When I moved to America in 1992 
I expected to understand America. 
I’d been watching American films all my life, 
American television all my life, I’d come here, I’d visited, 
I’d even stayed and worked from time to time.
Living in America and living in 
the part of America that people on the 
West Coast or the East Coast would call 
“flyover country” - the heart of rural Wisconsin -
for me was 
educational and strange 
and one of the things I realised is 
that I didn’t understand it at all. 
The stories that people told, 
the way that they related to the world… 
It was weird. 
And I thought “OK, in order to understand this
I need to write about it".
And that really is where American Gods came from.
American Gods was my attempt  
to understand this strange new country 
I was now living in. 
It took me about five years of living in America 
and pointing to things and going, “Do you think that’s weird?” 
And the locals going “No, that’s just how it is. 
Every winter we park a car
out there on the ice 
of a frozen lake and we wait for it to 
fall in and we take bets on the day.”
I’m like, “Okay, I thought it was weird, 
you guys think this is completely normal but 
I can put it in my book.” 
What am I your f**king chauffeur? 
I can’t have you two canoodling in Betty’s backseat! 
I mean, this is America! We’ll be pulled over!
Before I wrote 
the novel American Gods and while I was writing it, 
I took a lot of road trips.
I’d get in a car 
and I would drive - and I would drive for days. 
I would stay off the major highways. 
I would take the back roads that 
would take you through small towns 
even through villages 
so driving around America 
seemed like the best possible way of finding out 
what this place was.
You’d just sort of stop and find these things 
that you would never find if you were just on the freeways.
Things like, you know, a replica of the largest 
block of cheese in 1963, 
in a truck made out of polystyrene. 
So finding that America 
an America in which 
sometimes towns were dead, sometimes they were glorious, 
sometimes things were hanging on 
you just sort of meet people and encounter 
things that I would never have encountered 
flying or travelling around any other way.
It was all about the serendipity. 
It was all about the accidents.
Cow. 
I set myself a bunch of rules when I was driving.
Actually I would cheat. After a while I discovered that I would use 
freeways after dark, 
but definitely during the days, I would always take
old highways, 
I would take backroads.
This was in the old days before GPS systems and things, 
so the triple A would send me books. 
I would tell them where I’d like to go 
and they’d send me little map 
books with potential routes mapped out. 
And I would head off 
on those routes and just go from town to town 
finding weird things.
You going to fold that or f**k it?
Imma f**k it.
I think American Gods is about 
a big country that people turn up in. 
And they come from other places and they bring their culture with them 
and then they abandon it. They lose it. It gets worn away. 
And it’s… fundamentally it’s a novel about immigrants and immigration. 
People coming to America and what they bring and what they give up.
And what I love about the TV series is that 
is still absolutely at the heart of everything happening.
