Afterward follows a woman who finds her boyfriend unconscious in their apartment and is thrust into an emotional maze, forcing her to question love, responsibility, and belonging. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

Unfortunately, the story, or something like it, is something you hear more often than one would hope. I heard a version of it had happened to an acquaintance of mine in school (many years ago, and it had happened years before I met her), and it was just something I couldn’t get out of my head. I thought the normal things, such as how bad I felt for what she and the rest of the people affected must have gone through. But then my mind kind of wandered with new questions–about how one becomes equipped to deal with things like that, and what if you weren’t? How would that go? It was really in the course of thinking about those tangential questions that I came up with the story.

Are there any emotions or memories from your own life that you put into your character’s life?

Lauren as a character really didn’t inherit anything from me, but in the course of writing this, I did break my leg and end up in the hospital. I remember being tired and hurt in the ER, and hearing the staff talk about a bad date one of them had had. I remember thinking it was such an odd thing to overhear such an everyday conversation during a day that was so unusual for me. But of course, this was their every day, it wasn’t odd for them, and they should be able to talk with coworkers like anyone else. It just stood out to me in that experience, so I included that moment in the book.

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

Understanding was a big one. I really don’t even like Lauren in the beginning, but it’s easy to be critical, right? My hope was that by the end, the reader would find a little empathy for a flawed person in a truly horrible situation that wasn’t doing a great job with it. And, I guess, hope for the potential to grow and change. But there are other issues in there that different readers have picked up on as being big to them–friendship/bullying, race, alcohol, insecurity, mental health–and I’m glad different people are finding issues that mean a lot to them, and I hope I handled them okay.

What next book are you working on, and when will it be available?

Actually, I’m very excited to say I am sending my newest book to my publisher tomorrow. It is about a young man whose life events put him in the position to pursue his dream of living in a cabin in Alaska, and what that reality looks like. And I know what that reality is because I spent a lot of time growing up at my family’s homestead, which was not only “off the grid,” but also off the road system. It’s a love letter to, and a cautionary tale about, Alaska.

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