What are some things you know about Lise that didn’t make it onto the page? We get bits and pieces of Lise’s life throughout the story. We find out about her early childhood trauma and the hiring process she’s currently going through. Did some elements get trimmed back or cut entirely?

What you see is more or less what’s on the page! If it was a longer work I’d obviously know more about her than what got written but all fiction (short fiction especially, IMO) is a little like making a friend on a flight: Generally you only know what they feel like telling you about their life before they stepped on the plane, and that varies from person to person. What happens to them once they get their bags down from the overhead compartment and run off to make a connection or meet family or pick up the rental car? Unless you get their number or email and felt enough of a connection to check up on them, you’ll probably never know.

“Fragments of the Whole” is based on the work of sociologist Kathryn J. Lively. What first got you interested in her research, and what made you decide to write a story based on it? And I hear she got a chance to read it already. What was that like, having the research base be an early reader?

This story was originally written for an anthology back in 2022 wherein myself and several other writers were each assigned a researcher at Dartmouth’s field of study and asked to write a piece of fiction based around it. Long story short, it wasn’t my choice to make! Dr. Lively did get to read it and was very, very kind about the absolute muddle I probably made of her very interesting research, for which I am deeply grateful.

What was your favorite part about writing this story? What was the hardest thing to get just right?

Couldn’t pick a favorite part but managing to figure out how to approximate Dr. Lively’s research fictionally even a little was absolutely nerve-wracking. It’s a very nebulous field of study to really nail down, so I had to do the best I could. It was a bit like trying to put together a dinosaur skeleton in a dark room and then present it to a respected paleontologist.

Beyond the research of Lively, can you tell us about some of the other inspirations that came into the creation process? Is there a reason you settled on Freddie Mercury over someone else who could fill that persona role like Robin Williams or David Bowie or David Tennant?

I was writing on a tight turnaround and did what many of us do when we need ideas fast: I pulled from myself. If I think of people enviably comfortable onstage I think of Mr. Farrokh Bulsara. If you ask me to imagine something limp and pliable the first thing that comes to mind is a ragdoll. Sometimes there’s a deeper symbolic meaning to things; sometimes it’s just “because I think jackalopes are cool.”

Are there any personas that you are particularly proud of or attached to?

I do love the sassy jackalope a lot. I think he ended up being equal parts Augustus McCrae from Lonesome Dove/Bigwig from Watership Down and you really can’t go wrong with that combination.

Do you have any recent authors or stories you’ve enjoyed and would like to recommend?

Vigil by George Saunders is probably my favorite new book of the year so far; I’m a huge sucker for a good ghost-adjacent story and nobody writes dead people like Saunders (Lincoln in the Bardo is my favorite novel of the past ten years).

I also recently picked up John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor and Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon at roughly the same time entirely by accident, thus giving myself an impromptu “postmodern doorstops set in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries” thematic lesson plan that I should be done with by early 2030.

If you want something that’s not going to take roughly a decade to finish, though, I really loved Hawksmoor by Peter Ackroyd, which is (say it with me) a weird, temporally amorphous postmodern murder mystery partially set in eighteenth-century London. Definitely noticing a trend in my choices of late.

What have you been working on lately? Is there any exciting news you’d like to share?

I wish I had more to report but the past few years have been more about survival than anything else. As soon as an idea worth writing wriggles into my net maybe that’ll change. Fingers crossed!

• • • •

In addition to the interview with Brooke, I was also able to connect with Dr. Kathryn J. Lively regarding her research at Dartmouth, upon which this story is based. Hello, Dr. Lively! Thank you so much for taking the time to answer a few questions. First, can you speak to your research at Dartmouth?

I am a sociological social psychologist, who specializes in emotion and identity. I am also very much interested in purposeful self-change and emotion management. Recently, I’ve become more interested in tracing connections between sociological theory and psychological theory and practice.

If I understand correctly, in Internal Family Systems (IFS), you work to identify and separate out the core self from your other parts. What are the main archetype parts, and how does this reframing promote healing from grief and trauma?

Yes, IFS conceptualizes the self as being comprised of Parts—Managers and Exiles. There are two types of Managers—the prosocial type who manage your life so that upset never occurs. These include people pleasers, perfectionist parts, task master parts, the workaholic, etc. Then there are the Firefighters, who sweep in when the emotional upset has occurred, or when the Manager’s normal strategies have failed to contain the pain. The pain—emotional, though sometimes it manifests as physical symptoms, is really unprocessed feelings carried by the Exile.

I was first introduced to IFS while collecting data for a study of long-term weight loss and found myself struck by the similarities between it and a theory in sociology called Affect Control Theory that I had been working with for about twenty years.

I imagine a therapist in real life cannot do what happened in the story, but what are some ways that parts work has, or can, go awry if done improperly?

No, luckily Bo’s story is truly fiction. You could try—if you were an unscrupulous therapist—to manipulate a client. However, the psyche is actually quite intelligent. Parts, for instance, can tell when a client is blended with another Part, and they literally will not participate or cooperate until the Client has managed to unblend sufficiently enough to have sufficient self-energy (e.g. curiosity, compassion, courage, creativity, etc.). If a client is blended with another Part or has an agenda to make the target Part change their behavior, the Target Part literally will turn their back. It’s fascinating. It’s like, “No! Not playing. Thank you very much. Good day.”

And, at the same time, as a researcher, I’m always trying to make the world better. However, once you write something or discover something it’s truly out of your hands. So, I think it’s fitting that Bo took it where they did—as dark and as fantastical as that might be.

Lastly, if people are interested in your area of research, do you have any resources you recommend where people can learn more? Do you have any fiction or films to recommend (related or unrelated to your field of study)?

Inside Out, the Pixar movie, is a good place to start. I would also recommend that if they’re interested in learning more about Internal Family Systems—which is an amazing modality for change—they start with Richard Schwartz’s trade publication, No Bad Parts or check out his many demonstrations on YouTube.