AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
Jason Mott won the National Book Award a few years ago for "Hell Of A Book." And he knows everybody's looking for the writer's life in whatever they've put on the page.
JASON MOTT: If I wrote a story about dinosaurs and spaceships, someone would be, like, woah, were you that dinosaur on page 97?
RASCOE: Yeah (laughter).
MOTT: I feel like that happened to you.
RASCOE: And so, for his latest novel, "People like Us," Jason Mott says he's leaning into the character-writer confusion, like in the chapter when someone asks his first-person protagonist, also a novelist, a simple question - do you love America?
MOTT: (Reading) For the record, I know my lines in this particular scene pretty well. Yeah, I say. Sure thing. Hands on a stack of Bibles, I do. Love her from sea to shining sea. But I already know what you're thinking. Why? Or maybe how. That's fair, doll. I'll be the first to admit that it's got more than its fair share of problems. But hell, who ain't loved someone who was broken?
(Reading) We all got that one person in our group that's a little rough around the edges, that person we warn new people about before they show up at the party. But hell, we still invite them to the ball drop, don't we? So that's what America is. It's that friend that you love and you also give a disclaimer to others about. The land of the free is still my friend, still on my friends' list, still on the same text thread it's always been on. She still matters to me, even if she could be better, and even more than that, she's my home. Nailed it. Every line, every syllable.
RASCOE: Now, that's a kind of practiced answer. There's another one that you give a little later - or the first-person author, I should say. He's talking about a girlfriend who said, I love you, to him all the time. And then he says something that I found really profound. He didn't understand why she had to say it so much, why she was saying it, like, 30 times a day.
And then he says, then I figured it out. Sometimes when someone says, I love you, what they're really doing is asking, do you love me? Now I probably say I love you to America 30 times a day.
Talk to me about both of those answers (laughter) that this character gives and what that says about his relationship to America.
MOTT: Yeah. I think it says that he's got a pretty complicated relationship, as I feel a lot of people do. You know, I'm someone who lived here my entire life. I live on property that my father and great grandfather all owned. It's this very deeply rooted family land that I kind of exist on. So for me, America has been home and always will be home.
And yet, at the same time, America is full of problems. Like, it is a pretty scary place right now. This author, who is very loosely based on myself - he's trying to figure out his own position on how he feels about America and what that means.
RASCOE: Well, can you explain what's happening in this novel? - because...
MOTT: (Laughter).
RASCOE: ...There are these parallel stories. How do you describe this?
MOTT: It's the story of two authors. One author is traveling around Europe on a book tour after he's just won a very big writing award. And the other author is traveling around America in the wake of a school shooting that has happened. One author is exploring what America is from the outside. The other author is exploring America very much from the inside in the wake of gun violence.
RASCOE: And you say that the first-person author who's traveling outside of the U.S. - that he's loosely based on you. Is the other character, Soot - is he also loosely based on you? Which one is you? That's what I'm asking. Which one is you (laughter)?
MOTT: The classic question that I always duck.
(LAUGHTER)
RASCOE: Well, we can't duck here. We going to get right to it (laughter).
MOTT: Well, so they are both based off of me very loosely. This book started out as my attempt at a memoir, honestly. My last novel, "Hell Of A Book," had these two same characters, and after I finished it, I started writing a memoir just about myself and about kind of my association and my connection to America.
It eventually started evolving, and these two characters suddenly came back, and the two characters are very much both who I am, but they're actually also pieces of me that I am not, pieces of me that I wish I was sometimes or I wish I wasn't, depending on what the character's up to.
RASCOE: Why do you think you couldn't just do a straight memoir?
MOTT: The barrier of fiction gives me just enough room to put myself out there but also pull back from it if I feel like it's too personal. It creates just enough of a buffer where I can tell my story, but I can have just enough wiggle room to where I don't feel quite as exposed as I oftentimes do.
RASCOE: The first-person novelist buys a gun for protection. And why does he think the gun is going to protect him?
MOTT: 'Cause he's an American. That's the short answer. He's a good old fashioned American. Like, we tout how guns will keep us safe. They rarely actually do, and yet that has become the mantra of our entire society, is that guns are here to keep us safe, and we just need more guns to be more safe.
RASCOE: Soot - he also carries a gun, even though he isn't being overtly threatened. Soot does seem to be trapped in this kind of personal hell of a timeline.
MOTT: So I think for Soot, also just for people, like, grief and pain - they never really go away. From my experience, what happens is, it's like an orbit of a planet, and it begins very close. So for the first year or so, couple years, the planet's very close, and it comes by every day, and you hurt every single day.
But as time goes on, Planet Grief kind of starts to drift out a bit farther. And suddenly, every two days, every week - but it never really stops. You go for years and years and years, and it just keeps coming back. And that is some of what Soot is going through, is that he has these very painful moments, these moments of grief and pain and heartache that are all tied to guns, and they keep coming back. And he is navigating them as he's also trying to navigate his day-to-day existence.
RASCOE: Can I ask you, like, how much has gun culture affected your own personal life?
MOTT: So I grew up with guns. Like, my dad got me my first shotgun when I was 10. We hunted all the time. You know, I still own guns to this day. I still have several pistols, things like that. But I think, as I was working on this project, I realized just how tightly bound Americans are to their guns. It doesn't matter if you own a gun or not. Guns are part of your life, and they always will be, and we refuse to give that up, and I find it to be very fascinating.
RASCOE: In the book, the author who's overseas - he's won the National Book Award, which you won a few years ago for "Hell Of A Book." The author in this book, "People Like Us" - it seems to really mess with his mind. It's crazy. It's debauchery. It's a whole thing.
MOTT: (Laughter).
RASCOE: How did you feel? - 'cause people reading this book are going to think it was really complicated for you.
MOTT: I think it was complicated for me. It was very positive, though. I want to always put that forward. Like, it was and still continues to be kind of the highlight of my career and probably my life, if I'm honest about it. But it also kind of presented this unique position where suddenly, as I was touring for that book, the way that I was engaging with people in interviews, the questions that I was, you know, being asked - they were of a different caliber, of a different breed, and they made the entire process feel different.
It was kind of, like, the author that I was before the book won the National Book Award and the author that I am now are slightly different. It opened the door for some very interesting conversations about America and American identity.
RASCOE: Well, because - in the reading, it's like, well, America is also a part of us. We are kind of of it. We are here. We are - you know what I'm saying?
MOTT: (Laughter).
RASCOE: Like, we - and we also kind of make it, too, right?
MOTT: We do. We make it every day. And I think that becomes a coping mechanism, oftentimes, to say that - whenever some political thing happens, we like to say, well, that's not my America. That's not the America that I am, not the America I voted for, et cetera, et cetera. But the harder truth is that we are all part of this machine. We all help make it every single day.
When it goes negative or goes positive, we got to take ownership of both sides of it. And I think that is part of what the story also does, is try to understand what that means and how that's a harder thing to deal with.
RASCOE: That's Jason Mott. His new book is "People Like Us." Thank you so much for joining us.
MOTT: No problem at all. Thank you for having me. This was wonderful. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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