Well, I think people who narrate stories tend to be naturally a bit introspective, because the rest of people are busy out, like, living their lives, rather than obsessively trying to chronicle life. This is a very old convention in storytelling, and I certainly didn’t invent it, but it’s always struck me as both enjoyable and authentic.

I did try to play with it a bit more sophisticatedly in TFiOS, where Hazel is making a journey toward that extroverted kind of life and Augustus is making a journey away from it.

Well, I wanted to write—as I often do—about the relationship between given identities and chosen identities.

When you’re a teenager, you have to make a lot of decisions about which of your given identities you’re going to hold onto, and which you’re going to abandon. Like, say you were raised going to church every Sunday. Well, to be honest, you probably didn’t have much say in whether you went to church. But at some point, that WILL be your decision, and that identity will shift from given to chosen.

But there are a billion examples of this in adolescence. And I think that’s why we talk so much about being phony or fake and so on: Teenagers are beginning to realize that these identities are very complicated and fluid, and that can make them feel inauthentic.

So if your name is Jefferson Jefferson and then you go to court and have your name changed to Dr. Jefferson Jefferson, with Dr. as your first name, are you a doctor? Of course you’re not. But then you also are a doctor, because everyone calls you doctor and everyone assumes you’re a doctor. You are something to others but not to yourself, which is an experience a lot of us have as teenagers (and afterward, for that matter).

Margo especially goes through this, because the way people think of her is not at all the way she thinks of herself, and the interior life people imagine her having is wildly different from her actual interior life. So I wanted to use Dr. Jefferson Jefferson as a way of beginning that book-long conversation about whether your you-ness is imposed from within or from without.

Myrna because it sounded good with Mountweazel. Mountweazel because of reasons.

It was just meant to indicate the lack of creativity and sameness in the design of Q and Margo’s neighborhood, which is part of what Margo finds so completely unbearable.

When I was growing up I had a girlfriend whose parents had a huge Santa collection, so the possibility of such a thing was already lodged in my brain.

I wanted the black Santas because the novel is about how we imagine people (how Q imagines Margo, for instance), places (how Agloe was imagined into existence), and our stories (like Santa). It says a lot about us that we imagine Santa as a heterosexual white male (particularly given that St. Nick, on whom Santa is based, looks like this).

So Radar’s parents are trying to get us to imagine Santa differently and more complexly.

Well, there are a couple ways you could read it, I guess:

1. Nail polish is this traditionally feminine object, and Q is in many ways seeing this female person primarily as an object throughout must of the novel.

Also, 2. You could think about color and the way colors like black, red, and white are used in the novel, and what then a redblack nail polish color might mean.

Also, 3. You could just choose not to find that stuff very interesting/important.

Or 4. Find some interesting connection to stuff that I can’t find. This is the pleasure of reading: It’s up to you!

I liked the idea that Margo Roth Spiegelman had this massively polysyllabic name that most people use in its entirety, and that Q’s name was a single letter (and an interrogative one).

Radar: Among all the characters in the book, he is the one with the best sense of where people actually are.

Lacey Pemberton: Just liked the sound of it.

Ben Starling: Just liked the sound of it.

(Of course there may be useful/interesting resonances to these names or any others outside of what I intended, and if so, yay!)

It’s a Biblical reference intended to subtly indicate Lacey’s religiosity.