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ended up focusing more on Mike and me. A book takes on a life of its own and you end up telling this story.

Would you consider The Brother Years to be one for Y/A (young adult) readers, and did you have a target audience in mind?

No, not really. Do you think it's a Y/A book?

Only in that the language is clean and there's no sex.

It just might be the way I write. I tend to write pretty cleanly, in general. I don't have any problem with it being marketed that way or with it being a Y/A book. But if you're asking me if I went out of the way to write a Y/A novel, I didn't. My kids, who are 12 and 14, have read it. I want someone of a similar age (as the characters in the book) to be able to read it and to understand it.

The Brother Years is set in the fictional North Shore suburb of Seneca. You grew up in Wilmette, a suburb that has a Seneca Avenue. Is that how you arrived at the name?

One of my friends lived on Seneca when I was growing up. It was a street I spent a lot of time on, so that probably lodged in my brain. You pick a name and you’re like, “That seems to fit!” All the other things are named, like New Trier and Evanston, and I don't know why I didn’t name Wilmette. Anyone who grew up in that area would know it’s Wilmette. It’s a city that’s next to Evanston that has a lakefront piece of it and a harbor. It's obviously Wilmette. When you're writing, early on, it makes it easier if you make it fictional to just do what you need to do. You’re not worried about if it’s true or not, you’re just trying to tell a story.

I’m glad you mentioned New Trier, because the high school is its own character in the novel. As an alumnus, how would you rate your own experience at New Trier?

I feel like I captured pretty clearly like how I felt (in the book). I probably wouldn't be a writer if I didn’t go to New Trier. It's a great school. You have great teachers. We were poor and I didn't know that there were other people like us. As in the only kids we knew were kids of rich people. I worked as a janitor with my father on Wednesday and Sunday nights cleaning an office building in Wilmette. We called it the Baker Building. But other kids weren’t nice to janitors.

Some teenagers have a reputation for not being nice. Hormones and all that.

Yeah. They don't have a lot of experience; they don't understand that people who work as janitors are actually people, too. Not just my dad—I'm working at that job! There’s all that attitude about doing that work. You sort of hide, but you’re also defiant about it. It really informs your character. I'm always going to be on the underdog’s side because of that feeling of going to school but knowing you're sort of half on the other side of this hierarchal dividing line.

High school is cliquey enough and then you add that element to it and it just intensifies it.

That’s another thing I touched on, but it’s almost impossible to understand how big New Trier is. It’s 5,000 kids. It's not really cliquey in the way of a lot of high schools. You don't know half your class. You know how when you’re paired with someone to walk down the aisle for graduation? I was paired with a girl I didn’t know that I'd never seen before. So, it's more like a college where their cliques and popular kids, but it’s sort of muted because it's just so big. I would go to school and do the baseline of what I needed to do, and I was content. I liked being anonymous. I had four really good friends near the middle of my sophomore year. Those guys were really important for me. I knew who my crew was and we were together and it made school fun. The social part of it was fine. It was a great school. I learned so much there. I learned how to be around the people who are basically going to rule the world. That’s the way it is. It shouldn't be that way, but that is the way it is.

I recently interviewed filmmaker Kris Rey about her new movie I Used to Go Here, in which a novelist is invited back to her alma mater to do a reading. Have you been invited back to New Trier to do a reading or to speak to students?

I don't think I have. There may have been some invitation to speak to a class, but it wasn't possible. I live in Tennessee now and it's not convenient for me to get back there. But I would totally do it. All the English classes I had were good. I had an AP teacher who was great.

You are a co-creator of and writer for the Netflix series Outer Banks. If T h e Brother Years was made into a Netflix series or movie, who would you like to see playing the main character Willie and his older brother Coyle?

Gosh, I have no idea. Those roles are really young. They always ask me that! Outer Banks season two was just announced today.

Congratulations.

Thanks. While we’ve been on the phone, I’ve gotten like 25 emails. I’m the executive pro ducer and co-creator. I’ve co-written the first six scripts of the next season. But I’m like the guy who doesn't know anything about film. I'm writing the scripts and I'm doing the story, but when you asked me about younger actors, I don't know any. There are probably a handful of young people who are famous or have broken through in the adult world, like YouTubers or Instagram BY MIKE LUBOW ILLUSTRATION BY KIRSTEN ULVE

North Shore morning on Mars

Orange dawn. You’re strolling across an empty North Shore beach, far from the shoreline. The sun’s barely up, and so are you. You went there to start a hot day on a cool morning—to avoid people, avoid the mask thing, the social distancing thing, to avoid thinking about COVID-19.

It’s quiet. No wind. No movement. With the lake far behind, you’re in a world of dry stones and sand dunes. You think, this is what it must be like on Mars.

As a kid, you were fascinated by Mars, even

people who are sort of famous at that age. When we were casting Outer Banks, there aren't that many famous people who are 16. There’s a limited number. It’s somewhere around the early twenties when people start getting known. I’ve been asked that question in various forms

NORTH SHORTS LIFE ON MARS A SIGN THAT HOPE ON THE HORIZON.

and I’m terrible at it. wanted to go there. Here and now, this lonesome piece of the North Shore looks like Mars. And you figure, no, you wouldn’t want to go to such a lifeless planet.

Then, a bird flies from a tree on an overhanging bluff. Hey, you know that wingbeat. A neighborhood Robin. You have no idea why this solitary bird decided to fly through the empty sky at that moment. But you’re glad it did. A sign of normal life. Maybe a sign of times to come. The place is still bleak, but a little less so.

This column was adapted by Mike Lubow from his book: Wild Notes: Observations over time about birds and other fleeting things. Available on amazon.com.