From there on, certain objects (a baby doll with its arms pulled off) or minor characters (the tutor from Andover) appear that would, I suppose, clue you in if you had “Eloise” memorized and were reading with great care or suspicion. I believe the first (very subtle) clue is the coatrack that Margaret decides to leave in the baby’s room. Other than the mention of the Plaza, there’s really nothing in the story for quite a while that would lead you to Eloise. How challenging was it to control the pacing of that realization? It takes some time for the inspiration of the story to dawn on the reader. The parodic effect lies in the contrast between the tone of the original and the tone of the alternate version.

But, when the original is comic, a parody tends to take a more serious, literal tone. When the original art is serious, it makes sense for a parody to be comic. As I dug into a more plausible version of the story, with its constantly absent mother, the never-mentioned father, and the child left to be raised by the nanny, the narrative went to some alarming places. The original Eloise story is a fantasy, and an enchanting one, but one that belies the actual constraints and subjugations of women’s lives in the nineteen-fifties. In almost all of my work, realism (or at least psychological realism) leads me toward dark places and themes.

What was it about the “Eloise” books that made you connect them with this particular, somewhat sinister scenario? And then I thought, Wait, I know exactly who that is. He might put them not on an island but in a penthouse apartment. This turned out to be not at all where Vara was going with her story, but I started thinking about a man who might convince his mistress that she and their child needed to stay hidden for their own protection, when really he was only protecting himself. This is probably not the origin story you’d expect: I was kayaking last summer with my AirPods in, listening to Vauhini Vara’s wonderful début novel, “ The Immortal King Rao.” She has a plotline about a wealthy father raising his daughter in isolation on an island, ostensibly to protect her-and my initial suspicion was that he secretly had another family. What made you want to imagine Eloise’s possible origins and her mother’s life? It’s very hard to talk about the story without giving spoilers, so anyone who hasn’t read it yet should stop here! The story is, we gradually realize, a kind of parodic prequel to the children’s-book series “ Eloise,” written by Kay Thompson (and illustrated by Hilary Knight). Your story “ The Plaza” revolves around a young woman from a small town in upstate New York, seduced by a wealthy man from New York City who puts her up at the eponymous hotel.

The borrower by rebecca makkai