There are books that ask to be read, and then there are books that insist on being confronted. Jason Mott’s People Like Us is the latter. It is an audacious, slippery, genre-bending mirror that refuses to let the reader look away. Rather than merely highlighting America’s shine, this novel exposes its fault lines and the lives shaped by them.
Told through parallel narratives, the novel follows two Black authors living in radically different versions of success and survival. One is riding the high of literary stardom. He’s fresh off winning “The Big One,” and being swept across Europe for readings, panels, late-night interviews, and all the curated glamor that comes with being the new darling of the literary world. His days are filled with indulgent distractions, strange encounters, and moments where the surreal slips in like an uninvited guest.
The other author is rooted in the heaviness of home. He’s called to a small Midwestern town reeling from a school shooting. He’s asked to help a grieving community name what feels unnameable all while navigating the emotional wreckage of loss, guilt, and the pressure of being a “voice” when he can barely steady his own. His chapters are quieter, sharper, and closer to the chest.
Between them, the novel weaves in a third presence: a self-aware narrator who bends time, memory, and genre, offering flashes of autobiography, mythmaking, and metafiction. These threads loop back into each other until it’s hard to tell where the book ends and the writer begins.
As the two authors’ journeys echo and distort one another, People Like Us becomes a meditation on fame, grief, race, and the precarious act of telling stories in a country that is always rewriting its own. It’s a novel about the distance between who we think we are and who the world insists we be and what happens when those versions finally collide.
There are moments when the divide between these two authors grows so thin you can see the outline of one inside the other. Maybe they’re separate. Maybe they’re the same man at different distances from himself. Mott refuses to resolve it for us. He leaves us inside that liminal space, wrestling with the American Dream, the shape of Black identity, and the aching search for a corner of the world where Black folks can finally
As poets, storytellers, creatives and readers, National Book Award-winner, Mott reminds us that people like us (and our artistry) is not only a form of entertainment, but an act of advocacy. His work challenges us to use our words not just to move hearts, but to move the world.
I had the pleasure of interviewing him via Zoom. Speaking with him left me both humbled and inspired, with a deeper appreciation for how he carries the Black experience through every word he writes.
The Rumpus: As an aspiring author, writing through themes of identity, trauma, and belonging can take a toll. How do you protect your mental or emotional space during the drafting process?
Jason Mott: I start with a lot of friends. I have a pretty strong support system around me of people and friends and also a therapist that helps to keep me on track. And when things become a bit overwhelming, I have a lot of people that I can talk to and people I can engage with who can help keep me grounded and keep me focused.
The other part is I have learned over the years to control what I am willing to let go of. What I mean by that is, I think writers often underestimate how once you put something into print, it is no longer yours. It belongs to the public, and you have to be sure that the thing you’re putting out there, especially if it’s something very personal and part of yourself, you have to be very certain that you’re okay with that being public and not personal anymore. So I’ve learned to delegate and to navigate that.
Rumpus: What did you learn (about yourself, your craft, or the world) in writing People Like Us that you didn’t expect?
Mott: As far as craft goes, I learned a lot more about working with surrealism, a lot more about trying to balance comedy and seriousness. Both People Like Us and Hell of a Book (Dutton, 2022), my last novel, which People Like Us is a sequel to, both of them work really intrinsically with humor and gravitas. So I’ve learned how to better balance those things, how to be more personal, and also how to engage with the reader a bit more strongly. I also learned how important it is for readers to see themselves in the reading. I make sure that I try to create characters and create ideas and conversations that the reader can identify with very much and feel a part of. Making a reader feel a part of the story is wildly important.
Rumpus: Thinking about what it means to be American, especially through the lens of being Black, I couldn’t help but notice how People Like Us reframes the idea of the “American Dream.” At times, it feels less like a dream and more like a nightmare. You even mention the American Dream and Pennsylvania Steele in the same breath, which made me think about what Pennsylvania represents, the birthplace of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Your writing almost seems to throw a bit of shade at those documents, peeling back their layers to expose a deeper truth about who they were really written for. When crafting those moments, what did you want readers to walk away with?
Mott: I wanted people to re-examine what those documents mean and who they were written for. And what that now means in light of contemporary America. Those documents are living, breathing documents. They’re meant to be changed. I feel like they have undergone extensive change and that they have redefined themselves. However, I don’t necessarily think that they’re still in the best form. America as a whole is not in its best form by a wide margin. And so I think we have to remember that these documents are meant to be renewable. They’re meant to be changing. They meant to evolve with the nation. And I think sometimes we haven’t quite done the best of that.
