Karen Thompson Walker’s last book, “The Dreamers,” imagined a mysterious virus that quickly spreads through a small college town and induces perpetual sleep. That book came out just before the COVID-19 pandemic changed our collective relationship to viruses. Thompson Walker’s new book, “The Strange Case of Jane O.,” also seeks to understand the way our brains work, this time looking at memory. Karen Thompson Walker joins us to talk about her latest novel.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller coming to you today from the Gert Boyle studio. The best-selling Portland author Karen Thompson Walker joins us now. In her debut novel, “The Age of Miracles,” the Earth’s rotation on its axis slows, and a whole cascade of ecological and human disasters follows. In 2019, in “The Dreamers,” she explored another scary premise, a mysterious sleeping epidemic sweeps through a college town. Her new book shrinks the terror down to the level of a single character’s brain, and in so doing makes it even more intimate and just as powerful. The novel is called “The Strange Case of Jane O”. It centers on a woman named Jane with an extraordinary memory, who starts to see and experience things that are not there or not happening, it seems, calling into question not just her memory, but her identity, her entire sense of self. Karen Thompson Walker, welcome back to Think Out Loud.
Karen Thompson Walker: Thank you so much for having me. It’s really great to be here.
Miller: The book starts with case notes written by the psychiatrist named Henry Boyd, who is one of the main characters. He says that a woman named Jane comes to his office, didn’t really say anything for 15 minutes, and then walks out. Can you read the beginning of the next chapter?
Thompson Walker: Sure. “Three days later, I got a call from the emergency room at New York Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist. A woman had been brought to the hospital by ambulance after a maintenance worker found her early that morning unconscious on a field in Prospect Park. The woman had no wallet with her and no identification, no keys, no phone. Upon waking, the patient could not recall how she had come to be in the park or initially where she lived. She was severely dehydrated, but she was otherwise uninjured. By the time she arrived at the emergency room, her confusion had begun to clear. Her name, she said, was Jane, and to my great surprise, she gave my name, Dr. Henry Bird, as her doctor.”
Miller: So that’s very early on. After that, Jane does start to open up a little bit and to tell Henry ‒ who becomes her psychiatrist ‒ a little bit more, including the reason that she went to him, which is that recently she’d had a full, very real seeming conversation with this man on the street who she knew had died 20 years earlier. Early on, what are some of the possible diagnoses that this psychiatrist narrator considers?
Thompson Walker: He tries to consider everything possible. I think one that comes up is schizophrenia and various related disorders because she’s hallucinating, or seeming to hallucinate. That’s the main one, but then there’s some other ones related to amnesia because she has this blackout, or it starts with one blackout, later there’s some more. Mostly he’s looking at the things related to hallucination and memory, but nothing quite fits.
Miller: You have two epigraphs at the beginning of the novel, those quotes that sort of set up a novel. One of them is by the neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks. When did you first read him?
Thompson Walker: I first came across his work in college. My first creative writing teacher was Aimee Bender. She writes a bunch of fiction, especially she, at that time, was known for her debut short story collection and she writes these really beautiful, fantastical stories. She also recommended to our class that we read “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” by Oliver Sacks. I remember it was, it seemed a little surprising, like what does this have to do with fiction? But as soon as I read it, it was clear to me why a fiction writer would love a book like that. Oliver Sacks writes these really beautiful and profoundly moving case histories of real patients living with these rare and uncanny brain disorders that feel, in a way, as if they could come from fiction. But these are real people living with these strange disorders.
Miller: What impact did reading Oliver Sacks have on you?
Thompson Walker: I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately, but immediately I was struck with the truth of how many different ways there are to experience reality. Of course, these were really unusual cases, but it reminded me that in a way, we all experience reality in these at least slightly different and slightly subjective ways. So in his book, there’s a guy who believes it’s the year 1945, even though it’s actually 1975, because his brain can no longer create new memories. So for 30 years he’s believed it’s 1945 and is continually surprised when he looks in the mirror and sees a much older man. It was cases like that that struck me and adjusted my sense of, in a way, how real what I think of reality is, because these people are living in the real world and yet experiencing it in a drastically different way.
