Interview with a Plus One

Christopher Noxon is a Los Angeles-based author whose debut novel, Plus One, traverses the life of a husband and father, Alex, who just happens to be married to a screenwriter newly successful in creating and running a zeitgeisty premium-cable series. It’s important to note that Noxon is married to Jenji Kohan, creator of Orange is the New Black and Weeds. For Noxon “plus ones” are the partners of the talent invited to events like awards shows, and along with painting the portrait of a contemporary Hollywood marriage, the book offers a comic glimpse into an admittedly niche subculture: those folks partnered with celebrity types often found shopping for trendy clothes and buying pounds of wild animal flesh in high-end Los Angeles butcher shops—that is, when they’re not dutifully serving as “domestic first responders” and “family CFOs.”

Last week, I had an early breakfast with Noxon, during which he proved inordinately good-humored and at peace for a person who wears many hats and must regularly drive across Los Angeles during rush hour to drop off and pick up his kids. The following text comes from a conversation we had the next day.

—Adam Baer

THE BELIEVER: Let’s start with my best attempt at a Charlie Rose/US Weekly-ish question: What was it like working with… yourself (on this book)?

CHRISTOPHER NOXON: When I tell people I wrote a book about a guy married to a successful TV writer, the joke comes easily: “How’d you possibly come up with that?” My lead character Alex is an Angeleno, the son of lesbians and the husband of successful TV writer. Let’s just say if we met at a party Alex and I would have a lot to talk about.

But I swear Plus One isn’t a straight roman-a-clef. The truth is I took my life and exaggerated and condensed and expanded and reimagined it. True-life facts and feelings got mixed up with bits borrowed from friends, events that never happened, and material I invented whole cloth. Alex isn’t me any more than Figgy, Alex’s wife, is my real-life wife, Jenji.

Alex is my attempt to create an agreeable, conflicted “soft man” raised by well-intentioned feminists to “follow your bliss”; Figgy is an ambitious, intense working mother raised to believe she could “have it all.” In those ways, Alex and I are much more alike than Figgy is like Jenji, whose parents weren’t exactly encouraging of her career (her mom famously told her after college that she should go sit on a bench at CalTech and meet a nice man to support her). I could list the many big and small ways the book differs...