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Parenting and PT Cruisers: A Q&A with Kevin Wilson

By Isabelle McConville, Kevin Wilson / May 16, 2025 at 1:53 am

Families are messy — especially when your half siblings are scattered across the U.S. Kevin Wilson’s witty and wry voice is back in this hilarious and hopeful novel that takes us along on a cross-country adventure. Kevin joins us to talk about his latest novel, Run for the Hills.

Hardcover $25.99 ~~$28.99~~

Run for the Hills: A Novel

By Kevin Wilson

In Stock Online

Hardcover $25.99 ~~$28.99~~

An unexpected road trip across America brings a family together, in this raucous and moving new novel from the bestselling author of Nothing to See Here.

IM: Can you please set up the story of your new novel for us?

KW: Run for the Hills is about a young woman, Madeline Hill, who goes by the name Mad, who’s been living on a farm with her mom. Her dad ran off when she was 10, and one day, a PT Cruiser suddenly pulls up to the farm and she finds out that she has a half-brother who is 10 years older than her. He informs her that basically every 10 years their father starts a new family and completely reinvents his life. Reuben (her brother) asks her, ‘do you want to come with me? I’m going to travel across the country and find our other half siblings, and then we’re going to go confront our dad.’ They all start loading up into this car to search for their father, but they’re also trying to figure out what it means to have a family that they didn’t even know existed.

IM: And that car truly has a life of its own in this book. Can we talk about the car for a minute? I loved Mad’s fixation on it and how peeved she was that Rueben showed up in a rental PT Cruiser. How did you know that you wanted to have that PT Cruiser in the book? And why that model specifically?

KW: All the way back in 2002, my wife and I — who I was dating at the time — went to a wedding in Texas and we rented a PT Cruiser. It was such a strange looking car to me. It looked like a Dick Tracy car, like old and new at the same time. I didn’t really enjoy the experience. When I started to think about this book, I knew these characters were going to be in motion, and that’s rare for me. My characters usually don’t ever leave their house, so to get over that weird anxiety I had about writing it this way, I needed something ridiculous or fun for me to get them to move, and I thought, I’m going to use that PT cruiser. I knew I’d get something out of it if I put them in there.

IM: Where did this story really start for you?

“I wanted to explore that weird space between family and stranger.”

KW: It’s weird, because so many of my books come out of my previous books. I’ll be so focused on an individual story, that it isn’t until I’m done when I think, oh, there’s something there that I really love and I kind of wish I had more time with it. In my previous novel, Now is Not the Time to Panic, the main character is a writer. She writes YA novels, and she ended up writing her adult debut which was not well received at all. It was about a young woman whose father has died, and she is driving across the country to pick up all of her half-sisters who have the same name as her to attend the funeral. I don’t know why I gravitated to something that I explicitly said was a poorly received book in my novel, but I kept thinking about that, and I couldn’t stop. The idea of knowing you’re connected to these people, but not quite sure how; I wanted to explore that weird space between family and stranger. I always know I’ve got to go back and try to try to write the thing if I can’t stop thinking about it.

IM: In the novel, we meet Mad first, Chuck’s second child — though, she doesn’t know that yet. She’s living and working on an organic farm in a familiar town. How did you find yourself back in Coalfield, Tennessee?

“There was something so transformative about seeing my kids experience the same spaces that I had at their age.”

KW: It’s just so calming for me. Almost everything I’ve written at some point is set in Coalfield. It is an invented place — it’s a fantastical place where I can place every single story I’ve ever written, and it seems to morph and change with each new book. There actually is a real Coalfield, and it’s not geographically where I say it is. This drives my copy editor crazy! I live where I grew up, I still live in the same county. There is something so wondrous about this place that, at first, may have seemed adversarial to me. I wasn’t sure how I fit into it, and I didn’t necessarily want to leave, but I did want to figure out why this place didn’t seem to hold me in the way that I wanted it to. When I came back, had kids and put down roots in a different way, there was something so transformative about seeing my kids experience the same spaces that I had at their age. It’s always comforting to go back to this place in my mind, and I wanted Mad to feel connected to this place, even if it’s where her father left them. Even if her family has separated, she still has something solid there. Maybe that’s why she’s been afraid to leave, because this is the thing that has sustained her.

