When I was a little girl, a phone line repairman found a murdered woman’s body in an abandoned shack on a property near my neighborhood. It’s a cliché to say this, but that was a different time, and I spent much of my summer days unsupervised, and the subdivision I lived in was lined on a couple of sides by undeveloped wooded areas where I wasn’t supposed to go but often did. I thought it was thrilling to explore those woods, and I was fascinated by the idea that death had happened so close by—that it might have been me to find the body, under other circumstances. So that was the germ of the idea with Emily Houchens, her discovery, how entangled that discovery gets with her games of make-believe. But Emily’s story obviously isn’t mine, though we share some commonalities, such as having a father who works at a factory. And Emily isn’t me, thank goodness. I wanted there to be a disconnect in her, something missing. For all her sensitivity, she’s a character who has a hard time understanding the experiences of others, which is what I think her mother was actually talking about when she encouraged Emily to be “normal.”