Did He Steal Her Story? A Literary Mystery Is at the Heart of Keziah Weir’s First Novel

Otherwise, I was reading books on astronomy and physics. One of those is by a woman named Lou Page—A Dipper Full Of Stars—she was a geologist, but she wrote it to teach herself astronomy. I was thinking about Carl Sagan and people whose books are a model for that kind of writing. My reading life was also opening up from the very specific people who I’d studied as an undergraduate. I was reading Nicole Krauss and Zadie Smith’s essays and Toni Morrison. And I was seeing that it was possible that you could, you know, be a woman writer, writing about women. Mind-blowing.

Throughout your career in magazines, and now as an editor at Vanity Fair, you’ve written and edited book reviews, profiles, and other magazine journalism. Can you speak to the relationship between your own nonfiction and fiction?

I’ve read magazines since I was little. I remember having the Lindsay Lohan Vanity Fair cover that I’m sure my mom had gotten and then I weaseled away into my room. Both novels and magazines have been a big part of my life. I think that falling into other people’s brains, getting immersed in their stories, can be accomplished in both forms.

I didn’t get an MFA, but I’ve gotten to interview authors who I love over the years [and] profile Zadie Smith and Nicole Krauss and Rebecca Solnit. [In doing this,] I was trying to learn how to be a writer too. And I just have been really fortunate that the two can be in conversation with each other.

Did you have a run-in comparable to Sal and Martin’s meeting?

I did. I was at a reading at the New York Public Library. After the reading, we were all sort of milling around, there was a reception in the next room with cheese plates and too much cheap red wine. This man who was in his 70s just came up and started chatting with me. I was 22. He was saying all these wonderful things that I was very excited to hear at the time—that my life was going to be so beautiful, that he could tell that I was a writer. Afterward, my professor who had invited me was like, “You know that was Hampton Fancher, the screenwriter for Blade Runner?” Which meant little to nothing to me at the time, except that I was like, “Oh, that’s very cool.” I had already started writing the shadows of Martin and Moira, but I think that gave me something to latch onto. In some ways, it was a similar experience to Sal and Martin’s encounter. And then materially, it was totally different. But it opened up narrative pathways.

This interview has been edited and condensed.