Miller: Just today you published a short essay about this for Lithub. It had these lines: “The experience of having my own sense of reality temporarily demolished the way it was when I first encountered Sacks’s work is a feeling I’ve come to crave. There is a pleasure in being reminded that we don’t yet know all there is to know about the universe, much less about one another. All three of my novels grew out of this idea.” I read that and I thought what a testament to the power of literature. You read this, I don’t know, 20 years ago or something, and it’s not the only, but one of the kernels for all the three novels you’ve written.
Thompson Walker: Yeah. I think that that was one of the first really powerful experiences I had of that feeling of like suddenly my whole sense of reality was at least temporarily shifted. So yeah, I really do chart my interest in that kind of territory of this combination of everyday real life ‒ you know, people living in the real world ‒ with really something more extraordinary. And I think Oliver Sacks' work was the beginning for me of some of that interest in that territory of that overlap between the ordinary and the extraordinary.
Miller: So to get back to the new novel, one of the diagnoses or ways to think about what’s happening to this patient, Jane, that Henry the other narrator comes up with is fugue states. What is a fugue state?
Thompson Walker: I’m a novelist who has done a ton of research, but I’m not speaking as an actual psychiatrist, but it’s a really eerie and and real condition where a person completely loses touch with their sense of self and their whole identity, and who they are, and all their memories, and often in many cases ‒ it’s very rare ‒ but in many cases, people have an urge to flee, to leave where they are. They’re conscious, they can move through the world, but it’s like if you tried to have a long conversation with them, maybe they wouldn’t really sort of be fully able to speak with you in a familiar way. But actually, now I’m saying that, there are exceptions because in some of the most famous ones, people forget everything about their past and then start new lives seemingly but without any memory of their previous.
Miller: What’s a historical case of a fugue state that you find intriguing?
Thompson Walker: There’s a famous one from the late 1800s, that is kind of the original case. There was a minister who suddenly disappeared on the east coast. He suddenly disappeared and was missing for two months. Now I’m forgetting which state. I think it was in Pennsylvania. So, he was missing for 2 months, then fast forward two months, a guy who owns a boarding house gets a knock on his door. He opens the door and it’s this man that he has known for two months who has moved into his boarding house, and even opened a little stationery shop. He seems completely confused and he’s like, “Where am I? What’s going on and where am I and why?” He mentions a name that is not the name that the boarding house owner knew him as. And it’s sort of as if this guy just kind of woke up in a way, even though he’d been living a different life for two months. It’s just a famous fascinating case. It’s kind of the original case. Something that interests me, too, is that it was very famous at the time. His name was Ansel Borne, but there was also some kind of controversy about whether was it real? Did he really forget his old life and then suddenly remember it, or was he trying to escape something back home and maybe even like a scandal?
Miller: I’m glad you brought up the doubt about this, because it seems like that is consistent. There are other stories where people had questions about whether these people were faking it or not and that absolutely plays into your novel. There’s a detective who is super skeptical of everything that Jane says, and as readers, we have no choice but to be skeptical because of the way you tease us throughout. Where do you think this distrust comes from?
Thompson Walker: I think that’s a good question. I think when anything happens that is sort of outlandish or conflicts with our sense of reality, I think we all have a gut instinct to say, “Well, maybe it’s not really true.” It’s hard to believe, then maybe you don’t want to believe it. I think that’s a piece of it. In the book, I was interested in involving, like you said, the detective is very skeptical of her and wonders if she might be faking. The psychiatrist kind of goes back and forth and isn’t sure, and I wanted the reader to be involved in that same question. I think there’s something natural about that when something really outlandish happens. But I also think something I was interested in exploring in the book was that maybe, in the case of a woman trying to tell a doctor or the police officer about what her own state is or what her medical situation is, or what her experience of reality is like, that there is maybe this risk of being doubted more than men. So I was interested in exploring that.
Miller: The gendered quality of deprecating of a woman’s experience.
