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" On Sunday, HBO begins airing The Leftovers, a ten-part series based on Tom Perrotta&amp;#039;s novel of the same name. The 2011 best seller centers on the people who were left behind after what appears to be The Rapture (two percent of the global population simply vanishes) and the show expands upon that premise, focusing on a suburban town three years after the event. The cast includes Justin Theroux, Amy Brenneman, Liv Tyler, and Margaret Qualley (daughter of Andie MacDowell), among others. Perrotta has co-created the show with Damon Lindelof\u2014half of the creative team behind Lost\u2014and together they wrote the pilot.  I met Perrotta for lunch in May, halfway through shooting the first season. He arrived carrying a guitar case; he had made a cameo on the show that morning, playing a member of a local band. The restaurant specialized in fish. He ordered chicken. I guess I should have asked if he liked fish. I read an article in which Lindelof described pitching his vision for The Leftovers to HBO as &amp;quot;If Friday Night Lights and Lost had a baby and then severely neglected it.&amp;quot; A funny line, though I&amp;#039;m not sure I know what that means. Me neither. [Laughs] I&amp;#039;ve thought about it myself. I don&amp;#039;t think the child has actually being neglected. But I like the idea of those two poles. Lost, obviously, veered towards the supernatural and FNL was a slice of life, and we&amp;#039;re trying to combine those two in a way that&amp;#039;s not often done.  How much does the show veer from your novel?  Some things are changing. That&amp;#039;s the fun of TV. With a feature film you&amp;#039;re shrinking your book to fit a two-hour time frame and now we have ten hours to play with so we can actually go beyond the confines of the book. It&amp;#039;s clearly rooted in the existing thing, but it is a new thing. Do you find you&amp;#039;re able to expand on things you weren&amp;#039;t able to in the novel? Yeah, absolutely. And you might correct things you didn&amp;#039;t like? For sure. And because it&amp;#039;s a collaborative process, other people bring ideas to it that you might not have had on your own. Some exciting things have come up. In the pilot, Damon&amp;#039;s voice is very strong. From the first episode we&amp;#039;re sharing ownership, and he&amp;#039;s such an exciting writer that I&amp;#039;m happy to do that. As with any collaborative process, you have to be open to the idea that sometimes everybody can agree\u2014there&amp;#039;s real excitement in that\u2014and at other times there&amp;#039;s a push and pull. I try to be &amp;quot;a&amp;quot; voice in the room. Obviously, because the material originated with me, I may have more of a voice, but I&amp;#039;m trying to be a good collaborator. And that means that you can&amp;#039;t be fighting every moment. Nobody gets it 100 percent their way.  What are some of the things that you&amp;#039;ve amplified or gotten rid of? For one thing, Kevin [Justin Theroux] is now the Chief of Police, rather than the Mayor, which was a decision made simply because it&amp;#039;s more dramatic and it gets him in the thick of the action. In the book he&amp;#039;s kind of a peacemaker. There&amp;#039;s something to be said for that, but the worry was that his life would devolve into political town meetings. The biggest change that you see in the pilot is that there&amp;#039;s a slightly supernatural quality with dogs that have gone wild, as well as a stag that mysteriously appears on the road. That animal presence wasn&amp;#039;t really in the book. In the book there are these dogs that are living on the edge of the woods, but they&amp;#039;re only mentioned, and he really latched on to that. For Damon\u2014as you know from Lost, which also had some prominent animal characters\u2014animals are just a powerful part of his imagination.  Any polar bears? No. [Laughs] Not so far, at any rate.  It&amp;#039;s fascinating to see some elements of the book come to life. For example, the world of the Guilty Remnant, the cult of mute cigarette smokers that Jill Garvey joins. It&amp;#039;s very different from what I had imagined.  That was a revelation to me, too. I think I did a good job making the GR world seem real to the reader, but when it came down to what does this house look like, how do they live, it was really interesting to have to occupy a physical house and make decisions like, Are there things on the wall? Do they keep the blinds down? One of the things we realized was that it was kind of sunny and pleasant looking; these people are not complete recluses, nor have they rejected the world. They&amp;#039;re engaging with it in a very antagonistic way, but they&amp;#039;re engaging with it.  