He’s constantly callin’ his ex-girlfriend. That’s about it.

(The word singleton means a person who is not a conjoined twin. So you and I and almost very human alive on the planet are singletons. And obviously the idea that Colin cannot be as physically/emotionally connected to other people as he wants is important to the book.)

Maybe. I never thought of it in precisely that way, but that makes a lot of sense. One usually doesn’t associate acronyms and initialisms with other humans, so it is a way of expressing the distance Hassan and Colin feel from those guys.

But yeah, that’s basically what I was trying to do, although I don’t know that I would’ve characterized it that way before you explained it to me.

I think of it as a very subtle way of being able to torture my brother.

Well, there’s a lot of name play in this book (and also in Will Grayson, Will Grayson). In Katherines, some of it is about repetition and mirroring, I guess: Colin sees the women in his life so narrowly that they just become this single monolithic thing, the katherines.

In Lindsey’s case, though, Colin and TOC are opposites in many ways. They’re physically opposite; they have very different worldviews; they represent a different set of opportunities (Colin, the big city; TOC, staying home forever); and they also like different Lindseys. In a way, she has a boy for each of the ways she thinks of herself, and she has to decide which Lindsey is really Lindsey in order to decide which boy she really wants to be with.

It has nothing to do with Hank’s wife (who was not his wife at the time).

I chose the name Katherine for an extremely fancy and metaphorically complex reason: It is good for anagramming. It contains the right mix of consonants and vowels. Also, helpfully, it contains both the word “heart” and the word “tears.”

Yeah, good question.

1. This is going to sound crazy, but I spent a lot of time trying to think of something that Colin would think of as behaving like light, and after all that time thinking about it, I could never think of anything other than millions of tampon strings blowing in the wind.

2. There are—or were in 2006, anyway—still textile factories in the American South, and some of those textile factories had been reduced due to outsourcing to producing one specific product, and when I was in high school, a friend of mine explained her hometown to me by saying that every adult she’d ever known worked at a tampon string factory.

3. It seemed like a gentle and funny way to get at Colin’s massive discomfort with actual human women. Like, obviously he is obsessed with romantic relationships and being in them, but he is also majorly freaked out by the reality of girls, because he is so busy romanticizing them.

I wanted to write a character to counter Colin, so who was thoughtful and religious without being dogmatic. Also, I’d studied the Islamic world in college and had a number of Muslim friends in high school and college. I guess I chose to make Hassan a Muslim because I felt like I wasn’t seeing enough Muslim characters in novels, and like the ones I did see were defined entirely by their faith, when in fact “Muslim” is, for most Muslims, one identity among many. (One can be a Muslim and a feminist and a nerdfighter and an American and so on.) So I wanted to write a character who was faithful, and thoughtful about his religiosity, but not someone who was dominated by it—this in contrast to Colin, who is dominated by the identity of “child prodigy.”

He’s a good example of someone who mattered very much to human history, but didn’t really do anything to matter. History came for Franz Ferdinand, not the other way around. That interested me because Colin is obsessed with how you matter (and whether the extent to which you matter historically is the measure of one’s life).