HD: Sometimes, the best approach to current issues is a diagonal, oblique one. Why did you start the story right before the stock-market crash of 1929? What drew you to the '20s and the Great Depression?

The most poignant thing was to go through the papers of some of the wives of real-life tycoons and discover how, for the most part, they had remained unopened and neglected since they were first put away-decades or even a century ago. I worked mostly with primary sources-newspapers and magazines from the time, government documents, private papers. I had no previous experience in finance, but I’m well trained in archival research. What was the research process like for this novel? Have you always had an interest in financial markets? And this structure also turns the reader into a very active presence in the text: each “book” is a piece of a larger puzzle. Why do we demand that certain texts be true? Why do we immediately excuse others from this same demand? Why do we immediately believe certain voices? Why are we so quick to dismiss others? I felt the best way to present these questions was by having the reader actually experience them. HD: The book invites the reader to consider the unspoken agreements all of us enter into each time we interact with a text. Why did you organize the novel into four “books” with a different perspective for each? It was by focusing on these silenced women that the project really took shape. As soon as I started looking into this, it became clear that women had been completely omitted from these mythical accounts of wealth. But I wanted to explore how that privilege came to be and what sort of narratives it relied on to perpetuate itself. There are many novels centered on class, of course-consider our rich tradition of novels of manners. Hernan Diaz: Even if money plays such an important part in the American imagination, I was surprised to see so few novels dealing directly with it. Play icon The triangle icon that indicates to play

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