Poured Over: Tom Perrotta on Tracy Flick Can’t Win

“Tracy never went away. So yes, you can say I’m bringing her back, but the culture kept her in circulation in a way that was really interesting to me, and at times a little alienating. It’s like you create a character and, suddenly, she’s played brilliantly by Reese Witherspoon, and in a sense, that becomes the public’s image of the character—and I love that performance as much as anybody. But then Tracy got picked up by political journalists and by the internet as a kind of shorthand for an overly ambitious woman … In a sense she became a kind of touchstone and a shorthand and sometimes a bit of a stereotype, caricature, whatever.”

Tracy Flick Can’t Win is the first time Tom Perrotta (Election, Little Children, The Leftovers, Mrs. Fletcher) has revisited a character from one of his bestselling novels, and his timing couldn’t be better. Tom joins us on the show to talk about comic (and counterintuitive) openers, why he returned to Tracy’s orbit, how our own stories change over time, mental gymnastics, why he doesn’t see himself as a satirist, adapting his work for the screen and much more with Poured Over’s host, Miwa Messer.

Featured Books:
Tracy Flick Can’t Win by Tom Perrotta
Election by Tom Perrotta

Poured Over is produced and hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang. Follow us here for new episodes Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays).

A full transcript of this episode is available here:

B&N: I’m Miwa Messer, I’m the producer and host of Poured Over and Tom Perrotta is with us today. And of course, you know his name from all of the bestselling books, some of which had been turned into films, and some of which have been turned into HBO series like Mrs. Fletcher and The Leftovers. But more importantly, we’re back with Tracy Flick from Election because Tom’s new novel is Tracy Flick Can’t Win. And I am so excited to talk to Tom about this book, but also for readers to experience Tracy’s adult life because I don’t think it’s what she expected. Tom, thank you so much for joining us.

Tom Perrotta: Thank you so much for having me, Miwa.

B&N: So, you know, we’ve been huge fans of your work at B&N for a really long time, because Bad Haircut was a Discover pick back in the day, this is a really, really long time ago. But Election came out in ’98 as a novel, and I when did the film come out?

TP: ’99. So it was a very quick turnover. In fact, the book was published because a movie was coming. So it was actually optioned as an unpublished manuscript.

B&N: Which I didn’t know until I was researching the show. But why bring back Tracy Flick? Now, I mean, she’s a great character, and what you’ve done with her is amazing, but why bring her back now?

TP: The first thing is that Tracy never went away. So yes, you can say I’m bringing her back. But the culture kept her in circulation in a way that was really interesting to me, and at times a little alienating, you know, it’s like you create a character. And, you know, suddenly, she’s played brilliantly by Reese Witherspoon. And, in a sense, that becomes the public’s image of the character, and I love that performance as much as anybody. But then Tracy got picked up by political journalists and, and by the Internet as a kind of shorthand for an overly ambitious woman. And so I would hear, you know, my character being compared to any number of politicians over the past 20 years. Whether it was Hillary Clinton most famously, more recently, Kirsten Gillibrand, Senator of New York, at least a fan, a congresswoman from New York, Sarah Palin, that was a you know, just an odd experience to have, you know, my character, not be my character anymore. In a sense, she became a kind of touchstone, and a shorthand and sometimes a bit of a stereotype, caricature, whatever. So, that was there was always something like kind of just, you know, bothering me a little bit about this way that Tracy had kind of grown beyond the book. And that’s great. I mean, a writer has to love that and on one hand, but on another, I felt like, Oh, that’s not my Tracy, like, sometimes I couldn’t really recognize my Tracy. And then the real triggering event, I think, was me too. Because in Election, Tracy, who is only a high school junior has a sexual relationship with a teacher, it’s very brief. She decides she doesn’t want to continue with it. Her mother finds out, the teacher gets fired, it’s kind of the inciting incident for Mr. M’s, of Tracy You know, it was very interesting during the MeToo moment and again, a little disturbing to read, a lot of women talk about relationships like this, like at the time, I thought I was consenting to this, a culture that had kind of redefined that to say you, there’s no such thing as consent when somebody is under age, and one person has power and authority. And I just wondered, you know, what would Tracy, say about this? How, I mean, we all have come up with a story in middle age for who we were as young people, whether those stories are fully accurate. You know, I think really the question is, do they work for us? You know, and so, it was very, it was very interesting to pick up a character some 20 years later, actually 25 and say, How does this look to her? How does it look to me? So I think those are my two answers that one, Tracy never went away. And two, I got very curious to think about how she would explain herself and her high school experience now.

