Your story “A Talent for Seeming,” which is adapted from the early pages of a novel-in-progress, focusses on a teen-age girl named Adele, living in Butte, Montana, in the late nineteen-seventies, who falls in love with acting. What inspired you to tell the story of this girl and her coming of age?

My novels emerge from a soup of unconnected fragments, bits of narrative DNA that are typically associated with things I love: people and places from the recent or distant past, books and writers that have made a deep impression, personal experiences I’m glad to have had. With Adele, I was thinking of a particular adult actor I’d seen play Rosalind in a knockout production of “As You Like It.” It’s in the nature of theatre that no one will ever get to see that production or that performance again, but writing fiction can be a way of reclaiming a lost love. Shakespeare in general was foundational for me, and I had my own experiences of writing and acting in plays in high school—how personally transformative that can be.

In the course of the story, Adele goes back and forth between born-again devoutness and pursuing a life style that the other members of her church’s youth group deplore. Why is it important to the narrative to have her seesaw in that way?

It’s basically Drama 101: It’s not enough for a character to want something—there need to be obstacles to attaining what she wants. I’m also interested in people’s defining mythologies, and the way one set of beliefs can morph into another over time. My previous novel was populated by Christian believers who, by and large, didn’t lose their religion. This seemed like a good time to write a character who does lose her religion—or, more precisely, finds a new one to replace it with.

At the height of her piousness, Adele is confronted with a substitute English teacher, Bromley Stokes, a hippie from San Francisco, who, to her dismay, changes all the rules of school. She considers the possibility that he might embody the spirit of Jesus and also the possibility that he might be Satan. Do you think he plays either role in her life?

It depends, of course, on which side you’re looking from. Adele feels saved by Bromley, but her church friends disagree. Adele herself thinks, at one point, that “there’s nothing more horrible than being an actor.” It’s not at all clear that theatre makes her a “better person,” in the conventional moral sense. The evidence in the text suggests the opposite.

Adele is quickly seduced by the “spirit of theatre.” Or is she seduced more by the fact that she has a talent for acting? That she’s found an area in which she stands out? Why do you think that change in her happens so quickly and with seemingly little resistance on her part?

People who become artists typically have both a great talent and an unquenchable thirst for attention, and theatre offers a stage for the former and the most direct possible relief for the latter. The audience is there in the flesh, shutting up and paying attention to your talent. But this liveness of performance is the essence of theatre, its “spirit,” and so the answer to your question may be: both her talent and the theatre. When a young person discovers a talent, the change often happens quickly. You’ve stepped onto a train, and it whisks you away with it. When I started writing, in high school, I don’t remember feeling any resistance at all to it (except from my worried parents). My feeling was: why do anything else when it feels so right to do this?

For Adele, getting laughs while performing is like “ambrosia.” Why do you think inspiring laughter (rather than, say, tears) is so addictive for her?

Speaking for myself, I would never do a public reading that didn’t seem likely to get laughs. Audiences are generally pretty polite—they’ll sit there quietly and listen to anything, but what they’re thinking could be, like, “When is he going to shut up?” Unless they’re laughing. Then I know I have their full attention. And not only that but—since everyone enjoys laughing—I know that I’m delivering the thing that all artists, if they do nothing else, should deliver, which is pleasure. Tears will do the job, too, but they’re harder to hear.

Adele’s mother paid little attention to her when she was a child. She was left in the care of a neighbor most of the time. When Adele becomes a mother, she behaves similarly, leaving her child in Bromley’s care. Shouldn’t she know better?

If people learned from their parents’ mistakes, we novelists would be out of business. Adele probably does know better, but she also makes a choice, which is to pursue her talent, and you can’t have everything. Artists aren’t exactly famous for their sterling moral character. Actors take refuge in the mythology of art, the idea that they’re serving the higher good of theatre. And maybe, from a strictly utilitarian perspective, they’re right. What’s leaving one unhappy child at home compared to sending five hundred people home from the theatre happy?

The novel that “A Talent for Seeming” comes from will be a sequel to your novel “Crossroads.” How does Adele’s story connect to the narrative of “Crossroads”? Does she or her son, Jasper, eventually cross paths with the Hildebrandts? Is there anything else you’re willing to reveal about the new book?

“A Talent for Seeming” has indeed been excerpted, with the help of your keen editorial eye, from a much longer piece of writing. Toward the end of those pages, an actual Hildebrandt appears in Adele’s life. So quite a bit of coherent narrative has already emerged from the soup. But I’m still far from finished. ♦