Q&A With Page Getz  

This week I’m honored to do this Q&A with journalist & author Page Getz. Page is the author of A Town With Half The Lights On. The book became an instant USA Today Bestseller!  

Q: Page would you please give a brief description of A Town With Half The Lights On?  

A:  This novel follows the intersecting lives of a quirky small town called Goodnight, Kansas, as the Solvang family arrives from New York. It’s a modern day epistolary told through the voices of Goodnight, from diary confessions and email gossip to notes passed during algebra and letters to the Goodnight Star Free Press. Chef Sid Solvang has lost everything when his wife, Scarlet, inherits her estranged father’s estate.  Their daughter, Harlem, befriends the local black sheep, Disco Kennedy, who enlists their help in saving the fledgling May Day Diner. The Solvangs find themselves immersed in the political histrionics of the community as an ideological rift divides Goodnight. At its heart, it’s a story about community, redemption and the power of the press. It’s also about being different. 

Q: Where did the idea for the story come from?  

A: The world of Goodnight began as comical stories I wrote to reconcile my homesickness when I moved from Kansas to Hollywood. By day I wrote about everything wrong with the world, but at night I escaped to a sort of virtual Kansas where I could invent a town around my idealism. There were so many small towns, eccentric neighbors, sleepy diners and class injustices absorbed in the story from 23 years in Kansas. Not to sound too Jenny-from-the-block, but I never saw any of it clearly until I was far enough away for long enough that I could see where I came from and who I am because of it.  

Q: When did you realize that being an author was your dream?  

A: I never decided to be a writer, I just wrote. As a child I struggled with being suicidal for years, so I compulsively wrote terrible poetry which read like Dr.  Seuss’s 88-page suicide note, but that’s when words became medicine.  

The first time I felt the magic of writing something “real” I was 13 and without ever deciding to write, I poured out a short novel about a ballerina who time travelled to save the Titanic. (I was obsessed with the Titanic for so many years I was called Titanic Girl in school!) I remember writing late into the night while everyone was asleep and I felt high on it. For me, the magic is writing myself into a sort of trance-like spell and being surprised by what lands on the paper.  

Q: How long did it take you to write A Town With Half The Lights On?  

A: The structure of the story took less than a year of writing daily, but the characters, setting and world of Goodnight were stitched together from those 20 years of stories. This final iteration evolved as the culmination of these disconnected fragments through my shifting filter as I tried to reconcile the political acrimony around me.  

Q: After readers turn the last page after reading A Town With Half The Lights On, what are the most important lessons you hope readers learn? What emotions do you hope readers feel? 

A: The proliferation of dystopian fiction in the context of current world trauma has reinforced my belief that we create the world we imagine. I’ve seen in my personal life how my thoughts shape or project into manifestations and it’s changed the way I write. I also have a form of mirror-touch synesthesia that makes me physically feel pain when I read pain, so it feels very tangible and immediate. I can’t bear to read or write about suffering anymore. Trauma has been cumulative for me, and I can’t hold anymore, but I don’t like sentimentality or formulaic love stories, which is why I held onto Frank Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life” to keep my tone in check.  

I am a believer that literature can (and should) dream us out of where we are. I hope this book is comforting, but I also hope it inspires readers to consider in what ways, big or small, we can look out for each other as a community and call out the injustices that exploit our most vulnerable.  

Q: Will book 2 be a sequel to reading A Town With Half The Lights On, or will book 2 be a standalone novel?  

A: I’m working on a sequel now, but it is sprawling and it’s starting to look like I may have a trilogy on my hands. There are so many characters I love in this little town. I want to do right by all of them and I’m not sure their stories will fit in just one book.  

Q: You are a journalist as well as an author. I think it’s really cool you worked for the Los Angeles Times! Would you say being a journalist has helped in writing A  Town With Half The Lights On?  

A:  I spent a lot of time researching and fact-checking the book from deep-diving into the U.S. Farm Bills to the intersection of labor and environmental justice and my obsession with accuracy came from journalism. I couldn’t have written this book if I hadn’t been a journalist and I miss it, but as a reporter, my idealism was off the charts. The more I researched and understood the history of social justice, the less I could fit into mainstream media, so it was liberating to dream up a newspaper that played by its own rules.  

Q: How does it feel knowing A Town With Half The Lights On instantly became a USA Today Bestseller? I know it’s very rare for a book to get on any Bestsellers list so quickly!  

A: The happiest feeling is hearing readers say my book gave them hope or that it restored their faith in humanity. It restores my faith in humanity to see so many people resonate with a book essentially about human kindness. It’s hard for me to reconcile this American moment inside what feels like the inevitable and ferocious stand-off between democracy and capitalism, but more significantly, in the context of what we are witnessing in Palestine, which breaks the scale in terms of human suffering. It feels like I’m comforting an inconsolable world. For those of us with a heart for social justice, we’re traumatized, so I hope this story is healing. It is heartwarming to imagine readers who pick up this book will feel a little better when they put it down and maybe they’ll be inspired to find some way to do some good on this earth.  

Q: If/When Hollywood gets the rights to A Town With Half The Lights On, who would be your dream cast to play the characters?  

A:  As I wrote I thought of Sid Solvang as a Jewish George Bailey, but at some point, he became Jon Stewart in my mind, so if my dream movie had a budget for a time machine, he would’ve been Sid.  

Jon Stewart aside, I have a fantasy about casting actors with a connection to Kansas, so Paul Rudd could be Sid even though he’s from Overland Park, which is on the fancy side, but I forgive him. Also from OP, Jason Sudeikis has a Reverend Arlo vibe. Don Cheadle would make a good Ford Hollis, though he is only from KC, but I can live with that. Annette Bening is from Topeka, and she’d make a brilliant Virginia. Now I’ve run out of Kansas, so time machine-Ashley Judd is an obvious Bailey Nation. Jenna Ortega as Harlem? Disco would be the hardest one. I picture her as a teenage version of Jessi Zazu + Kacey Musgraves + Ellie Kemper.  Honeybee has a Holly Hunter vibe, if Holly Hunter was drunk at a church revival.