Bathing With JFK follows a bored Houston lawyer whose youthful fascination with John F. Kennedy has left him longing for the kind of extraordinary, consequential life he imagines JFK led. What inspired the idea for this book, and where did Austin Grant first come from?

While much of the chaos captured in the book was manufactured, the bored lawyer/JFK-adoration parts were real. It is sort of where I was back then. When one is young, personal limitations that seem so self-evident in later years don’t even make a blip on the screen. Like Austin, in my 30s I was hoping for an escape of some sort, and starting Bathing With JFK seemed a potential exit route. Though, as is usually the case in life, it didn’t come to fruition until decades later, when I no longer needed an escape. Life.

The campaign in the novel is chaotic, excessive, and often ridiculous, but it also exposes how political campaigns actually operate. What aspects of political culture were you most interested in satirizing?

Primarily the difference between what a politician says in front of a camera and what they say behind it. I have known a few of them, and my advice is that if there is one you particularly look up to, avoid getting to know them.

Martin is one of the novel’s most loyal and compelling characters. What does Martin provide Austin that Austin cannot provide himself?

Martin provides Austin with a sense of perspective and a view of the future that is longer than the life of the present cocktail. I have had a friend much like Martin for over 50 years who, at appropriate junctures, has guided me and chided me. Austin’s clumsy expressions of love for his friend wrote themselves, as I’ve had many such feelings in my own life. (Although one of the inside, practical jokes of the book is that my real-life Martin was the one always meeting the girls while I stood around and for the most part watched.)

What does “living a big life” mean to you now, and has writing this novel changed your own understanding of what makes a life consequential?

Ironically, now in my 60s, living a big life means living a small one: fewer people, fewer events, fewer ambitions. As far as a consequential life, I’d go with surrounding yourself with the right people and seeing things, especially difficult things, through.

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