RY: Can you talk a little bit about your philosophy of writing female characters? I really love all the women we encounter in this book because they each work against the clichéd renderings we so often see. Were you consciously thinking about how you would portray the women characters or did it just sort of arise naturally in the writing?

JD: That’s great to hear. For the most part, I think that to whatever extent those characters run counter to cliché is just a function of my being a female person and also knowing lots of other female people very well and thus realizing, as many people do, that there is an absurd, enormous gulf between the ways women tend to be depicted and the way they tend to be in real life, i.e., human.

But I did make a few conscious decisions regarding my female characters, and the biggest one was the decision to have a female narrator. As a younger writer, when I found myself writing in a kind of ironic, misanthropic voice—which was often—I would tend to hear that voice as male. I don’t know why—it would just sort of come to me in a baritone. I don’t think I was consciously avoiding writing about women, but I also don’t think I was asking myself why I kept automatically assuming any funny, ornery voice in my head had to be male (since those voices were, in fact, arising from my own brain), or why I was devoting almost all of my energy as a writer to making only male sensibilities come alive on the page.

So I decided before beginning the book I was going to write a character with a voice that was caustic and curmudgeonly and smart, and that character was going to be a woman. And then I think the other pieces of Irina’s character that felt to me important in terms of resisting conventional portrayals of women were mostly just a function of her voice and personality.