Every author has a story beyond the one that they put down on paper. The Barnes & Noble Podcast goes between the lines with today’s most interesting writers, exploring what inspires them, what confounds them, and what they were thinking when they wrote the books we’re talking about.

Tom Perrotta can be hard to pin down: in Election, he wickedly sent up American politics with a dark comedy of high school ambition; his treatment of suburban couples in 2004’s bestseller Little Children earned him a comparison to Chekhov in the New York Times. And in 2011’s The Leftovers, he pushed the boundaries of realism and fantasy to create a haunting meditation on loss.

His latest novel, Mrs. Fletcher, breaks new ground again, with the story of a middle-aged single mother who finds herself exploring a new identity – one in part defined by her sudden exposure to the world of internet pornography. Simultaneously, the novel tracks Eve’s son Brendan as he arrives at college, full of ideas and desires that have been influenced by the same online sources. On this episode, the author talks with Bill Tipper about his eyes-wide-open confrontation with American sexuality in forms virtual and otherwise.

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Eve Fletcher is trying to figure out what comes next. A forty-six-year-old divorcee whose beloved only child has just left for college, Eve is struggling to adjust to her empty nest when one night her phone lights up with a text message. Sent from an anonymous number, the mysterious sender tells Eve, “U R my MILF!” Over the months that follow, that message comes to obsess Eve. While leading her all-too-placid life—serving as Executive Director of the local senior center by day and taking a community college course on Gender and Society at night—Eve can’t curtail her own interest in a porn website called MILFateria.com, which features the erotic exploits of ordinary, middle-aged women like herself. Before long, Eve’s online fixations begin to spill over into real life, revealing new romantic possibilities that threaten to upend her quiet suburban existence.

Meanwhile, miles away at the state college, Eve’s son Brendan—a jock and aspiring frat boy—discovers that his new campus isn’t nearly as welcoming to his hard-partying lifestyle as he had imagined. Only a few weeks into his freshman year, Brendan is floundering in a college environment that challenges his white-dude privilege and shames him for his outmoded, chauvinistic ideas of sex. As the New England autumn turns cold, both mother and son find themselves enmeshed in morally fraught situations that come to a head on one fateful November night.

Click here to see all books by Tom Perrotta.

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Marcel Proust is a literary giant whose shadow is as long as his record-setting output. (Guinness claims À la recherche du temps perdu is the heftiest novel ever, which it may or may not be, but after 3,000 pages who’s up for arguing?). With its influence as extensive as its word count — Conrad, Woolf, Benjamin, and writers of equal stature proclaimed it the most important novel of the twentieth century — no doubt its own verbiage is now exceeded by that of its exegeses. No need to add more to that category, thank you. So a newly discovered cache of letters, as slender as Proust’s great creation is fat, gives occasion not to resubmit Proust’s talent to the artistic calipers for yet another measurement, but to discuss the writer’s need for quiet.

The letters Proust wrote to his upstairs neighbor on boulevard Haussmann in Paris come to us as a one-sided conversation, as we have none of her replies. Yet mysteriously they collectively form a work every bit as rich as an epistolary prose poem, or a novella, or the singular form of brief story of which translator Lydia Davis (Man Booker winner, MacArthur Fellow, translator of Swann’s Way, and author of Break It Down and Can’t and Won’t) is herself originator and master practitioner. Richer still, they make a catalog of the peculiar physical conditions a writer requires in order to write in the first place.

Proust hosted a gala of afflictions, including asthma and very possibly his own iteration of what we now call social anxiety, but he almost certainly was a prisoner of misophonia. (And probably the related phonophobia, a symptom of which is a debilitating fear of future noise.) This syndrome, in which certain sounds send the sufferer around the bend, disproportionately affects artists, as confirmed by a study published in the journal Neuropsychologia in 2015. Haunt online forums devoted to the disorder, and the same complaints turn up again and again: sporadic concussive sounds incite annoyance even unto rage. It might be the person you love most in the world, but when he sucks his teeth, crinkles the chips bag, or noodles on his harmonica, you want to murder him. You don’t. Instead, you can’t write.

