Your story “Travesty” is told from the point of view of Prima, an undergrad majoring in philosophy at Columbia, who becomes romantically involved with a professor, Heiss. What made you want to explore Prima and Heiss’s relationship?

I’m often interested in the frontier of a changing norm. When I was a student, professor-student relationships had become strictly verboten, but students still fell in love with their professors and even married them. I always imagined that it would be simultaneously exciting and disturbing to be in a relationship that so much of your community imagines is, by its very nature, manipulative or abusive. I’m preoccupied with the frustrating uncertainty around our evolving sexual politics—whether our current ways of thinking about power are a form of wisdom or a form of blind stridency. The ideologically intense university environment is a sort of petri dish for this question.

Prima believes that her relationship with Heiss is remarkable, and she generally has confidence in her own beliefs. Why then is she so thrown by Ruth’s suggestion that it is part of a pattern?

In recent years I’ve noticed that there’s a conflation, sometimes, of the desire to protect women from bad actors and the feeling that it’s humiliating for a woman to realize that she was one in a series, a participant in someone else’s romantic pattern. It offends our sense that “real love” is singular, and that someone who really loves us will treat us as they’ve treated no one else. What Prima wants most of all is to grow up. She isn’t fixated on having the right or the most happy kinds of experiences, exactly. And, in the context of wanting to grow up, being subject to another person’s selfish patterns is a pretty fundamental life experience. What offends Prima is Ruth’s certainty that everyone who is part of Heiss’s pattern will feel abused by it, and that she and her classmates need to be protected from Heiss. Possibly most of them do; possibly this includes Prima, despite herself, but her feeling, at twenty, is that being treated as someone in need of protection is more degrading to her than any consensual sexual relationship could be.

The word “travesty” appears twice in the story: first, in Ruth’s voice, in reference to Heiss’s being allowed to teach after having had affairs with students, then Heiss uses it to refer to Prima thinking of herself as a powerless child in their relationship, rather than as a woman with her own agency. Why did you use it as the title for the story?

The word “travesty” expresses a personal feeling that a distortion or a transgression is so perverse as to be undeniable—that anyone with a reasonable moral sense would perceive it. And that’s the basic tension in this story, that these two opposing sets of convictions—about, basically, to what extent Prima is an adult—are both so complete that they aren’t actually in conversation with each other. Instead, Prima is at the mercy of each in turn. In a way, this is the ultimate initiation into adult life, which so often involves our having to situate ourselves in relation to world views that fundamentally don’t make sense to us.

You were a student at Barnard, presumably taking classes at Columbia. Does “Travesty” draw at all on your own college experience?

It does. I was an eager student, and I found Barnard and Columbia almost magical. In retrospect I think I was amazed at the idea that I was part of a concrete, chosen community in which I was connected by shared values to lots of other people—which wasn’t a feature of the world I grew up in. I thought the whole premise of college was incredible, and even now it has a utopian sheen. It’s a formative thing, I think, to be disillusioned with the university as an institution when you find yourself betrayed by your administration or your peers. It’s more intimate than being disillusioned with your country, and, in a way, more damning. This type of grief is haunting and present for me. Prima is just being introduced to it.

This story is drawn from a novel in progress. Do you know already how it fits into the rest of the book? Is Prima the protagonist of the narrative throughout?

In my first attempt, this book was about a former student and lover of Heiss’s reëvaluating her experience in retrospect. Then I wrote a draft mostly from Heiss’s perspective, in which “Travesty” was the only chapter that followed Prima. It took me a long time to recognize that the question of how a student-professor relationship will seem in retrospect is actually most acute and threatening for the very young person who is being warned about how she may someday feel. It’s more harrowing for Prima than for someone older, like Heiss, who can contextualize it. The book in its current form is almost entirely about Prima, and about the frustration she feels—a frustration that I experienced, too, at Prima’s age—about how and when she will be taken seriously as an adult. In a certain way, it’s a privilege to be allowed to make reckless or naïve decisions and regret them.

Ruth wants Prima to make a moral judgment about Heiss’s behavior, to see it as a perhaps exploitative abuse of power—a kind of judgment that hadn’t previously occurred to Prima. As the author, do you also feel pressure to see the situation through a moral lens?

For me, fiction is a means by which to tease out and undermine the moral pressure I feel in everyday life. I spent a long time writing this book through Heiss’s eyes because I liked the fact that Heiss is in the most culpable position—it’s easy for us to assume that Heiss is blind, selfish, or malicious. I resisted writing about Prima because I worried that a character so young and inexperienced would be interpreted as a vulnerable victim, and that there would be a kind of built-in sympathy for Prima on the part of the reader—a sympathy similar to the condescending concern that Ruth feels toward her—which I really wanted to undercut. But that’s exactly why Prima demanded that the project focus on her, I think. The concern I felt that Prima was too vulnerable a character for my purposes is the same concern that infuriates Prima herself. ♦