The first complete section was the cruise-ship chapter. What was the first section that was written? Were there early drafts, or even entire sections, that were tossed out?
Something about the collision of East Coast and Midwest there, of the new and the old, gave me a key for the whole. The oldest scene in the book is the one in which he meets his parents at LaGuardia. But the real seed was Chip, with his rebellion and shame, his troubles with debt.
(I was still figuring out her basic story late last summer.) Around the same time, in 1992, as part of the same abandoned project, I wrote a paragraph about a father who sets out to murder squirrels. JONATHAN FRANZEN: I had a notion of Denise, of a character named Denise, who had dark, curly hair and fraught relations with her father, way back around 1992, but she was the last character to come properly into focus.
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