SACHA PFEIFFER, HOST:
Craig Thomas is an experienced television writer. He's co-creator of the popular long-running TV show, "How I Met Your Mother," and now he's written a novel. It's called "That's Not What Happened," and it's about a family of four.
CRAIG THOMAS: The husband has had a successful screenwriting career while his wife has been at home raising two kids, one of whom happens to have Down syndrome. And because of the extra needs and extra support that is required by raising a child with a disability, she gave up her career as an investigative journalist. Now that the kids are a bit older, Emmett, who has Down syndrome - he's about 24 - the mom, Paige, she's finally gotten back to writing. She writes a memoir about raising Emmett and about creating a space in the world for him, and it becomes a absolute fluke bestseller. And Hollywood comes a-knockin' (ph) and says, we want to make this into a movie.
PFEIFFER: Meanwhile, the dad, Rob, has seen his success fade.
THOMAS: He's sort of going through the middle-aged male ego death of, like, I'm not as relevant and powerful as I used to be, which I know nothing about. Read nothing into this. I'm perfectly...
PFEIFFER: (Laughter) Not at all autobiographical.
THOMAS: I'm not ironic at all in that way. Not at all - please don't read into it too much. And he kind of hijacks the opportunity to be the screenwriter adapting his own wife's memoir. And it almost immediately derails, and this feel-good movie starts to almost destroy the family it's about.
PFEIFFER: And then, meanwhile, this other storyline deals with Emmett, a child with Down syndrome, trying to become independent, another child still in high school and feeling kind of forgotten by her busy parents whose focus is on their brother, which is another great recipe for tension. So talk about that storyline.
THOMAS: So in real life, my son Elliot - he's 18 now - he has a different syndrome called Jacobsen syndrome, and my daughter Celia, she's 9. And we've spent so many years in and around the disability community meeting other families, and it's just - there's a way in which the child who has a disability just becomes kind of the orbit. And you try so hard to give everybody equal attention, but there are moments where the medical needs and the educational needs and all of the different challenges with raising a kid with a disability, they overshadow things. And so I wanted - this book is told from all four points of view.
PFEIFFER: I really like that because not only do we get a different perspective on the same event, which gets at the book's title...
THOMAS: Yeah.
PFEIFFER: ..."That's Not How It Happened," but also it becomes a great device for humor, like how her husband when he, at one point, is rewriting the script, makes himself look like a hero.
THOMAS: Yeah.
PFEIFFER: And meanwhile, the wife felt like he hadn't really been contributing.
THOMAS: Yeah, he takes a passage she wrote - a very honest passage in her memoir that owns the fact that he was absent a lot, and he missed a huge and very scary medical appointment when Emmett was younger that resulted in Emmett getting an open-heart surgery. And when he takes her memoir and rewrites it into a screenplay, he adds himself into that scene. And she says, wait, you weren't actually there in real life. And he's like, well, the audience isn't going to like the dad character if he's not there. And she says, well, maybe the audience shouldn't like the dad character in that moment...
(LAUGHTER)
THOMAS: ...Because I kind of didn't like the dad character, namely you. It's not a character. It's you. And so there's this funny tug-of-war that happens. How do we all frame our stories? How does a family frame its story? And all four members of a family all think they're the main character in the family, right? We all think we're the main character of our own story. And of course, bringing it back to Darcy, who's the younger sister, she feels left out of this narrative. She says, I'm barely in my mom's memoir. My mom wrote a memoir about raising Emmett, and I'm hardly in it. And that's her journey in this book is finding her place in this family and in this world.
PFEIFFER: So, as you've touched on, there are definitely autobiographical features to this book, quite a bit of them. In some ways, I wondered if this was an apology to your spouse or at least a chance to explain yourself to your wife now you're at this point in your relationship. Was it that at all?
THOMAS: I feel like it's a chance to own how complicated the journey is because this is not my family, exactly. This is a work of fiction. These characters are different from me.
PFEIFFER: But tons of parallels.
THOMAS: But there's a lot of my life in here. My son was born between year two and three of "How I Met Your Mother," the show I co-created with Carter Bays, and we ran it all nine years. And there was - it was an impossible amount of content to wrap our brains around at once because between year two and three, my son was born. He did need open-heart surgery. He did have this rare syndrome that would result in lifelong disabilities and intellectual disabilities and challenges and therapies and what's his schooling going to be and so many different challenges that my wife was doing an amazing job juggling while I was running a TV show. I was in this transposition of driving from my home to work to create a sitcom, then I would drive home into this, like, hour-long medical drama that was our lives (laughter). We were in the NICU for six weeks. We - it was so strange to juggle those two worlds.
In this book, I try to own the failings of this character, Rob, who, you know, bears some resemblance to me, who just felt he had to go out there and earn enough money to provide for a lifetime of, you know, supporting Emmett. And that's how I think a lot of parents like me and my wife - you know, we look at the long view, and we think, how do we make this work forever...
PFEIFFER: Yeah.
THOMAS: ...For a child who might not be independent? And it's just - the sheet doesn't quite fit the bed. And not everybody can be everywhere. And one person has to let go of some career things, and one person has to let go of some parenting things. And the ways in which that fall short, those resentments build up, and you have to, at some point, face them and own them to work through them. And yeah, that was kind of a healing part of writing this book.
PFEIFFER: The book is very funny, I thought, but it also addresses serious societal issues, like how people with disabilities often struggle to find work because potential employers think they're not going to be good workers. So often they end up with low-pay jobs doing mindless repetitive tasks. But you write that we - here's your quote - "we're all only temporarily able-bodied." So you're basically arguing for more compassion. Talk about how you wish your book would change the way that employers view people with disabilities.
THOMAS: Yeah, in this book, Paige sees no good opportunities for Emmett after the point that all parents of kids with disabilities globally seem to refer to as the cliff. The cliff is the moment when education ends and sort - and the structure and shape of a kid or a teenager with disabilities ends, and now you have an adult with disabilities. And it's just this, like, tacit thing that when you get around a bunch of parents that are like us, they will refer to that as the cliff. It doesn't matter if they were from Australia or Kentucky or England. It's just universally acknowledged that's the cliff you fall off. And the cliff is very scary.
My goal with this book was to write a comedy about the cliff to make it less scary. We do not, as a society, seem to have answered this question. What does an adult life look like with disabilities? And you have to be very inventive and ingenious as a parent and as a person with disabilities to find your place in the world. And that's what Paige has done in this book, and the book within the book is her memoir writing about creating that answer for her son, right? She's trying to find what happens after the cliff.
PFEIFFER: Craig Thomas is the co-creator of the TV show "How I Met Your Mother," and his debut novel is "That's Not How It Happened." Thank you.
THOMAS: Thanks so much for having me, Sacha. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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