Los Angeles Magazine Interview with Peter Mehlman

Excerpt:"You have spent most of your life crafting a career in journalism and television writing. What inspired the plunge into fiction? Not that I ever had goals, but writing full sentences always looked like it would be my career track. Frankly, Seinfeld was a detour. It was a fantastic detour—a thrilling, mind-blowing, eye-opening, grossly overpaying detour—but a detour nonetheless. When the exit ramp off TV finally showed up, the thought of making nouns and verbs agree with each other again was irresistible. Suddenly, living in real America as opposed to fictional New York prompted a flood of ideas for essays and articles. Anything fascinating or annoying turned into a thousand words, until one fascinating/annoying piece of Americana turned into 382 pages. Making the leap to fiction was pretty unexpected. In fact, I was 30 pages into it before realizing I was writing a novel." For the full interview, click here: lamag.com