I find it refreshing that your work deals so explicitly with the personal. In the case of “Google Your Feelings,” you’re quite upfront in your discussion of your own anxiety. Do you find yourself drawing lines between what you’re willing and unwilling to share with readers, or is writing a place for you where nothing is off the table?

Things that are truly off the table are so far off the table I can't even see them, I don't even know what they are. Maybe someday I will. But I often gravitate toward subjects that make me uncomfortable, or that push social boundaries of some kind in writing about them. I've written about mental health a few times—my own anxiety in several pieces, depression and suicide in my hometown in "The Tracks." The hardest part of writing about mental health doesn't have to do with disclosure for me.

You fold in references to medical journals, Oscar Wilde biographies and turn-of-the-century magazines with dexterity, but also recreate entire historical scenes in the present tense. What prompted you to play with tense and chronology in these ways?

The truth is I’m that person. You know, The one who you can’t watch a movie with because she carries on a running commentary about how the actor playing the FBI agent from Mississippi is actually from Glasgow, and that he worked for two years with a speech coach just so he could do the role, and that he is married to so and so, and he was arrested for drunk driving in 2003, and by the way that murderous bear is all CGI... (I’m also famous for reading the entire plot of the movie on Wikipedia and ruining the ending).

You have described The Anatomy of the Battle as your most important novel...could you describe the qualities of the novel that make it so important in the context of your career?

In the initial plan, this novel was only meant to be the story of the last phases of my father’s illness when he died of a tumor in the last year of the last century. But then in the process of writing, the importance of his previous existence and especially of his fascist training became evident, even just in order to understand his behavior during his illness. By studying fascism, which I knew very little about, I understood that many qualities I had attributed to his personality or to chance were actually related to the particular historical era he lived in and to his visceral involvement in the ideology of the Mussolini regime. 

What are you reading and loving now?

I wish I were reading more poetry, but my daughter is 18 months old, so I’m spending most of my time reading Dr. Seuss and Llama Llama Red Pajama. I’m curious to see if any of those nursery rhyme qualities end up filtering down into my work. I did, however, read and love Jennifer Givhan’s Landscape with Headless Mama and I’m dying to get my hands on Mother-Ghosts, Leah Sewell’s debut collection. She’s a poet whose work I’ve admired for years.