I made a decision early in this process never to interview anyone who had lost someone to suicide for the purpose of this book. I don’t think I’m entitled to that deeply personal pain to serve a novel. Out of respect and compassion, I researched that loss from a distance, reading articles, memoirs, even grief-counseling books. Otherwise, I relied only on my imagination and empathy. from her "You Belong With Me" music video, a T-shirt with names written all over it and pajama bottoms. The names included people like Lena Dunham, Ed Sheeran, and Gigi Hadid, but it was missing Karlie and Lorde, leaving fans to wonder if they'd been voted out of the squad. And earlier in the summer, Karlieposted I was struck first by the irony. That at a time when Harvard was an epicenter of pre-Revolutionary thinking and progress, with learned men debating the not-yet-nation’s ideals of freedom and independence from “slavery to the Crown,” meaning taxation, they were blind to the injustice for the enslaved people serving them in that very house, and, of course, beyond. And that Bilhah was a mother added a particular pathos. I was struck by the cruel irony that in 1765, that you could be born inside the house of the Harvard president and still have the least opportunity in the world, because of the color of your skin. Yana postulates that people are normally this horny, but being home is just channeling those urges into our phones and screens. Sex has always been part of the human condition, whether it’s pre-, mid-, or post-pandemic.