Your story “The Other Party” is set in a residential neighborhood in D.C., where everyone knows everyone and neighbors are truly neighborly. Were you drawing on your own community for this portrait? Is there actually a neighborhood in which everyone cares about everyone else?People around here communicate and are so friendly and helpful. You can borrow oregano on short notice, or get someone to break into your house if you’re stuck in traffic and you left the oven on. I did draw upon my own experience for some of this, but it’s also relevant that this story takes place at the tail end of the shutdown, in mid-December, 2021, and the shift in social habits has brought these people closer together.I’m not sure if there’s a neighborhood where everyone cares about everyone else, but where I live is zoned like the area in the story, so that from your kitchen window you can see into the kitchens of two or three houses twenty feet away, and it’s hard not to interact with people, and hard not to feel empathy and compassion in those bursts of connection.At the beginning of the story, the daughter inadvertently bares her soul to her father, and her friends speak to her in an open, honest way that the father overhears. Neighbors address one another as if in midsentence—“Hey, can I tell you something terrible?” A little girl a few doors down calls …
Matthew Klam on the Weirdness of COVID – The New Yorker