Thompson Walker: Yes. And maybe especially in the context of medicine. There’s just been so much discussion about that; that women are not always believed.
Miller: This is not a gender question, but I do wonder if going back to broader questions of where this distrust could come from, how much you think it could be tied to fear? That if it’s possible that you could go two months, live a separate life, have no idea what’s happening, then snap out of it and then go back to your old self. If that’s possible, what does it mean? Could that happen to any of us at any time? Is our sense of self that tenuous? And if it’s too scary, we just say, no, I don’t believe this happened to somebody else because I don’t want it to happen to me.
Thompson Walker: I think that’s exactly right. Fear, I think fear. Yes, I think that’s definitely, probably the main reason why we doubt things that seem to conflict with our own understanding of reality. And I think you’re right about the self. Even though I love to spend temporarily time in this space of having my sense of reality challenged, the one thing that I do find scary, personally, would be the idea when some people argue that the self is always a construction or an illusion. That it’s like one coherent self. And that idea really scares me in a personal way. There’s so many things in the world that we can’t count on. So you’d think the one thing you can count on is that you are a certain person in the world with a coherent sense of self. There is something really profoundly eerie about that. And, that’s one of the things I was interested in exploring.
Miller: It reminds me a little bit of one of the uncanny and eerie scenes ‒ and I think this happens maybe more than once ‒ where Jane is watching security footage of herself when she has no memory of that time, and she sees herself. There’s no doubt that these cameras at a mini mart or whatever, they captured her walking around, but she has no recollection of that and it’s almost like she’s looking at a stranger. It’s a scary thing to imagine yourself experiencing.
Thompson Walker: Yes. Yeah, it’s like she was there but not there. Like she wasn’t there to witness what she herself did.
Miller: It’s like getting anesthesia but then walking around.
Thompson Walker: Yes, well, it’s interesting you bring up anesthesia because I think that anesthesia is such a good example of one of those things that’s part of our real reality. And you know, maybe in a way it’s an everyday experience, though hopefully rare in each person’s life, and yet so mysterious. Like where do we go when we’re under anesthesia?
Miller: Does time pass, does it not? What are you doing when I’m asleep?
Thompson Walker: Yeah, right.
Miller: So, we started by talking about fugue states, but there’s another trait that makes Jane truly stand out. She has a condition known as hyperthymesia. I don’t know if I’m pronouncing that correctly. I’ve never heard the word. What does it mean?
Thompson Walker: Before her strange symptoms start, she is already an unusual person in the world because she has this condition. Which basically means ‒ I think it’s Greek originally ‒ I think it means excessive remembering, that word literally, and it refers to people who have this unbelievably prodigious memory, especially for their autobiographical experience. So they remember, every minute of their entire lives, or if you say a date, they remember what they were doing, like even 10 years ago and even a random date. And yeah, that I just find… That’s another example of a real thing that’s a fascinating way to be in the world that’s completely different from my own experience, but does really define her. It gives her a sense of because she’s been that way since she was a child, her memory is one of the things that defines her. She doesn’t forget things and she knows she’s very reliable in that sense. So I think for her, it makes it extra unnerving when her memory suddenly starts to fail her.
Miller: In the book this condition, it seems like both a kind of superpower and also a curse. Can you help us understand both pieces of that?
Thompson Walker: I mean, obviously I think it’s easy to imagine the superpower version. I think there’s a famous example in the literature about this of a journalist who didn’t have to take notes because he just remembered.
Miller: Yeah, if I could remember everything people have said on the show or just the prep I do each day, I feel like I’d be much better at my job.
Thompson Walker: Right.
Miller: That’s not what the audit said 17 years ago.
Thompson Walker: In another way though, there is this robotic element. It’s less of a personal lens of what you catch, what you notice, and what really sticks in your memory versus what was forgettable.
Miller: You’re more of an AI.
