India, Nov. 11 -- The Rest of Our Lives opens with the narrator, Tom, revealing, "When our son was twelve years old, my wife had an affair..." You've said the opening line came to you before you started working on this book. How did it become this novel?

Usually when I'm working on something, I get ideas for other books and I jot down a few notes, and then these often sit with me for a while so that they can accumulate ideas around them. And eventually, when I have nothing else to do, I'll think about what I want to do next, and then I pick one of them. So that's kind of what happened here. I had the these opening few pages.

There was something there that I wanted to write about... My daughter was leaving home. It seemed like an interes...