Jonathan Miles Biography, Books, and Similar Authors

Interview

Jonathan Miles discusses the similarities between his novels, how to go off the grid when everyone's plugged in, and what "stuff" means when it comes to people's lives.

Your debut novel, Dear American Airlines, consisted of one man's rant against life, disguised as a consumer complaint letter. Want Not, your new novel, seems like a striking departure; it's an expansive third-person novel with almost a dozen major characters. What were the origins of Want Not?

It began with an image, as most stories do for me; a mental film clip that jolts you sideways into an alternate fictional universe and in some sense strands you there. For spoiler reasons I won't say any more about the image, except that a character soon grew from it—a character who hosted a kind of party in my head inviting all sorts of strange, troubled people.But along the way she (the character) also seeded an idea in my head, an idea about our tangled relationship with stuff. About all the physical debris that we lug through our lives, and the emotional ties we develop for that debris. Following that idea led me straightaway to the place that much if not all of that stuff sooner or later goes: the trashcan. So I decided to try to tell the stories of all those people crowding my head from the perspective of their stuff—their disposed stuff, most of all. I rifled through their trash. I found all their secrets....