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If he hadnt been there, I dont know what would have happened next.
We nailed that window shut.
I slept on my daughters floor for three nights.
I obsess about it on humid days like these, when the weather reminds me of the threat.
She was a few months old.
I was naked and I was nursing her, and I thought I heard someone in the other room.
Phillips paused, terrified, unsure of how to protect herself from the amorphous threat.
What would I do if someone came into the apartment right now?
There was, luckily, no intruder, just this animal vulnerability.
I got this shiver through me and then I was like,I have to write about that.
The fruit of thatfear isThe Need, her poison dart of a sophomore novel.
From the novels very first moment, were shoved into the dark with Molly, a paleobotanist.
She crouches in her bedroom, holding both children, attempting to determine if she really heard footsteps.
Shes afraid a malicious force has entered her home, and simultaneously worried one hasnt.
What does it mean if we hear things that arent there?
She found herself, Phillips writes, face to face with herself.
Its another Molly, who calls herself Moll.
The Needis a thriller, and it isnt.
Its a novel Shirley Jackson might write if shed dropped acid with Rivka Galchen.
Molly is a doppelganger of sorts for Phillips herself.
Phillips doesnt shy away from connecting her own life to her characters.
Isnt all fiction auto-fiction in a sense?
she asks as we pick through her zealously organized tea drawer and sit down at her kitchen table.
When she speaks, Phillips projects an air of unflappability.
Because of her alopecia, she doesnt have eyelashes.
Shes always, it seems, fully open.
The second of four children, Phillipss childhood had unusual parameters.
You couldnt have that level of communication.
She could definitely smile … Thats a hard thing to not really know what someones experience is.
She began writing a poem a day.
Phillips was so dedicated to the task, she kept it up until she turned 21.
It was a way of processing everything.
Katherine was eventually moved to a facility close to their home.
The duality of siblings is what led her to write Molly as a mother of two instead of one.
Your sibling, she says, is kind of a doppelganger of you.
Theyre both your pal and your nemesis.
You are competing for the same attention.
Katherine is the only subject that brings Phillips to tears in the time we talk.
I was the lucky one, she says.
I could have been her.
If were talking about different possible lives, I mean, mines been with me always.
Phillips used to joke that motherhood was her good-luck charm.
- Her labor music Brian EnosMusic for Airports quite literally turned into her writing music.
Success wasnt instantaneous, however.
Both worked as mystery reviewers for bars and restaurants, but were ultimately fired for writing glowing reviews.
From there, they launched themselves into adulthood.
Thompson, who is long and lean with a thick, questioning brow, describes Phillips as uncommonly disciplined.
(There is power in limitation, she says.)
She turns her emotional turbulence into more forward motion, Thompson explains.
As a result of the books success, Phillips says, Thompson is able to rent a studio.
Its secured them, at least for now, financial stability.
Phillips mostly wrote in one-hour bursts (she sets a timer) in between parenting and teaching duties.
When Molly comes face-to-face with her doppelganger, panic storms her at every moment.
Moll, she learns, has her own tragic genesis story and explanation for emerging in Mollys life.
She wants, to Mollys horror, to share Viv and Ben.
Moll sees this as reclaiming whats hers.
For Molly, its practically an abduction, an eradication of the self.
Motherhood as horror isnt a new genre, butThe Needsends it to a new place.
For the most part, its been dominated by tales of devilish babes that send mothers screaming.
Russell describes Phillipss book as a totally new vernacular for the experience of motherhood.
She found some way to activate these primal anxieties, she says.
WithThe Need, rather than deliver a blackhearted child, Phillips plays with the terror of encountering your parent-self.
One mother offers the baby to the other, but the second encourages Solomon to split it in two.
Phillips has unexpected sympathy for the second mother.
Remember, she says, that woman is wild with grief.
We never think of that.
She seems like a villain, but in fact shes just lost her infant.
When I ask what kind of mother Phillips sees Molly as, she says, A human one.
A good mother, who is in a tough situation.
Its straining her along every vector, physical, emotional, intellectual.
I just adore this, she says.
She stares at the woman, and the woman stares at her.
