" I think the narrative structure of those story ballets, which were some of the biggest stories of my childhood. I grew up watching Swan Lake. Giselle, La Bayadère, these were stories that were as present to me as anything that I read. Those story ballets are often split in two parts in a way. You have the White Swan and the Black Swan. In Giselle, you have the young girl and then you have the shade, the kind of ghost who comes to haunt her, her lover. Very similar in La Bayadère. And the structure of this novel is in two parts and it's two versions, in a way, of the same character. And now that you said it, I wonder if in some way, without realizing it, that narrative structure had really seeped into my brain."

Katie Kitamura is the author five novels, most recently Audition and Intimacies, which was named one of the New York Times 10 Best Books of 2021, longlisted for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and a finalist for a Joyce Carol Oates Prize. She is a recipient of the Rome Prize in Literature, fellowships from the Cullman Center and the Lannan Foundation, and many other honors. Her work has been translated into twenty-one languages. She teaches in the creative writing program at New York University.

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