“Voices Lost in Snow” ran in The New Yorker in 1976, though I discovered it almost two decades later, in a discarded library copy of “Home Truths,” a volume now out of print. I was plunged into Mavis Gallant’s vertiginous world, stunned by the way she excavated the past, shuffled narrative time, and privileged shards of perception over conventional plots. The story forms part of a semi-autobiographical sextet, often referred to as the Linnet Muir series, and is an example of how Gallant dispenses with forced (and, I would argue, fallacious) distinctions between life and art, between the novel and the short form. When I fell under the spell of her work many years ago, I was still learning to piece together my first stories; it felt like sounding out scales and arpeggios after listening to the teacher perform Mozart or Bach.

“Voices Lost in Snow” is set “halfway between our two great wars,” as Gallant writes, in Montreal, where she was born in 1922. My story “Jubilee” takes place in 1977 in London, my own birthplace. (I moved to America with my parents when I was two.) I am now, as Gallant was, a writer in her fifties looking back at childhood—in particular, at a few months my family spent in England the year I turned ten, during Elizabeth II’s Silver Jubilee. I had been trying to write about this period for some time. Early drafts of the material were composed in Italian, but the heart of the story eluded me, and so my scattered impressions languished in a notebook. After I reread “Voices Lost in Snow” earlier this year, “Jubilee” came to me quickly. In this new phase, I decided to write the story directly in English: my first one in English in well over a decade. Perhaps it was the bravura and beauty of Gallant’s sentences that inspired me to work in that language again.

At a certain point, Linnet, the narrator of “Voices Lost in Snow,” refers to the “long backward reach” of memory. This is the key to Gallant’s story, and also suggests the spirit in which I approached “Jubilee”—reaching for something that had hitherto felt at once meaningful and distant, fleeting and fixed. Yes, those months in London were a set piece in my mind, but set pieces are not short stories. In “Voices Lost in Snow,” I noted the thin membrane between the narrator’s present, mature awareness and a past in which one’s parents feel both inscrutable and utterly in charge. Her description of Montreal in winter helped me to evoke my youthful impressions of London, and her way of talking about a displaced mother, and a father who inhabited a kind of elsewhere, led me, yet again, to place my own parents inside a new fictional container. The hovering but absent quality of Linnet’s parents reminded me in some ways of my upbringing. Her story, full of phantoms, of voices from the beyond, combines a gathering of scenes with observations on marriage, illness, boredom, loneliness, language, and death. It is at once tight and loose, stripped to its essentials yet free-ranging. This juxtaposition was Gallant’s unique signature and skill. Much of childhood, in her stories, is an act of decoding the incomprehensible behavior and speech of adults—one could call it a form of translation.

One thing I understood while writing “Jubilee” was the abyss, alongside the extreme closeness, between me and my mother during those months in London. This realization allowed the story to darken, to swerve, and it also created space for the character of Joya, who is six months younger than my narrator, to emerge. I suppose a fundamental difference between my story and Gallant’s is that mine includes a friendship between two girls, whereas Linnet is utterly alone in a world of adults. The godparent tradition is absent in Bengali culture; all the same, like Linnet, I was raised not only by my mother and father but by other adults, members of their social circle, who exerted their influences on me. The final paragraph of Gallant’s story refers to a spiderweb. Mine mentions a lace curtain. Both images are planted earlier in our stories, and are tied to the workings of memory. Spiderwebs and lace curtains have something in common: seemingly insubstantial, even ghostly, they are in fact sturdy, carefully wrought. I did not set out to replicate the gesture, but I am old enough to know that children sometimes mimic parental figures in unconscious, mysterious ways. ♦