Rivka Galchen grew up in Norman, Oklahoma, the child of Israeli immigrants. She attended Princeton and Mount Sinai School of Medicine where she spent a year in South America, working on projects based in Lima's shantytowns. Her fiction and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in The Believer, Harper's, The New Yorker.

Mark Thwaite: What gave you the initial idea for Atmospheric Disturbances?

Rivka Galchen: Though I'm not particularly interested in thinking of the narrator of my novel as any more mad or crazy than the rest of us, it is the case that one of the main influences that got me going with this novel was this nonfiction book from 1900, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, by Daniel Paul Schreber. Schreber was a highly educated judge in Germany who suffered a series of mental breakdowns, and his memoir—basically a plea to be released from the asylum—is widely considered the most lucid letter we've ever received from the proverbial far side of madness; after Freud read it, he supposedly said something like, "The wonderful Schreber ought to have been made a professor of psychiatry and director of a mental hospital."

In his memoir, Schreber explains how he has come to believe that the world is an enormous architecture of nerves dominated by a predatory God, and that a "crisis in God's realm" has left Schreber the sole human survivor, living alone among a race of fantasms and ghosts. The world, according to Schreber, can only be redeemed through his becoming a woman. His account is funny, terrifying, and heartbreaking.

And reading the memoir, I was touched to think: here's this man who (in all sorts of ways) feels utterly forsaken by everything familiar and real; and he deals with this awful feeling by writing this incredibly lucid book, making an evidenced case for his sanity, before others but also before himself. Part of why it's such compelling reading is that all along he's acknowledging the strangeness of his beliefs and even admitting that they may be wrong. And it's all suffused with unstated sadness and loss. It's just this beautiful presentation, so inciteful. And when you read the memoir, you begin to understand Schreber's delusions—and thus, also, our own delusions, we all have so many of them, which is made clear if you pay any attention to politics or even just to family fights—well, as you read, you begin to understand delusions as the real and interesting and telling creations of a very particular person. And I really like this idea, of revealing yourself by the very particular ways you have of being wrong.

MT: How long did it take you to write your novel?

RG: All told, about 3 years. Even though it's a pretty slim book. I took a lot of wrong turns and wrote a fair amount that had to be cut.

MT: How do you write? Longhand or directly onto a computer, straight off or with lots and lots of editing?

RG: I go back and forth between the keyboard and the pen. I periodically like to print everything up really tiny: single spaced, with four pages to a page, two on front and two on back, and then edit on that with a very fine point pen. Once at the mall, when I was maybe 8, they had this enormous “Handwriting Analysis Machine”—it looked like HAL—and so, for $2, I had my handwriting analyzed...and the machine said I was coldhearted! I still figure this is on account of the small size of my script. (Or, perhaps more likely, the analysis emerged from a random lottery of phrases.) Regardless, that's my sweet spot, that's when I feel best, when I've got my 0.005 pt pen, and I'm editing something that's already got a real body. I find that printing it up tiny—and so being able to see a lot at once—is the only way I can talk myself into really big cuts, the only way those cuts reveal themselves as wholly self-evident.

MT: Your novel opens, "Last December a woman entered my apartment who looked exactly like my wife..." It is a great opening line. Was it important to you to immediately immerse the reader in the story like this? Was it the first line you wrote!?

RG: So I hate starting things, I much prefer preparing to start things, or combing over already well begun things, or cooking brussel sprouts, or trimming my fingernails. So I somehow couldn't just start. So instead I wrote a prefatory introduction, in which the narrator kind of explained his project. And then, to precede that, I wrote an introduction about the nature of introductions, which, my narrator wanted to point out, are only called for (according to the ancient Greek rules of rhetoric) when speaking to a hostile audience, or an ignorant one. Really superfluous throat clearing. But I guess that was my way of working through some sort of unstated anxiety. Then a friend who is a great reader, pretty close to the end of the whole composing run, said, basically, ‘Umm, your novel actually starts here, on page 7!' As soon as she said it, it was clear to me that she was right.

MT: Dr Leo Liebenstein narrates his own paranoid story. As readers we are never quite sure whether he is mad or not, how much or how little to believe him -- how difficult was it for you to maintain the narrative and simultaneously maintain such a credible unreliable narrator?

RG: I do feel like saying: I don't believe I've ever met a thoroughly reliable narrator, not in person or on the page. Much of the pleasure for me, of conversation or of reading, comes from that destabilizing sense of looking through, well, someone else's glass darkly.

But, that said: I was reading a lot of “confessions” while writing this novel, and I think that reading helped form the particular kind of unreliability that characterizes Leo. There was The Confessions of Augustine (which occasionally verge on complaint), the Confessions of Rousseau (where he seems to be willing to confess to anything except for fathering five children none of which he supported or acknowledged, each of which he immediately handed over to state care)…also Werner Heisenberg's intellectual autobiography Physics and Beyond (which in fact reads like a roundabout defense of his decision to stay in Germany through the war)…also re-reading The Interpretation of Dreams (which you can't help but see as Freud's most—primarily unintentionally?—autobiographical work, full up with warped guilt and denial)…and also Daniel Paul Schreber's insanely lucid Memoirs of my Nervous Illness—with all of these books I found myself in love with not knowing quite where to stand in relation to these talkers and their tales. It felt like I was reading mysteries that hadn't been labeled mysteries. Really, really good and frustrating mysteries. And I felt like I was genuinely getting to know these people—maybe better, even, than I know my own closest friends. I guess it all goes back to that idea that maybe we can learn a lot more about a person by their revealing half-truths than by any honest report.

MT: Your novel has been called Murakami-esque -- what does that mean to you ... and do you like Murakami yourself!?

