cancer. There’s also something really informative in that relief, once you remember you already picked out your casket. Now you have to treat the psoriasis, but it’s also a good idea to take a look at the intense spiral you went on.

As a hypochondriac, I can relate. You earned your MFA at the New School. How did the experience of getting an MFA shape you as a writer, if at all?

It definitely did. Part of it was I had gone through a really difficult period in my late 20s/ early 30s and I made the decision to pursue something I actually felt a calling towards. I went with professional aspirations, but my real goal was to figure out how to give myself agency over my own time. I wanted to be around other people who were devoting themselves to writing. I got a really good scholarship and I loved the teachers––Darcey Steinke, Alexandra Kleeman, Dale Peck, Katie Kitamura. The experience taught me to take my own practice seriously and to do it with and in front of other people. Some people naturally have those skills, I needed a container.

At the same time, my day job was as a women’s health writer for Bustle. I was writing things I didn’t have a major emotional investment in. I was writing in the voice of a website. That was oddly helpful, because it allowed me to write without being super precious, to realize that the first draft is just a draft. I learned to make things legible, which is important to me as a writer, because I often am trying to find clarity in things that are difficult to understand for myself and for my reader. Legibility is not every writer’s concern, but it is one of mine, I think because I write a lot about trauma, and the felt experience of trauma is already so confusing.

Having those two experiences at once—the MFA and the job at Bustle—was really fruitful. At work I had to learn how to churn stuff out, I built the muscle that can fill a page with words. And one of the main skills I was getting in the MFA was how to read closely, and how to separate what I might like or expect in writing from what a person’s intention for a piece of work might be. Once I was able to discern that more adeptly, I could be better at actual analysis or editing.

I was lucky, I really liked everybody in my cohort, it didn’t feel competitive or catty. It felt supportive, and I needed that in order to open up. I made wonderful friends.

You said you wanted to take space to work on something that you felt a calling toward. I know that you were a dancer for a long time. What brought about the impulse to focus on writing?

I started writing when I was quite young. I journaled and wrote poetry. There was never a time that I haven’t been writing. It was mostly that I decided to do it in a way that was like, “I want to have a larger conversation with the world through my writing versus just doing it privately.” Because of all the time a person spends alone while writing, there is something really powerful that can happen when you share it. You’re sharing your privacy with somebody else. Even if the story is entirely made up.

I felt a calling to write, but I’ve also always had a calling to be a reader from when I was a pretty small kid. You get this peek into humanity that can be so profound. That can happen through a lot of art forms but for me, it’s most consistent with reading. That’s how I’ve found solace, hope. The process of transmutation gives me hope. I wanted to be a part of that tradition in a more intense way.

I noticed you don’t have an Instagram. How do you approach digital spaces like social media and other online distractions?

Actually, my friend made me an Instagram a couple weeks ago because she didn’t realize I had a New York Times book review. She was laughing, like, “Uh…you need a place to put your book stuff.” Now, I’m on there, but I’ll download it, look at it for a while or post something, then I delete the app. I don’t keep it on my phone all day long. I have a fraught relationship with the internet, a lot of people do. It feels intimidating to me, also dangerous. That probably makes me sound like nine million years old. And obviously I don’t trust the people making these platforms, they’re dark lords. This is me with like 265 followers. Working it out in real time.

I do understand the benefit of having everything consolidated in one place. But really I find the constancy of it discombobulating, often a little sad. Even the short while that I’ve been on it, I’m like, “So, I have to continue doing this? Each day I have to post another thing about my book?” As I’m being bombarded with ads. It’s boring. There’s the whole actual advertising element.

It’s like you’re at the mall.

Exactly. There’s actual stuff being sold (…I’ve already bought a bathing suit) but also I don’t like the idea of making an advertisement out of oneself. That feels at odds with my value system. It makes me feel mentally ill.

I can’t imagine deeply believing in crafting a brand online, and I don’t mean that as a judgment of people who do. But it doesn’t turn me on. It’s a thing people find endlessly fascinating, or at least a necessary evil. People have ideas about how to make it a transgressive part of being an artist. To me it feels like wearing uncomfortable shoes. I could just take them off. Maybe it costs me something, but it doesn’t feel worth sacrificing life-force.

I’m a mid-millenial, plenty of people my age are extremely online, but I don’t think it courses through our veins the same way it does for people even five years behind us. I’m affected by it, I live in the world it’s creating, I know of its power, but I don’t believe in it as an unshakeable reality. My young adulthood was on the cusp of social media. Facebook wasn’t at my college until the end of my sophomore year.

Although I see some of my professors or people in Gen X use social media in a way that doesn’t seem as ego dystonic as it can be for me. They are like “Here’s a realistic picture of my face and my birthday cake, as well as some books I enjoy!” There’s no built-in inclination towards profound image control. Some people use it as a minimally edited digital cork board, that’s more attractive to me. I also really love a lot of Substack writers. I like reading about people grappling with the internet, with AI.

I do like the whole, “Wow, I haven’t talked to this person since high school.” It’s wild. My mom has a friend she reconnected with online who’s a guy she went to preschool with. They’re buddies, they talk all the time. She’s always like, “You know, Tim told me this thing about when he worked for Ronald Reagan, before he became a leftist…” It’s this guy she’s known since she was a little, little kid who she hadn’t talked to and hasn’t actually seen for so many years. They get to bear a kind of witness to each other’s lives in the long-term because of this tool. There is something so beautiful and fun about that.