Now, of course, if I reread the book I&amp;#039;ll &amp;quot;see&amp;quot; the series. There&amp;#039;s no getting around that. Anyone who allows someone to adapt their work takes that risk, and some authors don&amp;#039;t allow adaptations for that reason, though not many. Even Phillip Roth allowed his work to be adapted, though he was never very happy with the films. I remember hearing him talk about one of the films and he was very harsh about it. I couldn&amp;#039;t do that. I&amp;#039;m sure those screenwriters operated out of a love of the book, trying to do the best they could. If I were the screenwriter I&amp;#039;d feel terrible. I also love movies and TV shows and I don&amp;#039;t have some sense of, Oh, this is a lesser creative endeavor. In some cases, I think movies and TV shows\u2014especially TV shows right now\u2014are the signature works of art of their time. Does the first season cover just the book, and then you move on beyond that for season two? Are you planting seeds right now to go off in different directions? You know what? It&amp;#039;s been such a task to write and produce the first season. One thing Damon is rightfully conscious of is that he wants to see how it all plays out. Certain characters or relationships will probably become important just because they&amp;#039;re vibrant on screen. I think he really likes the idea of a dialogue with the audience.  Well, he&amp;#039;s certainly used to that. The Lost situation was extraordinary. He and the show&amp;#039;s co-creator, Carlton Cuse, had a singular and ongoing dialogue with fans, which became almost as important as the show itself. Were you a fan of Breaking Bad? Totally. Vince Gilligan said something interesting about writing that show: Once he finishes writing and producing an episode, it belongs to the viewers. Any interpretation or point of view they have is valid. I&amp;#039;m sure there are many creators who don&amp;#039;t feel that way\u2014in fact, I know of some. But his point of view, that his work could have a life of its own, said a lot about how he creates TV. That&amp;#039;s very generous of him. [Laughs] I&amp;#039;m sure there were interpretations that he secretly believed were not valid! I&amp;#039;d be very willing to say that my stories have ramifications that I&amp;#039;m not aware of\u2014or that you might experience my story in a way that illuminates something that I don&amp;#039;t know. Your experience of the story is totally valid. On the other hand, if your interpretation is, as some Breaking Bad fans suggested, that Walter White actually died on the highway and never made it to where he was going, that doesn&amp;#039;t seem valid to me. That strikes me as trying to limit the meaning so that you control it. That idea that it was all a dream, and he died and what happened in the last episode was his final thought? That may have been interesting the first time someone thought it up 100 years ago. [Laughs] No self-respecting writer would do that today. But not everyone is a literary scholar with a sense that we&amp;#039;ve been there and done that and no writer would want to do it again. [Laughs]  Did you watch Lost when it was on?  Later\u2014and very conveniently. My son started to watch and I watched it with him; it was on DVD so it wasn&amp;#039;t even streaming yet. But when I went to HBO with The Leftovers, it was the show that I was actively watching. And I had been very impressed with how they used flashbacks because it&amp;#039;s hard to do in film, you&amp;#039;re not encouraged to do it. There were whole episodes that were essentially long flashbacks, as well as a freedom to move in time that felt very novelistic and innovative to me. So when the people at HBO asked who might be right to run the show, he was on the tip of my mind, and also theirs. I do think that the material\u2014obviously it&amp;#039;s not the same story, but there&amp;#039;s overlap. There was a massive online speculation about Lost, so you have that to look forward to when The Leftovers premieres. Everyone will have an opinion regarding why millions disappear. Did readers offer you theories? I think this will be a big difference for me. I got occasional letters from fans of the novel, but if you read the book to the end, in good faith, I think you&amp;#039;ll realize