Susan Kinnevy asked Tadzio Koelb:

I was born in 1946 in Trenton and stayed there until 1969, so your novel resonated with me in a personal way. How did you come to choose Trenton as your setting?

Tadzio Koelb Thanks for asking.

I was drawn to Trenton for a few different reasons. The first was that women had worked in Trenton’s factories during WWII, which was essential to the plot. Then, research taught me that the city is kind of a portrait in miniature of America in the 20th century—success and optimism followed by hubris and disaster, and beneath it all runs a vein poverty and disadvantage. It gave me an opportunity to look at a lot of our assumptions about our history, and to ask if the things that fed American success aren’t also precisely what we find at the root of its problems.

And of course I thought about the slogan on the Lower Trenton Bridge, a thing that had long been a kind of obsession for me, and which fits perfectly with a question I wanted the novel to ask: to what extent are we the products of our own decisions, and to what extent are we “manufactured” by the mechanisms of history and culture?

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