In your story “The Blight,” David Hastings, a semi-retired executive who is grappling with the onset of dementia and travelling to Switzerland for a voluntary assisted death, stops off in London to have dinner with his daughter. What made you want to inhabit the consciousness of a character in this situation?

As a writer, I’m always interested in consciousness, and how to render our experience as humans on the page. With David more specifically, I was interested in how his consciousness might be shaped by the knowledge that, very soon, on a specific day and time, he will die. How can anyone really take in the enormity of that? Yet David has to, somehow, and, in the meantime, the days keep coming and he still has to decide what to eat for breakfast. That unimaginable position really drew me in. The fragmentation of dementia sometimes makes David’s consciousness more sharply attuned to things, while entire other swaths of life fall away. What remains of our living? What of ourselves stays with us? These are questions that I struggle with as a mortal person, that I think all of us have to contend with in some way. We have a lot of systems to keep our eventual end out of our awareness—and thank God, because the awareness would be paralyzing. But David has to look into that void, if only in brief flares.

Like some of your other protagonists, David isn’t an entirely sympathetic character. When you fictionalized a few days in the life of Harvey Weinstein, in your story “White Noise,” in 2020, you said that you were interested in exploring his “moments of humanity, the banality and self-delusion, the recognizable foibles.” Did you have a similar impetus with David?

David is a pretty mild case, compared to my Harvey character. Maybe it’s funny with Harvey in particular, but in general, with writing, I don’t think in terms of sympathy. With David, I want to show the fullness of this person, who, like most of us, has probably failed at relationships, caused harm, let people down. But who has also just been a specific person, David, with all his particular references and experiences, and who, when he departs, will take with him the totality of David. “I am a human being, and nothing human is alien to me” (I had to look up the exact line, from a play I’ve never read, but I’ve always liked the sound of it): that’s something I feel strongly about as a writer—taking it as an absolute that every person who has ever lived has had a human consciousness that is not unlike mine. So I guess there’s no person who doesn’t have my “sympathy,” in the sense that I think their experience is of a piece with the human experience.

David hasn’t been the best possible father to Rebecca, and he knows it. Does his cognitive decline, ironically, allow him to see that more clearly than he did when he was healthy?

Moments of vulnerability or terror can maybe make people more aware of those around them. Facing your own peril can force you to look at the networks of intimacy and support that you have, or don’t have; and maybe the deficits in those networks or relationships can become more concerning to you. But it’s possible that you don’t get as much clarity or revelation as you might want. For David, I think there’s this desire to have a “reckoning,” a teleologically satisfying experience of accounting for his life and actions. But that tidy feeling eludes him. All the tools he has used to keep himself busy and prop up his idea of who David Hastings is have fallen away, and he’s left blinking and looking around at what remains.

We see the dinner through David’s eyes. Rebecca seems nervous, on edge, unsure how to communicate with him. Do you think that her take on the meal would be different from what he imagines her experience to be?

Who can ever know for sure what another is experiencing? Whatever David imagines is, of course, just his imagining. She brings her own little universe to the dinner, in the same way that David does, and these universes intersect but don’t really illuminate each other in any helpful way. Or maybe there are flashes of it—of genuine understanding—but those are rare. That distance—the difficulty of truly making contact with another person from the limits of the self—interests me as a writer. David is especially marooned, a man of a certain generation in a culture that’s rapidly slipping into illegibility for him.

The story is adapted from part of your forthcoming novel, “Switzy,” which gives the full arc of David’s journey to Zurich and his experience there. How did you prepare to write the book? Was there a lot of research involved?

I did a lot of reading of all kinds, and watched interviews and documentaries, both about navigating dementia and about medically assisted dying. I wanted to know concrete things, like the layout of the clinic room, what art is on the walls, what the parking lot looks like. I tried to poke around other corners, too: to write about David’s life and career, I looked at boarding-school yearbooks from the sixties and tax-planning forums; and I read broadly, from Ernest Becker’s “The Denial of Death” to Rilke’s “Duino Elegies.” I liked watching videos of Sheldon Solomon, one of the psychologists who developed terror-management theory, whose amazing Hang Ten affect softens all the terror.

I travelled to London and Zurich with no real plan except to walk around. Some details I knew immediately I’d use in the novel, and other things jumped into focus as I was writing, and were nice surprises. The entire trip was worth it to me for this one thing alone, which I probably wouldn’t have found in any book: on the road to the Zurich Airport, there are these highway signs that say “AUSFAHRT,” meaning “exit.” That detail clicked into the novel in a great way for me, as did countless other little sights and encounters, which all started to form a world for David in my mind. ♦