that I was not even trying to answer the question of why millions disappeared. The characters have a feeling of resignation. People have ideas\u2014scientists have looked into it, crackpots have looked into it\u2014but nobody really knows what happened, and that&amp;#039;s what so troubling to the characters. It&amp;#039;s like that Malaysian plane that went down. In some sense\u2014I mean, obviously, if those people are alive somewhere, being held captive, it would be preferable to hearing that they all died. But you don&amp;#039;t know. And it makes the survivors\u2014it puts a crazy amount of pressure on them. How are you supposed to feel? Do you give up hope? You can&amp;#039;t really breathe. There&amp;#039;s a psychological term, ambiguous loss, and it reminds you of why humans have these very specific rituals for grieving and moving on, you know? It&amp;#039;s like when soldiers went missing in Vietnam. Whatever it is, it suspends you in some place where you just can&amp;#039;t go on. I was going to ask you about Malaysia Airlines\u2014it must have been fascinating to you. It was. Not only does it have echoes of The Leftovers, it&amp;#039;s also very specifically the Lost story. You see 240 people missing\u2014that&amp;#039;s a lot of people. Unlike my book, it&amp;#039;s not a global event, yet look at the level of obsession that developed in just a few days? And the conspiracy theories! You know, Courtney Love was going to break the case. It just becomes this circus in the way everything becomes a circus nowadays.  Given Damon&amp;#039;s love of flashbacks, will you be going back to the day of the disappearances\u2014besides the moments at the beginning of the pilot? We may. I&amp;#039;m not allowed to speak about that. I don&amp;#039;t mean to be coy. Aside from a short bit at the start of the pilot, the series, like the book, really begins three years after the event. I&amp;#039;m wondering why you chose to write it that way? It had to do with me thinking about 9/11 and this sense that we had in the immediate aftermath that something cataclysmic had occurred and our lives wouldn&amp;#039;t be the same. In some ways that was true. We went to war and we stayed at war for ten years. But mostly not much changed; two or three years later, it was an historical event and we took our shoes off at the airport. I was writing an article for GQ about Britney Spears when the planes went into the Towers. You can find it online\u2014it&amp;#039;s called something like &amp;quot;The Cosmology of Britney Spears.&amp;quot; And I ended with this confident proclamation that people made all the time back then, that Britney belongs to a pre-9/11 world, and because of those events and the subsequent time of real sobriety and reflection, a different sort of artist was going to emerge in the post-9/11 world. And the opposite happened. We&amp;#039;re deep into reality TV and, in some ways, this march toward a certain kind of triviality continued unabated. That made me think about the gravity of normalcy, how rock and roll happened close on the heels of the Holocaust. History doesn&amp;#039;t move in this sort of predictable direction. But with The Leftovers I didn&amp;#039;t want to say that it moves in just one way either. Certain people are indelibly transformed\u2014some people leave home or join cults or are spun out of their lives. And Kevin and his daughter are still trying to hold onto that life. That&amp;#039;s the tension. Something huge has happened. Some of us are changed forever, and some of us want to reclaim what we had. That&amp;#039;s really what the story is about\u2014different responses to this cataclysm.  I was reading a debut novel by Anthony Mara, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena\u2026 I&amp;#039;ve heard very good things about that book. Deservedly. It&amp;#039;s about the aftermath of the war in Chechnya, and Mara evokes, quite beautifully, how deadening hopelessness can be, and why choices are made that might seem unthinkable to people who still live, primarily, in a culture of hope\u2014people like us. The Leftovers captures a similar sense of impending doom, though it is based, obviously, on something that hasn&amp;#039;t happened.  