This post-college world felt different from everything that had come before it.

We do seem, as a culture, to fetishize the "sweep." But I know there's room for "big" short, fierce novels, and "big" solid ones.

"Unputdownable" is, I suppose, something we all dream of, maybe without knowing it. I realized, some time ago, that a novel can hold a lot, and it made sense that this one was not of the sleek and economical variety, but instead the "full" type. Novel as piñata. And the reader does the whacking. I had a central idea, which is to look at what happens to talent over time.

In The Interestings I wanted to write about what happens to talent over time. In some people talent blooms, in others it falls away.

But clearly life took people and shook them around until finally they were unrecognizable even to those who had once known them well. Still, there was power in once having known someone.

But it had no doubt sprung from true emotion, for all that parents ever wanted, really, was for you to love their child the way they did.

It seemed that everywhere you went, people quickly adapted to the way they had to live, and called it Life.