1986 is a nostalgic and poignant journey through childhood’s highs and lows, weaving humor, heartbreak, and haunting realism into a vivid tapestry of suburban life in the titular year. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

When you look back at your childhood, there is always a series of key moments that stand out. For this book, I wanted to weave together those moments in a way that felt organic and captured both the feeling of the 1980s and the dreamlike way they exist in my memory. Though the stories are all fiction, the emotions, imagery, and characters they explore come from an amalgamation of real life.

The vignettes are so vivid. How did you approach balancing nostalgia with universal relatability in your storytelling?

I have always read and noticed myself that the most effective way to achieve universality in storytelling is through specificity. Which is nice, because then all I need to do as a writer is delve into my own experiences and hold nothing back. The reason this works is because at heart I think we all value the same things.

What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?

I dedicated this book to my family and that was always front of mind when writing these stories. Family and home are what the main character keeps returning to throughout the book. The project was started at a hard time in our country, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and just after January 6th, 2021. Like many, I was feeling as if the world was coming apart at the seams. Maybe subconsciously, I wanted to revisit a time when everyone was together and celebrate the goodness of that.

Were there any moments or characters in the book that proved particularly challenging to write, and why?

Yes, the most challenging thing was figuring out how to render complex situations and emotions in a voice that felt true to the age of the main character, since the stories are written in first person. The narration does go back and forth between being a child and an adult reflecting on past memories, but I wanted to keep the events themselves subjective to the eyes of a child, to keep things immediate and therefore powerful. One of the stories stumped me for months in that regard.

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