Canwen Xu

Most people don't have access to a ton of disposable income, but then you're in this big city where you also just get access to all these people who are so much older and so much more established and seeing their world from an aspirational lens.

So that's why I opened the book with the protagonist at an art gallery.

since it's kind of juxtaposing her dorm room where she lives, where there's, you know, rats and it's small and dingy with this really rarefied world that she hopes to enter.

So that was kind of the genesis of the story.

Yeah, for sure.

Well, you know, I was attending this New Yorker panel with Sandra Oh, and Min Jin Lee.

And one thing that they said, that really stood out to me, and I think I had maybe just started writing the novel, or I

was thinking about writing it.

One thing they said was to tell the truth.

And I didn't really understand what that meant because I was like, well, if I tell the truth, I took it in a very literal sense.

If I tell the truth, then aren't I just writing a memoir or something like that?

But when I thought about it a bit more, what I realized was that they meant telling kind of like an emotional truth.

So my emotional truth was that, you know, when I was in college, so I had grown up in the Midwest and I had gone to high school in Idaho.

And then I had gone into this world where

It's like so many of the people around me, they had gone to boarding school or they had lived, you know, internationally.

And I always felt kind of I always felt a little bit less than or like I didn't belong.

And I wanted more than anything to just feel like I belonged in this world and not feel so much like an outsider.

And I think that my path to trying to kind of resolve that conflict.

And I think a lot of people at these types of universities feel the same way was I decided to to go into Wall Street.

So I figured, you know, if I worked a Wall Street job, if I made a ton of money, then I would finally feel like I belonged.