In April 2018, Andrew Sean Greer was at a writers’ retreat in Tuscany when his life changed. He’d just finished changing his pug’s rhinestoned diaper—an absurd but affectionate act that now feels symbolically on-brand—when he got the call: Less, his comic novel about a mildly successful gay novelist on a round-the-world escape from heartbreak, had won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
He thought it was a prank. Comic novels, after all, don’t win Pulitzers. But Less wasn’t just funny—it was warm and generous and deeply human. Readers across the world connected with its voice: equal parts sly, lyrical, and devastatingly self-aware. It wasn’t a grand political novel. It wasn’t a statement book. It was, as Greer told The Stanford Daily, “about an American being wrong about everything and accepting that he’s wrong and just taking it, blow after blow.” The prize changed his life, but perhaps more importantly, it proved that joy and humility could still count as serious literature.
Greer had been writing for decades before Less. He broke out with The Confessions of Max Tivoli (2004), a reverse-aging love story that drew comparisons to Fitzgerald and Proust, and again with The Story of a Marriage (2008), a quiet but daring novel about secrets and race in 1950s San Francisco. He’s written about time travel (The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells), comets (The Path of Minor Planets), and unconventional love. But Less marked a shift: not just toward comedy, but toward something more disarmingly earnest.
He didn’t set out to write a happy book. For over a year, Less was a tragedy. “It was not working at all,” Greer told PBS NewsHour. Then one morning, while swimming in the San Francisco Bay, he looked back at the skyline and thought: this character, Arthur Less, is not tragic. He’s ridiculous. And lovable. “From there on, I knew where I was going.”
After Less, Greer wasn’t sure he’d write a sequel. His agent advised against it. “You can’t write a follow-up to a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel,” she said. But every time he drafted something new, he found himself slipping back into Less’s voice. “I thought I’d wear it out with time,” Greer told Kunzum. “But I kept writing it in my head.” Eventually, he gave himself permission. Less Is Lost sends Arthur across America—into diners, desert communes, and small-town bookstores—with a pug, a camper van, and the looming pressure of grief, money, and midlife uncertainty. It’s a sequel, yes. But it’s also a reckoning with identity, history, and home.
The inspiration came, again, from travel. After the 2016 election, Greer felt unmoored. “I thought, ‘I don’t really understand my country,’” he told Esquire. So he rented an RV and drove through the Southwest and Deep South, speaking not about politics, but about people’s lives. “Everyone told me their story within two minutes,” he said. “Even the waitress pouring my coffee.”
He turned his notes into a novel the way he always does: with awkward encounters, long drives, and a rule that the joke is always on Arthur, never on the places he visits. “They’re normal,” Greer said. “Arthur is the strange thing coming in.”
Andrew Sean Greer’s daily writing routine
Greer’s rule is simple: three pages a day.
“I don’t have any particular routine except to try to get those pages out of the way before the sun sets,” he told PBS NewsHour. “Once those pages are done, I’m allowed to do anything I like.” That might mean a swim in the bay, a cocktail with friends, or an extravagant dinner. “I always feel like I’ve done something miraculous and celebratory—but then, of course, the next morning I have to do it all over again.”
There’s no fixed writing space. He works from cafés, from his home in San Francisco, from borrowed apartments or rented campers. He’s written in India, Italy, Montana. Wherever he is, he adapts. “This sounds so pretentious,” he told The Stanford Daily, “but I fought really hard to have time to write. I just wanted to make enough money so that I could keep writing.”
He wakes early, makes coffee, and gets to work before reading the news. “Once I read the news, things are shot for a couple of hours,” he told Kunzum. “I have to be in the universe of the novel, which cares about different things.”
Greer doesn’t outline at first. He writes longhand. He stumbles through hundreds of pages before realizing the novel is actually about something else. “I sit down and write 200 pages and then have a nervous breakdown and realize the novel’s about something else and I start over,” he told Writer’s Digest. “It’s frustrating, but I’ve done it so many times that I think it’s a process.”
When revision starts, he doesn’t cut so much as reshape. He described his revision philosophy to Writer’s Digest with an anecdote from Daniel Handler: “The editor is the patient and you are the doctor. They say, ‘My arm hurts.’ And then they say, ‘I think it’s arm cancer.’ And you say, ‘There’s no such thing as arm cancer—but thank you for telling me your arm hurts.’” He listens to the complaint, but makes his own diagnosis.
If the ending doesn’t land, he doesn’t rewrite the ending—he rewrites the rest of the book. That’s what happened with Less. His editor suggested cutting the twist. Greer refused. “I said, ‘I hear what you’re saying. I’m going to make it work. You’re going to see,’” he told Writer’s Digest. “And I changed the rest of the book.”
Greer learned early to pitch with his left hand. He’d been writing “clever, tricky, incomprehensible stories,” when his professor, William Kittredge, pulled him aside. “Whitey Ford always pitched with his left hand,” Kittredge said. Greer was confused—he didn’t follow baseball. But Kittredge explained: Ford was a left-handed pitcher. That’s just what he did. Greer got the message. “You’re good at emotional,” he told PBS. “You should pitch from there.”
He writes alone. He doesn’t workshop. Doesn’t share drafts. “I tell people misleading things about the book I’m writing,” he said to The Rumpus. “Because I don’t want anyone’s input. Not because I’m a genius—but because I don’t even know what I’m doing yet.” The only thing a novelist needs to hear, he believes, is keep going.
When a novel is done, the relief is often bittersweet. With Less, he wept. With Less Is Lost, he and a friend celebrated with coconut wine they’d made from fermented juice in a plastic bottle. “It tasted like wet paper towels,” he told PBS. “And we got roaring drunk.” But the celebration always gives way to the ache. “It’s hard to let people go,” he said. “Even imaginary people.”
Greer’s success hasn’t made him faster or less self-critical. But it’s given him clarity. “I’ve always felt that I should do whatever I want—that makes a better book,” he told Kunzum. “And I’ve learned to admit what I’m good at and go fully in that direction, even if it’s devastatingly uncool.”
His writing may be full of pratfalls and puns, but the engine is empathy. Greer writes from the deep conviction that sentiment, when earned, matters more than cleverness. “If you’re not risking sentimentality,” he told Esquire, quoting Kittredge again, “you’re not even in the ballpark.”
He’s not sure if there’ll be another Less book. But he’s leaving the door open. “They’re so much fun to write,” he told Kunzum. “And I’ve found this to be a very useful way to get at some hard things.” If he ever returns to Arthur Less, it won’t be for the prize or the brand—it’ll be because, once again, he wants to get it gloriously, generously, and hilariously wrong.
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