B&N: And there’s a lot that she’s bumping up against, and she’s finding that a lot of those stories don’t work for her anymore. But I also do want to take a minute and just say, you know, we’re talking about adults being compared to a 16-year-old fictional girl who’s running for president of her high school class, and that telescoped something for me in a way because you write these novels that hit nerves in many ways. I mean, you’ve talked about how the election in ’92 has influenced the creation of Election, the novel and the left. You do have these moments in our sort of greater culture where you say, Okay, I think I’ve got a book here. But is this the first time you’ve gone back to a character? I mean, I realize she hasn’t left per se, but you had to sit down and do the work and create this narrative?

TP: Yeah, absolutely. The first time I’ve gone back to a character and I used to say, I never would and of course, you never do until you do. You know, Tracy was a high school girl. And yet somehow she became a way of talking about adult women. And part of that again, it was Reese’s Reese Witherspoon’s really electric performance. And Tracy was, the fact that it was an excellent movie, but also it was just there were actually no models. I had never read a novel about an American woman politician when I wrote Election, you know, I think you know, now Curtis Sittenfeld has, you know, written some but at that point, you’re there weren’t a lot of women politicians, Hillary Clinton was still, you know, a first lady. She had not had a political career. There had been like Shirley Chisholm, there’d been Bella Abzug. There’s been a few women politicians, there was one or two senators, but it really was like, empty territory. And then here came this character who’s just burning with ambition and just you know, but for herself, you know, she was post feminist, and that I think, was the important thing. But it was weird to watch this high school girl become a kind of stand-in for, you know, very accomplished adult women.

B&N: You’re exactly right. I don’t think there was a fictional character that had quite taken the world the way Tracy Flick had. But you know, Tracy is a piece of that story, the way she’s the piece of this, but she’s the big beating heart of Tracy Flick Can’t Win in ways that I didn’t really predict. And she’s sort of, I have a note from the book as I was going through, and she’s approached by an ex Silicon Valley bro, who has relocated to the tiny town in New Jersey, where she’s the assistant principal. And he wants to create a Hall of Fame in the high school. And there’s a note at the bottom of the page in pencil because I like to work in pencil, and it says, Oh, no. Just Oh, no. Because this is where it starts. It starts with this guy who comes back to the tiny town that he’s from, and we learn much more about Kyle, as the story goes through. Tracy is the assistant principal. It’s not the life she planned. She’s a single mom, not the life she planned. And oh, so where did this particular novel, Tracy Flick Can’t Win, start for you?

TP: Yeah, well. So, you know, I think I always liked to have a kind of comic premise or kind of a counterintuitive premise. So for Election, you know, that idea of like, I’m going to write a serious political novel, but it’s going to be set in a high school during an election for school president, and it’s something that we all know, is just a way to pad your resume, you know. Nobody expects anything from the high school president, you know, but it was fun to do that. And in this case, the Hall of Fame is another sort of, it’s a tiny local thing. It’s just not a big deal. But it turns out to be a little deal that reveals all kinds of riffs and values and personal tensions within the town. And it really was a fun inciting vehicle for the story also, because Tracy expected when she was young, that she would have a big life, a life where people knew her name, and that she would be, in a sense famous. She says I wasn’t interested in fame, per se, but the things I was interested in, you know, leadership and political office would lead to fame, the fame would be a byproduct of the kinds of achievements that she expected from herself. And so this trivial little high school hall of fame actually does, you know, trigger for Tracy, that kind of melancholy, midlife inventory, like, you know, and she says at one point, if my own high school, were doing a Hall of Fame right now, they would look at me and say, Nope, not Tracy Flick. She didn’t do enough. And it doubly wounds her because the person they want to honor is a former high school football star who’s spent a couple of seasons in the NFL, who is a terrible person. And it reminds her of all the unqualified or unpleasant, mediocre men who have somehow taken what was rightfully hers, whether going all the way back to election when, you know, Mr. M, puts up a kind of a empty football jersey, to run against her. And almost in almost pizza, you know, he cheats to try and make his candidate win, but, but it just brings back that whole drama for why that guy and not me.

