Andrew Sean Greer, who grew up in Maryland, won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 2018 for his comedic novel, 'Less.' His new book, 'Villa Coco,' “is about friendships and growing old,” he said. Photo © Kaliel Roberts

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Andrew Sean Greer grew up in Maryland, the son of two scientists. After writing five novels, he was as surprised as the rest of the literary community when, in 2018, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature for his sixth novel, Less. It was the first time a comedic novel had won the prize.

This summer his latest novel, Villa Coco, was published. Set in Italy, where Greer lives part-time, the book highlights a friendship between a recent college graduate and a 92-year-old grand dame known as the Baronessa.

We caught up with Greer by phone from his home in San Francisco two weeks before he came to Washington, D.C., for the National Book Festival.

How often do you get back to Maryland? Are your parents still living?

They are, but neither of them lives in Rockville. My mother lives near me in San Francisco, in Marin County, and my father lives in Winchester, Virginia.

My dad is going to come into D.C. for the National Book Festival and be my date to the reception at the Library of Congress. He’ll like that kind of thing.

Your parents were chemists. Were you good at chemistry?

I was not good at chemistry. I got a B minus, which was not acceptable in my house. My parents blamed the teacher, but let’s also blame me.

Your character Arthur Less played baseball as child. Did you play baseball too?

Not very effectively. I was so bad that the other dads tried to get me and my [twin] brother thrown off the team. We were 12 or something. Our father went before the whatever council and said, “Look, this is a public event for children. Everyone is allowed to play, no matter how good they are.” So they kept us on the team.

I did catch the ball one time. I think that was one of the greatest moments of my mother’s life.

How old were you when you discovered that you could write or loved to write?

I mean, you can’t really write much when you’re 10, but I sure tried. I wrote a novel when I was 16. That was a really formative experience because I thought, well, I’ll just write two pages every night. It turns out, that is how you write a novel.

I didn’t try to write it all in one weekend. I understood that it was a gradual process, and that habit that I set up when I was 16 was so helpful.

Is it true that you were the worst employee [the D.C. bookstore] Politics and Prose ever had?

Yes, I think they would say that. I was really chatty. I was one of those employees who, when someone would come in and ask for a book that I thought was not of the highest quality, I would be a jerk about it. That’s part of being a bookstore employee, to push people toward other books.

But it was really wonderful because Carla Cohen, who is one of the original founders of Politics and Prose, was the mother of my oldest friend. Carla was like another mom to me, and that was my first job.

Carla was a very straightforward person and would tell me when I was doing things wrong. She would give me advice, as years went on, about being a writer. She thought it was ridiculous for me to think that I could make a living as a writer. She told me that normal writers can’t make a living.

She did not live to see me achieve my dreams, which is just a shame — she would have loved that. She would have just been out of her mind with happiness because she held writers in great esteem.

What’s it like to go to Politics and Prose now for a reading and see teachers and other people from your past?

It’s lovely to see people show up who were paying attention when I was a teenager, who kept their eye on me. They were looking out for me because they knew I was gay, although I didn’t know, and they were protective of me.

They also were curious. I was a writer back then, too, and they were curious to watch me grow. I think that’s fun for a teacher, to know you contributed something to someone’s life.

You published your first successful novel, The Confessions of Max Tivoli, in 2003. What was it like to have John Updike praise it?

My agent called and left a message and said, “Call me back; I need to talk to you.”

I didn’t know what it was about, and I called him up, and he read the review from the New Yorker by John Updike, and I just burst into tears. To be taken that seriously in the pages of the New Yorker by the greatest living man of letters of that time was so extraordinary.

How do you see yourself in the long tradition of comedic literature?

Comedy is important for humans and literature. I find myself often having to gently defend comedy as part of literature. The tradition in literature goes back to Don Quixote, the first novel, to Voltaire and Jonathan Swift. It’s a little lofty to see myself as part of that.

In England, they’re more aware of [comedy] being part of the tradition than in the United States. I don’t know why, but we recently forgot about this. Updike is a great example. Almost all of his books are comedies. Philip Roth’s first books were all comedies, and that was accepted as great literature. But we lost it sometime in the ‘80s, when we went to dirty realism and minimalism.

