Killing Einstein follows an FBI agent assigned to surveil Albert Einstein and Kurt Gödel during World War II, only to be pulled into their friendship, ideas, and a deadly web of espionage, loyalties, and danger. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

I was a math nerd in a former life, and I’ve always been fascinated by Gödel’s incompleteness results. I’ve also always been fascinated by the fact that Einstein and Gödel walked together for so many years, and no one really knows what they talked about. So I thought I’d mix those two fascinations into a spy story.

How did you balance the demands of espionage plotting with the novel’s philosophical and mathematical ideas?

Great question. I am what they call in the fiction world a “pantser,” meaning I do not outline, I do not know who the characters will be, and I do not know how the story will proceed. I just get a core idea and start writing from the seat of my pants. That made balancing the spy story and the metaphysical ideas especially hard for me, and I ultimately found the balance during the long editing process. The original versions had a lot more math and were much less page-turning!

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

As a pantser, the themes bubbled up through the writing process rather than being planned in advance. Once everything settled, the themes I saw included Gödel’s insight that there are true things that cannot be proved true, but also the difference between right and wrong, and the difficulties all of us face when we confront that difference. The book also became about how some things are not what they seem, while the most important things are often exactly as they seem.

What did you most want to capture about the friendship between Einstein and Gödel?

Their energy, their love for one another, their kindness and humanity, and their shared devotion to the idea that there are deep truths—including moral truths—that are real and not relative. That may seem strange coming from the father of relativity, but Einstein’s theory is actually built on a remarkable invariant truth: the speed of light never changes, regardless of one’s frame of reference. Morally, against the backdrop of Nazism’s profound evil, neither man lost confidence in the reality of good and evil, though each remained sensitive to the challenges we all sometimes face in choosing between the two.

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