On writing a funny novel sideways — and the name I borrowed to do it.
Most of what I write here is the useful stuff. Where to go and how to get there for less. Which annual fee actually pays for itself. What I learned the hard way so you don’t have to. Travel, tips, the occasional good deal — life on the road, written down in case it helps somebody.
So a comic novel about a man named Greg probably looks like a detour.
It isn’t. I just took the side door.
Here’s the admission I’ll make early, before the marketing voice takes over — I couldn’t write this book as me. Not because it’s a secret. Because the truth in it needed a stranger to carry it. Some things you can only say out loud if you say them about someone else.
So I made someone else. His name is Beau Griffin.
Greg Pendleton is fine. He’ll tell you so. Divorced, organized, armored in routine — a man who has quietly confused managing his life for living it. He eats dinner standing at the kitchen counter, because sitting at the table “felt like a production.” He keeps a laminated packing list. He owns a nice shirt he never wears but always packs, on the private theory that bringing it guarantees he’ll never need it.
When his sister tries to tell him the truth, it sails right past him:
He had told his sister Karen recently that he was “in a really good place,” and Karen had said, “Greg, you’re in Dayton,” and he had laughed, because he thought she was making a geography joke.
That’s the whole man, right there. He thinks it’s a joke about Ohio.
Then work sends him to Manila, and a Filipino family he barely knows decides, without asking, that he belongs to them now. There’s a packing list that does not survive contact with them. There’s a travel jar of Folgers he guards “with the quiet fondness of a man regarding a spare tire.” There’s a wedding, a fiesta, and a man slowly losing the argument that he’s okay on his own.
It’s a funny book. I mean that. People laugh.
But you already see what I’m doing, don’t you.
“Fine” is the word I know best. It’s the one we hand the grocery-store acquaintance who asks how we’re holding up. It’s the smooth stone we keep in a pocket so no one notices the hand is shaking. Greg is fine the way the newly grieving are fine — fluently, exhaustingly, and not at all.
Most days this blog stays practical. But every so often a post tips its hand and admits the thing underneath — that we travel partly to outrun something, and that “fine” is usually a cover story. When it’s come up, I’ve told it straight. Greg let me tell it crooked. And crooked, it turns out, gets under the door.
I didn’t sit down to write a novel. I was on a plane.
Somewhere over the Pacific I watched Rental Family — the one where a lonely American in Tokyo takes a job standing in as other people’s family, paid to belong, and starts belonging for real. I got off that flight thinking about a man who’d get the opposite. Not a rented family. A real one, handed to him for free, whether he wanted it or not.
It started on a napkin. The napkin ran out, so I borrowed paper. The paper became voice memos — endless ones, the kind you mutter into your phone so the person next to you assumes you’re on a call. Then it became almost three weeks at café tables in Shanghai, and after that a month in my apartment in Bangkok, just me and Greg, arguing about whether he was okay.
Which is to say: I wrote the whole thing the way I travel. In motion, a little lost, following a stranger to see where he’d take me. This is a travel blog. Greg earned his spot on it.
About the name.
Beau Griffin isn’t a marketing invention or a wall to stand behind. It’s stitched from my two sons — a piece of each of them, set side by side and sent out into the world to do the talking I couldn’t do in my own voice.
There’s a son inside the book, too. The thing that finally pushes Greg out the door is a text from his kid: Dad try to actually do something this time. Go to a night market or whatever. Have an adventure. I didn’t notice until later that I’d built an entire novel around a son telling his father to go live — and then signed it with my own sons’ names.
So the disguise is the least disguised thing I own. I went looking for a stranger to write the honest book, and the stranger I built turned out to be made entirely of the people I love most. That’s the joke the whole thing rests on. It might also be the only true thing I know about grief: you don’t get past it. You carry it forward, under a different name, and if you’re lucky you let it make you laugh.
Greg, He’s Fine is out now. It’s funny. It’s tender. It’s a closed-off man and the family that refuses to take “fine” for an answer.
I’d love for you to read it. And if you’ve ever told someone you were fine when you weren’t — well. You already know Greg better than he knows himself.
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