Patrick Brown asked Rumaan Alam:

I found the structure of the book very interesting, the way that it focused on a relatively short time-frame and then jumped forward again and again toward the end. Is that something you had in mind from the beginning or did that emerge as you wrote?

Rumaan Alam I began working with only an idea - the notion of a friendship at a crossroads - and quickly realized that I needed a map, an outline. The challenge was to dramatize this scenario with some economy; I had no desire to write a book that covered 26 years (the period, in total, that my book covers) from start to finish, and I can't imagine who would want to read such a book, which would have to be 40,000 pages. Because my primary interest was the relationship between these two women, its everyday quality, I wanted to stick to mundane moments. Thus the big milestones in their lives in this period - getting married, having children - are secondary; the book barely covers them, but skips around in time so that I get to include them. I ended up with a novel that covers a fairly brief period (a few months), then leaps ahead in time not once but twice. But that's one of the great things about the novel as a form; there's no particular rule that you can't spend ten pages on half an hour of action, and cover five years in one paragraph.

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