Marisa Silver on the Tangled Nature of Memory

Editor’s Note: Read Marisa Silver’s new short story, “The Memory Wing.”

“The Memory Wing” is a new story by Marisa Silver. To mark the story’s publication in The Atlantic, Silver and Thomas Gebremedhin, a senior editor at the magazine, discussed the story over email. Their conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.

Thomas Gebremedhin: Your story “The Memory Wing” concerns a woman named Evelyn who begrudgingly visits her former son-in-law’s mother, Helene, at a nursing home. In the first few paragraphs we learn a lot, including that the women had a fraught relationship even while their children were married and that they share a dead granddaughter. How much of this character-building—the biographies, the tensions—do you have figured out before you start writing, and how much of it do you discover during the writing? Do you outline?

I generally start with very little, in terms of character.