"Q: Your story in this week’s issue, “Nero,” is about a seven-year-old girl who visits her grandparents and gets to know their obsessive guard dog. You mentioned to me that the piece started out as a memoir. How did it mutate into fiction?

A: I wrote the first few paragraphs of the story many years ago, imagining that I might one day turn it into a memoir. I had recently visited the Erdrich-family butcher shop, which still exists, in Little Falls, Minnesota, though it is long out of business. Standing in the back yard of the butcher shop’s living quarters, I thought of Nero. When I was a child, I had a record of a staging of “King Lear,” so I was attuned to the notion of tragic loss. Because the life of a dog is short and speechless, I witnessed Nero’s fierce vigor and his decline into madness. But even if I began with an attempt to remain faithful to the truth, I couldn’t help veering off. I added a skinny uncle (who resembles no uncle of mine), and then the girlfriend and her vicious spaniel. There was no going back.

Q: Does your fiction often spring from a fragment of memory, like this one?

A: There are often shards of memory buried in my fiction, but I write more from imagined incidents. Most of my books begin with incidents that just come to mind. Some are based on odd bits of fact: doves descend in vast numbers to devour the grain in the fields; a female outlaw rustles a pig; during a bank robbery, a woman is held hostage and the sheriff shoots her in the hip; the Red River expands in a mighty flood. And so on."

Get the Story:
This Week in Fiction: Louise Erdrich (The New Yorker 4/30)