RG: Well, my novel has less spaghetti than most Murakami, so that's one major aesthetic break. But yes, I do love his writing. Really love it. All those lost people, those uncanny worlds that seem familiar and wrong at once—I imagine that's why someone might say we drink from the same fountain a bit. But he's so singular, Murakami. I still vividly remember reading Wind-up Bird Chronicle in one fevered go. And I'm a very slow reader! Murakami has this ‘jazz' strength, this ability to sound rigorous and off the cuff at once, virtuosic and unstrained. I love that about his work.

MT: You recently said, you were "interested in gross misappropriations of the authoritative language of science" -- can you unpack that a little for me? And can you tell us a little about your own interest in science?

RG: Right, well one thing so distinctly beautiful about science (to me, anyway) is how—in terms of epistemological prowess—it's pretty unparalleled, its uniquely well-situated for breaking the idols of the tribe. It's exceptionally good at not telling us precisely what we want it to tell us, of going ahead and refusing to conform to what we might (emotionally or otherwise) need of it. But science can only do this when we let it. That's in ideal situations. It's also perfectly pervertable, as a fair share of enlightenment (and contemporary) works show—all that goofy measuring of distances to the Nile's ‘source', all that not admitting that monkeys had homosexual practices, and all that overvaluing of what is most easily measured, that stupid, stupid No Child Left Behind program, the list could go on and on.

So sometimes those perversions are awful. But there's also something kind of odd about starting off with what is really an unshakable conviction—starting there and then gathering up science-y sounding things to defend that position. What's interesting there (to me) is that the original conviction is just that, unshakeable, an idol. And yet some part of the self must be admitting that the conviction is insufficient. Some part of the self is kind of yearning. Otherwise, why even look for authoritative sounding support? And so one gathers up ‘data' to support the feeling. But that gathering is itself a kind of performance of doubt. And that's what I find beautiful, watching that laborious work of picking over the data, transforming it into just what you need, making of its clay—no matter how difficult—just the right little statue for your needs. So those appeals to science—so often misappropriations of science's methods and conclusions—those appeals end up being like a door to a castle that one holds closed even as one pretends to be trying desperately to open it, even as one is oneself furthermore convinced that one is, in fact, sincerely knocking there. And that's an interesting internal contradiction to be maintaining, one that elicits a lot of pathos (from me, anyway). It's like the left hand is reaching out for authority, while the right hand swats away what that authority has to offer, holds on only to the casing of authority which is, in fact, mystery. So it's interesting to me, the way that we do that.

MT: What was the most difficult aspect of writing your novel Rivka? How did you overcome it?

RG: Even though it's very quiet, and I don't think it's a large part of how readers see the novel, for me writing the book was a pretty overwhelming return to thinking about my dad all the time. The book very much reflects his interests, his sense of humor, his way of thinking. So sometimes that was a little too strong of an emotional place to hang out in. But at the same time it was really great. In the process of writing all sorts of old, odd memories returned to me, and it was nice to have them pop out of their neuronal hiding places like that, it was like time travel.

MT: Do you read the critics Rivka? Have you been pleased with the responses to your book? Have you learned anything from them?

RG: I mostly turn to my friends, also my editor Eric Chinski and my agent Bill Clegg, for a critical response to my writing, for a way to learn more. Curiosity has made me peek at a few reviews though; it's like seeing myself reflected in a hall of funhouse mirrors.

MT: What do you do when you are not writing?

RG: I like to see my niece. I like to walk around my neighborhood. I like to rent movies with my husband. I like to make little things.

MT: Did you have an idea in your mind of your "ideal" reader? Did you write specifically for them?

MT: I don't know, writing, for me, is like whistling in the dark. Like: it's more like I'm trying to scare away spooks (or attract them, I'm ambivalent on that) and distract myself, then that I'm trying to entertain an anonymous other or, even, an old friend. Frankly, it still feels vaguely inappropriate to me that other people have read the novel. It's not that it's so personal, but maybe it is that it's so personal? I feel like I'm brushing my teeth in front of strangers. Even as, I've been practicing brushing my teeth for years and years, so it's not like totally vulnerable. Still.

MT: What are you working on now?

RG: I imagine it will change forms, names, pants, everything else, but it's currently called, The Nature Theater of Oklahoma, and has a false prophet at the center who starts to take herself seriously.

MT: Who is your favourite writer? What is/are your favourite book(s)?

RG: Oh lots of people, different people on different days. In terms of favorite living writers, I guess it would be Donald Antrim. Jane Bowles (not, alas, alive) also matters a lot to me (albeit in a very different way.) Among my favorite books are: Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson, The Good Soldier Svejk by Jaroslav Hasek, Amerika by Kafka, all of Flaubert, Don Quixote by Cervantes, Independent People by Halldor Laxness, Hunger by Knut Hamsun, Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte, the Selected Stories of Robert Walser, Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, anything by Aleksandar Hemon, and The Pillow Book by Sei Shonagon.

MT: Do you have any tips for the aspiring writer!?

RG: Write, read, eat, and sleep every single day. Unless it's better for you not to.

MT: Anything else you would like to say Rivka?

RG: Growing up we had a sofa in the kitchen; it never struck me as weird then but now it does; there was something about my house that made nothing in particular seem weird, nothing in particular seem normal, and I now understand that my house was a very rare space in that way; also our house often smelled like fried onions, I never had a bedtime, no one talked or cared about my homework, I was consulted on family decisions like an adult, and I could watch as much TV as I pleased; I'm grateful to my family for having that kind of a home. I think that's something worth aspiring to, getting to a state where you can't quite remember why one thing might seem more appropriate or preferable to another. (There were, of course, a few exceptions to this non-normativeness) It was a nice way to grow up.