“People Like Us” by Jason Mott. Dutton via AP

How does one follow up writing “A Hell of a Book” that wins the National Book Award? If you’re Jason Mott, you write a sort-of, not-really, by all legal terms fictionalized — according to the forward — autobiographical story about what life is like as a semi-famous writer.

Or actually you write two viewpoints: one about a writer running away from his roots that seem to be choking the life out of him and the other about a writer running to help soothe the roots that made him.

The first, a middle-aged man who wrote said award-winning novel, is constantly misrecognized because writers, even award-winning ones, don’t have status like film stars. Sometimes he goes along with it and he agrees with them, for good reason; there is safety in bei

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