So, in suburbia, which is where I grew up （in a town on Long Island called Garden City, which is different from the one in this book）， I had a lot of advantages. The schools were great, and I got to keep the same friends from kindergarten through college. It’s a privilege to come from someplace, and I’m glad that I do.
But I was always surprised, growing up, by how much people gossiped. I mean, I couldn’t remember most peoples’ last names, and somehow everybody else knew what everybody’s dads did for a living. This was the ’80s, so nobody mentioned if the moms had jobs because they mostly didn’t, and if they did, you kind of felt bad for the kid, like maybe they had to sit by themselves and heat up Lean Cuisines and that was a tragedy.
The kids gossiped because they’d learned it from their parents, and their parents gossiped to signify status. It was a constant top-dogging, and the more alike we all tended to be, the pettier the criteria for who was on top. There’s a term, narcissism of nearness, that expresses it: the more alike we are, the more we notice and rank our very tiny differences. This tendency has a terrible side effect: conformity.
I’m reminded of the Star Trek episode “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield,” where one people are black on the left side, white on the right. The other people are white on the left side, black on the right. They’re at war and wind up murdering each other to the last man. It’s very important to them, this difference. They’ve decided that it defines them.
It’s a strong argument for diversity—racial, economic, and structural. I think people are just more relaxed about their own identities in diverse places.
Did the experience of writing adult characters versus children and teenagers differ? Was one more challenging （or more fun） than the other?
The kids came very easily to me. Their hang-ups were shadows of their parents’ hang-ups and not yet intrinsic to their personalities. They were clean slates. The hardest part was getting that friendship between Shelly and Julia down in a way that I felt expressed the depths of their feelings.
The adults were tough—I’d determined the outcome I wanted for this very complicated puzzle, and then I had to go back and carve pieces that fit.
Through the newspaper clippings and book excerpts, we learn the fates of many of the characters. Did you always know what would happen to them in the future, or did any of the outcomes you came up with surprise you?
I had thought Julia and Dave would get together in the end but changed my mind—Charlie felt like a better fit. The rest, I knew.
What do you think the bond between Rhea and Gertie is? What initially drew them together, and in what ways do you think they’re similar （if any）？
They’re meant to be best friends. It’s a tragedy that the holes in their personalities align the way they do and muck up the works. Early on, Rhea chooses to confess her abuse of Shelly in a confrontational way, and Gertie can’t handle confrontation, and it’s all downhill from there.
They have tons in common. They both feel like imposters, and they’re both trying to fit in, unaware that the act is unnecessary—other peoples’ opinions aren’t as important as they imagine. They both love their families and want better lives for their children but are utterly unequipped.
Where Gertie married a man who was helpful to her and invested in her emotional condition, Rhea married a man who was too limited to ever notice her, or the things she was hiding. This was an intentional choice—Fritz was nonthreatening—but also very bad for her psychological well-being. She needed to be loved and seen, and over many years, that neglect was injurious.
You explore many types of parent-child relationships: loving, abusive, indifferent, supportive . . . the list goes on and on! What fascinates you about the parent-child bond, and which parent-and-child pair were you most eager to explore in the novel?
Julia’s relationship with her parents was pretty fascinating to me. They take her for granted and don’t always have her back, but I think that’s pretty normal—no upbringing is perfect. On the plus side, they respect her and trust her judgment. They both admit their high esteem for her toward the end of the book, and that felt very important—it was something she needed to hear.
Larry goes through a different journey. Gertie blames herself for his weirdness, and Arlo does, too. They have to come around the corner on their feelings about him, and acknowledge that he’s just Larry, and by the way, Larry’s awesome.
The one character I want to address before closing is Shelly. The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe is a comedy of errors that serves to conceal a real tragedy. At the end of the book, we never find out if the boy hit by the car at the opening lives or dies. It’s all spectacle and narcissism, and the cost is the soul of a city. Shelly’s pain felt very real to me, and I very much wanted the opposite to happen at the end of Good Neighbors—I wanted the real tragedy of her death to be properly acknowledged. I wanted to bring up her body and say, This happened.