I think that I didn&amp;#039;t fully understand what I was doing when I tackled The Leftovers. I had gotten really interested in religion. I&amp;#039;d spent a lot of time thinking about it for The Abstinence Teacher. And at the same time there&amp;#039;s been a real vogue for apocalyptic stories\u2014which is funny, right, because as you say Americans live very comfortable, abundant lives. I mean Syria is an apocalyptic place right now. I think, deep down, we look at the rest of the world and we understand how lucky we are, but there&amp;#039;s something about luck that makes us feel fragile. We keep imagining the opposite. If there&amp;#039;s a drought in California, you immediately think, Is California sustainable? What if it&amp;#039;s not, you know? Or the weather that we&amp;#039;re having. I suspect that it&amp;#039;s because we sense that our position is very unusual in the world, and it may be an historical aberration, and there may be some element of preparing. But I also think that most apocalyptic stories we&amp;#039;re seeing, like The Walking Dead, involve complete crumbling of the infrastructure\u2014comfortable, coddled people suddenly having to fight for their lives.  Right, but in The Leftovers the infrastructure of America is still intact. It&amp;#039;s just that people have disappeared for no reason. If anything it&amp;#039;s a little less crowded than it was before. [Laughs] People can go through the motions of their ordinary lives, but there&amp;#039;s this heaviness and sense of dread and loss that they&amp;#039;re working through as they do it. And, of course, some people simply can&amp;#039;t move through their ordinary lives because they&amp;#039;re incapacitated by grief. Am I mistaken in thinking that the book\u2014which, on a continuum between dread and humor, was more equally distributed between the two\u2014has tipped slightly more towards dread on the show, at least in the pilot episode, which is all that I&amp;#039;ve seen? No, you&amp;#039;re right. It was a conscious decision to make it very clear that the world was transformed in some way\u2014that it looks a lot like our world, with some very creepy things happening. But as an ongoing thing we&amp;#039;re looking to find more opportunities for humor. We have some really good comic actors, including Justin, who is a very good dramatic actor but can be very funny.  As a writer do you visualize your characters?  People often say to me, &amp;quot;When I read your books, it&amp;#039;s like I&amp;#039;m watching a movie in my head.&amp;quot; But it&amp;#039;s not like a movie in my head. I&amp;#039;m experiencing the language. Things are happening in my head, and it would be really interesting if someone could figure out a way to reproduce those images\u2014they&amp;#039;re kind of dream images. One of the reasons I don&amp;#039;t describe my characters very much is because I&amp;#039;m not really seeing them. I might have a big gestalt\u2014he was broad-shouldered guy, or a slender woman. You read some writers and it&amp;#039;s clear they are describing someone they know who they&amp;#039;re using as a model, or they&amp;#039;re just visualizing someone in complete detail. I don&amp;#039;t do that.  What about as a reader\u2014do you visualize characters in the novels of other writers? If the writer tells me, yes. And I think sometimes we must have types in our head. Every now and then I&amp;#039;ll be startled reading a book, and it will describe a female character as having long dark hair, and it&amp;#039;s, like, page 100, and I&amp;#039;ll think, Oh, I hadn&amp;#039;t thought of her in that way. I noticed it with Little Children. All these people said to me, &amp;quot;Oh, that playground, I know that playground.&amp;quot; And it was a very minimally described playground. But people then thought they had some idea of what that playground looked like, and so that was that. You know, in 19th century novels writers would describe every piece of furniture in the room. And I think that was part of the function of language, to record how things looked, because they didn&amp;#039;t have ubiquitous cameras taking pictures of everything. But now we don&amp;#039;t have to do that. People know what the world looks like. I don&amp;#039;t know that I need to describe Fifth Avenue in New York or Main Street in a small American town, unless there&amp;#039;s some obscure detail that you wouldn&amp;#039;t be able to describe for yourself.  