This interview was featured in the Books & Fiction newsletter, which delivers the stories behind the stories, along with our latest fiction. Sign up to receive it in your in-box.

In “Dark Horse,” your story in this week’s issue, a woman has a recurring intrusive thought—the Thought, as she calls it—which involves her father having sex with his prize horse, Claudia. Her father acquired Claudia via the Horses and Burros Act, and he has a lot of thoughts about wild-horse policy. What drew you to that particular piece of legislative history as a backdrop for this family?

I majored in biology in college, mainly because I really love animals, and that resulted in having a lot of friends who now work in conservation. I don’t remember how we first got on the topic, but a friend explained this law to me one day, and I was fascinated. It’s such a strong example of trying to do something good, but in this ill-advised way that potentially is causing more suffering in the end, through weird unintended consequences. So much of conservation is fraught with these questions of how to do good by both people and animals, who sometimes have conflicting needs, and these questions are interesting to me, because answering them involves a decision around how you weigh the value of a particular life and how you define suffering.

The narrator believes that the Thought was born the day her mother died, when her father refused to come into the house to say goodbye, preferring to stay outside with Claudia. The mother is a quietly devastating presence in the story. How did you think about balancing her absence with how much she still shapes the narrator’s interior life?

To me, the Thought is transmuted grief. I’m really interested in denial and repression, and the messy and unexpected ways that grief worms its way out of us. Claudia’s and the mother’s fates became entwined in the narrator’s mind as her mother was dying, and that’s something she has to work through, but it will take a lot of reckoning—maybe a lifetime of it. So the Thought is a way of keeping the mother present.

The story has a road-trip element, as Claudia’s health worsens and the father decides to drive her to Mexico, where she can be humanely slaughtered. The mother’s death and Claudia’s decline are woven together. Did you always conceive of them as parallel, or did that connection emerge as you were writing?

Always. But the way that played out did change in revision. In earlier drafts of the story, the father didn’t come on the road trip. He was unable to face it, in the same way he was unable to face his wife’s death, and again he off-loaded the burden to his daughter. In that version, he is simply on the phone with the narrator when she makes the decision to release Claudia. Early readers gave the feedback that a phone call was not enough—he needed to be in that car and he needed to see the release of Claudia happen. They were absolutely right. It brought so much more energy into the ending and underscored the parallels between the mother and Claudia.

The narrator goes to great lengths to evade the Thought—even travelling to Australia, where she meets a former child TV star. Back in the U.S., she acquires a boyfriend, a twice-married man named Dylan, who’s a bit of a loser, and is treated as such by the narrator. What is most likely to be effective in shedding the Thought, once and for all?

I hope that readers will relate to the Thought in a lot of different ways. For me, this is a story about O.C.D., which I struggled with intensely as a child. There’s a subtype called real-event O.C.D., which involves endlessly replaying and questioning a past event. I learned about real-event O.C.D. only as an adult, and it was such a relief to understand that this specific form of suffering had a name, and that I wasn’t completely alone in it. So this is a somewhat clinical answer to this question, but two of the most effective treatments for O.C.D. are exposure and response-prevention (E.R.P.) therapy and acceptance-and-commitment therapy (ACT). It is possible the narrator will never be fully free from the Thought. In fact, accepting that we cannot control our thoughts is an important part of O.C.D. treatment. But that doesn’t mean the narrator can’t learn how to live with the Thought, to give it less weight, and to be free from the pain of it. ♦