Keith Gessen:

There were two reasons I wrote the book.

One of them was to kind of describe Russia at a more intimate level than I had ever been able to do as a journalist, to describe what it smells like and sounds like. I thought that could be done in a novel more effectively.

And the other reason was a kind of personal reason, which is that I had spent this year with my grandmother taking care of her and hanging out with her. And that was a really — it was a really profound experience. It was a very emotional experience.

It was an experience where I learned not just a lot about my grandmother, but a lot about Russia, and not just the Soviet experience that she had had, but the post-Soviet experience that she had had, and her feeling of being kind of a leftover or irrelevant person who didn't fit in to the new world of — that Russia had become.

And that was a kind of personal experience that could really only be expressed, I thought, in a novel.