Social media has become such an “integral” part of our lives that it’s hard to imagine a time when people weren’t sharing everything, from an aesthetic shot of a bagel, to birth announcements, engagements, and promotions. My mother used to lug out the family photo albums on my birthday and show bare-assed baby photos of me to all my friends. I shudder to think what she might have accomplished on a more modern platform.

Personally, I find monsters far more interesting if they share the same desires and pains as we do, if they are not so opaque or one-dimensional in their motivations. That touch of commonality evokes a different response than an alien or unexamined threat.

Speaking as a father, my greatest fear has long been failing my child in any one of many, many ways. So many ways. The protagonist of the story is a good man (probably, as it was deliberately written to be as ambiguous as hell), and he feels he is constantly on the cusp of failing his daughter. And there’s that other fear, that perhaps he already has, and the ramifications will be awful.

I’ve been interested in memory for—well, maybe for longer than I can remember. But my obsession with it started when I began a project to write a sequence of poems about my childhood. I became fascinated by the way memory distorts—the way that, when we look back at ourselves, we so often find ourselves looking at impossible angles into our past—down into our own faces, for example.