Comedy is a great way for writers who feel like outsiders to comment on their lives. Roth is a great example of that because he was a new generation of Jewish writers. A lot of the old-generation Jewish writers hated him because he was making fun of something that they felt was serious. But it was a new expression of that feeling of being uncomfortable in the world that you want to be a part of. I’m definitely part of that tradition.

What was it like to hear that you won the Pulitzer Prize?

I was working in Italy, and it was nighttime. I had been training a pug to wear diapers. Margaret Atwood was coming to this writer’s residency where I worked, and I didn’t want the dog pooping all over the dining room floor. I thought that would be unseemly. So I had ordered special diapers with suspenders, and I was training the dog.

After I put the dog to bed, my boyfriend showed me his phone. This was hours and hours after it had been announced in New York, but I wasn’t aware of any of that. He showed me the headline of the San Francisco Chronicle that said, “Local author Andrew Sean Greer wins Pulitzer Prize in Literature,” and I just said, “That’s not true.”

Then I looked at all my texts, and I had 100 texts. I called Michael Chabon, who had won the Pulitzer Prize in 2001, and I said, “What is going on?” If it was some sort of phony thing, I wanted to know that as soon as possible. He just said, “Am I the first person to tell you?” He was so excited.

Why did you move to Italy?

When I came to Italy in 2005 for the writer’s residency, it was really transformative. I was introduced to a world where it was taken for granted that you knew everything about art and world literature, old films, how to dress.

You were supposed to be cultured. Not just because some of these people were aristocrats — there’s a depth and interest that isn’t about showing off; it’s just because the history is so deep there. That was stunning to me.

I kept going back and learned how to have a sense of humor about things — and how to deal with a crisis. Italy is not a great country for preventing a crisis, but everyone’s good at dealing with one.

[I met my husband in Italy, and we lived in Milan.] Then I wanted a place to write, and we landed on an absurd solution: Venice.

Everyone asks, “Isn’t it crowded and hot?” That’s what I thought. … Yet [my husband] is from outside of Venice, so he knew people who lived there. There’s another city that tourists don’t see, which is not crowded. It’s a sleepy little harbor town.

How much is your new novel, Villa Coco, based on your own life?

It is [autobiographical] in a way, but people often think that novels are ways that writers work through their own problems in a sort of costume drama of fiction.

Actually, it’s the reverse. There’s something you’re thinking about, and you use all of the facts of your life to fill it out.

Villa Coco is about old friendships and growing old and coming into yourself as a young person. That’s not what happened to me in Tuscany. When I was living and working in Tuscany, I was in my 40s, so I wasn’t particularly growing old. But I paid attention to everything around me, and I kept a diary. I realized that all these details could be used in this other story I was telling.

What do you think of growing old?

Italy has a basic idea that older generations are still part of the vibrant life of a city or a small town. They are out late. They are dancing; they are drinking. They are not put away in some other room.

The older you get, the more dressed up you’re supposed to be. You’re supposed to be more and more elegant as time goes on. You don’t wear sweatpants and T-shirts. You strive forward with a sort of beauty, elegance and a sense of humor.

That is something I kept picking up from the people around me. They had been through very painful times — war and loss and death.

One of the reasons I was friends with them is that they had lost the friends who were their age, but they kept making new friends who were younger.

I would challenge these much older people, and they thought that was pretty hilarious, but they would change. They listened. We’re able to change, and that desire to keep changing is important.

I’m trying to keep that in mind. I need to make younger friends to keep challenging me and to keep life amusing.

I’m only 55, but I’m still pretty far through my life. I’ve realized there’s a lot of things you can just let go of that are a great relief: all kinds of vanity and trying to impress people or hanging out with people who bore you. There’s no time for that at all.

You realize who you are and you commit more to that and less to what you’re supposed to be, or what people expect, and you just don’t care anymore.

I’m sure you have met people who are in their 80s, and they do not give a f***.

I’m on an arc, aiming for that.