Rumpus: When The Author is asked to move to Euroland, readers can feel his deep sense of conflict, that fear of losing a place called home. For many within the Black experience, the question of home carries a unique weight.You had few mic drop moments throughout People Like Us but the one that struck me the most was:
“Maybe deep down inside I’ve always been afraid of America, and at the same time always worried about America. Always African. Always American. Always neither.”
This line actually made me think about Black expats and artists like Maya Angelou, Paul Robeson, James Baldwin, Eartha Kitt, Josephine Baker, Tina Turner and Mos Def; Black folks who left America but never truly left the conversation about what it means to belong.
Our families have been in America for over four centuries, yet the notion of belonging has often been contested. How does that layered history, of being both rooted in and estranged from this country, shape the way you approach the idea of home in your writing?”
Mott: I think I’m constantly struggling with that. I’m constantly trying to decide: “How much of America do I belong to and how much am I independent from it?” People Like Us defines how it’s influenced my writing. This was the biggest examination I’ve ever done of that identity and that place and that belonging and what that actually means to me.
Rumpus: Throughout People Like Us, there’s this underlying sense that both Authors are trying to protect themselves. That safety almost becomes synonymous with the presence of a gun. In light of the rise in gun violence across America, how do you think the Second Amendment functions today? Do you feel it offers Black folks safety, or does it cultivate more fear? Can and will the second amendment ever feel “safe” for people like us?
Mott: The Second Amendment is one of those parts of the American doctrine that has not been as mutable as it should be. I do not believe that the engineers of that amendment had any vision of what guns would eventually become. There’s no sense of change—no sense of approaching the Second Amendment on its contemporary terms and understanding what that means to people. I think that’s one of the biggest problems we have with gun violence. As it stands currently, rules are different for minorities than they are for white Americans when it comes to ownership and open carry, and all things related to guns. Will they ever be equal? Don’t know. I think that is a bigger social and complex political question. And that depends on what you believe in America. If you believe America, as an optimist, can reform and can actually bend towards justice, then yes, if you believe that.
Rumpus: There’s this recurring focus on identity throughout People Like Us. “The Author” often signs books as if he’s one of the other Black literary GOATs: Baldwin, Hughes, Coates, Whitehead and so on. On the surface, those moments feel humorous, but the more it happened, the more I wondered if there was something deeper happening. Would you say that was an insecurity of “The Author,” or more of a commentary on what it means to “play your part” in society?
Mott: A little of both. The Author in the story is coming off a high, but still living with the reality that even after this large achievement, he is not on the same playing field as a lot of other people. He’s still kind of a middle-of-the-road author, which is great, but it’s very much still a realization for him. There’s some humor in that, but there is also reality in this space too. There’s a tradition in Europe where Black authors and artists are viewed as the critics of America. A lot of the world looks to Black authors and Black artists to let them know the pulse and give it a barometer check of what America is doing and how America is doing it. They look for people like that, especially like us, to kind of speak power to truth and to be the ones who vocalize the issues of America.
Rumpus: How do you hold up to that? That seems like a heavy weight to carry.
Mott: I think it’s different for everyone. That’s part of what the book tries to explore: how this particular character tries to navigate that. For me personally, it’s a day by day thing. I’ve learned to be the voice of criticism and I’ve recognized that the art comes with a responsibility. I think that’s just the ultimate lesson.
Rumpus: How do you hope your readers will “inhabit” People Like Us beyond finishing it? How should it linger with them?
Mott: I really want people to explore the work on their own. My hope is that when they finish, they recognize the oddity and the danger that is American life. I hope that People Like Us makes the familiar unfamiliar in that way. I hope that it presents and lets us view America through a different lens and recognize that these things are not healthy and not normal.
Rumpus: For aspiring Black authors what’s some advice that you would give them?
Mott: Find your voice and stick to your voice. You can write anything that you want. You can be who you want to be. I think it’s really important to find where you fit and to just let your voice be your voice. Too often when you’re in the Black skin and you’re an author, there’s this inclination, this impulse, almost like it’s a requirement that you have to be the next Maya Angelou, the next Toni Morrison, the next Alice Walker, or the next Ta-Nehisi Coates. You don’t. You can just be you. Whatever you look like, and most likely you will have important, powerful things to say about topics that are important to you. I think that’s the key. And don’t try to be them, try to be you: that’s the most important part.
