Tom Perotta wrote The Leftovers, Election and now Mrs. Fletcher. (Photo by Ben King/HBO)
Tom Perotta has been living many authors’ dream for more than a decade. He’s watched his critically acclaimed novels turn into equally well-regarded movies and TV shows: Alexander Payne’s withering social satire Election, Todd Field’s piercing suspense drama Little Children, and most recently, the awe-inspiring HBO series The Leftovers.
Perotta had a hand in all three of those projects, and he’ll be involved in the upcoming HBO adaptation of his latest novel Mrs. Fletcher as well. But The Leftovers took an unconventional journey—its first season encapsulates the entirety of its source material, so its two follow-up seasons explored the characters in new surroundings written exclusively for the screen.
While helping craft the third season of The Leftovers, Perotta toiled away at his seventh novel Mrs. Fletcher, which he’ll discuss at Politics and Prose on Thursday. The book offers a melancholy, pointed take on modern sexual mores through the lens of its title character, a middle-aged woman faced with unsettling questions of identity after her son departs for college.
The Leftovers imagines the aftermath of a cataclysm in which 2 percent of the world’s population disappears without a trace.
“In spite of my sense that the two projects were competing with each other, maybe The Leftovers did influence it in ways I’m not fully aware of,” Perotta tells DCist.
To wit: Perotta recently bid farewell to his grown children, and spent much of the time during production on the show staying in friends’ houses and Airbnbs.
“Being a writer, it’s all I wanted to do,” Perotta said. “But it’s a lonely job.”
Those experiences informed both works. The Leftovers boasts several memorable sequences of self-actualization in hotels. At one point in Mrs. Fletcher, a character tells the reader she’s prone to becoming aroused when she’s staying in an unfamiliar bed, even by herself.
The show grew more assured when entire episodes focused on one character’s perspective at a time; similarly, the book oscillates deftly among several points of view, from main characters like Mrs. Fletcher and her son to minor ones they encounter along the way.
The shifting narrators propelled an introspective novel that’s light on plot. They also posed a challenge for Perotta, who felt obligated to properly realize characters with experiences unlike his own, including a trans professor who teaches Mrs. Fletcher’s community college gender studies course, and a young woman at her son’s school who fashions herself an activist.
The former led Perotta to immerse himself in gender theory, while the latter was drawn in part from encounters with his young adult daughter’s friends.
“Part of the reason why I have this method of bringing in these characters at strategic times is because I feel like I’ve gotten to know them in scenes where they’re not the point of view,” Perotta said.
Now that The Leftovers is over, Perotta can turn his attention to developing Mrs. Fletcher for the small screen. His initial idea was for a miniseries in the Big Little Lies tradition, but he now envisions a half-hour series in the vein of Atlanta and GIrls. That format, he said, will allow him to explore the novel’s colorful characters and perhaps even add new ones, as happened on The Leftovers.
Perotta offered no hints about who might be cast in the novel’s juicy main roles, even when DCist reminded him that given his clout, dropping a name now might pressure a dream candidate to sign on.
“It’s a fool’s errand,” he said.
Tom Perotta will discuss Mrs. Fletcher at Politics and Prose on Thursday, August 10 at 7 p.m.
