Roshan Sethi, The Simp

I hate reading out loud while people are watching me, but yeah.

So, okay.

So Raj is our protagonist, our hero, not hero of the novel, as it were.

Yeah.

Like you said, he goes to work for this Jim and Anna H., who I always kind of pictured him as kind of Guy Ritchie and some version of like Lauren Bezos.

Feeling accurate.

Yeah.

Raj assumes this role for them of effectively somebody who could be a nobody, who learns how to make himself invisible for them.

And you start the book with the actual laundry list of things, the ad or what they need to These people who are, again, so accurate, are they kind of amalgam for you of a lot of different people? Or were you very specific in your mind about who they were?

Yeah, they're really based on nobody because I don't know anybody quite like them.

And yet I know so many people like them.

But yeah, I don't know Guy Ritchie, for example.

Though I could fully see him acting that way with no prior knowledge of, again, having ever met him.

But yeah, it wasn't based on Guy Ritchie.

It

wasn't based on anyone else.

Some of them

are just little stories I've heard along the way.

I

heard, for example,

of a director who said, let's fuck instead of action.

And I thought, wow, that's pretty crazy.

I put that in the book.

But yeah, I don't know this person in any way, and I don't know his wife either.

And yet they came to me sort of unbidden from the various little fragments I've accumulated over years in this industry.