‘The Leftovers’ Author Tom Perrotta Breaks Down the Series Finale

With Sunday night’s episode, titled ‘The Book of Nora,’ HBO’s The Leftovers concluded its series, perhaps one of the best depictions of grief and the grand mysteries we all live with that has ever been put on a screen. In its final hour, we focus on one character in particular: Nora Durst, who’s spent the entirety of the series trying to deflect and deny the pain of having lost her husband and both children in the Sudden Departure. The final episode sees her enter that device that’s been promised to send her wherever those Departed have gone to, then flashes forward to the scene we saw at the end of the season premiere: older, gray-haired Nora delivering doves to a church in Australia.

While executive producer and showrunner Damon Lindelof has steadfastly insisted that the finale of The Leftovers would not ever explain the hows and whys of the Sudden Departure, we do get closure on the relationship that came to mean the most to viewers: Nora and Kevin. It’s The Leftovers, so it comes in the package of a story that keeps the audience wondering what’s real and what isn’t. Why is Kevin saying that Nora is just a woman he remembers meeting once in Mapleton? Why is Laurie all of a sudden alive and taking Nora’s phone calls? Is Kevin just telling a sweet story in order to pave over their years apart? What’s Nora been up to all this time? And then, in the show’s closing minutes, Nora delivers her monologue about what happened after she stepped into the device. She tells Kevin that she was indeed taken to where the Departed had gone: a world where 2% of the world hadn’t departed, but rather 2% of the world was all that remained. And after finding her family older, happy, and together, she decided to return. It’s an astounding monologue, told only from Nora’s perspective, and it ends the series on a note of hopeful mystery, which is just about perfect.

Closing the book on The Leftovers the series must be a uniquely meaningful experience for Tom Perrotta, who wrote the original novel from which the TV series is based, and who has been a co-writer with Linfelof on the series since the beginning. Decider got a chance to speak to Perrotta about his interpretation of the ending, the importance of Nora, the not-so-dead return of Laurie, and much more.

Decider.com: This final episode is called “The Book of Nora” which pairs it with the season premiere [“The Book of Kevin”]. Why was it important to end the season, and indeed the series, with Nora?

Tom Perrotta: I think that Nora is the person most affected by the Sudden Departure, and if the show has been about characters gradually finding a way to live in the face of the tragedy that’s occurred to them, Nora is the biggest test case of all. We saw her fall apart in the middle of this season, and I think she’s a character that we’ve really come to care about. In the shortest version: she deserves it. [laughs] Obviously, Kevin comes to his peace chronologically before she does. I think that’s what happened at the end of episode seven. They’re each on their separate journeys, and when he decides to blow up this other world where he is another person, he’s saying, “I want to live in that real world, and I want to live with Nora.” But she’s off on this other journey that takes her a much longer time to complete. And she needs him to find her.

Can you walk about what discussions you may have had with Damon Lindelof about how far to go in the finale in terms of offering up explanations? I know Damon had said previously in the press that we were never going to get an explanation for the Departure, but did you debate and discuss how much you were going to show of the device Nora goes into, or this alternate universe she talks about?

Yeah, it was in fact a very important and, at times, heated discussion because I have no issues with showing the device. The device is something that belongs to this world. In fact it was based on some technology that already exists. Tom Spezialy, who collaborated on the finale with me and Damon, did a lot of research into the physics side of it. That all passes the realism test. I think that we decided to have Nora tell her story rather than show her story because it put Kevin and the viewer in the position of having to accept or reject her story. In that sense, they are like people confronted with any religious narrative. I can’t prove to you that Jesus rose from the dead; I can only take it on faith. So the show itself becomes kind of test of faith in Nora. We can argue about whether or not that hotel that Kevin went to is real, but we can’t argue about whether or not he had those experiences. It doesn’t seem like a story he’s making up. He may be dreaming it in some sense, but he’s not consciously making it up. At the end of “The Book of Nora” the question is, “Did Nora just tell Kevin a really elaborate lie? Or did she bring back a truth that can help the whole world heal?”

In the episode, you see a lot of Nora flat-out rejecting any pretty stories — from the nun or from anybody at the wedding, the whole idea of the doves taking the wishes out to people — and then you have this idea [at the end] of, “Well maybe she was telling a story”. Was that intentional, the seeds of Nora being so resistant to accepting such stories?

And Kevin is also perpetrating a fiction. He saying, “Let’s pretend that we barely know each other and all the pain that we went through and all the terrible things that we said to each other don’t exist. Let’s see if we can start from there. Maybe that would be a healthy way to do it.” She’s being presented with various fictions that make life a little bit easier to live. The purely psychological explanation is that Nora learns that it can be useful to tell a healing fiction and that might allow people to live with themselves and live with each other in a way they couldn’t otherwise.

We see Laurie in this episode, and the last time we saw her it was strongly implied that she was going to her death. Amy Brenneman said that’s how she played that scene. Is seeing her again supposed to make us distrust the narrative? And thus, by the end of the episode, distrust what Nora says?

