grammaticality - What rules govern the ordering of phrases in a sentence?

When writing a sentence, I sometimes get stuck with the order of prepositional phrases if there happen to be a couple of them in a series. I cannot seem to place them next to the part they intend to modify, which ruins the sentence. I googled this particular problem and watched a few YouTube tutorials, which, unfortunately, has confused the matter further. I want to keep it simple and find out whether there's a way to get it right.

Another problem I have with them is that I sometimes cannot decide whether they should be punctuated or not, to make things clear.

Just to give you a small example

There was a great interview... 1) of Mary about her book 2) in NYT 3)
by John

I cannot put these phrases into their correct order, and punctuate if or where necessary.

Please help.
Thanks.