Mad Men may have ended last year, but show creator Matthew Weiner hasn’t dawdled: Today, it was reported that Weiner will release his debut novel in the fall of 2017. Heather, the Totality tells the story of a child named Heather from “the perspective of multiple characters who are obsessed” with controlling her, The New York Times reports. A press release quoted by USA Today described it as “a dark fable set in contemporary Manhattan … a novel about three people from two worlds who are on a collision course in pursuit of a beautiful child.” The novel was inspired by a chance conversation Weiner overheard on the mean streets of New York City, where a teen girl seemed to be having a tense conversation with someone. (Welcome to New York, bud.)
Weiner said he was plenty embarrassed by his early fiction efforts, calling them “nothing that I would ever show anybody.” The downside of waiting so long to publish is that every review—seriously, every review—will find some way to use Mad Men as a reference point. I can see them coming even now, a year before the book’s release: Remember how Joan the secretary spent seasons being ogled and manipulated by all the rich bad boys of the advertising world before she figured out how to play them, and got crazy rich? Imagine that… but with a millennial.
The book will be published by Little, Brown, who have already compared Weiner to Henry James and Edgar Allen Poe.
