I grew up in a town that was already halfway to empty, and I never really left it — not on the page, anyway.

I didn’t set out to write about towns that are disappearing. I set out to write about my grandmother’s house, which is a different thing, except that by the time I finished the first draft the two had become impossible to separate. The house was still standing. Most of what had been around it wasn’t.

Four novels later I am still, more or less, writing the same coastline from different angles — the boats that don’t go out any more, the shops that become something else and then become nothing, the particular quiet of a town that used to have somewhere for everyone to be on a Friday night. I am interested less in the leaving than in the staying: who does it, what it costs them, and what they notice that everyone in a hurry to go somewhere else misses.