📝 Andrew Sean Greer’s Writing Routine

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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.

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