Over at Guernica, Kyle Lucia Wu talks with Stephanie Danler about her new novel, Sweetbitter, and how Danler’s personal experiences as a young woman living in New York City and working in a restaurant overlap with those of her protagonist:

There is this moment when you cross the bridge or you land at JFK where you’re starting over from zero. You have to prove yourself and start at the bottom. It is a place where the American dream still works like that, to some extent. That was one part of it: I wanted her to leave her old life behind and this is the only place that you can go in all of the United States where you can freshly reinvent yourself, where you can be anonymous and then become someone.