Grant Ginder

And so the parties themselves evolved and changed and what kind of party it was as the book evolved and changed, right?

Which in a kind of a meta sense is, I think, also what the book is about, these characters evolving and changing over the course of time.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

In my head, I have like a whole, you know, timeline for each of these characters.

But the book itself just drops in on them at these five different points in time.

that's a really good question i love writing weddings and so the wedding chapter or the reddit wedding section which is the second section of the novel and it takes place outside cancun uh was very fun because i think that we've all been to really over the top destination weddings uh which is just sort of a hotbed of like drama and activity and so that was very fun to write as well

And, you know, the first section when the characters are in their 20s, like, made me so nostalgic for my own kind of, you know, first decade in New York.

So those two were very fun.

At the beginning, it definitely is.

But again, the book is about friendship and the tensions that arise between friends.

And so much of that comes from people either talking past each other or people having different perspectives of a particular event.

And so to write a novel about friendship, I think you need these multiple perspectives, right?

And so on the one hand, the perspectives were absolutely necessary to me.

But you're right.

At the beginning, it was really difficult to kind of get my head around all of these different perspectives.

But by the end, it was really rewarding and useful because you could say to yourself, well, what would Richie think about this?

What would Richie be doing in this various situation?

And you were able to pull these characters in.

I would say that also all of them, when you're writing a book like this with all these perspectives, everyone is a little bit of you.