Life isn't fair, awful things happen to blameless people, but then sometimes, just occasionally, the universe seems to get it right. Matthew Thomas, a 38-year-old former high-school teacher, is the sort of gentle, diligent and thoughtful human for whom you wish nothing less than, well, a million-dollar book deal. A reward he won after spending a decade of his life writing We Are Not Ourselves, his first novel, which tells the life story of Eileen, an Irish-American woman born in 1941, as well as the lives of her husband, Ed, and son, Connell. The name "Jonathan Franzen" has been invoked by those rushing to praise the book. It's an epic tale of family life written in the most un-epic of circumstances.
"We were in a one-bedroom apartment in Queens. Four of us," he explains, referring to his wife and their twin son and daughter. "So the kids would be in the bedroom, my wife would be asleep in the bed on the other side of the room and I'd be at the kitchen table late at night" – he mimes a furtive, abject hunching – "trying to work under a lamp very close to the table."
Now, he works at a rather enviable writer's space in Manhattan and the novel has just been nominated for the Guardian first book award. Thomas shows me the main room, made cosy with potted plants and Persian rugs. Unsurprisingly, he doesn't miss those late nights at the kitchen table.
"There was a period where it felt as if it was hard to think because I was writing all the time, I was teaching and grading all the time and I was a father all the time. And yet I got a lot done during that period. I guess you could say ambition propelled me forward but if it were just ambition it wouldn't have been enough… I hated the thought of slipping through the cracks of my own desires for my life."
He was, he admit, an entirely changed person by the time he finished the book.
"I was a fool when I started. I guess now I'm a wise fool in the sense that I know I'm a fool but I didn't know it then. I learned how to be a person over the course of writing this thing."
His former pupils and fellow teachers knew he was at work on something but didn't know much more than that. With a small smile he says: "I was very keen to play down my writing at the school, partially out of embarrassment. Talking about the book you're writing is such a terrible cliche, first of all, but also I respect the craft enough to have never been comfortable with calling myself a writer until I was done with the book."
Now, though, the book is as done as his teaching days. His old school is just blocks away and as he takes me in for a quick tour, a middle-aged coach greets him with a big slap of a handshake: "We miss having you around! The kids miss you too, y'know? So the book's [out] in the next week or so?" Then three teenage boys ("I taught every one of these guys!") spot him and the mutual delight is palpable in the high fives. "How's your book, Mr Thomas?" asks one.
As we walk back, he says: "Did you hear one of them call me 'Mr Thomas?'" His grin is enormous and he seems amazed. "I haven't heard that in a while."
