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Adam Levin on How to Exacerbate Trauma | The New Yorker

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In “Jenny Annie Fanny Addie,” your story in this week’s issue, a twelve-year-old girl named Addie is at a swimming lesson at her day camp when an older boy runs up and gropes her. This sudden violence precipitates a few things, which include an obsessive mental spiral on Addie’s part. Your portrayal of her interiority carries the story. How do you approach depicting the mental processes of a young girl in such a delicate situation? I started writing from Addie’s point of view a couple of years ago—I’ve written a whole book from her point of view—so it’s hard, by now, for me to distinguish what I knew at the beginning from what I discovered as I went along, in my usual slow, sentence-by-sentence way. As I remember it, though, I was thinking a lot about some of the sharp, art-prone, highly self-conscious girls I was friends with as a kid, and about my sisters, who also fit that description, and about my wife, who, ditto: imagining how one or another of them might have reacted had she bee

Save this story Save this story This interview was featured in the Books & Fiction newsletter, which delivers the stories behind the stories, along with our latest fiction. Sign up to receive it in your inbox. In “ Jenny Annie Fanny Addie ,” your story in this week’s issue, a twelve-year-old girl named Addie is at a swimming lesson at her day camp when an older boy runs up and gropes her. This sudden violence precipitates a few things, which include an obsessive mental spiral on Addie’s part. Your portrayal of her interiority carries the story. How do you approach depicting the mental processe

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