I assume you were involved in the casting process? Yeah. Was that helped by not having a set idea of what a character looks like? You just have to go for the best actor, and I learned that with Election. Matthew Broderick wasn&amp;#039;t who I pictured for Jim McAllister, but the performance was so great that now I can&amp;#039;t picture anyone else. Again, it&amp;#039;s a collaborative venture, and people bring their skills to it. A very simple example is the character of Jill, Kevin&amp;#039;s teenage daughter, who is not as beautiful as [the actress] Margaret Qualley. The minimal description in the book describes Jill as a much more ordinary looking girl. As often happens, though, people who want to act happen to be very beautiful, which was almost a stumbling block with Margaret because that&amp;#039;s not how we imagined the character. But she embodied a kind of sullenness\u2014you know, Jill has a tough veneer with a lot of emotion underneath\u2014and she&amp;#039;s very good in the role.  Jill is one of many adolescents in your books\u2014you capture children and teenagers with a striking authenticity. Do you have a kinship with that period in your life? I do. The Freudians consider the first three years to be the most significant in forming a personality. Scientologists say it&amp;#039;s in utero. In my experience it was late junior high and high school where I actively felt like I was making decisions that created myself. And in some cases very simple ones\u2014like, do I hang out with those people or those people? Am I jock or an artist? They are very common things, but I feel like they actually cost me something then. The stakes of the world seem very high. And it wasn&amp;#039;t so much that I felt scarred by it\u2014I know some people do feel very scarred by it. I feel like I negotiated it pretty successfully. But it felt dramatic to me in a way that some of my later decisions didn&amp;#039;t. I remember lying in bed the night before high school began with this feeling like I was going to war or something. Am I going to be able to survive high school? And of course it&amp;#039;s funny to look back at it now, because I was more than able to survive it, but at the time it seemed like a forbidden land that required some courage and, you know, getting through the day. I felt like those were the stakes. Maybe there are people who are fully formed by high school and weren&amp;#039;t vulnerable in that way, but I don&amp;#039;t believe it. [Laughs] You co-wrote the Oscar-nominated screenplay for your fourth novel, Little Children, with director Todd Field. What would you say is the biggest difference between writing for TV?  One big difference is a very positive one. There&amp;#039;s so much pressure on the ending of a film, when you have to wrap everything up. The great thing is that it&amp;#039;s really possible to look at TV episodes as chapters and I think you can be freer with the endings and more unpredictable with the shapes. From a novelist&amp;#039;s perspective it&amp;#039;s so much more congenial. So that part of it has been really good. I think when you do it with a network like HBO, there&amp;#039;s this freedom to be dark and complicated, too, which sometimes in feature films\u2014it&amp;#039;s no secret\u2014sometimes you&amp;#039;re asked to simplify or lighten it up. I try to imagine what bleak &amp;#039;70s films like Midnight Cowboy or They Shoot Horses, Don&amp;#039;t They? would look like now. Instead of shooting Jane Fonda, Michael Sarrazin would reveal that he&amp;#039;s an heir to a huge fortune and they&amp;#039;d move to Pasadena and live happily ever after.  It&amp;#039;s funny you bring that up. I do think people are feeling that, in the same way we look back at the &amp;#039;70s and think, Oh, that was a golden age of American film, this is that time for TV. The interesting thing about the &amp;#039;70s is that it wasn&amp;#039;t until later that it was a golden age, and since there&amp;#039;s a sense that we&amp;#039;re in the middle of what&amp;#039;s a golden age for TV, that might mean we&amp;#039;re approaching the end of it. But it doesn&amp;#039;t feel that way. It feels like technology has enabled people to watch in new ways and there&amp;#039;s a great hunger for shows. Of course, now everybody is writing a TV show, because people gravitate towards opportunity. Were you happy with the film Little Children? Oh, yeah, I thought it was great. I like Election, too. It taught me a lot about collaboration. It&amp;#039;s where I learned that a very good filmmaker is better than a very faithful filmmaker. Let Alexander Payne do his thing. The fact that he&amp;#039;s the one directing your book is fine in itself. There are writers, like Roth, who have been scarred because a bad movie is made of their book, and it kind of kills the book and the memory of it, and they get really wary. But I was lucky. The first experience I had, with Election\u2014it was turned into a movie that only gets better over time. And so it has solidified my feeling of letting the really talented adapter do their thing\u2014don&amp;#039;t be the obstacle and share ownership. I can&amp;#039;t build The Leftovers, but Damon can. I want the show to reflect his artistic vision. Have you ever written a screenplay that wasn&amp;#039;t adapted from one of your novels?  