Amanda: I wish I could tell you the fairytale, that I wrote this novel and I immediately got an agent and I immediately got it published, but it was not like that at all. It started in 2009, believe it or not, the journey began. I had fellow writer Nick Paumgarten, who's a New Yorker writer who's a friend and went to St. Bernard's, over for supper with his wife. Nick and I were just talking about what it was like to be parents now and what parents were like back then. Then we started to discuss the incredible lack of parenting that was happening in the early eighties. For example, there are these famous four brothers who had this duplex on Fifth Avenue. Their father died and their mother went to the South of France for the entire summer and left four teenage boys alone in this gigantic apartment. Nothing good happened. All of a sudden while I was talking to Nick, the lightbulb went off and I thought, I've got to write this story. I have to tell this story. I began to interview the people who I thought would have the richest stories and the people that I immediately gravitated to automatically. I had all those interviews transcribed.