Sara O'Leary, "The Ones We Carry with Us"

It’s December 22. Sara O’Leary, author of The Ghost in the House, puts a bowl of candy on her front step with a sign that says “Help yourself.”

How would you describe your story?

SARA O’LEARY: It’s a story about death, and deception, and how we can be haunted by both the dead and the living. It is also part of a larger project in which I combine memory pieces with deliberately obfuscating fictions, partly in answer to what seems to be an inherent desire on the part of readers to search out the autobiographical in novels.

When did you write it, and how did the writing process compare to your other work?

SO: I was working on this while waiting for the final edit to come back on The Ghost in the House in what was such a strange liminal time between working on this large (for me) piece of prose and being ready to let go of it. I started keeping a document open on my computer where I could quickly set down something closer to sudden fictions almost as a distraction. It felt a bit like cheating on my novel!

What kind of research went into this story?

SO: My life. My life was the research. (Thinking of that Lorrie Moore classic line: “There are the notes. Now where is the money?”) No, not really. I was pretty much raised on that edict of write what you know, but actually prefer to write what I can’t imagine. I wrote a novel because I wondered what would it be like if you came back from the dead and were invisible to your loved ones. In this story I was asking myself if things do happen for a reason.

What, to you, makes the short story a special form? What can it do that other kinds of writing can’t?

SO: Short stories are a form where the process of editing comes close to sculpture—that chipping away the extra stone until the form emerges. I love compression. I love seeing how much I can leave out and still have a story.

Where should people go to learn more about you and your work?

SO: There’s an interview in Hazlitt that covers some of the same territory as this story. And my website has information on my books.

What's the best gift you've ever been given?

SO: My kid makes me birthday cards each year based on my book covers. Makes me ridiculously happy.

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What did you think of today's story? Use the hashtag #ssac2020 on Twitter and Instagram to check in with your fellow advent calendarians.