Grant Ginder

through these friends and through their experiences, reckons with that feeling of knowing that you're getting older, but not quite believing that it's happening to you.

I've always been super interested in novels that explore friendships, particularly long-lasting friendships.

I think that when we meet people, and you'll see this in the characters in the book, they meet each other in college, which is this incredibly formative time for friendships.

I think that college is almost like a greenhouse for friendships, right?

Like these four years where you have so many shared experiences, and you think that those friendships are going to last forever.

But as the novel shows...

you start making decisions that are not necessarily in the interest of the friendship, right?

You get married to someone else.

You start having a child that draws your attention away from the friendship and which breeds, I think, if not resentment, then specific misunderstandings.

And those misunderstandings lead to a lot of dramatic moments in the book and these friends kind of talking past each other and not understanding where each other are in the spectrum of life.

That's a really good question.

So right, so the book follows these five parties.

I've always thought that parties play a kind of mythic role in the narrative of friend groups, right?

You're always kind of thinking about like what happened at that wedding and what happened at that reunion.

And so I wanted to play around with that.

I myself graduated college in 2005.

These characters graduated in 2006.

So that felt like a pretty good place to start for me.

Beyond that, the book tracks these pivotal moments in people's lives, right?

So that the first party is like a New Year's Eve party and they're in their 20s and they think they're going to be 20 forever.