Alan Opts Out: A Guest Post by Courtney Maum

When Alan’s oat-milk-driven career falls apart, he decides to live off the land in his Connecticut backyard. This sparks a witty and hilarious family dispute, though everyone else seems to think Alan might be onto something. Read on for an exclusive essay from author Courtney Maum on writing Alan Opts Out. 

The day I got the news that my daughter’s elementary school was shutting down and her education would fall to me and my husband, I went into my backyard and lay down on the grass. Adding the identity of “homeschool teacher” to the ones I was already laboring under (author, advertising executive, mother, wife, Virgo with a short temper but a solution for everything) flattened me. I lay on the ground for so long that an Amazon delivery person came and dropped off a package, elegantly ignoring the possibly dead person on the lawn.

I had to get off the grass eventually, and when I did, I had an idea for a novel. An advertising executive botches the biggest pitch of his career and is so thrown by this failure that he decides to opt out of capitalism completely, moving into a neglected playhouse in the family’s yard. He won’t apprise his wife of this. He will not tell his daughters. He’ll just start living off the property’s 0.4 acres of land, refusing to tell anyone (including his employees) when he’ll return to work.

The voice of Alan Anderson came to me immediately. After twenty years in advertising, I knew exactly what happened in the conference rooms where brand strategies were planned, where logo rebrands were chartered, I knew the kinds of ludicrous taglines that were suggested for new products before something sensible was landed on. And as a workaholic, I also knew how to write a fast-paced voice. What I didn’t know was how to keep such a voice up over the duration of a novel, given that Alan’s character arc would have him sitting in the yard, reconsidering his priorities. Fast-paced in thought, maybe: but not in action points.

I knew I wanted to include the perspective of Alan’s wife Vivian, to whom the emotional and physical labor of Alan’s “opt out” would fall, but I didn’t want the book to be a ‘he said/she said’ squabble between spouses. I wanted something larger, rounder: how to get the whole world into a character’s back yard?

Enter the Greek chorus. Behind my work desk, I keep a collection of the books that have most inspired me, and Jeffrey Eugenides “The Virgin Suicides” (where the adolescent male neighbors of the girls at the book’s center drive the ‘royal we’ perspective) sits in a place of pride. What if I had the members of the gated community where the Andersons live weigh in in some way? I played with giving monologues to different residents, but it made the book too choppy and dissipated the humor. An online visit to my town’s community forum gave me the idea I needed to make the novel work. I’d intersperse Alan and Vivian’s chapters with updates from “Eyes on Belleport!” so we could learn about Alan’s escapades from the neighbors’ point of view.

I was delighted with this solution—it allowed me to enlarge Alan and Vivian’s world without sacrificing the central plot point, which was Alan’s decampment to the yard. This narrative tool worked even better once I realized that the neighbors weren’t going to react to Alan’s time-out in the ways I originally thought. It would have been easy for community members to judge and deride Alan’s change in lifestyle, but instead, his reprioritization inspires the neighbors to reflect on what really matters in their own lives.