 Franzen said in an interview that "the most important experience of my life ... is the experience of growing up in the Midwest with the particular parents I had.I feel as if they couldn’t fully speak for themselves, and I feel as if their experience—by which I mean their values, their experience of being alive, of being born at the beginning of the century and dying towards the end of it, that whole American experience they had—[is] part of me.One of my enterprises in the book is to memorialize that experience, to give it real life and form."