“I’m a cards-on-a-corkboard kind of guy,” he says. Unwitting though his characters may be, the process of creating them is almost clinically intentional. “When I’m going through my day-to-day life, I feel much closer to Homer Simpson than I do to Chandler from Friends.” “I’ve always felt a lot of empathy for characters that know less than the reader, and I’ve always identified with those characters personally more than I’ve identified with smart characters,” he explains. The protagonists are often clueless to an endearing degree, which, true to his autobiographical tendencies, reflects how Rich feels about our “very confusing, baffling, disorienting” world. There are pirates trying to co-parent a stowaway a hulking human-ape hybrid navigating work-life balance after getting shunted from alien defense to middle management an adult woman struggling with resentment toward her less-than-perfect adoptive parents (wolves) and so on. In his latest short story collection, New Teeth, Rich focuses on the many relatable troubles and triumphs of parenting and family life at large. Rich has also adapted a number of his works for the screen, including the Seth Rogen-starring 2020 film An American Pickle ( based on the novella Sell Out), and TBS's Daniel Radcliffe-starring anthology series Miracle Workers (whose first season was based on the novel What in God's Name, and whose second season grew from the story “Revolution”). The former Saturday Night Live writer has spent the last 15 years or so translating everyone’s favorite drudgery mantra, Life is hard, into something more like this: Life is hard, but it can also be pretty funny, especially if you toss in a monster or a misguided Bible figure. “I just try to find the most entertaining metaphors I can to kind of dramatize the actual, boring, real-life experience that I’m going through.” “All the stories I write are very autobiographical, which people are sometimes surprised about because the stories tend to be about subjects like robots and pirates and time-traveling aliens,” he tells Mental Floss. If you ever want to know what was going on in Simon Rich’s life during any given few-year span, pick up whatever he was writing at the time.
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