About this episode
Alan Anderson is a visionary ad man. That is, up until the morning he isn’t.
He blows the biggest account of his career, comes apart, and moves out to live off the land, the land being his backyard in suburban Greenwich, Connecticut. He sets up in the children’s playhouse. He goes barefoot. He uses the woods as a bathroom.
His timing couldn’t be worse. His wife Vivian is in the middle of a campaign to join the Queen Anne’s, Greenwich’s most selective women’s social group. Their two daughters are similarly going off the rails. One prefers drama to sports, which is not done in Greenwich. The other has started talking to animals. And Alan is emerging unshowered from the playhouse just as Vivian’s trying to make the best possible impression.
Alan Opts Out is a comedy about what it costs to keep up, and what’s left of a man and a family when they stop trying. It’s a New York Times best book of the summer, blurbed by Elizabeth Gilbert and Carl Hiaasen, and currently in development as an HBO series.
In this episode of Elena Meets the Author, Courtney talks about the luxury playhouse that sparked the whole idea, her frustration with overconsumption and the Stanley cup trend, and what it was like growing up around extreme wealth in Greenwich. We get into her past life as a brand strategist, how she developed compassion for Vivian over eleven drafts, and the unexpected joy of Alan’s lobster sidekick Lenny. She also talks about the Werner Herzog epigraph, taken from his 1982 film Fitzcarraldo, and what she wanted it to signal about the book’s tone. And she mentions Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer as a book she returned to just before publication, and why Christopher McCandless was on her mind throughout the writing.
Courtney’s previous novel Touch also comes up in conversation. She describes it as the book she would have written next, except it’s already written, and thinks it will resonate just as much now as Alan Opts Out. She’s also the author of the publishing guidebook Before and After the Book Deal and runs writing classes and resources at courtneymaum.com.