It is obvious that Proust admired Mme. Williams, the erudite French wife of an American dentist whose office was directly above Proust’s apartment. But that did not stop him from expressing gorgeously veiled hostility to the sounds that emanated from her quarters, including those of workmen, movers, and the servants who “with violence” beat her rugs in the adjacent courtyard. Not to mention the dental patients who mistakenly rang his doorbell thinking they were on the verge of relief at last. Cork-lined bedroom notwithstanding, the writer’s exquisite sensitivity to noise chronically bedeviled him. How much more might he have written had he not had to war with the sounds that drove him to distraction?

“But you have bequeathed to me so many workers . . . [ordered] violently and perhaps sadistically to start banging at 7 o’clock in the morning above my head, in the room immediately above my bedroom . . . that I have no strength to write and have had to give up going away,” Proust complains — here forced to a directness he otherwise avoids — to a woman he has never met though they live at the same address. Usually he is oblique, backhanded, or delivers his pleas for quiet with flowers both actual and literary. He expresses sorrow for some recent trouble of Madame’s by writing, “I would like even more not to ask you for this silence.” He tries yet another tack by enquiring if he causes any similar discomfort to her; of course he knows he doesn’t. “I also wonder if the voice of my housekeeper, very sharp, does not rise to you. She stays with me very late and does not make any noise when she moves about. But if her voice could be heard, I implore you to tell me.”

Interestingly, sufferers of misophonia — and Proust was in good company, likely including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Thomas Mann, Samuel Beckett, and Gustav Mahler, according to Mason Currey’s Daily Rituals: How Artists Work — only mind noise that’s sporadic or concussive. “What bothers me is never continuous noise, even loud noise, if it is not struck,” Proust explains for the second time. Any writer who can’t put down two words in succession while someone is practicing drums or preparing a meal in the kitchen but easily enters a state of flow against the steady background hum of a café or bar understands.

Worth noting is the fact that Proust was conducting his white-gloved battles with household noises heard from inside a bedroom while the First World War was blowing life apart with unprecedented fury in other parts of France. As a military audiologist reports of a war whose din was not recorded and can hardly be imagined, “Artillery rounds created noise levels of 140 dB or more, which were often heard in London some 200 miles from the front . . . During a bombardment the noise was loud enough to split the eardrums and it quite commonly caused permanent hearing loss, especially among gunners.” The condition that during the conflict became known as “shell shock” was in part a response to the effects of repeated, horrific noise.

The Great War’s destructiveness, if not its noise, was indeed a frequent subject of the letters – those from 1914 to 1918 could hardly avoid it. Yet even when they touch on the combat death of a friend or the leveling of a landmark like the cathedral of Reims, they exude aestheticized distance like faint perfume. The writer’s suffering and solitude make a far more resounding clamor on the page.

Proust’s work and its legacy is a tangle of paradox, not to mention syntax. His weighty masterpiece, for example, is full of fleeting delicacy. This deceptively slight collection of letters, recently unearthed in a Paris archive, evokes similarly lavish wonders. How can such a vibrant picture of a life emerge from only twenty-six missives, some quite short? The translator’s fascinating afterword, full of sensate detail, reads like a detective story. All of a sudden it occurs that Proust’s friendship with Mme. Williams is an online relationship avant la lettre: imbued with intensity and imperative disclosure, despite their never meeting (or because of it). Their letters arrived from two flights of stairs away by way of a distant server — I mean post office.

Lydia Davis’s elegant translation, too, begets complex considerations. Primarily about the weird project that is taking a work made from specific materials — strings of particular words with their own sound, nuance, rhythm, diction — and replacing all its parts with different materials, then calling it the same thing. Germaine Greer holds a contrarian view of the writer Davis obviously reveres as well as finds a kindred spirit (“If you haven’t read Proust, don’t worry. This lacuna in your cultural development you do not need to fill”) but she is technically right that “all translation is mistranslation.” Because Davis’s own genius is akin to Proust’s — and because she does not so much translate as inhabit — her mistranslation is as like to the original as it may be possible to get.

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It doesn’t take a huge leap of the imagination to see how a person who was obsessed with A Nightmare on Elm Street as a five-year-old could end up writing a haunted house novel years later. Jac Jemc’s love of horror was instilled at a very young age.

