So back to The Merry Spinster, you use the term “daughters” in unexpected ways throughout the book, as a gender- and sexually neutral word. Just bringing my own preoccupations and anxieties into the rewriting of the story, I don’t feel like I did anything differently, in that anything I teased out of that story wasn’t already present, it was just more. I did not feel like any of them were mistaken about the human condition and I didn’t have an interest in fixing anything, but I did feel like something like The Velveteen Rabbit is concerned with ideas of ownership, of possession, of claiming, of becoming something other than what you were and whether or not you can do that at the expense of other people. I think sometimes there’s this sort of idea that older stories or fairy tales are from a “bad” past and we are smart and good now, and the work to do in retelling one is to correct the mistakes of the past and include new, enlightened ideas of whatever we think is important at this time, and that’s not something that I felt was necessary for any of these stories. MALLORY ORTBERG: I don’t know that I had a special interest in subverting anything.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Were there any specific tropes in fairy tales or children’s stories that you were particularly interested in subverting?

Twist of my life guide