ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Theres a lot of buzz on your book so far.
I saw what you tweeted after the Ron Howard news was announced.
You have a really personal relationship to his work, right?
Credit: Anna Ty Bergman; Crown
My agent emails me and hes asking me some really vague questions about film and TV.
I guess he was trying to feel out my opinions before he dropped the hammer.
Then he was like, What if it was a movie directed by Ron Howard?
Im like, Well, the conversation is pretty much over.
I have been such a huge fan of his since I was a kid.
Apollo 13 and Backdraft were two of my favorite movies when I was a kid.
Ron Howard was one of the first directors that I could cite by name.
Talk about the idea behind this book.I could really trace it back to this one article.
They were getting dinged for taking sick days, or these algorithms.
You literally and physically you couldnt keep up; how demanding and tiring and exhausting the job was.
I remember thinking, Theres a book here, and filed it away.
Over time, I dumped new information into one file-folder and tried to keep this mother document of everything.
I tried to write the book three or four times and I could never crack it.
One day it kind of hit me.
Even though Im working insane hours and Im not seeing my wife, at least Im getting a paycheck.
People really will say that.
Maybe thats not the answer.
Maybe the answer is: Why should we take terrible jobs and accept it?
Bridging that gap really came down to finding the entryway of my own anger and experience.
I feel like I need to recharge the batteries a little bit.
And the other one that really sticks out to me is Margaret Atwood,The Handmaids Tale.
I thought it was so weird and so cool.
You have this Big Brother meets Big Business narrative running through here.
But at the end of the day, its all just data.
And data does not sit with you the way a story does because a story is about emotion.
Its about fear and anxiety and anger, but also things like love and hope and joy.
But Ive never worked in a chicken factory, so I dont know what that feels like.
Stories are pathways to empathy.
Youve worked in politics as a reporter and a communications director.
How did that experience inform your work as a novelist?It keyed me into a lot of things.
It certainly helped me from a research perspective.
I knew that if I had a question, I could probably figure out how to get the answer.
Theres a lot of stuff I couldnt get into the book but still helped inform it.
Not the chosen one.
Not the orator whos going to get a crowd worked up.
The person whos going to be like, Im just a cog in the machine.
How do you bring that person to a point of making the difficult or impactful choice?