“I still like being scared, even beyond the realm of reading or watching a story that’s scary to me,” Jemc says. “I like the feeling of being alone in a big house in the woods, and freaking myself out.” Not long ago, she stayed in a huge manor house in Denmark for a writing residency.

“At night, I had to go all the way from one wing of the house to another to get a glass of water,” Jemc says. “It was so easy to get scared [during that walk.] But it was great! I loved it!”

In Jemc’s latest novel, The Grip of It, a young couple named James and Julie are haunted by their relationship and themselves, just as much as external forces. James has a gambling problem, and buying a house is a chance at a fresh start. But after they move into their new home, an atmosphere of the uncanny sets in; the woods seem to grow closer to the house, and rooms appear out of nowhere. Mysterious bruises show up on Julie’s body.

The Grip of It is the literary love child of Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle and Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves. Jemc had Jackson’s famous novel in her head as she worked on her latest book, because she is intrigued by things that go unsaid and “what people avoid talking about.” She also read The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, This House Is Haunted by John Boyne, and The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters. While some writers are afraid of other voices influencing their own, Jemc loves to read while she’s working on a book. “I want my work to change and bend.”

But one thing stays the same, no matter what she writes.

“The theme I keep returning to in my work is no matter how well you know a person, there’s always this gap between what you think about yourself and what they know about you,” Jemc says. “The closer you get to a person, that gap can feel wider and wider.”

The Chicago-based writer is the author of several books, including My Only Wife and A Different Bed Every Time. This fall, she’s teaching creative writing at Illinois Wesleyan University. Jemc got her start being published by small presses, Dzanc Books and Greying Ghost Press. In an era when so many people use their online platforms to share their accomplishments, Jemc offers a welcome alternative. Since 2008, she has posted her rejections in a very public way, on her own website. “For the most part, it’s kind of a numbers game,” she says. “If you put yourself out there enough times, at some point you’ll start hearing yeses back.” That transparency is refreshing, and proof that persistence can pay off. The important thing, Jemc says, is to not “get bogged down by rejection.”

Fear dwells and grows in the unknown, and that’s something Jemc explores in her book. How are we supposed to go about living our lives when there’s so much uncertainty and deception in the world? And if we can’t completely trust our partners, how can we trust ourselves? The longer James and Julie stay in the house, the harder it is to make sense of themselves, and that confusion seeps into their surroundings. Even everyday objects lose their meaning. “Everything I see in our house looks as if it had been replaced with a replica,” Julie says.

Jemc alternates from the point of view of the husband and the wife, making it easy for the reader to feel like they side with one character and then, just as quickly, feel sympathy for the other. Whom can you trust in a novel that is built around the disintegration of trust?

“Because their relationship is becoming destabilized, everything around them seems unusual as well,” Jemc says. “They no longer have each other as this failsafe, as this touch point, where you can always count on what it is you’ll be getting from the other person.”

That’s one way to explain why their house is so unnerving — but it could be more than that, too. It’s up to the reader to decide. What’s more frightening: the supernatural or the natural world? It’s difficult to say. But what makes this book especially frightening — and pleasurably disorienting — is how the haunting continues even when they leave the confines of their home.

“If things are really falling apart between James and Julie, then it’s not only going to happen in their house, it’s going to happen wherever they are,” Jemc insists. “Nature is alive and changing all the time, and so we have these things that we think we understand about how the world works, but those things aren’t necessarily reliable.”

“The inability to trust ourselves is the most menacing danger,” James states halfway through the novel. “I fear what we could find there. I fear what we won’t.”

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Alice McDermott’s eighth novel, The Ninth Hour, begins in early-twentieth-century Brooklyn with a thirty-two-year old man named Jim preparing to take his own life. He has sent his pregnant wife, Annie, out to the shops; he seals the windows and doors of their tenement apartment and turns on the gas. Jim’s mutinous attitude toward time and attendance, and preference for lying in bed, have lost him his job as a BRT trainman. A quick glimpse into his soul shows him glorying in what he takes to be exercises in independence — these largely amount to his flouting of set hours — but at bottom he is wracked with insecurities, and the fortitude most people exercise in soldiering on is not his. Thus he dies, leaving his wife and future child with no means of support.