B&N: And I’ll say you have a really sort of poignant line where she says she likes coming back to school in the fall because honestly, she’s much more comfortable in her professional sort of persona. And she’s not one for vacation. And if that line alone just sort of bridges who she is as a teenager and who we come to know, as Tracy Flick as an adult, she likes to have guardrails in a way that you know, when you meet her as a kid, she likes guardrails, and we do sort of find out why we get more of her backstory, we get her mother’s story, we find out how her trajectory changes. But you’re sitting down with Tracy, we’ve got Kyle, the Silicon Valley, bro who has a role to play, we’ve got the principal who’s about to retire. And we’ve got Vito, the football player and a couple of current students, and they’re sort of our main chorus of voices. And they’re really fantastic. Because we’ve got the generational shift, we’ve got the gender shift, we’ve got really just the right mix of folks. So who showed up after Tracy was it Kyle or was it someone else?

TP: So actually, the funny part of this is the the book started with Vito Falcone who is a football player. I, for years have been very moved by the spectacle of these pro football players, you know, who sometimes in their 40s and 50s, you know, discover that they have brain injuries that kind of mimic dementia in some ways, but also, of course, can lead to violence and to suicide. And, these are guys who, under especially like the kind of high school world that I grew up in, they were the kings, and now suddenly, the the culture is looking at them with a kind of a pity, you know, and they’re feeling like the loss of their abilities. And some of them are deeply depressed and suicidal. And I just thought, somehow, what if this guy gets brought back to his hometown, he honored it, but he’s just a wreck, you know, and that there are all these people in town, who are still angry at him, because he was such a jerk, you know, and that was kind of the beginning. And I’m gonna end when I tried to ride it. I kept writing it in the form of Election. I wanted to write it with the kind of oral history, different people telling little pieces of the story. And I said, Well, I can’t do that, that’s just sort of self plagiarism, you know. And, but I couldn’t write in any other way. And then at some point, I just had that moment of, oh, Tracy’s there. You know, that’s why I want to do it this way. Tracy’s there. And that’s when the whole book opened up. And that’s just so funny how. And I would say the same thing happened with Election where I wanted to write about the brother and sister running against each other. But there needed to be this sort of mainstream candidate and that was Tracy So Tracy was a little bit of an afterthought in Election, but then kind of took it over in her way. And in in this book, too, Tracy just kind of pushed her way. She’s pushy. Tracy’s pushy.

B&N: She is and we liked that about her but as you’re moving forward, because you’ve famously said you don’t outline you just sit down and you start. So how does this cast show up for you? So we’ve got Vito, Tracy comes back, then how do you find those those sorts of other main voices?

TP: There’s the principal who is Tracy’s boss, and he’s going to retire. And that leaves an open space for her. And he somehow became a very important he doesn’t, doesn’t have to be an important voice in this book. But for some reason, the idea of this old male guard seemed, he is kind of Mr. M. For this, he you know, and he’s also misbehaving like, Mr. M a little bit. So, maybe that’s part of it. So there’s Tracy, of course, but there’s, you know, there’s her boss, who is a little bit of Mr. M, kind of echo. And then there are the two high school students who are also echoing, you know, some of the characters in Election like Lily Chu is a little bit reminiscent of Tracy, though not quite so driven. Though, again, like feeling the weight of parental expectation, the way that Tracy feels the weight of her mother’s expectations for her. Nate is a little bit like Paul, not quite as dumb. But I think the interesting difference with Tracy Flick Can’t Win is that there are also these third person chapters. So Vito, for instance, is only ever treated as a third person character. The high school secretary frontdesk, Diane. And then there’s a local auxilary police officer was an important role. Who also is mentioned. So it’s almost like a combination of the oral history style of Election with the close third person that I do in books like Little Children.

