Interview

Jonathan Tropper discusses his novel This Is Where I Leave You in a video interview and a text Q&A...

A Conversation with Jonathan Tropper about his 2010 novel This is Where I Leave You

What inspired you to write a book about a fairly secular family observing a traditional Hebrew mourning ritual? Did this situation or premise motivate you to write the book, or was it Judd Foxman's distinctive voice that developed first?

This novel was always first and foremost Judd's book. As a matter of fact, I was writing his story before the idea of the shiva ever occurred to me. I wanted to tell the story of a man who loses everything that he thought defined who he was; his marriage, his career, his home. For me, it was going to be a very intimate look at one man's rock bottom. But then, around a hundred pages in, I wrote a chapter where Judd goes to see his nuclear family - for his father's seventieth birthday, actually. And in writing Judd's siblings and mother, I found that the novel came alive in a way it hadn't up until then. So I decided I had to turn the novel over to them. But what would make a guy in Judd's situation go spend any significant amount of time with his ...