Camille Bordas on the beliefs of others

In your story “Understanding the Science” in this week’s issue, a group of friends sit around a dinner table in Chicago, celebrating the fact that Maria’s cancer is now in remission. The conversation was general, perhaps a bit boring, and Maria was certainly feeling a bit upset. The spark comes when Catherine’s boyfriend, Adrian, enters the scene, as he is a famous actor. Although the story begins from Maria’s point of view, it begins to shift subtly, and ends from Adrian’s point of view. How have you thought about who is telling this story, and whose voice – or voices – we should trust?

As is always the case when I write anything, I didn’t know what problems the story would pose until I started asking them. I really thought that Understanding Science would focus on Maria, and that we would learn more about her brush with death and gain access to her wisdom (or her disappointment at not gaining more of it, perhaps), but her character kept resisting me. She didn’t want to be known. I became a sort of Bartleby-like character, and I felt like I had to respect that. I treated her the same way her friends did in the story, a little too dignified. She expected everything she said to have a deeper meaning just because of what she’d been through, and that was an unfair burden. So, I let her be herself: not a saint, a little judgmental, and mostly quiet. She thinks her friends’ conversation is boring, for example, but doesn’t offer to change the subject. When Adrian comes in, things start to shift, as I said. He attracts everyone’s attention, including Maria, even if she is reluctant to admit it. When the energy of a story starts shifting like that, I think it’s always good to follow it where you want it to go. Especially since, as a reader, I tend to like it when stories and novels don’t behave the way they should.

The people at the dinner party talk nonchalantly about conspiracy theories and rumors before the story shifts into a more philosophical tone, with questions about hope and meaning. Was the dinner table discussion always central to the story, or did it evolve as you wrote?

I think the initial impetus for the story was to try to showcase the difficulty many of us have when it comes to talking about big topics (death, fear, faith, etc.), perhaps especially with people close to us. Maria has cancer, but all her friends can talk about in her presence are problems at work or new trends in self-care. I love writing this kind of dialogue. I love the elephant in the room. I thought most of the story would be dinner conversation. I saw the discussion of conspiracy theories as a step toward touching on more personal things without seeming like it, because in the process of trashing someone else’s beliefs, you are inadvertently (or not) highlighting some of your own beliefs. So that was fun. Then Adrian comes in and kind of blows things up. He is less afraid to research certain topics. But there is a question about how sincere it is. Is he himself, or is he a trained actor, playing a role? An outsider shakes things up?

In the final scene, Adrian prepares for a role in a film whose script—with the Earth rotating faster and bodies turning into “bloody scraps”—seems to reflect the story’s focus on mortality. What was it like playing with those parallels?

At first, I thought the last part would be true: In the reality of the story, the day after the dinner party, the Earth would start spinning faster on its axis, throwing everything off balance. But then I had Adrian, who is an actor, and I felt it was more interesting to make a film adaptation starring him. It’s more fun and less depressing too. If it was the whole movie, I could do without the rest of my characters, like Maria, Catherine and others. Safe at home as Adrian prepares to face the end of the world once again for work.