B&N: Yeah, that close third actually is a lot of fun. I mean, you do it and Mrs. Fletcher, you do it and Little Children and Leftovers as well. And that tiny bit of distance, and partially I raise it because this idea of distance, you do a lot with close third in ways by stepping back almost, and just letting your characters come to the fore and say what they need to say and do what they need to do. And the story just moves forward naturally. I want to come back to the principle for a second because he’s got this line, where he’s like, Well, aren’t we all sort of held hostage to our past? Like the historical moment? Oh, we’re all prisoners of our historical context. And it really sounds like something a guy on the verge of retirement in this age would say, because, you know, he’s remembering sort of what he was taught coming up in the ’70s when everyone was raised by wolves, everyone, we cannot pretend for a second that one of us was not raised by wolves in the seven days. But here he is, he’s got to deal with a clothing issue with a teacher who is not Tracy and he’s just like, Tracy, can you talk to her? I can’t. He understands that the world is changing, more so than some of the other characters in his orbit. And I was kind of pleasantly surprised by that. I mean, he’s still struggling with it. At one point, he’s like, this is like the gaiety and it’s the French Revolution. Everyone’s coming after the old guys. And it’s like, well, we’re not coming after the old guys. We’re just changing the way things are done.

TP: Yeah. Well, that’s a funny one, you know, because when you first meet him, this often happens with my characters when you first meet them. Youth, you think one thing about him, you know, which is there. He seems like a guy that’s very careful. Like I don’t want to get in trouble. I hear a lot of I remember when I was teaching in college, and after years of getting a free pass, you know, male professors were getting in trouble for having affairs with students, et cetera. And people get very theatrical, I’m leaving the door to my office open. I’m going to be completely above board here and transparent. And you know, Jack, the character in this book is like this. I can’t talk to this woman about this clothing issue. Because it’s just not something a man my age can bring up, you know, some clothes are Inadvertently revealing. And he caused Yes, Tracy to do it. And you think, Oh, this this guy is just he’s a little paranoid because, you know, a lot of older men are getting in trouble. But then you realize later, he has very good reason to be watching his back. He’s done a lot of, you know, ethically questionable things. Especially in you know, even with a student early in his past and now he’s got some other illicit things or had some guilty conscience is really what’s going on there and which maybe is the case for a lot of men who are feeling like You know, the world’s coming after me.

B&N: And Kyle, our Silicon Valley bro. I don’t know if he doesn’t know the rules have changed or he doesn’t care. He just sort of does what he’s going to do. He moves through the world with a lot of confidence that may or may not be earned. But can we talk about the men for a second? Can we talk about the men in Tracy Flick Can’t Win for a second because they seem a little befuddled. But if they really think about it, and stop for a minute, like you said about Jack Weed, he knows what he’s done. He knows who he is, but they still put forward this sort of pretense that Oh, but you know, it’s interesting.

TP: You know, what? This is sort of where I started as a writer, which is that almost everybody deep down, thinks that they’re a good person. And, you know, we all have to do a certain kind of mental gymnastics to separate out the things that we’ve done, that maybe aren’t good. Most of my characters have a conscience even though they’ve done bad things. I mean, Mr. M, in Election, was a perfect example of that he saw himself as a defender of the weak. I think it really is, the ethical code that he taught was a good one. He just didn’t live by it. And it’s hard to live by it. And so I mean, that’s the only defense I would say, for some of these male characters. Kyle thinks he’s helping other people.

B&N: Oh, yes, he does.

