Our fiction editor and the author in conversation.  Illustration by The New Yorker; Source photograph by Han Ong Deborah Treisman: In your story “I Am Pizza Rat,” a man in his early fifties, who is struggling to succeed as a writer in New York, goes home to California to help care for his widowed father after a fall. When you started writing the story, did you have just this premise in mind or did you already know where the story would go? Han Ong: I took the basic outline of “I Am Pizza Rat” from an unproduced play of mine called “Great Lives,” written in 2016. In the play—which takes its title from the BBC podcast, which is also name-checked in the story—a middle-aged, failed writer moves home to the West Coast from New York City to take care of an ailing father. The father has dementia or Alzheimer’s—it’s not yet clear which; at any rate, it’s his mind that’s failing. That outline got me started. Almost all of the elements that followed—the Falling Naturally class, “The Mikado,” the Cameroonian nurse Bun, the son’s pot smoking—were discoveries I made in the process of writing the story. I should say that “I Am Pizza Rat” is an iteration of a kind of story that I wrote a lot when I was younger, but which I haven’t attempted in many years: a tale of sad sacks. Like the characters of Barbara Pym (one of my two favorite novelists), these are people who are in retrenchment from the Great Flow of Life, and now stand to the side and simply make observations about Life’s Major Characters. The narrator in “I Am Pizza Rat” has an “awakening” late in the story, when his writing ambitions are revived, but till then he’s a pot smoker and a piddler-about. | 
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