An Imposter: A Guest Post by Grant Ginder

From the author of The People We Hate at the Wedding comes a novel filled with love, loss and laughter that we often experience on this roller coaster we call friendship. Read on for an exclusive essay from author Grant Ginder on writing So Old, So Young.

The great thing about going through a midlife crisis as a writer is that, once you wrap your head around the fact that you’re no longer 22, the experience makes for fantastic copy. A few months before I turned forty, I started having this recurrent experience where I’d wake up in the middle of the night not knowing where I was. And I don’t mean this in some figurative way—I actually couldn’t figure out how I arrived at that exact moment. The best way I can explain it is that it felt like I had woken up in someone else’s body, like I was an imposter in my own life. It seemed like yesterday that I had been in college, and an hour since I’d met my husband, and yet suddenly here I was, married and with a mortgage. Where had the time gone? Who was this adult I’d suddenly become?

These were the questions that led me to write SO OLD, SO YOUNG. The book charts the loves found and lost between a group of six college friends over twenty years. Structurally, we only see them at five parties over the course of those two decades, catching up with them in quick bursts as they navigate their way through adulthood. We jump from the apartment parties of our twenties, to the destination weddings of our thirties, to fortieth birthday parties, to suburban backyard BBQ’s featuring too many toddlers and not enough wine.

This structure interested me for two reasons. The first is that parties and gatherings tend to play a mythic role in the story of friend groups. At least when I get together with my college friends, we’re all talking about what happened at so-and-so’s wedding, or who-said-what at our last reunion. So, I wanted to play on that theme. I also wanted to try to account for how we register and comprehend the passing of time, which is often in these totally bewildering bursts. Days go by without us realizing it, but then suddenly five years go by and we’re, like, “what the hell just happened?” I sought to capture that feeling in how the book is paced.

In terms of the characters in the friend group ensemble, it was Mia’s voice who came to me first. I think that’s because she’s the character with whom I have the most in common. Her imposter syndrome, her nostalgia, her desire to stop time in its tracks: I was feeling all of that during those nights leading up to my 40^th birthday. From there, the rest of the cast sort of sprang from Mia’s head—that’s the best way I can put it. Who was she going to fall in love with? Who was she going to live with? Who was she going to help, save, need, and resent? As I answered those questions, the characters started to materialize on the page. And for the three years it took me to write the book, they were my best—and worst—friends.