Thompson Walker: In a way. I don’t want to speak for, because there are this very small number of people in the world who have this, so I don’t want to speak for how they feel about it, but I think a big part of the curse of it, as I understand it ‒ I definitely don’t have this ‒ would be just not being able to to let go of the past. Especially imagine really difficult memories. Instead of the way that I imagined it for Jane, instead of something upsetting that happened a long time ago, kind of gradually, maybe not, not fading from your memory, but sort of taking a kind of smaller and smaller emotional piece in your mind. For her, everything just stays as if it happened yesterday.
Miller: And as if it’s of equal importance. It’s all filed away. All that seems like a practical and internal version of the challenges of this, but it seems like Jane also… Part of the curse is the interpersonal side. Early on, her school classmates treat her almost like she’s a sideshow freak, to use old language. Why? How do other people understand this talent of hers?
Thompson Walker: Well, I think you’re getting at something that’s a quality of hers and maybe kind of an obsession of mine in my fiction, is for Jane, having this incredible memory and people knowing about that, it makes her really different from everyone else. So in a way, maybe it doesn’t even matter, especially in grade school, what the difference is. She’s just very different from everyone else and it interferes with her ability to really connect with other people.
Miller: Where conformity is valued in a place like that.
Thompson Walker: And as she gets older, she often hides that ability and pretends that she hasn’t met someone that she really has met, because it’s awkward.
Miller: And you feel like this is something you’re particularly interested in.
Thompson Walker: Well, I’m interested in characters who are a little bit apart, who are in some way not quite able to fully join the social world around them. I don’t even know if I can completely explain why, one, because there’s just so much emotion in that type of life, to feel that sense of isolation, but maybe also it’s those types of characters are also more likely to be observers or have a lot going on their own mind because in a way they’re a little less connected maybe to the people around them.
Miller: One of the deep questions that your book really foregrounded for me is the extent to which our memories are us, make us who we are, define us, define our sense of self. How do you wrestle with this question?
Thompson Walker: I just love spending time on that question. But there’s a lot of tragedy in the experience of losing one’s memory. Obviously Alzheimer’s would be a familiar reason that people lose their memory. That doesn’t really come up in this book, but becoming disconnected from who you were before, there’s just something so tragic about that. I read a lot about memory for this book, and there’s all kinds of different cases where temporary blackouts, that’s fascinating, as we’ve already talked about. But also the inability to create new memories is also an interesting and tragic way to be in the world if you sort of end up stuck where you are.
Miller: We talked 5 years ago when “The Dreamers” came out, and we talked, among other things, about your interest in exploring fears, listening to fears, interrogating them, and asking what they can teach us. Are you still as interested in fears as you were when you gave a TED Talk, I don’t know, 10 or more years ago or when we were talking about “The Dreamers?”
Thompson Walker: Oh, that’s a good question. I think fear is going to be a forever interest of mine. It’s true, this is something I’ve been thinking about for more than a decade, but just the idea of this relationship between fear and the imagination. So for me, those are very closely linked. I like reading about the unusual cases. People have brain disorders with these strange relationships to memory. I think on some level it’s a fascination that I have, but also fear. Like that’s scary. And then immediately my mind starts to be like, well, what if this other thing happened to your brain? How would that affect things? It’s intimately connected, I think, for me; fear and imagination.
Miller: This is the second book in a row in which a psychiatrist is one of your main characters. Henry Moore… So there’s a psychiatrist in “The Dreamers.” There’s many more characters who come and go in “The Dreamers”, and in this one, which is a smaller cast of characters. What interests you in the field of psychiatry?
Thompson Walker: Yeah, that’s a really good question. I’m interested in the brain and consciousness and memory, and human emotion, all of it because of its sense of mystery. It feels like someone who is like a cardiologist. I’m not saying there’s no mysteries left in the heart. But, I feel like we’ve figured out a lot of which valve does what. That kind of thing.
Miller: The mysteries in the heart are more about metaphors, I think, more than about squishy muscle movement.
Thompson Walker: I didn’t even… obvious plenty of mystery left in the metaphor of the heart, but no, the actual heart. I think the mind and the brain are just going to be forever. There’s going to be a part that we can never fully see into. And so I think psychiatry is a field that, while it’s science and it’s medicine, there is going to just always be this sense of mystery. I find that to be really fascinating. I obviously don’t have any particular training myself. All my knowledge of psychiatry comes from research, which one of the fascinating things about writing this book is becoming better versed in that.
