Anyway, the title essay of the collection is great. Was there any other kind of relationship with Susan Sontag? This is a collection of her essays, in which she also explores her complicated relationship with Susan Sontag, in an essay called Desperately Seeking Susan. She’s an English professor at Stanford and she writes for the London Review of Books. There’s a book that I can’t stop referencing whenever I talk about this, called The Professor by Terry Castle. We were talking about that the other night, on this panel about mentors, and I guess that’s part of the reason I’m obsessed with reading narratives that explore this power dynamic-that murky, unclassifiable desire. It’s almost like a sexual desire for someone’s identity. It’s not exactly sexual, but it’s not totally not sexual. Female/female, authoritative, older woman/younger woman who, as is often the case with young women, has this sort of confused desire toward her mentor. I guess I’m pretty obsessed with that power dynamic. I was just on a panel the other night that was about mentorship.

That seems to be an ongoing interest of yours - the pleasures and risks of the mentor/protégé relationship. Finally, she met some guy who read her aura and said, “You are being attacked by this woman whom you admired and trusted. She couldn’t figure out what was wrong with her. Anyway, so she, as an introduction to the greater phenomenon of psychic attack, talks about her experience as a young occultist studying with a legendary mentor and how this woman attacked her-psychically attacked her-and how she didn’t know for a year. It’s about how to identify the signs of psychic attack. She wrote novels, and she also wrote this extremely helpful book (at least for me) called Psychic Self-Defense - an occult self-help book, basically. The inspiration for this novel was a book that was published in 1930 by a woman named Dionne Fortune. I read somewhere that The Vanishers was triggered by a book you came across - a non-fiction book that had to do with the occult. That some people, some readers, might choose not to suspend disbelief. With each step you take away from the familiar, you’re taking a bit of a risk. But nothing in fiction is exactly like the real world, is it? Not even if you’re writing about a suburban mom. But The Vanishers does take place in the sort of fictional realm in which people don’t think it’s the weirdest thing ever for someone to display psychic abilities. Maybe ‘alternate universe’ isn’t the best term for it.

I guess I don’t really think of it as an alternate universe. What was it like to invent one for The Vanishers? You’ve never written a speculative novel before, one that takes place in an alternate universe.

The Mineral Palace by Heidi Julavits