Doni Katz asked Raphael Chayim Rosen:

Enjoyed Sink, thanks! I found it interesting that you wrote it as a first-person narrative with a female voice, especially when I tend to think of the hedge fund world as bro-centric. Why did you choose to write that way, and was it more difficult and/or more fun?

Raphael Chayim Rosen Fun question, Doni. A few answers:

1. I had the idea of Celeste (Esther) about eight years ago while writing a previous novel about Sol Van Rensselaer-Kauffman, her brother. Sol is an academically-inclined type and I'd envisioned his older sister as a business-minded, hard-nosed lady. I wanted to continue writing about the Van Rensselaer-Kauffman family and Celeste was the character I most wanted to write about. In my head she worked in finance which made her the natural heroine for "Sink."

2. I enjoy the challenge of writing from a female perspective. It often forces my writing to be more deliberate, and I appreciate that discipline.

3. Finance in my experience is indeed a "bro-centric" world as you call it, but there are all types of people in finance and Celeste and Ana seemed like a powerful pair who could easily make it big. It was definitely more fun to write about them than to write about banker stereotypes which would have been at once more cliché and also less interesting and duller to write.

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