As I started to structure and think about that bigger world, I drew on mythology and legends and fairytales, which I have always loved. I like thinking about the stories we tell over and over, the things we pass down, the stories we inherit from the culture around us. I’ve always loved retellings of myths. I like to see what gets left behind or shifted in a modern retelling, and what new things can be revealed about a story we all already know. I engaged with a lot of myths and legends to construct the world of this book. There is the myth of New York, which I was really familiar with because I grew up on the West Coast but spent as much time as I could reading fiction set in New York City. I fell in love with the city first because of the myths about it. I moved there because of them. I believe in their power.

This is also an immigrant story, a love story, a parenting story. And then the Mafia, I think, operates in our collective consciousness the way a myth does. There are things everyone knows about the Mafia—but they don’t know how they know. There is something about that combination of violence and honor and love and integrity that is compelling, that resonates really broadly. Once I began drawing on the rich well of mythology and the canon of work about New York and about the Mafia, I couldn’t stop.

How does the finished novel compare to the novel you originally intended to write?

This is my first novel, so if I am being entirely candid, I didn’t intend to write it at all. I spent the first two years wondering if it even was a novel, if it still existed when I closed my computer. I can still feel the wilderness of not knowing, and it still amazes me that I wrote my way through it.

But the whole time I was writing, I knew I wanted action and emotions to coexist on the page. I think fiction is often either driven by the characters or by the plot. But I wanted a book so exciting that readers of more emotionally driven fiction feel like it is a guilty pleasure; I wanted a book with such carefully articulated characters that readers of classic action and adventure fiction surprised themselves by loving these people. I wanted to write something that refused to sacrifice either suspense or emotional depth.

Editing this book was a long and intense process. The most salient thing I learned was how to not just express both action and emotion but connect them. The emotions in the final draft are what drive the action. The action feels like a culmination of the emotional arcs. These two story elements do not just coexist; they are symbiotic. Learning how to use plot and character as interconnected building blocks has changed me as a writer.