Andrew Sean Greer

I think it was when I first started working at this rural writer's residency and the septic tank overflowed on my first day, which is something that happens in the novel, and I understood that I had to deal with it.

And that was also, I think, the first moment I really became a grown-up at age 46 when I thought, there's no one to deal with this.

Yeah.

Except the Baronessa was happy to help me deal with it.

And I realized that there were depths to her that I had not expected.

And so I started taking notes, not on her, on...

the little details of life that surprised me every day or meeting a porcupine or what we had for dinner.

And when I decided I wanted to write a kind of charm novel, a kind of lovely escape novel, I thought, oh, I have all this experience and I can invent some more.

I can't think of a lot of American charm novels.

Comic novels, yes.

But something that touches on real human pain lightly, but with a sense of humor and absurdity, has its own absurd logic.

And I think of the Mitford novels or a comedy like Cold Comfort Farm or Graham Greene's Entertainments.

that are not absolute farce.

People die, hard things happen, but you move on and everything is a sort of funny story.

Or especially, I had in mind, Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals, which is not a novel, but which is certainly an exaggeration.

Well, I mean, maybe it's part of my own personality.

That I find myself not quite understanding what's going on.

Or at least I understand that I'm the thing that's wrong in most situations.

And I'm willing to change.

But it is, of course, I exaggerate that property in the books.