I don’t think so. What’s interesting about the background is we wrote episode six thinking that Laurie was going to kill herself, but unusually for our writers room, there was not consensus. People who wanted Laurie to live were so … we couldn’t move on. There was just this sense of “That’s not right. That’s not what we should do.” Certainly, all we see is Laurie goes overboard, and it’s quiet. It’s only thirty seconds. It’s an incredibly weighty silence in the context of the show. You can either look at that episode as it begins with Laurie’s attempted suicide and it ends with her successful suicide; an arc of “Oh, she has finally completed this suicide. The whole series has been about Laurie being finally able to kill herself.” Or you can say the show is about people who constantly walk up to the edge and make the choice to live. I think that’s the story we decided to tell, and once we did that and we established consensus in the room, it allowed us to find a lightness in the storytelling that maybe is the most unexpected thing about it.

At the wedding, we’re introduced to the symbol of the scapegoat: people putting these beads on the goat to represent their sins, and then sending it off. And then later, when Nora finds it and frees it, she takes on those symbolic sins. Does that tie into this idea that the Departure, Nora lost everything, lost her whole family, but then in her story, she mentions that on the other side, her family could all be together? Was that notion of Nora as a sacrifice intentional?

Yes, I think there’s that in it. The other part of it is, we saw a goat get sacrificed in season two and there was an Old Testament quality to that. There’s a sense that the wound of the Departure is so fresh, and people are so bewildered that they’ve returned to this ancient sense that the gods need to be appeased. When the goat appears at the wedding, I think you have that feeling of dread, like, “Oh God. This fun wedding is going to turn into a sacrificed goat.” But instead it’s a much more Christian redemptive idea. Let’s make our sins symbolic. Let’s transfer them to this other creature and we won’t even kill the creature, we’ll just banish it from our community. We have committed a symbolic ritual. It seems like a much more sophisticated and less punishing sense of religious possibility. But when Nora then takes those beads and puts them on, to me, there’s a feeling that there’s all this guilt that Nora has been living with. She doesn’t always acknowledge it, but it’s there and occasionally she does acknowledge it. The finale is about Nora breaking down and becoming vulnerable enough to offer this story to Kevin. That attempt to take the sins from the goat and to read the messages of love that she’s ignored and just open herself up again, all seems part of a necessary process. In other words, she wasn’t ready to forgive Kevin at the wedding; she had to go through something that night that got her farther along that path. To me, that was one of the steps.

In adapting and expanding the universe of your novel, was it fun and interesting to see which characters may have emerged more significant – or differently significant – on the show versus on the page?

Yeah, it was a constantly surprising process. The show, as it grew, became something that had only a kind of tangential relationship to the book, so absolutely. It was really interesting to watch Nora emerge as a huge center of gravity in the show. It was really interesting to watch Matt Jamison step up from a very minor character in the book to a crucial force. And it was really great to watch Laurie liberate herself from the Guilty Remnant and become a source of wisdom and empathy and kindness. That transformation was very dramatic, I think.

As you were writing the novel, did you have these thoughts of how the Sudden Departure might have played like in other areas of the world, that we then got to see, in places like Texas and in Australia?

I thought it was such a huge idea that I decided that the microcosm was the way to approach it. I did understand in my own mind that it would have different meanings in different places. Though my original concept was “No religion could explain this,” so that everyone would be left to improvise responses. That, I think, would have been globally true. Though it may be that if I sat down with some religious scholars, they might tell me otherwise, that maybe some religions would be strong enough to withstand it. But I also felt like we live in a country where there’s a lot of religious improvisation, that it’s always been going on, so I didn’t really think outside of an American context. And I don’t know that the show really has either, in the sense that Australia is kind of a backdrop for the show rather than a forum for investigation.

There’s a recurring thread in this episode of people writing their own story. We see it as Nora dictates the Mad Libs of her own obituary. And then we see Kevin makes up this story to tell her. Is there some sort of greater thematic significance that in the wake of this great tragedy, the responsibility to write everybody’s story falls upon them as individuals?

Yeah, and very specifically, Nora is consistently being offered models for fiction. Kevin tells a story, like, “Let’s pretend all our misery never happened,” and the nun is saying, “Isn’t it nice to think that these pigeons are out there delivering messages of love to the most far-flung corners of the world.” And Nora of course has been the person who, you know, she won’t allow in episode two the widow of the Pillar Man to say his disappeared from the pillar, rather than that he plunged over. And she even brought the autopsy photo over and places it over the beautiful painting. So she has been this cruel truth-teller. It does seem like, in a world that is tragic, having a real passion for the truth may not be the best survival tactic.

And isn’t that what religion can be, is a way of telling the story without having to be so cruelly factual.

That’s what it looks like to those who don’t believe, for sure. When you say that the child who died is an angel now, I don’t know if that’s true or not, but it certainly makes people feel better.

Where to stream The Leftovers