Claire Messud

This:

'But Messud is most interested in the collision between our inner lives and our reality. "An abiding preoccupation for me is how much of our lives are invisible and unknown by other people like the Chekhov story The Lady With the Little Dog. There's that wonderful thing where he's walking his child to school and he's in love with his mistress. He's had lots of affairs before but with this one, he's fallen in love and he suddenly thinks to himself, 'Nobody knows. Nobody knows about her. I'm the only one and nobody can see the things that are most important to me' and then he has this realization that that's true for everybody, and that it's their inner life that matters to them," explains Messud. "I wanted to try to write about Nora's inner life and the relation of that to reality. She builds an elaborate friendship in her mind from external signs which, while not exactly tenuous, don't perhaps add up to the connection she imagines."' -- from Huffington Post, more here.

 Claire Messud's new book is "The Woman Upstairs". Listen to her conversation with Terry Gross here.