Q: One thing I thought was really well-done was how unflinchingly the little boy (who I assume you based on yourself) is depicted as unable to deal with his loss. Did writing this story teach you more about yourself, and did it help you process some of these experiences from childhood at all?

ZT: I think when you experience tragedy at a really young age you come to think you’re broken or that you deserve something more than what you got. Writing The Replacer certainly helped me make peace with a lot of that longing for something more, something vague. My whole writing life is about processing that feeling for something I feel like I missed out on earlier in life. But this project in particular was hard because it really required me to go back to my past and fully immerse myself in something that’s hard to revisit. The protagonist, Marcus, is based on an amalgamation of myself and my youngest brother. So in coming up with his character, I went through old photos and journals to bring myself back to what I felt like as a kid. It might not come as a surprise that I’ve been sitting on this story for years, trying to find the best way to approach it. So in finally sitting down to put the script together, I was deathly afraid of what I may have found out about myself along the way.

I knew the ending from the moment I started the first page. I knew that capturing these experiences was going to be tough, and sometimes nearly impossible to write. There are a few scenes in here where I had to imagine myself closer to events than I actually was. The scene were Marcus actually witnesses his father in the midst of his stroke was probably the hardest thing I’ve ever had to script. I had tears in my eyes the entire time.

Writing the book definitely taught me how to make peace with some parts of myself I’ve always considered ugly. My childhood was painful and confusing. I looked for answers in a lot of places and never really found anything that felt like it could help outside of pure escapism into comics, film, or television. So in writing the book, I learned to make peace with the hurt inside myself and that lack of answers that can consume you when something happens to you at a very young age. I became content with letting the mystery be, so to speak, and forgiving parts of myself for acting in ways that were truly ugly. When I finished scripting the book, I had a breakdown and wept for hours. It felt like I had truly let part of myself go that I had been holding onto for years.