Tristan 4 America follows a laid-off tech executive grieving the loss of his career and camaraderie, whose growing anger at American politics drives him toward an ambitious but highly impractical plan. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

This is a “write what you know”–style book, in the sense that, after that first pandemic summer, I retired from a Sales Operations job in Silicon Valley, and I have for some time been experiencing anger at the state of American politics, an anger that runs through my brain constantly. In fact, this exchange between Tristan, the protagonist, and his wife Cindy, from page 38 of the book, fits me perfectly:

“It’s the politics, honey,” he said. “The politics of the moment. It just fucking pisses me off so much. You’ve seen me when I get exercised about it.”

“Well, we haven’t lost any friends yet, but yeah, we’ve come pretty close.”

“Yeah, and for every one of those times I just sort of lose it, there are hours and hours of just running over all this shit in my addled brain. It’s driving me shithouse.”

Beyond this, on page 22, Tristan first becomes aware of the amounts of money even failed presidential candidates can pull in, a realization that gives him the idea to run himself. In that passage, the “latest Republican challenger, a former southern state governor” was rather transparently inspired by former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley. I distinctly recall when Haley announced her candidacy, with the revelation that she had, at the time of her announcement, already raised two million dollars for her campaign.

So the inspiration was literally what was happening in real-time as I was developing the story in my head. I had been working on a sequel to my first book, The Cyclone Release, and I was pretty stuck, partly because the 2024 campaign was in full swing and I was constantly getting distracted by the latest outrage. So I decided to put the sequel down and write Tristan 4 America instead. The Cyclone Release took me somewhere between 11 and 13 years to write. Tristan 4 America took me three.

Did you begin with the political satire, the characters, or the idea of someone searching for purpose after losing his career?

I’m not ashamed to admit that I created the character of Tristan to speak for me. In fact, in my pitch to publishers, I described the story as an “unabashedly progressive manifesto.” As such, I definitely started with the character of Tristan, after which the whole thing just became so damn much fun. Creating the characters of Shonda, Nance, and Laz just set the table for this great line of irreverent banter—the kind of thing that is really common in the kinds of high-performing Silicon Valley teams I was accustomed to working in during my career. So, as far as the satire is concerned, I was just having a blast doing the writing on this one. And as for the conflict of someone searching, late in life, for purpose, that was a natural conflict that just fit the story like a glove, and just happens to also be something many, many people struggle with, particularly late in life. I kind of have to pinch myself when I reflect on the writing of this book. I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to have that much fun writing a book again, and I think I came away with something intriguing and thought-provoking.

Tristan is both sympathetic and flawed. How did you balance his ambition, frustration, humor, and vulnerability?

Man, this is a great question to think about. I guess the only honest way to answer it would be to admit that I write fiction partly to engage my own fantasies. As a person, a writer, who would never have the stones to do what Tristan does, to stand in front of audiences, some of them innately hostile, and say the things he does—to say nothing of running for President of the United States—I am able to create that person and those scenarios in fiction. We novelists live vicariously through our characters, so I created a character who has a balance of qualities that I most decidedly do not have, but really wish I did. So the answer to the question of how I balanced those qualities in Tristan is that I did so by creating a person I personally would love to be. One of the first comments from one of my first readers was, “I’m not sure I like Tristan very much.” And I actually loved that because I never want any protagonist to be 100% lovable and sympathetic. I don’t want that because that’s not real. That’s not how humans work. We all have a dark side, and we’re all molded to some degree by the circumstances we find ourselves in. And first and foremost, I wanted Tristan to be real. I wanted readers to recognize him in themselves and the people around them, and I think all of his flaws and virtues accomplish that quite well.

What do you hope readers think about after finishing Tristan 4 America? 

We live in ignorant times. Everything has been dumbed down so thoroughly that the unthinkable has now happened: we have managed to elect a complete narcissistic buffoon as the “leader of the free world.” And I think one of the results of that general tilt towards ignorance is that intelligent people are reticent to wield their intelligence in their everyday lives. I’ll admit that I personally suffer from this. There’s a fear of not being heard, or of embarrassing oneself by not getting the facts quite right, or of appearing insincere or inauthentic. And so, I hope readers will see in Tristan a person who has no compunctions, a person who is not just willing, but anxious, even inspired, to wield an intelligence that has been laying dormant throughout a rewarding, but somewhat superficial career in Silicon Valley. I of course want people to learn from the facts Tristan promotes in his diatribes, but more than that, I want them to be inspired to, as Shonda describes it early in the book, “bring the funk” just like he does. In fact, I’m hoping the book will change me, and that I’ll do a better job of bringing the funk in my own life—beyond that funk I’m bringing through Tristan’s voice, of course.

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