Hey, it's Empire's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. It's rare to hear how big awards

change authors. Often when writers are asked about winning a Pulitzer or something, they say something

pat like, oh, it was nice, it was an honor, and so on. But in Jason Mott's new novel, we might

finally get some real answers. The book is called

People Like Us, and it's a bit of metafiction into the life of an author, including what it's

like to win a fancy award. Mott won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2021, and in this

interview with NPR's Asia Roscoe, he talks about how this book was almost a memoir,

but writing in fiction gave him just enough wiggle room if he was feeling a bit too exposed.

That's ahead.

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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.

If I wrote a story about dinosaurs and spaceships, someone would be like, were you that dinosaur on page 97?

I feel like that happened to you.

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?

For the record, I know my lines in this particular scene pretty well. Yeah, I say, sure thing.

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