Our home is not adorned with Monticello souvenirs or TJ doodads. I do not pore through TJ books day and night. I do not know where I got the idea for TJRM, which obviously took a lot of research, thinking and imagining. WHY did I commit myself to years of pondering the character of Thomas Jefferson in order to bring him to life in a "wonderfully strange what-if story," as Kirkus Reviews calls the book? I just do not know the answer. I was looking for a book idea and nothing was coming to me that panned out. During time off from a job, after I quit the East Hampton Press in 2009, this idea started to take shape. That's when I started doing a lot of TJ reading.
It's always been a little fantasy of mine, at least while I was growing up, to actually MEET famous people from American history. One stimulus for that was an old 1940s B&W movie I saw on TV as a little kid called something like "The Amazing Andrew" about a good guy accountant who lands in jail on trumped up charges of embezzlement and is visited in his cell by the ghost of Jefferson, Jackson, Washington and Franklin (I think). They counsel him. Why that scene stuck with me all my life I do not know. But it helped inspire TJRM. So did my own "ghost" experience at age 15 in Washington, CT ... more on that someday.
As for TJ, I've always been utterly fascinated, even mesmerized, by Monticello. The place is so unique, so beautiful, and so revealing about that man. You gotta go if you've never been.
I may be obsessed with this book and trying to sell it but no, I ain't obsessed with TJ. Just fascinated. He left more of himself to ponder — and the most complex, contradictory legacy that goes to the heart of the American experience — than any other founder. I suspect he was well aware we'd be poking about his relics, forever fascinated. I think he set us up. He wanted to be immortal.