The Book of George: A Novel

"There’s a quote on the book from The Washington Post that says: “If you’re honest, you’ll admit that you’ve raised George or dated George or, worse, you are George.” I definitely think I might have done the first two. This is almost like The Diary of a Nobody : George is a sort of everyman, a hapless figure who is drifting through his life, getting into scrapes almost by default because he doesn’t have the sense of agency to get out of them. He misses his dad’s death because he has gone on a road trip by mistake with his friends. He’s in a relationship that he’s not very interested in because he can’t get the motivation to leave it. He’s a figure who is detached from his own life. Again, it’s very American, but in a way that is recognisable, I think, to everybody. He’s an everyman for the 2020s, I guess. There are wonderful little things, like he has a panic attack at work and has to go to hospital, where he realises that he has forgotten to get health insurance, so he gets a huge bill for this, and so in response to being frustrated by this hospital bill, he punches a wall, breaks his hand, and gets another hospital bill. There’s a very sitcom aspect to it—a very ordinary guy who gets himself into situations because he can’t be bothered to get himself out of them. It’s very character driven. He’s surrounded by women who are smarter than he is, but he seems to have an easier path through life. It’s very witty in how it’s written."