Lauren Rothery didn’t plan on writing a novel.
The London-born, San Diego-raised author worked for years as a filmmaker and editor, directing short films including “Matter,” “Shelly,” and “This Is Alice” and music videos such as Razorlight’s “You Are Entering The Human Heart” and Röyksopp’s “Running To The Sea.”
Then COVID hit.
“I couldn’t really film anything,” Rothery recalls. “I had a little bit of savings, and I was just interested in what I would find myself doing when it felt like there was no option to monetize what I was doing.”
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Rothery wasn’t a stranger to fiction. She had written short stories for her own entertainment for years, never showing the finished products to anyone. But with the pandemic limiting her ability to shoot films, she decided to try her hand at short fiction again.
“When everything opened back up again, I felt like if this is what I do when I’m not making any money out of it, I may as well keep doing it,” Rothery says. “The idea for ‘Television’ was originally a story, but my boyfriend, when I told him about it, said, ‘I hate to break it to you, but that’s a novel.’”
It turned out he was right. “Television” follows a trio of characters: There’s Verity, a movie star who has decided to give away the pay from his latest film via a lottery open to anyone who buys a ticket for it. There’s Helen, his best friend and sometimes lover, who tries to keep him down to earth. And, across the world in France, there’s Phoebe, a screenwriter whose connection to Verity and Helen isn’t revealed until the end of the book.
Rothery discussed “Television” via telephone from San Diego, where she was visiting family. This conversation has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.
Q: Did your experience as a filmmaker inform the writing process for the book in any way?
Definitely. I don’t have any training as a filmmaker, actually. I didn’t go to film school. I just learned how to tell stories by making films myself on cameras. You learn a lot that way, because you have to be so economical, you really feel the weight of every decision you make. I learned a lot by editing other people’s films as well, just finding what I like in narrative, the kind of feelings I like to create. That definitely carried over into fiction, but it was fun to have slightly different tools and not have anybody see anything that I’m talking about.
Q: Did any of the three principal characters come to you first?
I thought of Verity first because I found the circumstance of this jaded actor — who feels that he’s had more than his share of good fortune and wants to throw it away towards somebody else — funny and sticky and interesting, but I couldn’t quite get it into context until I thought of Helen. And once I had him in balance with Helen, then it made sense to me, and then Phoebe just kind of cropped up once I started writing.
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Q: What made you decide to tell the story from all three perspectives, switching among those characters?
I don’t know, actually. I started writing it in first person, because characters always come first for me, more than plot, even in film. I started that way with Verity to figure out what he sounded like, and then it all just ended up first person. I liked the feeling, ultimately, as I started getting going, of two people who have this really long entanglement who don’t necessarily disagree about what’s happened in their relationship, but they may disagree about what the key moments are, and what’s really important and relevant.
Q: Why do you suppose that Verity is so eager to give everything away?
I think he’s an unusual person. There’s a few things going on. He has a certain amount of guilt, kind of an internalized, very American idea that you ought to earn what you have somehow. I think he romanticizes that idea, and it lives in his chest and he feels embarrassed, he doesn’t think he’s earned anything. I don’t think he even really had the courage to go after a strictly artistic version of an acting career, and so I think he looks at his beautiful house and all his money and everything he has, and as much as he enjoys it, it’s uncomfortable for him. But then I think he also likes spectacle, and he likes to amuse himself. So rather than just giving the money away to a charity to spend in a responsible way, he does this version of things that interests him and surprises him.
Q: Do you think that he could have predicted that the lottery was going to end up making this movie an even bigger hit than it probably would have otherwise been?
No. I don’t think he thought far enough into the future. Once it did, I don’t think he liked the way that the lottery actually went. He obviously isn’t that crazy about the guy who won the first lottery. I think he doesn’t love that it ended up making the studios a lot more money, but it probably interests him to some degree.
Q: What do you think that Verity and Helen see in each other that makes them basically inseparable?
I think they just really like each other. They’re so different, but they also like and dislike a lot of the same things in the world. When I was writing about them, I was thinking of a Yiddish term, “landsman,” which basically means somebody from the old country, someone who’s from the same place as you, and just kind of perceives things in a similar way. It’s like this kind of natural kinship. We look at the same set of circumstances and find the same things funny, find the same things sad. The things that they want often don’t match up, but they perceive things in a similar way, and they like each other’s personalities and each other’s company. They can’t quite make a relationship work, but I don’t think they ever even consider letting go of each other.
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Q: There’s a line in the book, “If you can’t see how romantic television is, you’re blind.” Do you find a certain romance in television as well?
Yeah. The way that I watch television is so much just for the characters that I want to hang out with, and I’m so loyal to them. I love watching “Columbo.” I love watching “Barry.” I love watching “Seinfeld.” I have a lot of different shows that I like, and it’s often just because I want to hang out with those people rather than find out what happens in the plot. To me, there’s a real romance to that.