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 being someone else. The second is a man who can’t s

See Full Page