Staff reader Gibson Grimm talks with NER 45.4 author Nicole Zhu about telescoping in and out of loneliness, humor and contradiction, and the sequencing of her short story “Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Often.”
Gibson Grimm: Early in the story, you mention making “quantifiable a subjective feeling.” This comes to be a defining phrase in the story as you weave together ideas from biology, psychology, and politics into the personal experiences of the characters. Could you talk about how folding in concepts rooted in fact can be a powerful contribution to narrative?
Nicole Zhu: This story started from a prompt at a generative writing workshop. Alexandra Kleeman, our instructor, asked us to “telescope” in and out of a topic. Loneliness felt like the perfect subject to examine at both the macro and micro levels, to zoom into individual experiences while putting them into a larger, shared context. Research was my way of accomplishing that. By threading all these intersecting ideas with the lives of three characters, I tried to translate something systemic into something personally relevant and meaningful. Loneliness is interesting in that it’s both complex and simple—it’s shaped by so many factors, yet it’s one of the most universal human experiences.
I read many news articles about loneliness and listened to interviews with US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy. Seek You, a graphic nonfiction book by Kristen Radtke, was really influential and introduced me to the psychologist Harry Harlow. There’s a wonderful Vox video where I learned about the ROMEO Club. While the story is fiction, the types and impacts of loneliness—but also its counterpoints, ways of feeling connected and seen—are very real. I think there’s something hopeful in that.
GG: One of my favorite aspects of this piece is its subheadings (as well as the title), which evoke doctor’s office mental health forms. What was the inspiration for them? How did you decide on the placement of each?
NZ: Thanks so much. Some early readers were a little divided on the subheadings, but I’m glad that I ultimately kept them in!
I can’t remember how I originally came across it, but I’d bookmarked a PDF about the UCLA Loneliness Scale, a four-point rating scale developed by psychologist Daniel Russell. That was the genesis of this story, really. The simplicity and directness of the statements struck me, as well as how much depth they could simultaneously capture and obfuscate. The subheadings in the story are the same twenty questions from that scale, with Never, Rarely, Sometimes, and Often as the respondents’ answers that are then scored. I took some liberty with the loneliness clinic and my own interpretation of the scores, but it was a lightbulb moment for me. It was very rare for the title and the structure to come to me before the characters.
I spent a lot of time in revision thinking about the order of the subheadings. As you point out, they evoke mental health intake forms, and the story tracks the characters’ potential responses to each one, ultimately tying it back to the title. To “I feel left out,” The Son might respond “Always.” To “I am an outgoing person,” The Scientist might respond “Sometimes.”
At one point, I actually wrote out all the headings and section summaries on index cards, laid them out on my kitchen table, and tried different configurations until I felt satisfied with the arc. Interestingly, the two sections that never changed were the first and last ones.
GG: Loneliness has been described as an epidemic, and I like the way you explore a wide swath of people affected by it. How did you choose your characters for this story?
NZ: When I set out to write this piece, I wanted to avoid the easiest interpretation of the “loneliness epidemic” you see in news headlines, which mostly talk about it in the context of social media and the younger generation. That was certainly an element I wanted to capture, but I didn’t want it to be the focal point.
It was important that these were characters who experienced different types of loneliness throughout their lives given their personalities, identities, and circumstances. Like with many of my characters, I wondered about their wants, their fears, their day-to-day routines, and how they wanted their lives to change. I wanted to explore mental health, romance, work, grief, friendship, and the unique intersections of loneliness with race, age, sexuality, and culture. For example, people of color are more likely to be lonely, and LGBTQ+ adults are about twice as likely as non-LGBTQ+ adults to say they felt “always” or “often” lonely in the past year. While men and women report roughly equal levels of loneliness, men suffer more from a “friendship recession.”
I also wanted the characters to have their own journeys and different degrees of awareness about the loneliness they experience. Ironically, The Scientist is not immune to loneliness and has a hard time adjusting to living in a new city. Including a family, The Man and The Son, was key in both showing the passage of time and the ways in which they worry about each other’s isolation but struggle to truly communicate.
GG: I would also like to touch on your writing style, which has the ability to make something that appears mundane resonate powerfully (i.e. Reddit discussions or lunch clubs). Is there anything you wish to share about how your writing has been able to make abstract concepts feel so tangible?