Miller: Was that research reading books or did you talk to therapists or psychiatrists as well?
Thompson Walker: It was almost all from books. I just read tons of memoirs by patients and by psychiatrists. Some do sort of double duty like classics in that category are “An Unquiet Mind” by Kay Redfield Jamison. She wrote about a memoir of being a psychiatric patient, but from the perspective of when she was older and had become a psychiatrist. So, mostly from books. Then at the end when I had a draft, I actually shared it with a psychiatrist who I met sort of a bit by accident. She lives in Portland, too. It was very scary to send her the draft and I just wanted her to sort of fact check it for me, if I had gotten anything really wrong. I think there’s always space in fiction. My psychiatrist doesn’t have to be 100% right about everything, but I wanted it to feel plausible to a psychiatrist.
And that was one of the most interesting parts of writing this book, her response, because she seemed to feel when I met her for coffee afterwards, she seemed to have had a sort of uncanny experience because to her, she couldn’t understand how someone who was not a psychiatrist at all could have sort of impersonated a psychiatrist on the page for the length of a novel. That was fascinating to me and also relieving and satisfying. She’s like, “It’s undetectable that a psychiatrist didn’t write this.” That, to me, was another uncanny thing for me.
Miller: Because we are for more than half the time inside the words in the mind of Henry, the psychiatrist, there are plenty of times when he tells us if he’s withholding information from Jane for the sake of their therapeutic relationship. What did you learn about that dynamic in particular, how much the therapist doesn’t say to their patient?
Thompson Walker: That is another thing that’s fascinating to me about, and this maybe applies beyond classic psychiatry, but also just anyone who does psychotherapy. I think it’s the debates about how best to interact with a patient and how much to tell, how much not to tell about your own personal life, but also when to comment, when to listen. I think the one thing that he withholds is even just his own initial judgments. He doesn’t immediately say what he’s thinking when she’s describing her symptoms.
I don’t know that I have a whole theory of that, but it was fascinating to read about. An older idea would be like, absolutely no that a psychiatrist or a psychotherapist would ever say anything about their own personal life to a patient, for example, but then I know that some people have a looser idea of what’s going to be helpful for a patient. So even eavesdropping on the conversations in the field was really interesting to me as a fiction writer.
Miller: In all three of your books that I’ve read, but maybe never more than this one, you build tension and creepiness in a really effective way. There’s a background level of unease that’s really impressive, and it’s sustained. How do you do that?
Thompson Walker: So much of what writers do is a bit intuitive, but I think I love that experience as a reader. I love the feeling of needing to turn the page and see what’s the next thing that’s going to happen. And I think that sense of, at least in my books and in some books that I love, that sense of unease and uncertainty about what’s really happening or what the next thing to happen is is very intriguing and fun reading experience. So I try. I would say most of it, most of my sense of how to do it as a writer comes from the experience of enjoying it as a reader.
Miller: And it’s interesting as ‒ it’s maybe hard to put into words here ‒ but the experience I get, it’s different than a thriller. It’s not like there’s a serial killer out there and we don’t know where they’re going to strike next. It’s deeper and a little bit weirder than that. Unease is maybe the best word I can think of, but I’m wondering what writers you really respond to in terms of the overall vibes that they are able to create. Who do you respond to?
Thompson Walker: Yeah, well, that’s interesting. I think for this book and in general, but for sure for this book, the book “Never Let Me Go” by Kazuo Ishiguro is really a major influence.
Miller: I’m so glad you said that. I was thinking about Ishiguro, not just that book, but “Remains of the Day” as well, in the context of this book. Very different, but there’s something about the restraint that is sustained and in combination with “Never Let Me Go.”
