I do sometimes feel that my attachments to certain things are ludicrous.
Personally, though, I can say that I probably envied my narrator’s reaction to the robbery. I just like seeing how things click in the end, and knowing that readers will probably connect different aspects of the story in their own ways. Sometimes I don’t even ask them afterward, either. I generally don’t ask myself big questions like that as I write, questions of meaning. So, basically, I started with that, as opposed to a big idea where robbery would operate as a metaphor for loneliness in our very materialistic society, etc. His mother was sleeping, and he was in bed, and when the burglars came to his room, he saw them and pretended to be asleep while they worked. But then, a few years ago, a friend of mine in Paris told me that he’d been burglarized as a child, too, except that he was home when it happened. When I was a kid, our house was burglarized twice, but both times we were out of town, so I always assumed that’s how burglars operated. In this case, I started with the idea of someone being home and asleep as her apartment gets burglarized. I often just start with a single sentence or image or piece of dialogue and see where it can go. I can explain a lot of aspects of my work after the fact, but the truth is that, like many writers, I never know what I’m writing about until it’s done. The narrator here is definitely taking the robbery pretty well, and I guess that, when I started the story, that was the first big clue for me about who she was. What does a traumatic event like that reveal about a person? And what does robbery share with loneliness? But it seems as if sometimes other characters have to remind the narrator of this.
Being robbed can be an extremely emotional event, and in this story it’s also tied into notions of what it means to be, or feel, alone. In “ The State of Nature,” your story in this week’s issue, an ophthalmologist gets burglarized, which leads to a series of unlikely events, including her going to a flea market called the Thieves’ Market, to try to recover her possessions, and possibly learning a sad fact about her mother. Photograph by Denis Darzacq / Agence VU / Redux
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