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Your story in this week’s issue of the magazine, “Separation,” centers on Kate, a young woman whom we follow through a run of life changes. The story’s fairly short, but you touch down at various significant moments in Kate’s life. What are the challenges and rewards from taking in such a long scope of time in a short story?
Photograph by Edward Friedman
I started writing this story during a period of my life that seemed to me to lack narrative coherence: no defining features, no unifying theme, characters who came and went with alarming finality. And yet I was familiar enough with the way people tend to narrativize their lives that I assumed from some future point in time I would find this “phase” all too easy to sum up: oh, yeah,