TP: So, that’s often those good intentions, you know, people want to be judged on their good intentions, not on their murky actions. And especially I think, for men who grew up at a time when I think they got passes for being successful. And so Kyle made a lot of money. Vito played in the NFL. Jack Wheats is the principal, they’re all guys who were at in some way, the top of that heap and the culture did tell them, that that’s your reward for being at the top of the heap, you know, you can you’re exceptional, and some of the rules don’t don’t really apply to you. And then they’re having these moments later in life when there was like, No, the rules apply to everyone. And, you know, Jack, in a way got away with things. You know, at the moment that we’re getting the story, he’s not doing anything bad. In fact, he’s spent the last 10 years really helping his wife, who’s been ill. And I think people around him see just a good selfless guy who’s about to enjoy his well earned retirement. And of course, the book tells us a different story of what his past was, and I’m just, I’m really interested in that idea that that everybody thinks that they’re good, no matter what they’ve done, and the ways that we managed to tell those stories to ourselves, are really interesting.

B&N: And it’s the narrative tension between all of these characters that keeps the action moving for I mean, that’s the one that you never stop. The story is always, always going forward. And there’s always one more piece to be revealed. And what I find kind of interesting, though, is a lot of reviewers, and folks out in the world will say, Oh, no, well, Perrotta, he’s just he’s a fabulous satirist. And there are elements of satire, certainly, in this novel in the new Tracy Flick novel, but that’s not all you’re doing. And in the past, you’ve said, Oh, hey, wait a minute. I’m just trying to push the comic novel in new directions. And I realize some of what we’ve just talked about doesn’t sound like it’s particularly funny, but it is because it’s you writing these characters, and they do things and they say things like, well, that’s what that person would do. It makes perfect sense on the page. And you have always had this balancing act between getting laughs even if they’re kind of bleak, which, in life can be oddly funny in strange ways. And, you know, sometimes you just have to laugh for the release, because otherwise you’re staring at a wall saying what just happened? So can we talk about this whole comic novel versus satire thing for a second because I really do feel like people keep trying to put a label on you.

TP: I know, I know. And, I’m a little confused myself because I do think of myself as a funny writer, I can’t help it in a certain way, like, like, an enemy that is, in a boastful way. It’s like, I play poker with these guys. And they don’t find me particularly funny like, like, in real life, I’m not super funny. And yet, when I write, I think there’s a sense of absurdity. That just comes out no matter if I’m trying to bring it out or not. It’s just essentially, part of my voice. And when I was young, I was very clear, like, I want to be a funny writer, I want to get laughs. And, you know, I would say like, that goes, like Philip Roth when he was younger, he was a much more comic writer. Weirdly, by the time he was an old man, a lot of the humor was just gone. You know, it’s just there’s a kind of magisterial, somber voice that came out of him. And I would say, my writing has gotten darker and more serious over the years. But somehow a book like this does have moments of just, you know, real absurdity. And I would laugh when I was writing certain scenes. But, I think there’s a comic novel, which is a novel written in a funny voice, maybe a novel that is forgiving of the characters, in some sense and compassionate toward them. But again, that doesn’t have to be a comic novel. One thing I want to stress and one of the reasons I don’t see myself as a satirist is that I take my character seriously. I think a lot of times in pure satire, a writer is kind of looking down at the characters and a little bit poking fun. And there’s a sense that the writer and the audience are feeling superior to the characters. And you know, I try not to do that. I think Kyle gets mocked a little. Because he’s this sort of tech bro who’s gotten rich off some, you know, kind of a silly virtual pet app that he wrote, and he takes himself very seriously. He’s the kind of person that you would probably make fun of if he lived in your town, you know. So, I feel like he’s a little he’s a character who gets satirized a bit. Vito is not really satirized in this book, I mean, he’s suffering. And I think he just he gets treated with a compassion that I think, even though he’s done a lot of bad things, I think his dilemma within the book is, is one that I find moving, you know, and and, that’s an interesting challenge for a writer, I mean, I think, to have this person who is objectively pretty unpleasant, and he has pain and to kind of see him struggling to be better. You know, is, that was something I was really interested in is because he’s the kind of character who I might have been more scathing about, and if I was writing about him at a different time of his life, but in this book, he’s hit bottom and is trying to do better and is somebody who’s finally, for the first time in his life, able to look at himself and his shortcomings in an honest way.

