John Grisham

The text cites a recent ranking that grouped several living or recently deceased writers who all sit right around exactly 11 feature adaptations.

John Grisham, Nicholas Sparks, John Le Carre, and Ian McEwan.

The clustering at the number 11 is the real story here.

Mm.

It's the industrialization of specific feelings.

Mm.

Think about the last time you watched a John Grisham movie on a Sunday afternoon.

You weren't watching it to be surprised by some avant-garde narrative.

Gorgeous setting.

Then John Grisham is stepping slightly outside his usual Southern courtroom drama with The French Illusion.

Which is fascinating.

It is.

Well, and that is, I feel like we've talked about this too with books, is it's like an author writing a story that features unsavory characters and terrible things, that is not a reflection of the author's beliefs, and it's not an indictment of them.

Like, that is what the character did, and unfortunately, like, we need an adversary, you know, like we need to have the antagonist in the books and depending on what the book, like, just like, do you get mad when you read a John Grisham novel and there's a serial killer? Like, do you get mad about that? Or do you just get mad when like a woman might write a book where she features somebody who like does something abhorrent? You know, I don't know.

It's just like interesting.

It's an interesting thing that like people like, I don't know.

Never mind.

It's a thing where everybody thinks they're the lead lawyer in John Grisham.

It's like, no.

You work at Chipotle.

It does not sound like a lawyer book written for lawyers.

It sounds like, honestly, a John Grisham novel, except it's all true, and it's from your perspective.

And to see the way you investigate this case and decide how to bring charges when obviously at the first shot it was not clear who had done this.

You guys had to figure out.

There's a jury verdict, and we had to wait a couple years for the appeals.

And then I had the transcripts and all of my notes, witness statements, photographs.

And I wrote two Southern writers, one I knew personally and one I only knew of, Pat Conroy and, and John Grisham.

And I wrote both these gentlemen.

No, that's the...

John Grisham.

Yeah, that's Grisham.

That's a Georgia guy.

A publisher really doesn't invest in you the way they used to, partly because a lot of those avenues have dried up.

You know, if you're older, you may have, you know, listened to other authors and steps authors talk about, you know, getting an ad placed in the New York Times or, you know, those things just don't exist anymore unless you're the... one or two, you know, unless you're John Grisham or something, the publisher just isn't going to make that big of a bet on you.

Until you, what we call breakout, until you sort of prove yourself.

And that's just from book to book.

chair like this.

But a vanilla envelope under your bed, like it sounds like you're in a fucking John Grisham novel, man.

Yeah.

That's insane.