NZ: Juxtaposition was the key to making an abstract concept feel tangible. I committed to the conceit of a questionnaire and this detached style. That clinical voice is consistent throughout and delivers facts about these characters’ lives. It was then important that their life experiences and relationships, while representative of all the research and news articles I’d read, were also familiar and grounding. The Scientist goes through the ups and downs of a romantic relationship. The Man grieves the loss of his wife. The Son struggles at his corporate job but is so busy that he has no time to take care of himself or foster genuine relationships.
Even with a more restrained narration, I tried to capture nuance in the details. For example, when it comes to the convenience of technology, that idea covers everything from online radicalization to Animal Crossing to mass layoffs to teletherapy. The most effective way I’ve found to capture the universal is to focus on the specifics, like glossing over a friend’s check-in over text or the dissonance of social media algorithms.
Humor also helped depict a lot of the contradictions of modern loneliness. I read the ROMEO portion of the story at different points in time, and that acronym always made people laugh. Humor is disarming, so it can provide a way into a subject that feels heavy and unwieldy. It’s also one of the ways we cope with loneliness, so it felt natural to include.
As a writer, I’m stylistically drawn to language that is direct but dense with meaning, sentences that may, at first glance, read quickly but ultimately stick with you and worm their way into your brain because of repetition or new uses of familiar words. George Saunders comes to mind, particularly “The Braindead Megaphone” and “The Semplica-Girl Diaries.” I found novels like Erasure by Percival Everett and Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu influential in both their experimentation with form and their commitment to a specific style and voice.
GG: There’s a moment in the piece where you acknowledge the comfort of watching rom-coms with happy endings. In thinking about the ending of this story, where might we find comfort in it? Where might we not?
NZ: It was intentional that neither character ends up with the rom-com “happily ever after” of being married with kids. For The Scientist, I wanted to subvert the notion mentioned earlier in the story that the solution for loneliness that’s often pushed upon women is monogamy and motherhood. For The Son, I wanted him to have one genuine friendship that he actively tended to and someone he could be vulnerable with.
The ending also ties back to the idea that loneliness is subjective and deeply personal. Being alone is not the same thing as being lonely. The opposite of loneliness is many things: security, community, connection, and feeling understood. Both characters ultimately find some version of these things in their lives, whether that’s through friendship or work, which I hope readers find comfort in.
The ending is, for lack of a better term, open-ended, because I think that’s true in life. Maybe that’s not as comforting. Loneliness isn’t something that we can ever fully avoid, and modern life compounds it in unique and escalating ways that often are out of our control. Technology silos and radicalizes us. We tend to live further from loved ones and have fewer third spaces to gather. Economic precarity and wage disparity mean more time is spent at work, and work/life balance feels impossible. We can know all the things about loneliness and its antidotes—or even our own social needs—but we need systemic change if we hope to improve things at the population level.
GG: Is there anything you learned—about yourself, about the world at large—while exploring loneliness and writing this story?
The American Dream is one of inherent loneliness: buying a house in the suburbs, raising a nuclear family, driving everywhere in your own car. We’re obsessed with individualism, achievement, and self-optimization, always aiming to make our lives more “streamlined.” I looked to other countries and cultures for ways of thinking about stronger social structures—for example, multigenerational households in many Asian countries (my grandma lived with us on and off while growing up). I also gained a deeper appreciation for friendship and the role that close or even peripheral friends can play in our sense of belonging. I wanted to emphasize friendship as the through-line of the story.
While writing this piece, I’ve become more aware of the ways in which convenience often comes at the expense of connection. Perhaps it feels trite to say, but friction is necessary to our lives. I keep returning to this sentiment from an essay by Rayne Fisher-Quann: “Being alone is hard, to be sure, but it’s also deceptively easy—it requires nothing of us. People, on the other hand, challenge us. They infuse our life with stakes.”
Nicole Zhu is a writer and engineer based in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in Epiphany, Catapult, Electric Literature, The Margins, and elsewhere. She was the winner of the 2022 Pigeon Pages Flash Contest and is a 2023–2024 Center for Fiction/Susan Kamil Emerging Writer Fellow. She has received support from Tin House, the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.
Gibson Grimm is a staff reader for New England Review. He lives in New York City where he writes and performs primarily for the theatre, most recently producing a show at The PIT. In his free time, he eats donuts and teaches high school/college students how to write. He can be found at gibsongrimm.com and anywhere else he shows up on Google.
Photo of Nicole Zhu courtesy of Zach Gross