Craig Thomas, co-author of How I Met Your Mother, is now a novelist. His debut novel, That’s Not How It Happened, will be released by Hanover Square Press on November 4th. Told from four different points of view, the book is a family drama about a young man with Down syndrome, his parents, and his teenage sister, and how their lives are forever changed when Hollywood decides to make their story into a movie. It’s a funny and heartwarming story filled with meta moments from Thomas’ own experiences as a broadcaster and parent of a child with a disability. “This family is not my family,” Thomas told Variety. “But there’s a lot of my family there, and a lot of me.”
Eighteen years ago, between seasons two and three of How I Met Your Mother, Thomas’ first son was born with Jacobsen syndrome. Although the child required immediate and intensive medical assistance and survived open heart surgery at two weeks of age, long-term developmental symptoms set him and his family on a unique journey. In the midst of early production on How I Met Your Mother, Thomas joked, “I would drive to see a sitcom and then drive home to this dark medical drama. I was living in these two different worlds.”
For years, Thomas has sought to blend these two worlds by incorporating something from his family’s stories into his creative work. “I flirted with trying to write about it in How I Met Your Mother,” he says. “Marshall and Lily was based on my wife and I, and we often incorporated things from our real lives into the story.” When Marshall and Lily, played by Jason Segel and Alyson Hannigan, respectively, became parents on the series, Thomas recalls, “I had no idea how to talk about my life as parents on the show. I felt really alone.”
Thomas tried to write other stories and screenplays that captured his unique experience as a parent, but all that came to fruition was “It just didn’t happen.” However, having an older son with a disability is not the only thing that aligns the family in this book with Thomas’ own experiences. Like his fictional family, Thomas also has a neurotypical daughter. The book’s father is also a screenwriter, opening the door to incisive commentary on Hollywood and its questionable endeavors in on-screen representation.
Regarding the choice to tell the story from multiple points of view, Thomas says, “I missed writing the characters and the dialogue. I wanted to be in the shoes of all of these characters, to be inside their minds and their souls, to see how differently they see the world, and the different ways they contradict and conflict and fight each other.”
Even as a writer, Thomas carried over the lessons he learned from writing for television. “Writing this novel was a lot like conceiving a season of How I Met Your Mother,” he says. “I was surprised at how much the TV show management skills were applied to shaping the novel’s story. It gave me confidence once I realized how similar those skills were.” Fans of the show will notice similarities between Thomas’ prose and the narration he wrote for the sitcom. This book is a comedy, but comedy has taken on new meanings and forms in many ways since How I Met Your Mother ended nine years ago.
“When we want to say something, we use comedy because we don’t know any other way. We need to laugh while trying to say something meaningful, and I think we need that now more than ever in this country,” Thomas says.
Thomas and How I Met Your Mother co-creator Carter Bays began their writing careers on The Late Show With David Letterman. So he’s shocked by recent disruptions to the talk show industry, particularly the cancellation of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” and the federal government’s attempt to censor Jimmy Kimmel. “I can’t imagine a world in which the president of the United States is trying to cancel late-night comedy shows or publicly fighting comedians who exercise their right to free speech in America. It’s amazing. Go Jimmy Kimmel! Go Stephen Colbert! I have so much respect and gratitude for those guys and their writing and production staff. We need free speech in this country. We need to be able to do comedy,” Thomas says.
Although “That Never Happened” is not ostensibly a political book, Thomas hopes it will make people think more positively about disability. “The way disability is being talked about in politics and pop culture, the R-word is making a comeback, and so many services and funding are being jeopardized and attacked is truly frightening. It’s a frightening moment for the disabled community in America,” he says. It’s about getting people thinking and talking about how we think and talk about disability: what representation looks like, what inclusion looks like, and using ingenuity to invent ways to include and represent people.” ”
The audiobook of “That’s Not How It Happened” will be released at the same time as the novel. How I Met Your Mother stars Josh Radnor and Cobie Smulders as the voices of the father and mother, respectively, in the audiobook, along with Kevin Iannucci as the son and Marlee Watson as the daughter. Radnor and Smulders played Ted Mosby and Robin Scherbatsky, respectively, for all nine seasons of the CBS sitcom. Thomas and Radnor are currently collaborating on the “How I Met Your Mother” rewatch podcast, “How We Made Your Mother,” which features Cobie Smulders as a guest.
