A Conversation with the Author

Interview conducted by Laura Wilson, Executive Producer, Macmillan Audio

I really enjoyed your book. There’s a lot of humor in it, even though there’s a lot of sadness. What was that like for you as a writer, to sort of find the humor in what’s ultimately a sad situation?

Well, I have to say it was almost the reverse for me. I’d been experimenting in recent years with trying to see just how much I can broaden the idea of the comic novel, and if I could get it to accommodate this idea of a post-apocalyptic scenario.And while there is quite a bit of humor in the book, I ultimately realized that the book was more about grief and loss and sadness.

You don’t expect people to just disappear one day. And yet it was very affecting. The Rapture is obviously a cataclysmic event. But I started realizing it was a metaphor for getting older, for mortality and living with mortality. It’s really powerful. We all basically live in a world that we define by the people who have disappeared. Obviously they haven’t disappeared in some sudden unexplained way, but there’s the sense of living with the absences and with loss and trying to go on in spite of the fact that there are these mysteries that you don’t understand.

One of the great comic [elements] in the book is the idea of being forced to smoke. Were you trying to build in an element of social critique?

I was thinking that if you really do dispense with the idea that you have an indefinite future, and the future is inherently limited, then what would happen? This idea of smoking seemed really interesting to me; it becomes a declaration of faith, that we’re not going to live long enough to get sick from it. It became a kind of ambiguous social critique in that smoking is a very complicated act in our culture, the meaning of which has changed dramatically over recent decades.

I really liked the teenage characters in the book and how their planned futures begin to lose meaning for them. [How] was writing from a teenager’s perspective for you?

I’ve been doing that for quite a long time. My first book, Bad Haircut, was a coming-of- age book, Election was set in a high school, and The Wishbones dealt with young guys in a rock band. What’s different now, of course, is that I’m writing from the perspective of a father who has teenage kids and who no longer necessarily sees the world through the eyes of a kid, but more through the eyes of a parent. There is some element of returning to my roots as a writer, but also of having a whole new perspective.

When you were writing [The Leftovers], were you aware of the prediction of an imminent Rapture?

I wasn’t. I was writing this between 2008 and 2010. (The Rapture was predicted for May or June of 2011.) What I was aware of, of course, was the impending apocalypse of 2012, which is the end of the Mayan calendar. There’s always some apocalyptic scenario we’re living with. My imagination was more rooted in more mundane situations. I remember being very focused on the economic collapse in 2008 and that sense that some people felt, and still feel to some degree, that the structure that we’ve taken for granted all our lives, living in a really powerful, prosperous country where the future is sort of expanding and guaranteed and that our kids will prepare for a world that makes sense. And there was this feeling that this could all go away and we could be living in a very different world ten years down the road. What I wanted to write about was the world where characters no longer felt their futures were guaranteed or predictable or comprehensible. It’s obviously a kind of a magnification to go from economic doubt or despair to a post-apocalyptic scenario. I’m much more interested in that idea of losing faith in the future than I was of sort of critiquing any kind of religious prophet.

Suburban life is a topic you’ve explored in other novels. What do you like about writing about people in a suburban setting?

It never feels like a choice to me; it’s like the default setting of my imagination. I’m from a small suburban town, I grew up that way, and with the exception of a couple years when I lived in Brooklyn, my life has been spent in relatively suburban settings. For me, this idea of a small town as a kind of an understandable social unit is important to me. I think there have been a lot of writers who’ve been experimenting lately with really sprawling novels that will deal with a number of different characters and different points on the globe. I understand that as a method of getting at the global culture that we live in, and I understand writers who want to maybe juxtapose very different historical periods to make some larger points about how things have changed over time. I tend to like the sort of idea of the novel as a little village, and the novel as a microcosm, a smaller world standing in for a larger one.

Are you already at work on your next book? Do you go from book to book, or do you spend some time in between novels deciding what you want to work on?

I usually spend about a year recovering from the effort of finishing the last one, and what I’ll usually do in that year is sometimes write journalism, sometimes short stories. More recently, I’ve been doing some screenwriting. So over the past year I’ve been working on a screenplay for my last book, The Abstinence Teacher, and also I had adapted my novel The Wishbones for a TV pilot, so that’s what’s been keeping me busy. And I have also been working on a collection of short stories.

As a writer who’s had his work made into movies, did it work for you to see your work on screen?

I’ve been very lucky and really happy with the film versions of both Election and Little Children. I think there’s a leap of faith that you take; you’re turning over your creation to these other artists, these writers and actors and directors. I’ve just been extremely lucky to get really talented people doing wonderful things. Sometimes as a writer it’s a little bit humbling. The movie of Election has become a kind of cultural icon that sort of overshadows the book, and you have to live with that. I sort of understand why: Reese Witherspoon’s performance in that movie is, I think, going to survive a long time and really stand out as one of the great comic performances in recent memory. I’ve learned to really love that sort of rolling the dice of collaboration and seeing what happens.

TOM PERROTTA is the author of six works of fiction, including The Wishbones and Joe College. His novels Election and Little Children were made into acclaimed and award-winning movies. He lives outside of Boston, Massachusetts.