Yeah, but I&amp;#039;ve never gotten one made. I tried it twice. Getting films made is so mysterious. I got paid to do it so it didn&amp;#039;t feel like a waste of my time, and it improved my screenwriting skills. There&amp;#039;d be periodic flurries of so-and-so is interested, but then it goes away. And you just never knew what project would pick up. I remember finishing Little Children and giving it to my agent, who is a very supportive agent. She told me it was going to be a really hard sell for film\u2014there&amp;#039;s a child molester and the characters are not all super likeable, and there wasn&amp;#039;t an example of a movie that operated like that. But what happened was that people loved Todd Field after In the Bedroom; everyone wanted to work with him. Suddenly the sheer force of his will and people&amp;#039;s interest in what his next film would be\u2014as well as actors flocking to him because they saw how beautifully directed and actor-centric his film had been\u2014made Little Children possible. All it took was the right person to say, &amp;quot;I want to do this.&amp;quot;  Field is particularly good at capturing ephemeral emotions.  He holds on faces for a long time, so if they&amp;#039;re good actors, like Kate Winslet\u2014her face was so expressive; she would go through like six little emotional adjustments in each take. Todd casts with that in mind. There&amp;#039;s a very deliberate feel to those movies. Sometimes I object to that if it feels precious or arty, but Todd&amp;#039;s films never feel that way. Filmmaking is a crazy job, though. You work 12 hours to get two minutes of film\u2014the physical stamina is kind of amazing to me. I guess writing is that way to. I&amp;#039;ll spend a whole day on a paragraph sometimes. But you can do it when you want to do it. You aren&amp;#039;t dependent on other people. From what I&amp;#039;ve heard, TV writing is pretty grueling.  What I&amp;#039;ve been feeling\u2014and it is grueling at this stage because we&amp;#039;re writing, editing, and producing at once. But what I like is that I got so used to working in feature films, which is always about why it&amp;#039;s not happening, you know? You&amp;#039;re dying to work and there&amp;#039;s always some obstacle. It will take years to get things going. The Abstinence Teacher script is still inching along\u2014I started writing that in 2007. And it&amp;#039;s still not dead, but there are always reasons why it can&amp;#039;t happen: We were with Warner Independent, and it went under. Once that happened, directors dropped out. I understand; a movie costs money and it&amp;#039;s a difficult project. But with The Leftovers we&amp;#039;re just running like crazy to supply the script to this crew that&amp;#039;s waiting for us. So it&amp;#039;s great to be working so hard. And you can&amp;#039;t be too precious with TV writing. At a certain point you have to let the script go. That&amp;#039;s another problem with feature films, too, because the development process is so protracted. They&amp;#039;ll make you rewrite it 12 times, and a certain point you don&amp;#039;t know if you&amp;#039;re making it better or making it worse. You&amp;#039;re just trying to respond to somebody&amp;#039;s opinion, which I don&amp;#039;t think is a great way to write. We get notes from HBO and we have to do some rewriting but it&amp;#039;s all happening at an accelerated pace. They can&amp;#039;t blow the whole thing up, which often happens with features. You know, Let&amp;#039;s take a whole new approach to this. We have to take a whole new approach?! [Laughs] I&amp;#039;m really enjoying the process of TV\u2014maybe a little too much. When I go back to sitting in a room by myself to write my next novel it&amp;#039;s going to be a shock. I&amp;#039;ll be lonely! [Laughs] Do you have an idea for your next novel? I have a couple that probably wouldn&amp;#039;t shock people who read Little Children. The Leftovers novel posed a real challenge for me because it was kind of different and kind of the same as my previous book, but I liked the freedom that came with not being so rooted to the actual world. I