Thompson Walker: That’s great to hear. Yes, “Remains of the Day” is another one that I also actively was thinking about with this because I think what he does so well ‒ and maybe, I don’t know if this really is answering your question ‒ but I just love a narrator who thinks they’re telling the whole story, they’re trying to tell the story, but yet, either by these minor things that they don’t want to talk about, or they think it’s minor, or even just accidentally they don’t see it. Big important parts of the story are being left out and interfering with the reader’s initial understanding of what’s going on. And I just love that effect and I think Ishiguro is just a master at that type of narrator who is kind of quietly withholding and almost accidentally withholding. I just love that as a reader.
Miller: Then after the withholding, there are little dribs and drabs of giving information. Both of your characters have moments where they say things like, “I guess I should tell you something now that I didn’t tell you earlier,” or “before I wasn’t quite full with the truth.” And then it’s both we get a little bit more information which we maybe can trust, but it’s a kind of after-the-fact admission of their previous unreliability. How do you think about parceling out revelations as you go?
Thompson Walker: I love it as a reader, so I try to be a student of it. But I start to get a sense of the pacing of when another revelation is needed, I guess. Sometimes I feel like my own short attention span is kind of an asset as a writer because I have a sense of, “I don’t know, this feels like this is getting too slow now,” and then I can feel it as a reader and a writer. Then I’m like, “Well, maybe we need another clue or shift in tone.”
Miller: Do you feel that as a writer or more as an editor? So what I mean is in the first draft version or after when you’re going through and saying, ah, I feel that I have dragged things here.
Thompson Walker: Yeah, I think that’s a very good question. I would say that’s as an editor, but I edit it as I go, you know, so like even within a chapter, I might be like, “It feels like there’s three or four too many sentences in this spot,” and it’s like my own mind is wandering when I’m rereading it, and that, in a way, is helpful even though in other areas I’m like, “Oh, I wish I could just force myself to concentrate.” I’m a little distractible. So I find that to be useful as a writer, when I’m editing.
Miller: Without giving anything away, I can say that there is more of an answer at the end of this book about what has happened than there was in either of your two novels. So, we won’t talk about what the answer is, but I’m wondering about the decision to do that. I think the last time we talked, you had said that some of your readers said, “How come you didn’t give us an answer?” and you said, “Life doesn’t have answers.” Was that in the back of your head for those readers who wanted more finality you’re giving it to them or is this more internal?
Thompson Walker: I think it’s both. Maybe I would also say that this book has a different form. My first two books are sort of disaster novels that have a mysterious element, but the story is sort of charting the disaster, whereas this one is sort of partly a literary novel, but partly a mystery. It is like what’s going on…
Miller: And so classic, not classic, but a version of a mystery in which in the genre, normally the mystery is solved.
Thompson Walker: Yes, right, even though it’s not not a mystery like a crime mystery, but there’s a big question at the beginning, like what’s going on? And so I didn’t want to end it without any answer to that. But I do think that hearing it over and over again from readers, some readers love that, as I do a kind of uncertain ending, but hearing it so often, it’s not that I wanted to, it was not that I’m like, “Oh, I need to please the readers,” but it was more like setting a challenge for myself. Like, oh, well, it’s true, even though I kind of like an uncertain ending, I did sort of feel like this would be an interesting challenge for as a writer to try a different kind of ending and it is a little less uncertain at the end.
Miller: What was the challenge, craft wise, to write in that sense a different kind of book.
Thompson Walker: You mean in terms of the ending, or just…
Miller: Exactly. Where you parcel out little bits here and there. I didn’t know. I was surprised, but I think I’m never very good at figuring out mysteries, so it’s not a surprise that I was surprised. But I’m wondering what it was? How it was different for you as a writer to write a book where there is a kind of grand reveal.
Thompson Walker: I mean, that part did feel really different. I write books that have some kind of speculative or science fiction or unreal elements. That’s something that I love to do. But sometimes I’ve come up with premises where there really is no plausible explanation for them, and in this one, again, it’s a sci-fi element, but I guess the challenge was I did want there to be an explanation. So the challenge is trying to figure out the explanation. I don’t know if this is a spoiler, but the answer is not it’s schizophrenia, you know, it’s not like one diagnosis that we know. That’s not the answer. So having to figure out an answer that is both logical, but yet still in this sort of fantastical science fiction universe, that was the challenge.