B&N: And you don’t really do villains. Typically, anyway, even in Little Children, there’s always humanity. I mean, we’re talking about ordinary people in sometimes extraordinary circumstances, but also sometimes just life.

TP: It’s funny, right? I mean, Ronnie, in Little Children, is objectively a villain. But we mostly see him through the eyes of his mother, who loves him and wants him to be better. And that’s a good reminder, right? That everybody deserves some kind of compassion, but, you know, he’s objectively a villain and people are frightened of him, and they’re not wrong to be appalled by him. I think Election is a perfect example of this. Mr. M is the villain, right? He does something unbelievably corrupt, at the end, corrupt, you know, it causes lifelong damage to Tracy, you know, the idea that a teacher would scheme against you, that somebody you respected, hated you so much that he would stoop to this kind of underhanded action to, you know, to stop you. It really it makes her doubt herself in certain ways. But for a long time, people would watch that movie and think Tracy was the villain You know, you can say I don’t do villains, but it’s more like, you know, I do villains, but sometimes people don’t recognize, which is the villain.

B&N: Yeah, let me rephrase that. I mean, it’s more that they’re not villains in the classical, you know twirling of the mustache sense because it’s also partially that they don’t know they’re the problem.

TP: Yeah, they, they all believe they’re good, or they all are starring in a personal narrative. They’re the protagonist and, and, you know, they’re very well aware of the pain that they’ve suffered. And they’re very well aware of the goals that they’re moving toward. And I’m really interested in the stories we tell to ourselves about ourselves and what we, where we’ve been and where we’re going and what we deserve. I mean, that’s really important to me, and nobody’s the villain of their own story, for sure.

B&N: I do think that our art sort of reflects where we are, if we’re in conversation with the wider world, and we’re in conversation with our culture, and our society, as you frequently do in your novels. You know, you are going to be landing some hits right away, and things become sort of timeless. I mean, Tracy’s experience right now feels very, very timeless, and she feels like she has really pushed forward. I mean, she’s meditating now, Tracy Flick meditates.

TP: And she would do that, you know, but but there, I think you’re onto something, because it was nerve racking for me to go back in, you know, 2021 and see what I had written about. Basically, cuz I hadn’t picked up Election and read it. In a way the movie had become a kind of shorthand for me, but I had to read those scenes. And, you know, it was definitely like, a bit of a time machine for me like, oh, you know, Victoria’s Secret catalog is mentioned many, many times. Madonna is mentioned many, many times, there’s, you know, there were things like Madonna was a kind of a feminist figure, that now I think a lot of feminists look askance at Madonna. But back then I think she represented, especially for girls like Tracy like, idea of like, if you want it, you go get it, you know, and you just be bold about that. And you don’t apologize for what you want and for asserting your ego. And, you know, she was a powerful figure and Tracy wanted to be that kind of person. And I think she was a little, you know, more personally conservative, but still, I think there was a feeling of, you know, strength and boldness. And, you know, and Tracy is very clear, like, I didn’t want to be a victim. And, you know, I feel like I was channeling ideas that were in the zeitgeist at the time, but they’re now seen as a little bit like, iffy, you know, and Tracy is having to deal with that as well. So the good thing is, I felt like Tracy and I were in it together.

B&N: What did you learn? Going back to Tracy Flick Can’t Win? What did you learn about yourself as a writer? What did you learn about yourself as a middle aged guy in America right now?

TP: Oh, boy, that that is a deep question. What do I learn from from my own work? I mean, I think that in some way, some of my concerns haven’t changed. One of the insights of Election was sort of like that all the hierarchies that you saw it at play in high school, were reflections of, you know, these hierarchies that play in the larger world and even, you know, the political dynamics of that time, you know, Tammy being a kind of anti government.

B&N: She’s a great kid, she’s a great character.

