I consciously decided to make both 'Sammy's Hill' and 'Sammy's House' more of a warm satire and not go the route of writing a dark and bitter book about D.C.
I'm allergic to caffeine. When I have it, my throat gets sore, and I get a rash.
I was one of those dorky kids who'd wanted to go to Harvard since the fifth grade.
I've seen some version of 'An Inconvenient Truth' since I was born.
You think about D.C. as a boring stuffy place. That's kind of its image. But if you grow up in that, you see all these energetic, fun people and crazy stuff that happens behind the scenes that no one knows about.
The wrists, the Achilles' tendons, and the neck are some of the weakest points of the human body, so a lot of people have phobias about those things. I can't deal with the undersides of wrists.
My parents were enthusiastic fans of 'Sammy's Hill.' But they think 'Sammy's House' is a better book.
I'm just grateful that my parents still love each other.
From age 7 on, I wanted to be a writer.
After writing for TV for a while, I got sort of fed up with all of the cancellations and the volatility in that industry. Also, you're always writing for someone else's character and story, and I really wanted to develop my own.
Whenever Congress was in session, we were in Washington. So four months out of the year we were in Tennessee and the rest of the time in Arlington, which is where my mom grew up. Then, of course, in 1992 we moved into the vice president's house in D.C. I was 15 then.
I didn't realize I wanted to write about D.C. until after 2000. Even though I was a comedy writer, I stayed away from that subject on purpose. It took attaining some distance and perspective.
In my free time, I'd written 'Sammy's Hill' - it had started out as a play. I just did it for myself.
I make things up for a living. It would be pretty boring to just fictionalize real people.
There's this perception of D.C. as a boring town run by old white men, but in reality, there are incredibly young people in charge of really important things.
When my father became vice president, I was a sophomore in high school. I'd do things like go on a run with my soccer team and purposely dodge the security van. Then my parents compromised with the Secret Service when I went to college. I just had a panic button in my dorm room, so if I pressed that, they'd be there within 2 or 3 minutes.
Any writing teacher tells you to write what you know, and for better or for worse, Washington is a world I know well.
I love the satire and skewering of comedy writing.
I can't look at people's wrists. Something about the veins makes me weak. My siblings used to torture me with that because they knew it was the thing I couldn't handle. They would stick their wrists in my face.
I was really nerdy. Compared with my sisters, I often felt like a boring person because I lived so much in my head and in books.
