It's the Late Show Potshow with Stephen Colbert.

Jason, thanks for being here.

You are a best-selling author of two poetry collections and four novels,

the last of which won the National Book Award.

But you're here today for your newest novel, People Like Us. How would you describe it in one sentence?

Ooh, one sentence. It is the story of two authors, one traveling across the U.S., one traveling across Europe, discovering what America and belonging mean to them.

A lot of people are calling it metaffiction, and much of that is because you

started it intending it to be a memoir. Right. What happened? I'm just bad at writing memoir,

apparently. I think that's what happened. So it began as I won the National Book Award

after a hell of a book. I started trying to write about what I was seeing as I was

touring around. Touring is a very frenetic, very crazy, which is a strange thing to do. I'll just say it that way.

And I try to capture some of that feeling of strangeness and not belonging and the oddity of the action of traveling and touring.

I was trying to capture that in a memoir. And the more I got deeper into the memoir, the more complex things became, the more I realized that I just didn't have the tools personally to tackle this. And I figured these two characters who I'd worked with before, they suddenly kind of showed up one day and they felt very much at home. I felt like I realized that I could use those two characters to have a different conversation than I did in the previous book.

And that's the only reason I stuck with it.

Like I knew that I didn't want to rehash the same topics.

I had to have something new to discuss.

And I did.

And these two characters were a great foil for that.

Do you think of people like us more as a sequel to Hell of a Book or as a standalone novel that shares characters?

So in the same way the book defies genre and things like that or tries to, I call it the

standalone sequel, which makes no sense at all, but that's kind of what I refer to it as,

where it does all those things. Like, it is the same two characters from Hell of a Book.

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