The author’s debut novel, Pick a Color, explores the rich and mysterious inner life of a nail salon owner.

What draws you to write about physically demanding labor?

I’m really interested in the way people work, whether they’re a bartender or a nail salon worker or someone who works on a farm. I like to imagine how thinking happens through the body without words, and to portray that as a writer. I also think back to the poet Jan Zwicky, who said that work can carry you the way love can, but with less sorrow.

That reminds me of another key theme in your novel, solitude. Your middle-aged narrator, Ning, who runs the nail salon, rejects love and matrimony and chooses to be alone.

I don’t think we really value solitude, especially when women choose it. They’re often seen as a loser, whereas I see it as an act of power, and I wanted to show that in the novel. In bestselling novels, women are depicted as either being killed or wanting love. What if you center someone who isn’t going to be killed, someone who isn’t after a man? I wanted this book to show that your life could still be valuable.

Your narrator’s past life as a boxer is central to the story.

I love the language of boxing. It’s so direct and clean and spare, but also so moving. I had read Leonard Gardner’s Fat City, but also I wanted to know what it was like to be a winner, so I read Muhammad Ali’s The Greatest. And of course, to write about boxing, you really have to know it technically, because readers who are familiar with the sport don’t take it lightly, so I did a lot of research and got a trainer to teach me how to box for a year and a half.

My goal as a novelist, though, was to take these two different worlds that seem so far apart, boxing and a nail salon, and make a universe where they fit together. It was such a tremendous joy to find a connection when my narrator makes a mantra out of her former coach’s refrain, “Control the center line,” and applies it to her clients’ faces when it comes time to pluck their eyebrows.

Your narrator is missing her ring finger, a fact that she continues to mention but declines to explain.

That was so fun for me. I know some readers will feel unsatisfied because I don’t tell them what happened, but I also feel like it doesn’t matter.

There are other blind spots in the novel. What makes you choose to write this way?

I’m a writer of absence. As a reader of my work, you can feel the stuff that’s off the page. I hope readers of Pick a Color will notice that we never hear directly from the clients themselves at the nail salon, only the employees in their own language. We read it in English, but it’s reported to us. If they were speaking English, the clients would understand what they were saying.

Absence is not a trick. It’s a presence that I’m trying to achieve and make valuable on the page. I’m thinking of the painter Agnes Martin, who only paints in white. What I love about that is it’s so close to being nothing, but it’s her skill as an artist to make it something. And that’s what I want to do with writing, to bring it so close to its absence, but to make that absence valuable.