I didn’t set out to write about myself.

I got the idea from a video game trailer. I don’t even play video games, but I follow the stories — it makes me feel younger. The trailer was for The Last of Us Part II. In it, the protagonist Ellie is shaking and twitching from a zombie bite, hallucinating about her father figure Joel, and then she looks straight into the camera and says: I’m going to kill every last one of them.

Throughout the entire first game, Ellie is immune to the infection. I was certain the twist of the second game was that she was never actually immune — that the violence, the killing spree, all of it was what it looks and feels like to lose your mind and become a zombie. To watch yourself turn from the inside.

When the game came out, that’s not what happened.

So I decided to write that book myself.

Originally Ava was going to be my guinea pig. She was going to get bitten. She was going to turn. The whole story was going to be about what it feels like to lose your mind from the inside.

But that’s not what my mind wanted to create. The further I got, the more the story resisted me. It kept pulling in a different direction, insisting on something else, something quieter and more specific and a lot more personal than zombies. Eventually I stopped fighting it and let the story become what it wanted to be.

And then I looked at what I’d made and realized: Ava is me. Jenn-Jenn is me. The mother holding everything together with both hands while nobody notices — also me. I went looking for an escape from reality and reality followed me in and sat down and refused to leave.

I didn’t want this book to have anything to do with me. Except it has everything to do with me. That’s why I’m writing it.