My novel in progress, The Swank Hotel, follows a woman whose sister is “mad”/“mentally ill” and a man whose lover is. By refusing to settle on a static conceptualization or depiction of madness my project is to embody the efforts of flawed ordinary people to understand what is, by definition, beyond understanding. I’m interested in the way that a world that includes madness as one of many modes of human experience is a world primarily in flux, and how that changes meaningfulness in narrative. Of course, mostly what I do is imagine these characters and write down what I imagine happens to them, but I want the sentences along the way to suggest shifting architectures of consciousness, both for the people depicted and for the narrator doing the depicting.