By 2008, the lights in the Bear Stearns building began to go dark, floor by floor. Their rock-bottom sale to JPMorgan Chase shook the stock market, wiping out jobs and retirement savings overnight. The reverberations were felt throughout the economy, and the other big banks trembled.

I wouldn’t be there to see how many more lights went out as the crisis spread. The economy ground to a halt, and I was laid off by my firm. I was far from the only person to have my life upended by the recession—all over the country people lost their jobs, savings, and homes.

As one character in The House Party notes, all markets have winners and losers. The financial crisis affected all areas of the American economy, but the middle class may have been hit hardest of all. Americans have always been preoccupied with the idea of the middle class, and the values and aspirations it embodies. In The House Party, I wanted to explore how Americans perceive their class standing, and how those perceptions play out within their friendships, families, and communities. I chose to set the book in a small town on the outskirts of Philadelphia because it presented a microcosm of America: multigenerational farmers and first-generation immigrants living side by side with real estate developers and investment bankers.

In a way, the book is an ode to the charming towns that dot both sides of the Delaware River in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. These towns, with their historic mills and canals, art galleries and ice cream parlors, seem like an unlikely setting for class warfare. On the surface, they offer spacious homes and good public schools. But the people in these bucolic towns are subject to the same forces that shape the country as a whole, and they aren’t immune to the struggle, resentment, and tension that such a society entails.

By focusing my story in part on high school students who make a serious but not atypical mistake, I hoped to show how differently one event could shape the lives of people who see themselves as peers, but who in fact have very different resources available to them due to their families’ wealth and connections, or lack thereof. High school students—teenagers just on the cusp of adulthood—are at a point in their lives when their futures can diverge widely based on their social class. In a place like the fictional town of New Falls, Pennsylvania, kids from many backgrounds attend the same public schools and play on the same sports teams. But what happens after graduation, or when they face challenges or adversity, can be a very different story. I wanted to ask the question: When a town that prides itself on equality and community is put to the test, how willing are the individual members to put the community’s best interest above the safety and future of their own families?