Your book is set in suburban Connecticut in the 1990s, and you grew up in the American suburbs yourself. How autobiographical is the novel?
The novel is not really about my own childhood as much as it is a reaction to my being a parent of four children in contemporary America. It can be a challenge. The pressure on kids to "succeed" - to be fashionable, get into top universities and land good jobs - has never been greater than it is today, and trying to help my own children negotiate this process served as a general inspiration for a lot of what goes on in the book. (Luckily, they are much saner and more well-adjusted than my characters!)
Author interviews
