“As I got older, I made a study of it,” Golden says. “A 70-year-old would probably chuckle that I would call myself wise, but I mean in contrast to who I was at 25—I feel so much wiser.”

This was a guiding force in writing the novel.

People, Golden says, are fundamentally all the same—driven by the same needs and desires.

“If you can understand how those needs and desires translate themselves, it makes for almost like solving equations,” Golden says. “I think there are fundamental psychological truths, and so you always solve the equation of a personality with those things in mind.”

He says he keeps a sharp eye out for anything that departs from the believable, both in the psychological development of his characters and in the detail which fleshes out a historical novel.

“A lot of writing this novel felt to me in some ways like taking the path between the trees,” Golden says. “It was a constant struggle to find a believable path.”

This path took him to the boundaries of occupational dedication. Friends say that his intellectual curiosity is infinite, and Golden himself admits that he will stop at nothing to make sure his story is true to reality, calling this thoroughness an “obsession with the truth.”

“For him, writing is approached in a very different way—like conquering all of literature. He takes no shortcuts, whatever it takes,” friend and fellow novelist Mameve Medwed says. “By the time he sits down to write he knows everything there is to know—only Arthur would learn Dutch for his new novel.”

In preparation for writing Memoirs of a Geisha, Golden took nearly 200 pages of research notes. His new novel, he says, required nearly twice as many.

In an effort to adhere strictly to the reality of a geisha’s life, he even went so far as to purchase and experiment with the makeup a geisha would have worn, Medwed says.

She goes on to say that she wouldn’t be surprised if Golden went around barking in an effort to get into the head of the dog named Rosine who is featured in his new novel.

“He could have told his story from the perspective of a woman or of a baboon in a zoo,” says Golden’s best friend Anders .

Golden attributes his respect for accuracy to his newspaper roots.

“A writer, even a writer of fiction, and maybe even especially a writer of fiction, has an obligation to the truth,” he says.

Despite this nod to his family’s tradition, Golden’s success led to a major shake-up of the assumptions of his powerful family, Anders says.