As writers, we do tend to talk to each other through our work. John Updike said, “I have almost always begun a book with another book in mind…” Through what he called such “intertextuality,” Updike felt, “writers give each other the courage to carry on.”

More recently, Yiyun Li said of William Trevor, “I talk to him in my stories.” Some of her stories, in fact, are direct responses to Trevor’s stories, reminiscent of Raymond Carver saying he was writing to and for Anton Chekhov.

“It just feels like he’s writing about my own world,” Li explained of Trevor, “or how I feel about the world is the way he feels about the world, and I write about the world the way he does.” Li thanks Trevor in her acknowledgments, and in almost every interview, she mentions him.

While on the surface their worlds are seemingly far apart (Li’s work takes place mostly in China, while Trevor’s work takes place mostly in Ireland), their exacting, careful prose is similar—with a deep sense of loneliness, an underlying melancholy and seriousness, and an understated beauty. Li has conversations with other writers, including arguments—Graham Greene and Iris Murdoch, for instance—but she’s in alignment with Trevor, with whom her connection is deeper. She describes this connection as “intuitive.” Surely, her relationship to Trevor’s work is intimate, and although they’ve met a few times, these interactions “don’t matter…because really it’s the things you write, because you’re talking to a writer, and you really talk through your writing.”

So my third novel, Mermaid, is a retelling of the original little mermaid story by Hans Christian Andersen; my previous novel, Godmother, came out two years ago this week and was told from the perspective of Cinderella’s fairy godmother, now an old lady with wings living in New York City’s Garment District. My first middle-grade novel, The Next Full Moon, comes out on June 7, and is about a 12-year-old girl who begins to grow feathers and discovers that her mother was/is actually a swan maiden; it’s based on the old fairytale of a man who steals a swan maiden’s feathered robe (there are many similar tails about a man stealing a selkie’s seal skin), leaving her stuck in her human form. He marries her and has a child with her and then one day confesses to her what he’s done, showing her the robe. Immediately she puts it on and flies away. My story’s about the kid she left behind.

I guess you could say that I like fairytales. A lot.