IM: I also want to talk a bit about Rube; he’s a 40-something mystery writer who enlists Mad’s help for a cross-country road trip to confront their dad. He was such a compelling character to me. He was the very first child that Charles abandoned. How did you make the decision to have him show up after introducing us to Mad and what really helped you find his voice? Also, I have to say I appreciated the little Barnes & Noble shout out you included in the book!

“I think the true mark of success is having your book be sold in a Barnes & Noble.”

KW: I think once I knew that there were going to be all these children, the one thing that I was afraid of was that they’re all just versions of the same person, you know? In some ways that’s unavoidable, that’s genetics and family, but I knew Mad was going to be this person who is tied to the Earth, someone who is hard working and quiet. I didn’t think she would be the kind of person who, even if she discovered all this news about her father on her own, that she would be the one to chase him down. I knew I needed someone before her, and Rube is a little more expansive, maybe a little more manic. I like that playfulness in his voice; he definitely is more interested in the notion of family than Mad might be on the surface. Also, he’s a writer, so I knew that if I could get Rube to think about it as a story, he wouldn’t let go of it. I needed that kind of mania and energy and desire to write the story as it happens, to get the engine of the story moving. I needed Rube to be a little happier, a little more willing to put himself out there than Mad would be. Then you would get this kind of dynamic that I could start to figure out.

Also, as someone who grew up in the 90s and into the 2000s and has always loved reading, I think the true mark of success is having your book be sold in a Barnes & Noble. Rube, who is really trying to impress his sister, is just praying that his books will be in that bookstore because it’ll show her that he’s made something that he’s proud of.

IM: What really interests me is this idea of legacy and inheritance that the kids are all grappling with. Charles had these fleeting habits and interests that he would build into an entire life and personality that he eventually would abandon and reinvent, again and again. I think it’s so interesting that you had each of the kids carry on these habits, whether they really wanted to or not, because those are the things their father shaped their childhoods with. Like you said earlier, Mad is connected to the land because that’s where her father left her and it’s all he really taught her how to do. Rube became a mystery writer, just like the version of the father he knew, who was an unsuccessful mystery author. Their half-sister Pep is a basketball star, and we find out Charles was her coach in childhood. Their other half-brother Tom always knew Chuck to have a camera in his hand, so he declares himself to be a low-budget indie movie maker. They all carry on this false legacy of the father they thought they knew.

“How much of me is a product of the people who made me and shaped me? How much of me is my own self?”

KW: I think that’s the thing any kid thinks about, you know, how much of me is a product of the people who made me and shaped me? How much of me is my own self? That was always a question I was grappling with. Then, when you grow up and have your own kids, you’re like, how much of me is shaping them? How much is too much? You want them to understand what you love and hopefully it’ll mean something to them too. All of these kids have excelled in ways that their father couldn’t, and part of it is not necessarily because they’re better than him, it’s more that they held onto him in this way and they had a kind of obsessiveness that their father didn’t. I think one of the main things I’m trying to figure out is how you can be made and shaped, and how it affects the trajectory of your life. It’s what you choose to hold onto that makes your identity. I was always thinking about how these kids are the best version of what their father couldn’t be and how bad it sucks that he never got to see it. He’s not there to witness the thing that he had hoped he could become.

IM: Chuck himself was a great character to read. Don’t get me wrong — everything he did was really, really terrible — he left his kids, he lied to everyone and all-around ruined a lot of lives all at once. At the same time, there was a point where I felt that I could maybe understand his need to feel like he had the freedom to start over whenever he wanted? We only have this one lifetime, so what are you going to do with it? Do you want to be a farmer? Do you want to be a basketball coach? Do you want to be a successful novelist? What do you think about that? I’m wondering if I’m giving him too much sympathy.

