A founding editor of The Believer magazine, San Francisco-based writer Vendela Vida is also known for writing entrancing novels, such as The Lovers and Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name. Her latest, The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty, centers on a young divorcee who travels alone to Morocco, where immediately upon arrival her bag is stolen—along with all her identification. What begins as a frantic search for a passport and credit cards quickly morphs into a more existential exploration of identity, as our protagonist discovers she can slip personas on and off as quickly as tossing a backpack over her shoulder. Part travelogue, part thriller and very funny too, the book transports the reader to the hectic streets of Casablanca and simultaneously inspires big questions about what it means to be yourself. Vida reads from the new novel at Elliott Bay Books on Thursday, June 18, at 7 p.m. Here, she answers a few of my questions about the origins of the story.

BD: Your central character is captivating because she’s a shape-shifter on many levels. But instead of establishing one new identity, she swims through several. What led you to write about this type of person?

VV: Before I knew where the book would be set, I was thinking a lot about Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mister Ripley, and about one of my favorite films, Antonioni’s The Passenger—both are obviously about shape-shifters. There’s something appealing to me about someone who’s always having to lie to get out of a situation, and not just that: they have to tell the right lie.

BD: Tell me about your choice to use the second-person voice throughout. Did it feel risky to do so?

VV: When I first thought of this book it was in the second person, and I never had any second thoughts. (I just realized the pun there.) Second person made sense to me since the book was about the malleability of identity. The second person is so interesting to me, and I’m still not done exploring its nuances—the device can seem to be someone talking to themselves, or accusing themselves or others. It can be used as a technique to make the reader feel immediately comfortable, or uncomfortable, in the protagonist’s shoes. It was only when I’d finished a draft of the book and I realized how many times the protagonist switched identities that I understood there was the advantage that the reader didn’t have to keep track of all her incarnations: she was simply “you.”

BD: The Lovers and Northern Lights were also told from a solo female traveler’s perspective. Do you travel alone a lot? And have unsettling experiences while doing so? If not, why do you suppose you are drawn to such themes?

VV: I usually travel with my husband and/or whole family, so in these novels, I’m writing from some degree of experience, in that I’ve been to Morocco, for example, but under very different (and less intrigue-filled) circumstances. Like a lot of authors, my real life is much less dangerous and fascinating than the lives of the characters in these books. So if I take a trip to, say, Lapland, sometime later an idea might gestate that involves some very different character—in that case, a young woman who doesn’t know who her real father is. I strive to write the kinds of novels I like, and I love books set abroad in which something unexpected happens, novels in which something happens that’s so extreme that, afterwards, there’s little chance a character will ever be the same.

BD: I love the image of the diver’s clothes lying empty, literally and as a metaphor. Did you know about the Rumi poem with a similar title before you embarked on your story? Or did you discover it in the course of writing?

VV: I knew all along my protagonist was going to be an athlete. I wanted her to be more connected to her body than to her face, especially because I wanted to experiment with the idea of “masks” as far as her face was concerned. So I had her as a diver, and going to college on a diving scholarship. (I think because I help students at 826 Valencia with their college admissions essays, and teach a class on writing the college admissions essay, I’m inordinately concerned with how people are going to pay for college.) Anyway, I knew my character was a diver and was talking to some writer friends about potential titles for the book, and one of them said, “Isn’t there that poem by Rumi about a diver?” Just after our conversation I went to one my favorite bookstores in San Francisco, Dog-Eared Books, and found and purchased a collection of Rumi poems. I found the poem “The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty” and got chills. The poem was in so many ways exactly what my book was about and I knew I had my title.

BD: What is your next book about?

VV: The next one is set in Sweden and it’s a nonfiction book that’s based on a “Lives” column I wrote for The New York Times Magazine a few years ago. It’s about how my mom grew up on a farm with four siblings, and after their mother died at a very young age, the Swedish government wanted to separate the kids and place them in different homes. They didn’t believe their father, a single widower, and a farmer no less, could raise five kids on his own. But he persisted and the family stayed together. That makes it sound very serious. It’s also about the adventures they had on the farm and how whenever their father became involved with a woman the kids would find a way to drive her away. Sort of like in The Sound of Music but without Julie Andrews, and without as much singing. Actually there was a lot of singing in the Swedish farm house, but not necessarily in tune.