This interview was conducted by Assistant Poetry Editor Christine Degenaars.

To start things off, I’d love to ask: What is memoir to you? What is a poem?

As a writer, I look at both forms in their different containers as me trying to tell a story of myself or my perception of something to someone else. All I’m ever doing is telling a story. How we shape it, how we pitch it, where we shelve it—thankfully, that’s a separate thing.

Tell us about Disappearing Act.

Disappearing Act is my memoir of becoming a teenager during my father’s first suicide attempt, prison sentencing, and incarceration. An exploration of best friendship, high-low first love, flailing Judaism, and trying to reconfigure a family unit even as it dissolves. Also, a lot of pizza. I’m from Long Island.

 It’s challenging to write about a true experience, especially about people you love. How did you choose which details to include and which to leave out?

What I remember and how I feel now are shadow puppets, a version of the thing, not the thing itself. The thing itself you can never properly pin down or reproduce. I love everyone involved in this story, no matter who we became to each other or who we are now, but I also felt a responsibility to the teenager I was, the daughter I was, and anyone out there who might be going through something similar.

In my author’s note, I mention how the real events of the book transpired over several years, yet the book takes place over the course of months. For the most part, that editorial and emotional compression was a gift.

 Can you talk a little bit about the creation of the piece “My Dad,” which appears in the first section of your book? I was really touched by the speaker holding Curious George with two hands at the end of the poem. How did you decide to end on that image?

I’m so glad you appreciated Curious George! I fidget, I collect, I fidget with my collections. I’ve always been this way. I love things out loud, with both hands. And with these sort of “who’s who” poems early on in the book, there’s a bit of foreshadowing going on. I cling to this symbol of comfort, as if Curious George could keep me safe. To a child, that’s a realistic possibility.

While this book is about your childhood relationship to your father during the time he was arrested, it is also a book about women’s friendship. There are your relationships to your sisters and your friends Maya, Noelle, and Britt as well as your mother’s friendships, specifically with Sarah. In “August 15th,” your mother says about Sarah, “not every friendship is meant to last forever.” How did you think about women’s friendships when writing this book? What relationship do those roles play in juxtaposition to your relationship to your father in this moment in time?

No one knows you like your truest and oldest friends if they stick around, if you stick around. I’m fascinated by all the ugly, wanton, wonderful ways we love each other as teen girls, especially when we all have our own first-time things going on—our own trials and triumphs, body issues, talents, and fears. We’re not always good friends or even good people!

And every friendship is different. Some of the unevenness never goes away, as you see with my mother’s friend in the book. Mostly, I wanted to illustrate the tenderness and intensity of teen friendship, especially as compared to the impossible work of being a diligent and loving daughter to an incarcerated parent you have complicated feelings about.

 Blanks are used throughout the book, leaving the reader to imagine what could fill those gaps. Why did you choose this device? What effect do you think it has on the reader and what role do you think it plays in the collection?

For all the words we accumulate to make meaning, there is always going to be negative space or a hole in any narrative. Why not show that to the reader? In the book, I talk about hiding in plain sight. While Disappearing Act is about me, a version of me, it’s also meant to be a window for people with a similar story. If I let you fill in the blank, this story belongs to you too.

To take a step back, could you tell us more about your writing process?

I don’t recommend this, but! This book was written almost exclusively on Fridays over several months. I would open the doc and write until my brain froze or I reached a particular plot point or scene I knew I needed to reach in order to spark new ideas and next steps. The book took maybe . . . three and a half drafts? I barely remember the first draft! But it mattered.

I don’t have any thoughtful, conscious ritual when I write, but I will say that I wrote most of this book while listening to two Hollow Knight soundtracks. Video games, even their music alone, tend to unlock a storytelling mode in my brain.

In 2018, your essay, “Missing, Not Dead,” won the Pigeon Pages Essay Contest—congrats again! What was your approach to crafting that essay? Did you take a similar approach to writing Disappearing Act?

Thank you! And thanks to fellow video game enthusiast Garrard Conley, brilliant memoirist, for choosing my essay. A very different version of “Missing, Not Dead” made it into Disappearing Act for a strange reason: the core events of that essay also occurred many years earlier. They happened twice.

So to repurpose that adult essay to write the teen version of those events for the book felt right, albeit challenging. Memory, anxiety, excitement, anger, nostalgia, acceptance . . . I took the non-linear threads that loop in my mind and wove them together to shape both versions of the essay. As for writing the book, I stuck to a linear plot while also allowing for tricks of the mind, like a memory or a poem from the future.

 More generally, how did you think about weaving elements of prose and poetry into your book?

Whether it’s a line break or a new paragraph, I usually have a gut feeling about how a piece should look or read. It’s not always right, but it’s always a step in the right direction. That’s enough. It gives me somewhere to go. As the book grew, there were certain patterns I liked and forms I wanted to keep side by side. My editor was also hugely helpful in this, supporting my experimentation while reminding me to pay attention to logistical details I might otherwise forget or allow to overwhelm me, like calendar dates.

 Disappearing Act is a YA collection but early versions of these poems existed before you zeroed in on that perspective. How did you think about revising these poems into YA? Was it different than your usual revision process?

Though most of the book is made up of new poems and prose work, the poems that existed before or that I reshaped to fit the book—I think of them as seeds; I planted them elsewhere and begged them to grow. It helps to not be too precious with your work, especially if you’re embarking on a long project, like a book. With this book, I’m precious about the story, less so about the words.

As for the YA shift . . . Young adults are incredible people! Like any adult, they fear, they want, they doubt, they hope. The language didn’t need to change so much as the perspective did.

 What are three books you’d recommend to someone who wants to write? 

I love this question! On a craft level, I highly recommend Matt Bell’s book, Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts. It reads like step-by-step guidance from a wise, methodical friend.

I’d also say Alexander Chee’s book, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel. The essays in it feel like lessons in how to be a writer in the world, particularly in relation to other writers.

A learn-by-osmosis recommendation: The Best of Brevity: Twenty Groundbreaking Years of Flash Nonfiction. I think every writer would benefit from exploring the short form, and this collection has dazzling, fully realized pieces.