text:  Well, so this is great because you interviewed people who are actually in this life, but you were also in this life as a busboy. How did you come, though, Jay, to write so exquisitely about women? The women are center stage. There's men who are, you know, stage left and right. But women are center stage here. And it's not as much that they have secrets, but they have full lives, you know, back in the 1930s that maybe their daughters, granddaughters don't even know about. Where did those stories come from?