
“It came out of the same mental and emotional space as a lot of the #MeToo conversations, but I didn’t write it explicitly,” the 37-year-old author explains. “I couldn’t have.”
In a similar way, her debut collection of stories, You Know You Want This, seems to touch on conversations that the country has yet to have — often using horror and magical realism to illuminate the darker corners of our world. (See “Scarred,” in which a woman discovers a supernatural way to obtain her deepest desire, only to find it might come at the expense of her own humanity.)
“There’s a lot about romance, a lot about interpersonal relationships gone darkly wrong,” Roupenian says. “The use and abuse of power is a big theme.”