Novelist Tom Perrotta on white privilege, gender identity, and Tracy Flick 20 years later

Tom Perrotta’s books have become one of our most consistently enjoyable dissections of a very specific sort of America — upper-class, wryly comic, and white. Even when his books dig into a world where something very much like the Rapture has happened (as in The Leftovers), they take place long enough after the catastrophic event for things to be reverting to the status quo. That makes him terrific at picking apart the foibles of our modern world, and it’s also made him a frequent target for Hollywood adaptation. His Little Children became an Oscar-nominated film in 2005, while The Leftovers turned into a tremendous HBO series. It’s Election, however, that won him the most fame. A book the author had largely given up hope of seeing published, Election found its way into Hollywood’s hands and became a classic 1999 film that helped propel Reese Witherspoon to stardom and cemented Perrotta as a novelist to watch. Now, nearly 20 years on from Election’s 1998 publication, Perrotta’s latest book, Mrs. Fletcher, tackles lots of meaty topics, from issues of white privilege to gender and sexual identity, from going to college to the ways the internet has changed all of our lives. They’re places many novelists fear to tread, but Perrotta tackles them with his same command of tone and sly sensibility. He joined Todd this week to talk about finding his way into the heads of characters very different from himself, seeing your book turning up on the big screen, and reading some of his most famous books all these years later. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices