I’m interested in the essay’s conception. It’s so crafted. It reads like it could be in a novel or at least in a memoir written by a novelist.

I had been working on this essay for six months. But really the moment I met Caroline, she was already such a literary figure that it’s really sort of been in process for seven years. Also because my job became writing the character of herself, and sometimes writing the character of me interacting with her. So there’s many layers of fictionalization within this true story.

When I think about it, the real impetus was trying to reclaim my own perspective in a narrative where I was very intentionally pushed to the sides of it. I think about Lorrie Moore’s “People Like That Are the Only People Here,” where it’s technically fiction but it’s inspired by true-life experiences and it just feels like this very angry reclamation of personhood in the medical establishment.

How did the essay come into being? Did you pitch The Cut?

I did. I have had really complicated feelings about whether or not to write about this because it’s a lot of vulnerability that I still feel about the way I acted. I feel embarrassed and ashamed about how small I made myself at times in that relationship and also my own manipulation. And even though the effort of the piece was to tell my story, of course Caroline is still a huge part of it and right now she is completely in the public eye because of this.

It took me a long time to make the decision to start writing about it, and I can’t really point to one key moment where everything changed. But in January when the creativity tour happened, she started becoming a bigger and bigger public figure and she began speaking openly about her Adderall use and her mental health.