L'Italo-Americano

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, 2017 www.italoamericano.org 32 L'Italo-Americano A s a writer, Tom Perrotta may not be a household name but chances are you're familiar with some of the films based on his books. Perrotta's novel Election, the story of an intense campaign for high school class president, became a movie in 1999 and starred Matthew Broderick and Reese Witherspoon. His 2004 book Little Children, which the New York Times called "a darkly satirical suburban drama," was made into a critically acclaimed film two years later. It received three Academy Award and three Golden Globe nominations, including those for best actress (Kate Winslet) and best screen- play (Perrotta and Todd Field). In 2014, his novel The Leftovers was adapted into a Peabody Award-winning televi- sion series on HBO, airing for three seasons. This fantasy-mys- tery follows a small group of New Yorkers who try to get their lives back on track after an unex- plained occurrence kills millions worldwide. Perrotta's most recent novel is Mrs. Fletcher which he describes as "that moment when your kids grow up and move away, and you have to take stock of who you are and what you want to do with the rest of your life." Tom Perrotta was born in Garwood, N.J. His father was a postal worker whose parents had come from a village near Avellino, Campania. He earned a B.A. in English from Yale and an M.A. in English/Creative Writing from Syracuse University where he was a student of the writer Tobias Wolff. He has taught at both Harvard and Yale, and cur- rently lives outside Boston. Perrotta was in Seattle recent- ly as part of a national book tour for Mrs. Fletcher. We caught up with him at an event sponsored by the Seattle Public Library. Tell us a bit about your childhood. I come from a small working class family in New Jersey. My dad was a mail carrier and my mom was a stay-at-home mom and later a secretary. We were not poor but we really did not have a lot of books. My mom would take us to a one-room library in the basement of the public school. That's where I first discovered reading. What is your latest novel, Mrs. Fletcher, about? The story is about a 46-year- old divorcée Eve and her son Brendan. In chapter one, Eve is taking her son to college. When she gets back home, she starts to wonder who she is, now that she is no longer a full-time mom. I initially thought the book would be Eve's story and I was plan- ning it would be short, like a novella. But in chapter two, I got inter- ested in what her son is doing at college. Just like his mom, he is also starting a search to find him- RITA CIPALLA Tom Perrotta: "The Steinbeck of Suburbia" self. So I began to write about him. Then he meets a girl at school and I got interested in her. So, the book evolved in that way. Does this wandering approach sum up how you usu- ally write your books? As an author, you have to embrace who you are, even though you start off with a cer- tain idea or think you are trying a different approach. Sometimes the book you end up with is dif- ferent from where you started but it still comes out as your book. Mrs. Fletcher is provocative and funny and seems very modern. The book is set in 2014. At the time, it felt really current. It engaged with issues that were being talked about: gender iden- tity, sexting. Now, as I look back, it seems to have acquired an air of premature nostalgia. It was just three years ago, but it is already such a different world. What are some of the differ- ences between being an author and a screenwriter? In Little Children I co-wrote the screenplay with director Todd Field, just the two of us. It was a very collaborative experience. The Leftovers was even more collaborative. We broached every scene in the writers' room and every line of dialogue had to reach consensus. It was incredi- bly gruelling. I had to cede con- trol and try not to become defen- sive. Sometimes my feelings got hurt. When you write a novel, you work alone. You make all the decisions. There is no one to help. I think of it as the differ- ence between being a solo per- former or joining a band. It's great to have the help but then you have to spend time with the band, the people in the band get on your nerves, and so forth. I heard that Election could not find a publisher initially. What happened? It was kind of a Cinderella story. By the mid-1990s, I had written three books but none had been published. They were all good books but I could not break through. At last, a small press picked up my short story collec- tion called Bad Haircut: Stories of the Seventies which I had written a few years earlier. Later, I was at a book reading and someone in the audience came up to me and said that what I had just read felt like a movie. And I said: Well, I have this unpublished book about a high school election. Are you interest- ed in looking at it? I sent them the book and they really liked it. It was optioned as a screenplay in 1996 by director Alexander Payne. We had to rush the book to print. It barely got into the pipeline in time, and just made it out before the film premiered. Overall, it was an amazing expe- rience for me. Writer Tom Perrotta is the best-selling author of nine works of fiction, two of which have been made into Oscar-nomi- nated films. (WBUR) "Mrs. Fletcher," published in August 2017 by Scribner, is a wickedly funny exploration of middle age and finding yourself SEATTLE ITALIAN COMMUNITY

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