There was a point, Elaine Castillo says, when she called her new novel the final work in her “trilogy” of “hard-ass bi women.” That unofficial trilogy started with Hero de Vera in America Is Not the Heart, Castillo’s 2018 debut novel. In How To Read Now,” a collection of essays, the author suggests that she herself was the hard-ass woman in question. Now, in Moderation (Viking, August 5), it’s narrator Girlie Delmundo, a Filipina content moderator for a social media company whose new position moderating real-time virtual reality content exposes her not only to new worlds of work and technology but also—perhaps most horrifyingly—to the prospect of romance. (On the plus side: The guy—her boss!—has a lovable German shepherd, Mona.) In a starred review (Castillo’s third from Kirkus), our critic says, “Castillo raises the bar for writing about tech and virtual reality, family stories, and workplace romances.…A brilliant novel with much to say about work, family, excess, identity, and love.” Castillo, 40, spoke to Kirkus over Zoom from her home in the Bay Area. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Tech books are everywhere now, but writing about content moderation still seems pretty niche. Are there personal experiences that made you want to write about this particular aspect of tech?

I didn’t set out to write a tech novel, even though I grew up in Silicon Valley. I always had a sense of my own communities and my childhood experiences as someone who grew up in the heart of Silicon Valley but also very much on the fringes of it, in terms of class. The people in my family were the security guards and nurses and cleaners circling around the periphery of that larger constellation.

My father was a security guard for a computer chip company in the ’80s and ’90s. Girlie, when she first starts working at Reeden, probably worked at a corporate park very similar to ones where my father worked. For me, the novel was less about tech and more about labor. I [see] links between security guard work and nursing work and content moderation—I often say that Girlie and content moderators generally are the frontline workers of the internet.

Did writing this novel make you feel differently about social media or how people conduct themselves online?

I’m not the most online person anyway. I only got an Instagram because my first novel was coming out, and I was like, Well, I guess this is the new era, and I have to be on social media. I gave it a good go, but gradually my presence there just started diminishing more and more. I don’t really love being online, but I always differentiate that from being on the internet. I use the internet. I’m looking at German shepherd dog videos like everybody else. I had that early, what you might even think of now as that softened glow of the ’90s utopian vision of the internet as this information highway. Information is free. People can connect with each other. I still have fond memories of those times, even though they were also not always safe for a 13-year-old girl, as you can imagine.

Writing about the kind of harrowing work a content moderator has to do to make a social media site, or the internet period, safe to use for—let’s use the word civilians—certainly it made me less willing to go on those sites. I found it quite difficult.

Prior to this novel, you published a book of essays. After you completed that, did you know you were going to return to fiction?

Yes, I knew, mainly because writing How To Read Now was a diversion from fiction in the first place. I was supposed to write this other novel, which I’d been postponing—and still postponed, because I didn’t end up writing that novel, which I sold along with How To Read Now. And so How To Read Now is, in some ways, a very long an exercise in procrastination [from] writing novels. After that book, I was very happy to return to fiction, even though it took me a while to get back into the groove. Fiction is my first love. I don’t think I ever want to write nonfiction again, to be honest.

If you could write a nonfiction book about anything you wanted, to get back in that genre, what would it be?

Technically, the last nonfiction work that I wrote was not How To Read Now. When I was procrastinating writing Moderation—this is how hard I can procrastinate—I wrote a 100-page essay on German shepherd dog rescue and dog training and the history of German shepherds. I wrote that for Everand, because Roxane Gay was doing a series [of] longform nonfiction, and that was wonderful. I was able to write about my first dog, who the dog in Moderation is based a little bit on, and my dog now, and about the history of German shepherds and dog rescue and get into Yellowstone wolves and Imperial Germany. I really loved Rick McIntyre’s Yellowstone series on the Yellowstone wolves. I thought, Wow, if I could just work at Yellowstone and observe wolves and bears and write these natural behavioral histories, that would be wonderful.

Milpitas, California, is your hometown, and it’s also the hometown of the protagonists of both your novels. Do you feel that there are any particular difficulties of writing about the place where you’re from?

I don’t know that it’s difficult, exactly. I think because I think of my three books as a sort of loose trilogy that there is something about that region, and in writing about it from the  ’90s in America Is Not the Heart and then writing about it in the 2000s era, to see the evolution of not just that city, but the Bay Area writ large, particularly under the shadow of the developments in Silicon Valley. I think there was something to that project where I wanted to trace the life of that community.

I could only write America Is Not the Heart when I was living in London. I think this happened to James Joyce, too, right? He could only write about Dublin when he was outside of it. I think for a lot of writers who return to a particular region or landscape in their fiction, it’s because that region or landscape holds the key to their worldview and how their politics evolved, how their aesthetics evolved, and how they do worldbuilding and character-building. I think back then I would only have been able to write about Milpitas, or I was only able to write about Milpitas, living away from it. Even so, Moderation takes place in Las Vegas, where a lot of my family really did move after the 2008 financial crisis, fleeing the stock-market crash and the housing-market crash.

This is not a romance novel, but it does have romance. Was it fun to put your own spin on the trope of a worker falling in love with her boss?

Yes, it was fun, because if you know me as a person, I hate stuff like that. I’m the first person to be like, That’s an HR violation. There are very strong boundaries. No! I don’t like forbidden romance, any of that. I think what’s most interesting to me is that, really, I’m writing about two people who are very repressed and who have completely subsumed their entire souls to the kind of bootstraps projects that each of them has carved out for themselves. To understand how people stymie their own true desires and longing for connections is, I think, what was most interesting to me.

Nina Palattella is the senior editorial assistant.