Interview

Joshua Ferris talks about his first novel, Then We Came to the End, set in a Chicago ad agency during the business downturn at the end of the 1990s.

Tell us a little about your writing background up to this point

I lived in Key West as a kid, and there I started writing imitation Alfred Hitchcock stories — not "The Birds" but, given Key West's coastal view, "The Crabs." Many good people, boaters and sunbathers, were eaten alive as Hitchcock turned in his grave. Then in college, at the University of Iowa, I started writing stories again — again imitations but with sights set a little higher, or at least more literary: Nabokov, Barthelme. Shortly after college I got a job in advertising where I wrote ad copy for national brands, which taught me a good many things. And after my time in advertising I enrolled in the MFA program at the University of California, Irvine, where I started Then We Came to the End.


So you had experience working in an ad agency. Is that how you arrived at the setting of your novel?

Ad agencies can be a lot of fun. Creative departments are full of toys and games and wacky surprises, and throwing a Nerf football down the hallway to release tension isn't immediate cause for walking papers. I wanted my characters to have the freedom to do certain things that wouldn't fly, say, in a law firm. ...