In “Reality Check” we meet Oliver, a reclusive and imaginative teen whose choice to seclude himself in his room leads to his family taking extreme measures to bring him back into the fold. What was your inspiration for this story?

I had read news articles about such kids both here and in Japan, and I know from experience with my own boys how deeply invested kids can become in video games. There is research to suggest that extreme gamers who isolate themselves may have trouble dealing with offline reality. The relationship between reality and imagination has always intrigued me since, like all fiction writers, I spend a lot of time with people who are vivid to me but who don’t actually exist. In this story, I wanted to explore the rewards and costs of that relationship. Invented tech, such as brain operations, are often good means for such explorations—what Ursula K. Le Guin called “thought experiments.”

Although Oliver’s parents are both driven by the desire to connect with their son, the image that stayed with me was of Sarah peering through a crack in the linen closet outside Oliver’s room while her husband Harry storms off to obsess over the relationships of microbes in his lab. What was it like to develop these characters and the family dynamic as a whole?

Dysfunctional families are always interesting to write; they illuminate the differences of viewpoint that divide us. I enjoyed writing Sarah and Harry.

One of the reasons I’m drawn to this story is how evocative the visuals are, from Oliver’s fascination with an abstract Jackson Pollock painting to my favorite lines from a tense scene between his parents: “Harry performed a peculiar, complex maneuver: turning on his heel to leave, arresting one foot in midair, turning back to Sarah as if moving through concrete, reaching one hand to touch her and pulling it back as if burned. His face contorted wildly until it settled into a single expression like a pioneer on virgin territory.” Do you tend to start the writing process with these kinds of details in mind, or do they come to you later on?

They come as the story develops. Harry is feeling a lot of different emotions in that moment as he tries to beseech Sarah, a thing he never does, and I first visualized the movements that might capture that and then tried to find the words to describe them.

The idea of a person who suddenly loses the ability to immerse themselves in a fictional world or see things from another perspective is a uniquely terrifying concept, especially to fans of this type of magazine. What drew you to explore this scenario? Should we be more worried for Oliver or for the people around him?

I know people—I am intimately related to some of them—who say, “I never read fiction. Why would I want to read about something that didn’t happen?” Those people all seem to function just fine in the world, but it is not my world. I and they have, at best, achieved peaceful coexistence. As for suddenly losing the ability to immerse yourself in a fictional world—we have barely begun to understand the workings of the brain. Brain disruptions—tumors, stroke, trauma, surgery—can cause a person to not recognize their leg as their own, or lose all sense of identity and/or reality, so I suppose this development is possible too. Let’s hope it does not become widespread.

Do you have any upcoming projects you’d like to talk about?

I have a book coming out next summer, The Queen’s Witch. It is fantasy, which I have not written in decades, about a witch at the court of Henry VIII. I am excited about it.