Miller: We’ve spent a lot of time talking about the sense of self and memories and sort of interior life, but there’s another big dimension of this novel, which is really moving, which is the connection between these two people, this patient and this doctor, Jane and Henry. What did you want to explore in their relationship?
Thompson Walker: I think maybe the counterpoint. I was saying I was interested in characters who are a little apart from society or the regular social world and a little lonely, a little isolated. I’m interested in that, but the counterpoint to that is just how meaningful it is when people like that find some kind of sense of connection with another person. I was interested in they both, I think, even though it’s patient and doctor and their situations are different, I think they recognize something in each other that I found to be really moving.
Miller: There’s a gentleness in the way Henry approaches Jane as her doctor. He’s patient and careful and empathetic and even ‒ and this case is what we’re talking about early ‒ even when he knows what she’s experiencing can’t be tethered to reality as he knows it. He takes her experience seriously. What’s the analog to that in non-therapeutic relationships?
Thompson Walker: Oh, that’s interesting. I think that’s just such a powerful, meaningful thing for any of us to do; to be a really profound listener; to listen to someone else’s experience, even if it seems so different from our own that it’s hard to fully grasp it. I think it’s the kind of foundation of connection, to be able to really accept someone else’s experience and respect it. And, I think about that sometimes with parenting. Sometimes, to remember that if my first grader or my fifth grader is really upset about something, that for me as a 44 year old, I have a sense of whether it’s important or not, I try to put that aside and think but it’s important to her right now.
Miller: It’s so hard to do that sometimes. I mentioned that there are two epigraphs at the beginning of the novel. That first is by Oliver Sacks. The second is from a short story by the writer Rivka Galchen. It’s this line. “Surely our world obeys rules still alien to our imaginations.” What attracted you to that quote?
Thompson Walker: I read that maybe 15 years ago. I actually went to graduate school with Rivka Galchen and Karen Russell. We were all in the same class. So I read her story and that just captured a feeling I have in life and about the world because I think I love science, but I also, my favorite type of science is like a scientific mystery or like when science brings us up to some edge that we can’t fully, sort of breach; like we can’t quite fully understand something, but maybe we will later. Maybe science will be able to figure it out later. So it obviously applies to cosmology or quantum physics. And I just love how she captured it there in that story that this certainty, that the universe and the world, not that it doesn’t follow rules, scientific rules ‒ it’s not magic ‒ but it follows some structure that we don’t totally understand. I love that, that territory.
Miller: But that surely almost seems plaintive to me. Like please tell me that this world that seems crazy at times, there are rules, right? It’s not just random. Please tell me that.
Thompson Walker: Yeah, I don’t know if I’ve actually fully, you’re right, you’re right. That is another facet of that same. I mean, it’s related to what I was saying, but yeah, I think maybe that’s a little bit of a different, like a sort of new facet. But yes, you’re right, like a desire for there to be rules, even if we don’t understand them yet.
Yes, but I think that’s built into science. There’s obviously logic in the universe or the world, even if we don’t understand it in the kind of physical reality of the world.
Miller: But I’m intrigued by your first reading. With you, still caring deeply about science, you long for the unsolved parts, the parts that are still mysteries.
Thompson Walker: Yes. And also when they come up with something new, like I love when I read what’s happening in astrophysics and maybe I barely understand it, but I’ll see like a New York Times article about this new thing that they figured out or measured. Is it going to have to rewrite all these things we thought we understood? I love that. I love that mix of science figuring out a new mystery. That’s a fascinating space.
Miller: Karen Thompson Walker, thank you so much. It was a pleasure talking to you and it’s a real pleasure reading your book. Thank you.
Thompson Walker: Great, thank you so much.
Miller: Karen Thompson Walker. Her new novel is called “The Strange Case of Jane O.” Her earlier books are “The Age of Miracles” and “The Dreamers.”
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