Emma Cline on Rendering the Human Experience

In your story “The Blight,” David Hastings, a semi-retired executive who is grappling with the onset of dementia and travelling to Switzerland for a voluntary assisted death, stops off in London to have dinner with his daughter. What made you want to inhabit the consciousness of a character in this situation?As a writer, I’m always interested in consciousness, and how to render our experience as humans on the page. With David more specifically, I was interested in how his consciousness might be shaped by the knowledge that, very soon, on a specific day and time, he will die. How can anyone really take in the enormity of that? Yet David has to, somehow, and, in the meantime, the days keep coming and he still has to decide what to eat for breakfast. That unimaginable position really drew me