The novelist’s propulsive latest, Evil Genius, chronicles a young woman’s awakening to the destructive forces of her own desire.

What was the genesis of this novel?

I had just finished Poor Deer, which is a sad book, and it took a lot out of me, and I didn’t know what to write next. I said to my husband, David, “I don’t know what to write, I feel like I’ve written everything.” I felt that I had nothing in my past to mine for another novel. And right away David said, “You haven’t written about your ex-husband yet.”

The novel’s main events unfold in the 1970s, but Celia narrates from a near-present, post-Covid perspective. What led you to choose that retrospective vantage point?

I felt it would take that long for Celia to be able to tell the story. It was the most natural idea for me to have an old woman tell the story of her emancipation as a young married person in a terrible situation. That it would take her that long to get over it felt true to me because it was true of me. It has been a very long time since I was in that relationship, with a man who abused me, and I had never written about it. And I had never used the word abuse.

How did you land on telephone company billing operator for Celia’s job?

I worked as a billing operator at the phone company in the late 1980s. I had even written a little scrap of a memoir about it, about the experience of having your headset on, and not being allowed to just get up and go to the bathroom anytime you wanted. It was very confining. And you had to listen and be nice to people.

What made you choose to have Celia’s husband, Drew, work as a scrub tech?

That was like a piece of the puzzle. If my protagonist was going to lose her mother and be vulnerable to entering a bad marriage, where would she meet this person? She might meet him at the hospital where her mother is a patient. I didn’t want him to be a doctor; he has a meticulous, rigid sort of job.

In this book and in your first novel, Chouette, the picture that’s painted of heterosexual marriage seems pretty grim.

Yes, it’s sort of mysterious because I’m in a very happy marriage. I think I just had my 33rd wedding anniversary, might have been the 34th. So maybe even with Chouette I was working through my first marriage. It takes a really long time to get over things.

Were there any big surprises for you in writing this story?

The biggest surprise to me personally as a writer was the chapter in which Celia describes her wedding night, because that’s exactly what my first wedding night was like, blow for blow. It was important for me that it be exactly the truth.