Nicole Krauss on the Purity of Independence

That, before reciting it, he asks if she minds can be read in different ways. She is Jewish and he is German, she is the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors and he may or may not be the grandson of Nazis, and this strangeness is explored between them from the beginning. Is it appropriate, he may be asking, to recite this prayer, in this language, in the presence of this woman? What will it invoke for her? There is a gingerness in the question, and also a sense of an ingrained sensitivity that is either special to him, or a reflection of how Germans of his generation were taught to think about their history, or both. But another way to look at his question is as a way of asking whether she can be trusted to witness a moment of vulnerability. After all, they are alone there in the heart of that forest, and there is little choice except to return to childhood next to her, to try to sleep.

Gebremedhin: As your title suggests, you explore every contour of manhood in “To Be a Man.” The final image, which sees the protagonist accepting that her older son is going to soon cross over into the land of men, suggests a kind of submersion or drowning. Are there aspects of manhood that should be resisted?

Krauss: That ending, which opens out into a vastness, can, I hope, be read in different ways. One is as you’ve described. Another is as a contemplation of time and life and the forward pull into the future, into the unknown, into change that will be irreversible. To me, it is very much a mother’s moment of regarding a child who must grow to leave her for other shores. It’s a letting-go, with all of the sadness and joy and trepidation and wonder she feels. The story, which focuses on her observations of the men and boys near to her, is only obliquely about her own feelings. But I think they come rushing to the fore in that final moment.

Gebremedhin: Some of the stories gathered in To Be a Man date back to the early 2010s. What was it like to revisit your older stories? Did you rediscover anything about yourself—as a writer or otherwise—in reading them again?

Krauss: Most of the stories were written over the past eight years, before and after writing my last novel, Forest Dark. But one, “Future Emergencies,” dates back to 2002. I wrote it just after 9/11, after I’d finished my first novel but before it had been published. Writing fiction was almost entirely new to me then—until I’d sat down to write that novel, a year earlier, at 25, I’d dedicated myself to poetry. There were many strange things about returning to it all these years later. Not least of all that people in the story are walking around New York in masks—gas masks, in this case, but the sense of large-scale catastrophe and fear is the same. Also strange was that, in the years since writing it, the young narrator’s much older boyfriend had become my own age. Which raised another strange feeling, namely: And here I am, still at it! This absurd job! These forever unresolvable questions! Like many characters in the later stories, the narrator of “Future Emergencies” is poised on the cusp of deciding whether to stay or go; to commit to the shape her relationship requires of her, or leave it, to go and become who knows where or what. The future emergency of that story is, in all senses, still ongoing.

Thomas Gebremedhin is a former senior editor at The Atlantic.