think I&amp;#039;m starting to see it more as that was that, and I am more or less who I was before. How do your novels evolve? Some writers have to have the first paragraph before they can start, others write the last sentence and work backwards\u2026 The John Irving way. Do you have a process? I start with a broad situation and then have to work my way into a particular character. I go sequentially through the book, so that I&amp;#039;m almost reading it as I&amp;#039;m writing it. I don&amp;#039;t know where I&amp;#039;m going until\u2014at some point, maybe midway through, I try to have a question in mind. So, the way I write, every story is a bit of a mystery story. With Little Children it was, are they going to run off together? I have kind of borrowed romantic comedy-type plots in the past, but I&amp;#039;m trying to do something interesting. I read a lot of crime fiction and I like there to be narrative momentum. The Leftovers is more episodic and has less momentum than something like Little Children\u2014that&amp;#039;s one had the most of that [crime novel] feel: You have a psycho in the town. Do you have a set routine? I work in my house, on the top floor, and I try to be up there by 9:30 or 10AM, and if I can go to 3:00, that&amp;#039;s good. And, let&amp;#039;s be honest, if I&amp;#039;m writing for five hours, the first two or three I&amp;#039;m trying to get to the place where you&amp;#039;re really inside of the story. My only rule is to do something new, to break new ground. It doesn&amp;#039;t have to be five pages or two pages, but I can&amp;#039;t just rewrite what I did yesterday. Otherwise a novel is just never going to get written. Often revising and tightening what I&amp;#039;ve already done is my warm-up, and hopefully that momentum will lead me to new stuff. But, of course, the danger is that three or four hours go by and you&amp;#039;ve only done that. I always say that it&amp;#039;s a critical mass of self-loathing that gets me through.  How do you get beyond self-loathing? Sometimes it&amp;#039;s simple laziness rather than self-loathing. One of the things I really respect about Damon is that he seems always able to write. He stays close to that part of his mind that is involved in making stories. I think Joyce Carol Oates is probably like that as well. But I really have to work to get to that place. And because I have to work, I often fight against it. It feels like laziness, but I don&amp;#039;t think it&amp;#039;s that. Some people can just start sprinting, but I have to run a few laps before I can sprint. I feel like the best you can do is make peace with yourself. You know, you&amp;#039;re always fighting yourself. I read that Joseph Conrad used to shackle himself to his desk because he found writing so painful. Of course it was his third language that he was writing in.  Are you a big consumer of novels? Yeah, though a slow one. [Laughs]  What are you reading right now? I&amp;#039;m about to start The Fever, the new novel by Megan Abbot. It&amp;#039;s based on stories about epidemics of twitching among young girls. She&amp;#039;s a writer I like a lot.  You mentioned crime novels. Who do you read?  Kate Atkinson, Laura Lippman, Dennis Lehane, Michael Connelly\u2014I&amp;#039;m a big fan of his. I had enjoyed Henning Mankell; I went through the Wallender stuff but haven&amp;#039;t liked a lot since. I like espionage as well\u2014John le Carre.  Speaking of crime, though not fiction, have you read Walter Kirn&amp;#039;s memoir, Blood Will Out, about Kirn getting conned by someone who claimed he was a Rockefeller? I wonder if you think that could have happened to you\u2014could you be that gullible?  [Laughs] I don&amp;#039;t think I would fall for that kind of con man. In fact, I&amp;#039;m probably too wary. But I do share a lifelong drama, similar to Walter&amp;#039;s, that has to do with class. Like Walter I wrote a book about going to an Ivy League college from a small town. But he embraced those wealthy people and was able to pass for one of them, while I really resented them and tried to keep them at bay. Only later did I realize that, despite all of my desires to remain rooted in a working class world, college had changed me. And I still feel bad about it. Yale remains this hugely important place for me, transformative\u2014it felt like a Utopia when I got there\u2014but I wonder now what would have happened, just as a writer, if I&amp;#039;d gone to, say, Rutgers? Part of it had to do with this cultural divide that we live in. You write literary fiction, so the rich are your audience. HBO, which has a very upscale audience\u2014that&amp;#039;s sort of my audience. And it wasn&amp;#039;t how I envisioned myself when I was younger.  