TP: He was the character that I really identified with at the time, you know, Tracy was somebody I had some distance from. And I was thinking you know, she’s kind of humorless and you know, Tammy is funny, and I did I think much more connect with her. I think now though, my heart is with Tracy a bit. I think there’s something about becoming middle aged and and looking back on on your life and feeling like you know, you did your best, but you also failed in some way. You know, there’s something melancholy about Tracy that I connected with. You asked the hardest question, what do I learn from my own work? I think it allows me to explore things that maybe I can can barely talk about. But I do try to be kind to my characters in the way that A, if I’m at my best, I’m kind to the people in my lives, which, you know, sometimes they don’t measure up to that ideal, either. But, also, you know, we talked about this a little bit, before we started recording. Sometimes it sounds like a cop out when somebody like Jack says that the culture changed on me. Meaning. You know, Jack says at one point, if you think that morality is absolute, you just haven’t lived long enough. And, I know, it’s easy to be skeptical about something like that. But it is also true that that, you know, we look at our lives, and we look at the people around us through a cultural lens, and the prescription for that cultural lens changes sometimes, and then the world looks suddenly very different. You think about Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, for example. The culture has definitely gone back and revisited that, you know, I think I would not like to go back and hear like my take on that in, you know, the late 90s. If I can see it clearly now, in a way I couldn’t see it clearly than when it was right in front of me. And I do think what’s interesting about Election and Tracy Flick Can’t Win is that I’m looking at a lot of the same issues, but through different cultural lenses just because of the times in which they were written.

B&N: It’s a fun reading experience, I would say, I mean, can you read Tracy Flick without having read Election? Yes, absolutely. Because actually, I reread Election after Tracy Flick, because I wanted to see what the experience was like coming to this particular character cold, and it totally holds up. It was really exciting. So if you haven’t read Election, do not let that stop you from reading Tracy Flick. But can you bring this character to the screen again, it does feel like that film became such an iconic moment for Reese Witherspoon that I feel like some people feel like that character now belongs more with her than with you, even though you are the creator.

TP: And I don’t blame them in that sounds good. I think the reason that she’s become a kind of icon and someone that people are still interested in, you know, 20 years later, is because of that performance, you know, Election was not a big book, right? And so the only reason Tracy looked down in the culture was that Reese Witherspoon embodied her with this sort of electric energy and, you know, can you bring her back? I think it would be really interesting if Reese did it. I mean, because then I think you have that same thing of just, it becomes a kind of window into how how people change. I do think, you know, a lot of times when we’re young, we’re bold, and we’re confident, and life, you know, gradually takes it out of us. And, there is something about that process that is quite, you know, it’s moving. And it’s a little sad, and I think to have the same actor, you know, play somebody who’s a teenager and then play them as a middle aged person. That’s, that’s very unusual possibility. I think there’s an opportunity to do something extremely interesting that I haven’t really seen before.

B&N: I would watch that, I would totally watch that. So what’s next for you?

TP: Um, you know, so I had a long period where I was doing a lot of TV and film work. And it got to the point where with Mrs. Fletcher, I was the showrunner on that. And it was a hugely time and energy consuming project, and I came home from that, and that’s when the pandemic hit. And suddenly, I was just back to being you know, a homebound writer, go up to my room and work on this book. And it was such a pleasure really. I love collaborating and I love making TV but I feel like the pandemic for like for me, like for a lot of people became this sort of pause. And it lasted so long that well, it still hasn’t ended but you know, whereas little bit on the other side of it and you go back and say okay, how have How has my trajectory changed? And I think, at least for me, it feels like almost like that period of like deep involvement in film and TV is at least over for the moment, you know, I would like to just keep writing you know, with with not too many competing activities going on. And you know, I am just starting something now and all I’ll say is like, Tracy Flick, it doesn’t involve me kind of returning. It’s not a sequel to another book, but it’s, it’s definitely returning to the past. Maybe I’m in a slightly retrospective. I’m you know, getting older.

B&N: We have plenty of space on the shelves for you, Mr. Perrotta.

TP: Tom Perrotta, thank you so much for joining us on Poured Over. This has really been a treat. Tracy Flick Can’t Win is out now.

B&N: Thanks, Miwa. I really enjoyed talking to you.