Your story “Something Has Come to Light” was inspired by what your mother told you about a cousin of hers, who, as a young man in the nineteen-sixties, left his Mennonite community in Canada in order to pursue his academic and musical ambitions. What was it about the cousin’s story that made it so memorable to you?

It was so mysterious and tragic and romantic in a way—at least it was to me, as a kid, hearing about him for the first time. He was such an anomaly, especially in my conservative Mennonite home town. My mother described him as an intellectual and a poetic soul and said that he’d gone to Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship. I was just immediately intrigued by him. What happened to him at Oxford? Would it have happened to him even if he’d stayed at home? For me, his story stood, on the one hand, as a warning about the dark evils of the world—from which we Mennonites were attempting to isolate ourselves—but, on the other, as a tantalizing possibility. It hadn’t occurred to me, until my mother told me about him, that you could be such a person in my community. An intellectual and a poetic soul with a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford! It blew my young, fundamentalist mind.

The story is a letter written by a grandmother to her grandchildren, to be read after her death. Why did you choose the epistolary form for this narrative?

The letter is a confession. It reveals something that she doesn’t want to tell her grandchildren, or anyone, while she’s alive. But she needs to say it, and she can say it in a letter that will be read only when she’s gone. She needs to confess her crime, if you can call it that, but she also wants to impart something about living, or how it might be possible to live, to her grandchildren. The crime she commits—digging up Roland’s grave—is not really the thing that she wants to be forgiven for. What she’s asking forgiveness for is the sin, as she would call it, or the mistake, of not having listened to that small voice inside her head and not having said yes to life’s possibilities and to her own self.

The story is ultimately about regret: the narrator wishes she had accepted an invitation decades earlier. What was it about Roland that makes him so important to her in memory, when they had almost no interaction? Was it Roland himself, or the idea that she might have taken a completely different path in life?

When she was a teen-ager, and in his presence, she was perhaps feeling a kind of longing for him. It may have been an early twinge of sexual desire but was also, more importantly, a longing to connect with him on some other level—intellectually, maybe, or spiritually. She would have sensed that they were somehow similar people, outliers in their community, and that they could have been soulmates, although she wouldn’t have articulated that to herself then, or maybe ever. And, later in life, certainly, Roland represents the idea of a different path, the path that she regrets not having taken, a path into the outside world, and a path that would have subverted all expectations of her within that community.

Your memoir “A Truce That Is Not Peace” is about to come out. It is also at least partly epistolary, and it deals with your own decision to leave the Mennonite community to pursue your creative ambitions. Do you feel an affinity with Roland?

Yes, very much so. I often imagine the cousin whom Roland is based on alone in Oxford, in the sixties, and what that must have felt like for him. I wish I had known him.

Your fiction has sometimes overlapped with your reality. And you published a short memoir piece in The New Yorker a few years ago. What inspired you to explore your own life directly in the new book?

I had been thinking a lot about writing and about not writing and about silence and about my sister and her death—which is central to the book—and just kind of the futility of it all, but then again also my need to write. I was having these long internal arguments with myself, building up walls and knocking them down at the same time. And I guess I was trying to figure out a way, a structure, that would contain those thoughts and questions and dilemmas and doubts, and writing from and about my own life, directly, seemed to me to be the way to do it. ♦