This is definitely not a two-hour movie, but it feels bigger than the small-screen, too.” I went into the process a little bit on edge - I was concerned that people wouldn’t see it the way I was seeing it. When it did come time to think about selling it to Hollywood, I was like, “I don’t know how this is going to work. What does that look like to you? What can you share about the development process so far? It was announced as a major deal with Shonda Rhimes and Matt Reeves adapting the book into a movie and a series. Which I guess means it’s some form of therapy for me.Īnd of course, this is on the way to Netflix. How do I deal with the lingering nostalgia and regret of that period of my life, without letting it just subsume me in grief? I find often that my protagonists in my books - I don’t know it at the time, always, but as I get into the book and certainly towards the end, I realize that they’re at some level a reflection of me and where I am in the moments in my life. I was coming off a divorce and really trying to get my head around the idea of a big piece of my life having not worked out - that disappointment. It’s a reflection of where I was emotionally as I started writing the book. He’s a few years out from a divorce and dealing with the trauma of his daughter’s death years before.

We come into the book and Barry is very much this broken human being. He’s a cop and honestly, his profession was far less important to me than his emotional journey. Given the personal nature of Recursion for you, is he close to you as a character? Walk me through how you sketched out Barry.

Recursion by blake crouch