1. In the beginning, Hana Knight's character is unaware of a lot, which makes her discoveries all the more realistic. How hard was it to keep her out of the loop so to speak? You of course knew what was going to happen but she did not. Was this a challenge?

Hana as a young woman in Manhattan is naïve and unaware, coming from a rather sheltered homeschooled life and fairly insular family, and of course, absorbed by her music. But the adult Hana, the narrator, knows exactly what has happened, and she strings the story of her naivety out for Tomas and for the reader from her own perspective almost as if she is writing the novel she appears in. I see The Performance as 3 embedded stories. There is the story that Hana tells Tomas, the story she tells the reader and then there's the story she tells herself. Hana is not completely honest in the telling of any of the 3. Each involves secrecy, denial, self-justification and either naivety or downright lies. I wanted the reader to piece together his or her own version of the story of Hana and Jacqueline, including bits from the reader's own life and experiences, and ultimately, I wanted the reader to start to question or doubt Hana's story. I wanted to recreate the psychology that follows a breach of trust: the disability to trust again. Was any of Hana's story true? Was she pulling the wool over her audience's eyes? And for what end? How reliable is she as a narrator? Of course, such a structure is a balancing act to pull off. When should Hana start to realize what Jacqueline is up to, when should she reveal a key piece of information to the reader, to Tomas, to herself? I needed to provide motivation for each of the decisions she makes about what and when she tells who. The process, I imagine, was a bit like writing a mystery or a detective novel, rolling out the clues one by one so the reader thinks she is half a step ahead of the Hana, but still in the dark until the climax.

2. At an early encounter at Hana's apartment, Jacqueline refuses to accept Hana's free tickets to her concerts and insists on finding means to pay for them. I found this added darkness to Jacqueline's character, indirectly making the reader feel uneasy about her intentions. Before putting those characters in a scene together in which they speak, how did you carve out their separate worlds in the novel?
This novel lived in my head for quite a long time before I wrote anything down on paper. Hana, the young classical pianist, in my mind, stepping outside from a concert hall and seeing a woman, who became Jacqueline, watching her from across the street. A creepy moment. This scene played over and over in my imagination for months. Who were these two women? Why were they where they were, at that time, in that particular city. How would their paths cross? I knew there had to be a mystery. I had to answer those questions for myself and for them. My conception of character and plot is very much cinematic, both at first and during the writing and editing phase (Maybe I should have been a film maker). I see the characters walking and talking, moving through their lives, interacting. I'm always endeavoring, struggling to translate the pictures in my mind into words on the page. I seldom find the result completely satisfactory but that is what drives me forward, that translation of the visual into the literary.

3. Is there a bit of Hana Knight in all of us? Is there a bit of Jacqueline in all of us?

The simple answer to the question is yes. The more complex answer is that I believe every person is capable of anything, given the right circumstances, from the altruism of a saint to the most heinous act of evil, even murder. This human capacity makes writing literary fiction endlessly fascinating as it is all about exploring the range of human actions and emotions or as I recently heard Tim O'Brien describe it, fiction is an exploration of the human heart. Why do we do the things we do? How do we feel about it, about ourselves, before, during, and after? Why are we as individuals or as a society, a species, so capable of self-deception, or cruelty of the greatest degree? I know I'm never going to be a famous classical pianist like Hana, but I've been part of a family, been betrayed by a friend, betrayed a friend, been in love, fallen out of love, even told a few lies (my husband, the poet, jokes that he tells the truth, I tell the lies). As for Jacqueline, one thing I learned through interviewing street dwellers and reading about the homeless is how fine the line is between being okay and not being okay, having a warm home and having to sleep rough under a tree. For some the line is wider than for others, but a single moment can change a person's life forever, whether it be the result of an accident, a death, an illness, the choices of another, or as in The Performance, a crime.

- Douglas & McIntyre, 2016