Tom Perrotta might never have become a writer if it weren’t for his mother.
“My mom was the one who always said, ‘My kids are going to college,’” the author of the new novel, “Ghost Town,” says. “And she was also the one who said, ‘Oh, you’re bored? Read a book,’ and ‘Let’s go to the library,’ and ‘Let’s order from the Scholastic book club.’ She wanted us to have books in our hands.”
It worked. Perrotta not only became a book lover but also an author. He made his literary debut in 1994 with the short story collection “Bad Haircut,” and he went on to write several novels, many of which have been adapted for the screen, including “Election,” “Little Children,” “The Leftovers,” and “Mrs. Fletcher.” His novel “Tracy Flick Can’t Win,” a sequel to “Election,” is also in the works as a film.
Sign up for our free newsletter about books, authors, reading and more
“Ghost Town” is a novel close to Perrotta’s heart. The book, which is dedicated to his late mother, follows Jimmy Perrini, a 13-year-old New Jersey boy whose life is thrown into disarray when his mother dies from cancer. He believes his mother tells him to leave the wake at a funeral home, and he accepts a ride from Eddie, a pothead with a Chevrolet Vega, who introduces him to weed. He also befriends Olivia, an older girl who urges him to use her Ouija board to try to make contact with his mom, all the while navigating his relationships with his distant father and sister.
“My mother really loved being around kids and was a natural teacher,” Perrotta recalls. “That’s part of the book, just trying to imagine how different my life might’ve gone if my mother hadn’t been around.”
Perrotta will discuss and sign copies of “Ghost Town” on May 16 at 4:00 p.m. at Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena. He talked about the novel via Zoom from his home in Belmont, Massachusetts. This conversation has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.
Q: Can you talk about the origins of this book?
Unlike Jimmy, whose mom died when he was young, my mom lived to the ripe age of 91, and she stayed in the house that I grew up in that whole time. During the pandemic, she started to decline and was living alone because she’s one of those independent people who just wanted to stay put. So I ended up going back to New Jersey one week out of the month for a few years. I was back in my childhood bedroom in this small house in what used to be a working-class town that’s now gotten a little more upscale because it’s close to the city. But the house was so quiet, and I just remembered this house used to be full of life, and it was a melancholy experience to watch a parent decline, but it also really pushed me back into the past, walking those same streets that I’d walked when I was a kid, feeling both how much the town had changed and how many memories were lurking behind the tree trunks.
Q: The book is set in 1974 when Jimmy is 13, which is a difficult age for anyone. How did you decide to write about him at that stage in his life?
One of the elements of this book was me remembering using a Ouija board, and I think that’s the age. When you’re 16 or 17, you’re too cool, and you’re a little wised up. But 13 is such a vulnerable age. There’s so much at stake. But I also think it was important that Jimmy was surprised by his mother’s death. I don’t think his sister is surprised by the death. I think she knows that it’s coming, but it was more common in those days to hide medical facts from family and sometimes from the person who’s dying themselves. So the more vulnerable Jimmy was, the better, but he had to be old enough to be out on his own in the world. If he had been 10, I don’t think he would’ve been wandering around town in the same way or smoking weed in a car. It seemed like the right age for him to be vulnerable but old enough to get into trouble.
Q: Why do you think Jimmy forms a friendship with Eddie, who’s very different from him?
I think part of it is a kind of delusion, which is that his mother had told him to leave the funeral home, and then Eddie shows up, and there’s this weird coincidence, so that Eddie seems somehow like his mother’s agent in the world. But I think it’s really that Eddie’s a damaged person and that Jimmy is now a damaged person, and there is some sense of kinship. Jimmy’s other friends, who are not sharing in his grief, are just happy-go-lucky kids, and he doesn’t feel right around the happy-go-lucky kids anymore, and he senses there’s some darkness in Eddie that matches his own.
Q: There’s a passage in the book where you write, “He couldn’t understand what his father and sister had been thinking, how they’d left him to his own devices at a time when he needed them the most.” Why do you think they did that? Was it because they were handling their own grief in their own ways?
That’s one of those mysteries that he’s grappling with. Mainly, the fault is his dad’s. The sister’s just living her life, although she could have been more attentive. I think it was one of those families where the mom held it all together, and when she’s taken out of it, they just spin off. Grief is a strange crucible. Sometimes it brings families closer together, and sometimes it separates people.
Q: What was it like getting back in the mindset of someone living in the mid-’70s?
That is one of the mysteries of writing fiction to me, because I know there are writers who would go back and do a ton of research to uncover all that. I found that I just didn’t need to do it, partly because they’re my own memories. I can test them against what I remember. But the other part is if the few, sparing details feel real, people fill in a ton. I tried to have just enough to trigger the image-making part of your brain to fill in the details. Just the Vega with a racing stripe, which no longer exists, that goes a surprisingly long way.
It’s a very foreign world now, where people didn’t have a lot for entertainment. A lot of life was like, “What am I going to do today?” This town was sort of bare bones for kids. There’s just this sense of loneliness and looking for trouble that was just part of that era, this world where kids hang out and adults don’t have a lot to say about it.
Jason Reynolds says teen lives are complex. His books honor these struggles
Q: Your first book was also set in ’70s New Jersey. Do you see this new one as something of a full-circle moment for you at all?
I have felt a little bit like I’m revisiting things. Obviously, “Tracy Flick Can’t Win” was a way back into “Election.” I wrote a short story called “Dad Band” that was a middle-aged rethinking of “The Wishbones.” Then I was writing this book, which revisits the world of “Bad Haircut.”
I think who I had in mind was just Philip Roth, who just kept continually revisiting Newark. If you look at it, you’ll get “Goodbye, Columbus” or “Portnoy’s Complaint,” and it’s written with this irreverent comic streak. Then later, he gets oddly reverent when he talks about the Newark of his childhood, and this vanished world. The past looks different after 30, and it looks different at 60 than it did at 30.
“Bad Haircut” has its darknesses, but there’s a comic energy in it that’s a young person’s energy. This has a much more elegiac energy that’s very much, when you’re in your 60s, and you look back at the world you grew up in, and you’re trying to account for what you miss and what you’re glad has gone.
Tom Perrotta discusses and signs ‘Ghost Town’
When: 4 p.m., May 16
Where: Vroman’s Bookstore, 695 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena
Information: https://vromansbookstore.com/event/2026-05-16/tom-perrotta