Enter Sister St. Saviour of the Little Nursing Sisters of the Sick Poor, the first of the nuns whose work and inner lives play as much a part in this story as anyone’s. Discretion, savvy, and determination are St. Saviour’s salient virtues. She has seen it all, “breezed into the homes of strangers and seen the bottles in the bin, the poor contents of a cupboard, the bruise in a hidden place, seen as well, once, a pale thumb-sized infant in a basin filled with blood and, saying nothing at all, had bowed her head and nodded in just such a way.” St. Saviour takes over, comforting the young widow and moving fast in an attempt to arrange a Catholic burial, which Church law forbids for a suicide. The old nun has cultivated a network of influence, lending her de facto power in circumventing the laws and strictures “that complicated the lives of women: Catholic women in particular and poor women in general. Her own little Tammany, Sister Miriam called it.”)

St. Saviour enlists other nuns from the order to help manage Annie’s situation, and eventually the young mother-to-be is given a job in the convent’s laundry, where, in due time, she brings her baby to tend while she works. This is Sally, a child who grows up in the midst of doting religious women. Among them are Sister Jeanne, tiny, adored by children, and possessed of such understanding and compassion that she is willing to make the most extreme sacrifice for another; Sister Lucy, forceful problem solver, impatient of incompetence, indolence, and self-pity, a woman who lives “with a small, tight knot of fury at the center of her chest”; and Sister Illuminata, indefatigable head of the laundry, “a wizard with a hot iron and starch, with scrub brush and bleach.” The nuns work tirelessly on behalf of the poor, more effective than priests in practical matters.

Early on, McDermott slips the narration to Sally’s future children, and we move ahead to their time to find that the nuns are still involved, coming in to manage the household during what turn out to be their mother’s bouts of melancholy, periods during which Sally simply takes to her bed. A narrative “we” then looks back to the family’s much-told stories, of the break between Michael, their father’s father, and his own father, Patrick, who opposed Michael’s choice of a wife; of how Patrick lived a life blighted by having paid a substitute to take his place in the Union Army during the Civil War; and of how, crippled and badly scarred in battle, the man appeared at the door one day to take up residence in an upstairs room — a living reproach, tended by Patrick’s sister, still a child, who devoted her life to his care: “A widowed spinster, our father called her. A married nun.” McDermott, a master of resonance, gives these stories later valence, attaching them with the utmost subtlety to coming events.

At one point Sally, now eighteen, still cosseted by the nuns, eager for admiration, and heroine of her own fantasies, flatters herself that she has a religious vocation and travels by rail to a novitiate in Chicago. On the train her romantic view of service and sacrifice are punctured in a series of hellish encounters that are both horrible and — to the reader, at least — bleakly funny. Departing from her quiet descriptive style with its undercurrent of revelation, McDermott paints a grotesque phantasmagoria of lubricity, gluttony, cruelty, deviousness, fraud, and filth. The trip — which might have been conceived by Flannery O’Connor — exposes Sally not only to what the secular world has to offer but to her real self, a person unable to overcome her disgust with human nature and commit herself to others. If her later melancholy — what we call clinical depression — has a root beyond inheritance, it is here and in the shadow of her father’s suicide and in a later, truly shocking event, all creating in her a feeling that life has no meaning but the inevitability of death.

Problematical and complex versions of sacrifice and their ramifications run through this book. The nuns, of course, are self-sacrifice incarnate, devoting themselves to helping others and, not least, exercising the self-abnegation and restraint that communal living demands. Sister Lucy, for one, expresses this wordlessly, her frequently raised eyebrow saying, “You women constitute my purgatory . . . I will endure it, but not for your sake.” The novel’s title itself points to sacrifice, the “ninth hour” being one of the canonical hours, 3 pm (notionally the ninth hour after dawn), the hour that Christ died on the Cross, sacrificing himself for the sins of the world. Such fascination with sacrifice and its endless demands — willingly embraced, reluctantly endured, or guiltily refused — belongs to the Catholic Church of an earlier age and to a vanished sensibility and milieu, all evoked to perfection by McDermott. This is an exquisitely deep novel and a triumph.

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