Alexandra Kleeman’s story “Choking Victim” appears in this week’s issue. Photograph by Graham Webster / Courtesy Alexandra Kleeman

In “Choking Victim,” your story in this week’s issue, a new mother named Karen confronts her feelings of estrangement not merely from her baby but from other elements of her life. Do you get the sense that all this alienation cascades solely from the birth of her baby, or are there other factors at work? And where can Karen look for some sense of re-grounding?

This story is one in a series that I’ve been writing about Karen, visiting her at different times of crisis in her life—I think of these stories as core samples taken from the overall bulk of a life. One thing that’s common across the different installments is a feeling of alienation brought on by her situation, but taken all together it becomes difficult to tell whether the loneliness is rooted in an abrasive world or whether it’s carried around within her, congenitally. Sometimes I describe her to myself in this way: she views what’s around her with the focus of someone intently watching a film, but as the viewer she necessarily feels excluded from the scene that is unfolding before her. Her perspective is lonely, even though her life is well-populated.

To give Karen more credit, it’s certainly true that the introduction of a new, fragile being to her life is destabilizing. It’s painful to have love evoked inside you, roughly. But there’s the destabilization the baby brings, and then there’s another kind—Karen’s expectation that this dramatic life change will alter her emotional landscape completely, and her disappointment at finding out that she still has to keep herself company. I think she feels grounded in moments when, thinking between her past and her present, she reaches an epiphanic certainty and takes action. But I feel that all epiphanies are temporary. I’ve seen many people, including myself, come to the same epiphany over and over again.

I love the strange central metaphor of this story—that sensations accumulate, like sediment, in the mind of the child until they’re finally spat out in the form of speech. You point out that “the word ‘express’ derived from the medieval Latin ‘expressare,’ meaning to ‘press out.’ ” Was this the starting point of this story? How did you know that this bit of etymology would be central to the story?

Yes, that bit of etymology was so important! I love the way that word’s usage merges high-minded linguistic expression with the very bodily, mechanical act of pressing something to force its inside out. It seemed like there was a story there, between those two different usages: How do you evoke a mental or spiritual event when all you can grasp, all you can manipulate, is physical matter? I thought of the sort of broad patience that you need to be a parent, waiting gently for your child to become more like you. You feel the desire to press, but another person’s mind is a thing you can never press down on. I think the moment in the story when Karen accepts that no specific thing she can do is going to cause or prevent her baby from speaking, that the outcome belongs to a process that’s hidden away from her, is the closest she gets to an epistemological breakthrough.

The narrative is told from the point of view of Karen, except for two significant shifts. The first is a paragraph told from the perspective of Puldron, an unlikeable retired neighbor, and the second is the ending, which is told from the perspective of Karen’s baby, Lila. What’s the idea behind these shifts—how did you conceive of them, and what do they allow you to do?

Most of what I’ve written has been in the first person, firmly tied to one character’s point of view—so writing in the third person is a big thrill to me, even though I still stick to Karen’s perspective most of the time. What moves me about these brief dips into two very different consciousnesses is that there’s information and emotion there in those other experiences that could disrupt the cycle of worry that Karen is in, but these experiences remain inaccessible to her.

With the shifts, I can force Karen out of the frame for a moment, lingering with Puldron or Lila to show a perspective adjacent to her own that resists her way of viewing. I can show, for example, that however worried Karen is about damaging her baby, for Lila it’s as if this whole series of troubling events never happened at all. Engaging with these adjacent worlds would be a relief for Karen—the story would go differently—but the limits of her perspective don’t allow it. Fortunately, as readers, our perspective is more flexible!

For a while, you were pursuing a Ph.D. in rhetoric. How has your academic work intersected with your fiction? Has it provided you with useful insights or strategies or, conversely, has it hindered your writing?

I went into academia thinking that there’d be constant reciprocity between my scholarship and my creative work, but found that doing one always turned my mind into the sort of tool that was badly suited to doing the other. When I did academic work, I was too critical to sit with a draft that seemed unformed and inadequate; when I was mostly writing, I was too lazy to chase an idea to its more interesting conclusion. These days, there are times when my academic thinking intervenes in my writing, but it’s usually while I’m developing a project and not while I’m writing it. Ultimately, for me, I think the ideas have to come from within a fictional situation, not from the outside—I think that there are ideas latent in every scene, but there are not necessarily scenes in every idea. I still read theory to give shape to how I think about the world, or I read it very loosely as a kind of brainstorming or daydreaming, but there’s a sort of tundra between the two. I love that tundra, its emptiness is a source of comfort.