Who By Fire novel : Interview clips
Video clips from my conversation with Eleanor Anstruther — Book comes out February 24, 2026. Glimpses of Eleanor’s reading:
A Male Narrator, Color, Perspective and Point of View:
Eleanor is saying Rothko, the artist and talks about his painting and my use of a male narrator in the novel. Flaubert’s answer to the question about Madame Bovary, “Who is Emma?” answers “Emma c’est moi.”
Lena is an archivist at The Smithsonian. Isaac is a forensic anthropologist there. Both are married to others: Isaac to Evan and Lena to Robert.
Motifs
Eleanor says at the end, “That’s really beautiful.”
Use of Unusual Structure: Invention Versus Memory
Stunt Pilot Structure:
The line I’m quoting is what Robert the narrator says: “I’m like the skull that looks in at the banquet—the only way I can know who I was—because as you must know by now, their story is my story.”
Mystery and Love Story:
The complete interview, Including when my phone got hot and stopped momentarily working, but I came back! That was a scary moment, but all went well. Your thoughts on the clips or anything we said?
With inestimable thanks to Eleanor Anstruther …
Love,
Thank you so, @Adrian P Conway!
What a lovely way to invite the reader into the craft of the novel, not just “here’s my book,” but “here’s how it was built” ☺️ I especially enjoyed the clip’s focus on perspective and point of view, because that’s where fiction becomes a kind of cognitive neuroscience: you’re asking the reader to run an entire mind as a simulation, complete with blind spots, self-justifications, and the emotional physics of memory. The line about needing the story to know “who I was” feels clinically true; our identities are often reconstructed narratives more than stable facts. 
The structure notes also landed: the “invention versus memory” tension and the “stunt pilot” framing. It’s a reminder that form isn’t decoration; structure is meaning, especially in stories about intimacy, secrecy, and the ways we edit ourselves to survive. 
And I love that you kept the human texture in (your phone overheating mid-interview!). It’s oddly perfect for a book that seems to live at the intersection of control and contingency, art made in real time, with real-world friction.
Congrats on the upcoming release (Feb 24)!