Her fiction often reworks non-fictional source material, including interviews and found texts.
[17][18] Scanlan selected fragments from the 400 pages of the diary and rearranged them to form a narrative arc, ordered in five seasonal sections.
[3][15] In an essay published in The Paris Review in 2019, Scanlan described how she later tracked down the diarist on Find A Grave and found out that she had died at the age of 95, four years after the diary ends.
It is based on interviews Scanlan conducted with Iowa-born horse trainer Sonia, a family friend.
[3] The interview material is extensively reworked to form a linear narrative of the trainer's life, from birth to retirement, rendered in short chapters arranged in numbered sections.