And, I hope, in this case, pleasure for the reader, as well. Some titles merely name a story in other cases, the titles provide a way into a deeper level of interpretation. The title is important here, too, which is not always the case with titles. The thematic link, rather than an advancing plot, is what drives the story and allows it to make its discoveries. Is there a thematic link to all of these things? The story has four subplots: one involving an encounter with a strange woman at a bar, one involving the mudslides, one about the narrator’s wife’s work at a suicide-prevention center, and one in which the couple make a misjudged attempt to set up two overweight friends. As I like to say to my long-suffering wife ten times a day, “You’re you, aren’t you? Which means that I must be me. On a deeper level, after having written twenty-eight books of fiction, I’m not really sure who I am. As to whether the narrator is me, I’ll have to plead that this is fiction and that the actual events mutated into a kind of dream-the dream that sustains all short stories and novels-and that the characters grew out of that dream. For me, writing this piece was a way of gaining perspective on those events. Readers may recall the nonfiction piece I wrote for The New Yorker back in January (“ The Absence in Montecito”), when our village was devastated by the Thomas Fire and the debris flows that succeeded it, which gave me a point of departure for this story.
Something similar happened to you earlier this year-is it safe to assume that the real events were a starting point for this story (though the character is, of course, not you)? Your story in this week’s issue, “ I Walk Between the Raindrops,” is set in Southern California, and is narrated by a man who has just emerged unscathed from a series of mudslides that devastated his town. “All my stories are explorations, evolving organically, day by day, until they find resolution,” Boyle says.
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