So you and Kirn were sort of walking the same tightrope? Yes, and we probably ended up falling on the same side, but he fell off a lot sooner than me, and maybe less reluctantly. What&amp;#039;s remarkable about him is that he was so taken in. It&amp;#039;s your worst fear\u2014you&amp;#039;re not just toadying up to rich people, you&amp;#039;re toadying up to a rich person who is also a con man murderer. The thing that would be a minor flaw in most circumstances is suddenly a glaring moral error. [Laughs] But, you know, kudos to him for writing about it. I think he&amp;#039;s one of the best critics out there, and he&amp;#039;s also a terrific fiction writer. And does occasional magazine journalism that&amp;#039;s just hilarious, and part of the hilarity is that he&amp;#039;s willing to satirize himself, which I love. I just saw that video he did, the open letter to Gary Shteyngart, and it&amp;#039;s like performance art.  Based on your Britney Spears article, it sounds like you keep up with pop culture.  Yeah, though I&amp;#039;m just as likely to get it from Jon Stewart as to see it myself. And I&amp;#039;m on Facebook, so I know what the pop culture conversation is at any moment\u2014though I&amp;#039;m not the kind of person who&amp;#039;s going to recap The Bachelor.  I kind of guessed that. I just wanted to make it clear! [Laughs] I was on Facebook for two years. Someone accused me of being a stalker because I never posted anything. It had something to do with feeling like anything I might say wasn&amp;#039;t all that interesting. But it also had to do with my inability to multi-task; I can&amp;#039;t even listen to music while I&amp;#039;m reading. Living life while simultaneously reacting to it is not an option for me.  I&amp;#039;m with you. One of the reasons I became a writer is that you have a deliberate, concentrated response to things. And the reason we write is to organize our thoughts and to reflect and discover what we think. In the course of a writing day, I don&amp;#039;t want to be aware that so-and-so just died so I have to comment on it, or this movie just came out and I have to have an opinion about it, or everybody is watching the Grammys so I have to say something about the Grammys. I&amp;#039;m not that interesting to myself.  So I&amp;#039;m gathering you&amp;#039;re not on Twitter? No. Twitter is just react; there&amp;#039;s not that period of reflection and concentration. Some people have really quick minds and responses. Me? I&amp;#039;ll sit with a novel for a couple of years\u2014sometimes I&amp;#039;ll sit with it for a couple of years before I even write it!  We talked about Breaking Bad. What other shows do you like?  In the past year I watched The Americans. It just works. I&amp;#039;m a big, long-time Justified fan. Game of Thrones, Mad Men. True Detective was really exciting. It was great to watch the transformation of Matthew McConaughey&amp;#039;s character from that young man\u2014I mean, troubled, but clean cut\u2014and that older, haunted version. It was riveting, you know? Do you still teach? No. Once I started screenwriting I stopped teaching because there&amp;#039;s just no way to do that. If they need you for a meeting, you have to be available. Also, while I like to teach and I had great students, I never had a real professor job, I was an adjunct. So it was easy, from a financial perspective to walk away from that job. [Laughs] You live in Boston, which has a comfortable and amiable literary scene\u2014not the competitive world of New York, I imagine.  It would be hard in New York because there are so many writers. I did live here in the early 90s, before my career had really begun, and I&amp;#039;d go to these parties and break into an anxious sweat. It was like a character from Balzac: I have not proved myself! I have no right to be here! [Laughs] And then somebody would say, Oh, I just got my story accepted by The New Yorker, and I&amp;#039;d be like, &amp;quot;I hate you, I hate you! That should be me!&amp;quot; And now look at you. You can waltz right in and say, &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m Tom Perrotta.&amp;quot; [Laughs] Yeah, that&amp;#039;s exactly how it is. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.townandcountrymag.com/leisure/arts-and-culture/reviews/a1752/tom-perotta-the-leftovers-interview/>