Jennifer DuBois: To be honest, the freedom and privacy I felt while writing A Partial History of Lost Causes meant I didn’t spend much time contemplating it as a first novel per se or consciously modeling it on other first novels. My approach was pretty much confined to following my own genuine interests, weird and morbid as they were. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to do it any other way, since I didn’t know if anyone else in the world was ever going to read the book.

I’d always been interested in Russia and geopolitics and, to a lesser degree, in chess, and when I read a bit about Garry Kasparov I thought the character arc of chess champion-turned-political dissident could be really compelling. And my father’s decline and death from Alzheimer’s meant I grew up with a lot of questions about personal identity and cognition and how you confront futility, so I wanted to write about a character who was grappling with those things, which is where Irina came from. I picked Huntington’s disease because the way that illness works genetically meant I could have a cognitively intact character who would know ahead of time that she would one day lose her mind—and even, approximately, when. The fundamental parallel between Aleksandr’s battle against Putin and Irina’s battle against Huntington’s became apparent to me early on. Like a lot of themes in books, I think, this was neither a coincidence nor a longstanding strategy—just a natural product of my personally wrestling, over and over, with the same set of questions.

RY: Was writing something that you turned to during your father’s illness to help make sense of what was going on? And was this book, in a sense, an answer to the question, as you pose it, “what does one do in the face of futility”?

JD: I didn’t really spend much of my time writing until I got to graduate school—before that, I think I was averaging like a short story a year. Once I began seriously, I found myself writing about lots of questions I realized had probably been on my mind in one way or another, consciously or unconsciously, for my whole life (which is probably true for any writer). Some of those questions were related to my father’s illness kind of obliquely, and a lot of them weren’t.