“Books have always done that for me; they pull me into characters that I would have repelled in real life.”

KW: I don’t think so, because this is really a testament to the power of writing and reading. In real life, I am incredibly anxious, and defensive, and worried when I step out into the world, and I don’t think I’m always great at giving people the benefit of the doubt. What I try to do in my work in some small way is to try to dive into the complexity of people and to realize that my initial response isn’t necessarily wrong, it’s just that the more information you add to it, the more you might see parts of yourself in it. That can also be a little scary. Books have always done that for me; they pull me into characters that I would have repelled in real life. I don’t think he’s a good guy and I’m not interested in likability, but in a sense, I think you’re right, and I do feel a connection to him in some way. My publisher at Ecco said I wrote a book about all of my favorite things. Chuck represents so many of my own interests. I am a writer, but I love basketball, I love film, I’m so interested in the landscape of this place where I grew up. If I had had another chance, maybe I could have explored more of these interests. That’s what makes me love Chuck a little bit, because he wanted to try as many things as possible. I get it.

IM: Yeah, that’s really where I was at while reading, because I found myself thinking a lot about his character and thinking about well, why can’t you do all of it? Just don’t do things the way he did them — we can do without all of the lies and abandonment.

KW: At the start of the book, I’m just ready to beat him up. The longer I spent with those kids remembering their dad, the harder it was to be as angry.

IM: You also touch on the craft of writing itself a bit with Rube’s character, since he is a novelist. I have a quote here that I really loved: “Most stories, he decided, could write themselves if you knew enough to let them happen the way they needed to.” Would you say that’s your philosophy?

KW: I think it is. The loveliness of reading and telling stories is that at first, there’s so much uncertainty about where you’re going. If you find that book that you love or you’re writing the story that you love, I do think there’s less resistance. There’s the feeling that you’re moving toward the thing that makes sense. We don’t always get that in real life. In stories, that’s the thing that I love; not that it ends the way that I want it to, but that I can feel myself giving over to where the story is taking me. There’s so many times in life where I resist everything, and so a good story is the moment where I totally give myself over to it and I’ll go wherever it wants me to go.

IM: I’d also love to talk about how you use humor in your writing, because it’s not the first time you’ve done it. I love your books because I know I’m always getting something really well-rounded and heartfelt, but I’ll also get a laugh out of it. Rube even touches on this himself, when he thinks about reading his dad’s unpublished mysteries. He says something along the lines of, ‘I know we’re trying to solve a murder here, but it can still be fun.’ What made you want to be that kind of writer?

“I love playfulness, I love not being precious about the material and trying to win the reader over with a little bit of playfulness and silliness.”

KW: So much of writing, of art and life is that some of what you do is because of what you think you can’t do. Growing up where I grew up and living the kind of life that I’ve led, I just never felt like I had the capacity to write something too serious, or some huge Great American novel. That stuff felt so beyond me, but what I knew I could do was lightness. I love playfulness, I love not being precious about the material and trying to win the reader over with a little bit of playfulness and silliness. If I can win them over that way, then that weakness that I think I have where I can’t touch on the heavier stuff, if I can get the reader on my side, then gradually I can let that that heaviness get into the story. I go light and I can turn it dark if I need to, but I always know that I can come back to lightness. It’s a way to allow myself to tell the stories that I want to tell without feeling overwhelmed.

IM: Lastly, who are you reading now?

KW: Hot Air by Marcy Dermansky. Marcy is a writer that I’ve admired from the release of her very first books. There’s a lot of ways that I’ve modeled some of my writing on her. She is fearless and she creates characters who, on the surface, might make you worry about your ability to connect with them, but she’s so good at showing you not necessarily that you should love these characters, but she gives you some insight into the way they’re made, and what makes them tick. And she’s funny! Hot Air has the wildest premise, and I just love it. It’s such a great book.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.