Thinking of the people who populated my life, who acted, spoke, and viewed the world so differently—Mesut, Juho, Lakshmi, Riley, and all the others—I recognized how important it was for me that I could understand them all, at least a little bit, and better than they could understand each other. Was that what a novel was: a plane where you could finally juxtapose all the different people, mediating between them and weighing their views?
