By Lauren Mechling
Author’s portrait by Michelle Claire Gavint
Courtney Maum remembers the exact moment. It was months into the pandemic, and she’d simply had it. Newly transplanted from the Berkshires to Norfolk, Connecticut, she was juggling work Zooms and panicked group texts and helping her then-6-year-old daughter learn how to read. One afternoon, Maum stepped into her backyard, lay down on the ground, and thought: I’m done. Really and truly.
She wasn’t the only one. Her across-the-street neighbor had also had enough. Unlike Maum, he wasn’t afraid to show it. He stopped wearing shoes. He started wearing ponchos. He didn’t answer texts, but he was always easy to find—in the treehouse where he’d taken to spending all his waking hours. “There was some nude bathing, too,” Maum says, sounding faintly delighted at the memory. “Watching him externalize what I was feeling was somewhat satisfying, and it was definitely the seed of my book.”
She’s talking about Alan Opts Out, her warmhearted and astutely observed Connecticut comedy about a couple who get their aspirational wires crossed. Alan, the prosperous ad man, suddenly questions the values he’s selling to the rest of the world. Morals aren’t much of a concern for his wife, Vivian, who wants nothing more than to fit in with the Joneses—a pursuit that will be easier once she acquires the perfect at-home red-light skincare contraption, a spot in the queen bees’ social circle, and a new pool out back.
From the ladies who titter over mocktail hour to the neighbors on the town chatboard banging on about other people’s garbage cans and lawn permits, Maum’s book might feel familiar to anybody who has taken note of other people’s Amazon deliveries or ducked a nosy neighbor at the grocery store. The author says the book’s setting is based on Greenwich, Connecticut, but many of the details feel too vibrant not to have been plucked straight from her own local Facebook groups. Born in Connecticut, Maum has spent nearly two decades in the Berkshires and northwestern Connecticut, first in Sandisfield, then in Norfolk, after a search for daycare nudged her family across state lines.
An early job as a reporter for The Berkshire Eagle offered Maum an excellent window into the theater of small-town living. “You go to enough town halls and you start to think about how your grass height affects your neighbor,” she says over FaceTime from her vintage Mercedes-Benz station wagon. “It has an eight-CD player,” she offers from the parking lot of a local library. (She was driving to a dentist appointment, and stopped along the way for Wi-Fi.)
Maum’s fascination with the quirks and customs of a community fueled the columns she used to contribute to The B, and is a key driver of Alan Opts Out, which was optioned for television by the producers of Ted Lasso. While Alan refuses to go to his office anymore, taking meetings from his treehouse, Vivian wants to perform the perfect life, and is ready to master all the dark arts that come with it. She learns to host elaborate themed parties, with wowie-zowie tablescapes and flower arrangements to die for.
“Flower arranging is definitely a thing that a lot of women I know are doing these days,” says Maum, who once worked as a trend forecaster in Paris. “I could definitely see enormous floral arrangements becoming the next new thing,” she says. Maum recalls another “thing”—this one a thing of the past. When she first moved to the Berkshires, her cohort was obsessed with having potlucks. “I was like, goddamn it. Can someone just invite us for a proper meal, because now I’m bringing my own food and my own wine, and I’ll just stay home,” she says with a smile.
When she entertains, she likes to keep it simple. “It’s really about the people, isn’t it?” she asks. A day spent tidying and shopping and cooking is not her idea of a good time. Friends gathering around a baked potato bar? That’s more her speed. “I don’t have time for a multi-course meal,” she says. “I just want to be with the people I like enough to have over, and who like me enough to leave home for.”
That casually bountiful spirit comes through in Maum’s writing. Her books have been about everything from her love of horses to the interior life of Peggy Guggenheim. She also pens Before and After the Book Deal, a wildly popular Substack about the business of writing, named after her bestselling book on the same subject. With a number of titles under her belt, Maum is approaching promotion differently than she used to. In a recent Substack post, she swore off writing personal essays as a means to selling more copies of her book. “If I want to write about something, of course I will, but I can also say no to things that don’t feel right,” she explains.
This sense of equanimity comes through when discussing the launch of her novel, to be held June 2 at the Norfolk Public Library. “Some of my friends and neighbors are going to be there, and it’s at my wonderful local library,” she says. “If you bring the right people together at the right time and place, it’s guaranteed to be fun.”
Alan Opts Out by Courtney Maum is available now from publisher Little, Brown and Company. Click here to find a retailer.
