“All my stories are explorations, evolving organically, day by day, until they find resolution,” Boyle says. Photograph by Tibor Bozi / Redux

Your story in this week’s issue, “I Walk Between the Raindrops,” is set in Southern California, and is narrated by a man who has just emerged unscathed from a series of mudslides that devastated his town. Something similar happened to you earlier this year—is it safe to assume that the real events were a starting point for this story (though the character is, of course, not you)?

Readers may recall the nonfiction piece I wrote for The New Yorker back in January (“The Absence in Montecito”), when our village was devastated by the Thomas Fire and the debris flows that succeeded it, which gave me a point of departure for this story. For me, writing this piece was a way of gaining perspective on those events. As to whether the narrator is me, I’ll have to plead that this is fiction and that the actual events mutated into a kind of dream—the dream that sustains all short stories and novels—and that the characters grew out of that dream. On a deeper level, after having written twenty-eight books of fiction, I’m not really sure who I am. As I like to say to my long-suffering wife ten times a day, “You’re you, aren’t you? Which means that I must be me. Right?”

The story has four subplots: one involving an encounter with a strange woman at a bar, one involving the mudslides, one about the narrator’s wife’s work at a suicide-prevention center, and one in which the couple make a misjudged attempt to set up two overweight friends. Is there a thematic link to all of these things?

The thematic link, rather than an advancing plot, is what drives the story and allows it to make its discoveries. The title is important here, too, which is not always the case with titles. Some titles merely name a story; in other cases, the titles provide a way into a deeper level of interpretation. And, I hope, in this case, pleasure for the reader, as well.

There seem to be two narratives here: one in which a relatively contented, happily married, satisfied man recounts some events that revolve around the misfortunes of others, and another, in which he is subconsciously aware of the role that he played in those misfortunes and is subtly trying to deflect guilt. How hard is it to channel those two narratives into one?

This is the beauty of first-person narration: the reader can never be sure whether the narrator is telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth or fudging things just a wee bit in order to assemble the psychological blocks of his own self-defensive version of events. I do like the way you put it, Deborah, with regard to the conflict here, and, of course, there is the revelation near the end in which Serena, the ESP woman, calls Brandon out for what he is.

Is Brandon an unreliable narrator?

After what I’ve just said above, it seems so. Or, rather, he is reliable in his recitation of the facts but not quite able to see beyond himself, until, perhaps, the last three lines of the story.

Is there a moral to this tale?

There is a moral to every tale. But usually our lives are too complex to apply them. Which is why we have art and why I feel so privileged to be a conduit for it and why I revere the short-story form. Every day I awaken to the mystery of consciousness and the perplexity of mortality—the only way I know how to deal with that is by taking these exploratory journeys (and all my stories are explorations, evolving organically, day by day, until they find resolution).

You’ve just finished writing a new novel, “Outside Looking In,” which will come out next spring. From what I’ve seen, it’s more historical than contemporary. Was the story a change of pace, or in some way linked to the book? Can you say anything about the subject of the novel?

“I Walk Between the Raindrops” is one of a number of unrelated, stand-alone pieces I am now writing in the wake of “Outside Looking In,” replicating a pattern I’ve followed—and found rejuvenating, if not downright soul-salvaging—through the completion of seventeen novels and eleven collections of short fiction. “Outside Looking In” deals with the early years of LSD, from its first synthesis, by Albert Hofmann, in 1943, to the time when it broke free of strictly psychiatric use and set society afire, in the nineteen-sixties. My interest here, beyond the thematic level of ontology and the mind/body divide, is in how we got to that point and what it might mean for us now that psychedelic drugs are once again being used clinically. And, yes, Dr. Leary does appear as a subsidiary character in this one, just as Dr. Kinsey appeared in my novel “The Inner Circle” and Dr. Kellogg in “The Road to Wellville.”