Ask any aspiring author, and they’ll tell you Jason Mott is living the dream. He was working as a customer service rep at Verizon—“getting yelled at on the phone, all day, every day,” he says—when he sold his debut novel, The Returned, in 2012. It was then adapted for television as Resurrection, which ran for two seasons on ABC.
“I got the Willie Wonka golden ticket to a certain degree,” Mott says via Zoom from his home in Bolton, N.C. “I was an overnight success, only 10 years in the making.”
The idea for his debut novel came to him in a dream: his mother, whom he lost a decade earlier due to complications from a stroke,
had come back to visit him. “It was me sorting through some grief that I hadn’t sorted through,” he says.
The story—about the reappearance of the dead—touched a nerve with readers, and that, it seems, is Mott’s specialty. Case in point: his 2021 bestseller Hell of a Book, which follows an unnamed Black author on a book tour, explores the African American experience
and earned Mott the National Book Award for fiction, among other accolades.
“That’s me, just checking things off the writerly wish list,” he says, laughing. “I think the expectation was that it was going to be
this intimidating, terrifying thing. All that pressure. But thankfully, I have a very good therapist. I didn’t plan on climbing Everest,
but I somehow found myself on top of Everest all of a sudden. Nowhere to go but down.”
Despite the pressure and expectations, Mott says writing People Like Us—his follow-up to Hell of a Book, out in August from Dutton—was actually liberating. “Because who cares? I still got a National Book Award in my closet. I’ve had such a bounty of career highlights that I feel like desiring anything more is being greedy and, quite frankly, a bit vain. I’ve decided to let myself not worry about that.
I decided to just let myself tell the story I want to tell in the way that I want to tell it. To be creative and have fun.”
People Like Us, which charts the lives of two Black writers and explores the crisis of gun violence in America, serves as a sequel to Hell of a Book, but also lives in a very different moment. “It’s a book about letting go of the history you carry with you, and what that costs you,” Mott says. “And given these times, it’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot. We cling to these ideas of a place, a country, something to call home. But what is that costing us?”
Born and raised in Bolton, Mott grew up a library kid, devouring books, especially anything that had to do with mythology.
When he discovered John Gardner’s Grendel at 14, he became a writer, too. “It was an absolutely amazing moment, because it set my brain off, trying to deconstruct how it all works,” he says. “Who is the villain? Maybe the bad guy isn’t the bad guy. That just melted my brain. I said, I want to make someone else feel this way one day as a writer.”
Mott, a self-proclaimed “hipster comic book nerd before it was cool,” got his BA in fiction and his masters in poetry, both from the University of North Carolina Wilmington. “I didn’t know you could write poetry about superheroes, but it was mind-blowing,” he says, citing poets like Bryan Dietrich and Lucille Clifton. “I became obsessed with writing sonnets and did my masters on sonnets and superheroes. The kid who loved mythology got to be an adult nerd who was researching it deeply and making all those connections between myth and superheroes.”
After graduating in 2003, he spent about a decade writing short stories and poetry, publishing two collections of poems, 2009’s We Call This Thing Between Us Love and 2011’s Hide Behind Me. He also had four or five unpublished novels—“They were terrible, terrible books,” he says—before he started writing The Returned. His debut bestseller was followed by 2014’s The Wonder of All Things, 2018’s The Crossing, and Hell of a Book.
By that point, Mott says, the stakes were low. “I didn’t have a contract, so I could just play and let it evolve. It was an amalgam
of concepts, a tough pitch, I think. A risk. But it paid off.”
In People Like Us, one author is scheduled to speak at a school in the wake of a deadly shooting, while another is on a book tour in Europe and gets an offer he can’t quite refuse: to stay there, under the protection of a wealthy patron, and be set for life—but only if he abandons his life in U.S. It’s something Mott has considered himself. “America persistently reminds you that it doesn’t really care for you, regardless of what contributions you’ve made, if you’re not white, male, cis—all of it,” he says. “Eventually you kind of start thinking to yourself, Maybe I just don’t want to stay here. Why stay where I’m not welcome?”
One of the themes that permeates the book is the lack of safety most Americans feel these days—especially people of color. “I get to bear witness,” Mott says, “and that’s a big deal. I think that’s the biggest part about it. I’ve had readers cry, telling me very personal parts of their story, and we have these very intimate, powerful moments.”
It’s one of the things that keeps Mott humble. Another was the sudden death of his mentor. “He had been such a formative part of my writing journey,” Mott says. “And it made me realize, I’m at the age that you have to start paying some stuff forward.” So, in 2022, after he won the National Book Award, he decided he might like to teach and applied for a position at his alma mater. Spoiler alert: the University of North Carolina Wilmington hired its homegrown NBA winner.
Mott’s been teaching for two years now. “It’s been an absolute blast watching my students develop as writers and remembering what it’s like to be on that part of the journey,” he says. “The insecurity, the worry, the feeling of discovery when something finally clicks into place. But there’s also something fun about recognizing that, like, I’m not there anymore. I am further on the timeline, and I’ve grown, so I can help them avoid some pitfalls that I got into.”
But Mott admits that success—and living the writerly dream—comes with its own pressures. And more than ever, he says, publishing is a tough game. “A lot of universities are losing their creative writing departments, libraries are losing funding, books are being banned. There are a lot of pendulum swings in history, but I’m curious how it plays out long-term.”
Thanks to his students, Mott is optimistic. “Today’s kids get a bad rap,” he says. “But as someone who engages with them every day, it’s amazing to me how well they are managing, how much they can bounce back, in the face of Covid, an insane administration—these headwinds that we never had to deal with. They’re active and they care, and they’re becoming activists. It keeps me hopeful.”
Sona Charaipotra is a journalist, editor, and the author of six books.
