Autobiographical, and yet not

Author Tony D’Souza is careful to point out that while there are similarities between his life and that of his first-person protagonist in his new novel, “Mule,” he is not now transporting nor has he ever transported high-grade marijuana from California to Florida.

“For me, writing this as a style is a tradition of writers I admire from Hemingway to Raymond Carver. Everyone confused their fiction with their lives,” said D’Souza, a Sarasota-based writer now living in St. Louis while his wife is in graduate school. “The reason I’m trying to do that is because people enjoy stories more if they think the story really happened. People want things to be real that aren’t real.”

The underpinnings of “Mule,” however, are very real for D’Souza. His characters, James and Kate, find themselves in difficult economic circumstances in the Great Recession. When an unexpected pregnancy and no health insurance complicate their lives, James turns to running drugs from California to Florida to make ends meet.

Minus the drug running, James and Kate’s situation is not unlike D’Souza’s. In 2008, his wife, Jessyka Lee, lost her job as a manager with a large retail chain in Austin, Texas, at the same time she was pregnant with their first child.

“Since I’m a freelance writer, we don’t have health insurance,” said D’Souza. “It was a very scary time for us.”

D’Souza’s previous two books, “Whiteman” and “The Konkans” were well-received literary fiction with, again, autobiographical underpinnings. “Whiteman” drew from D’Souza’s experiences as a Peace Corps volunteer in West Africa and Madagascar; “The Konkans” drew from his family heritage of a minority group in India of Hindus converted to Catholicism by the Portuguese in the 16th century.

“Mule” takes him into what he hopes will be better-selling territory, with its attention to contemporary issues and the page-turning writing.

“I like to feel my literary fiction was engaging in the same way,” he said. “When you want to write a page-turner you have to make sure that every sentence is interesting.”

“Mule” has already attracted the attention of Hollywood.

Hunting Lane Films, which produced “Half Nelson,” “Blue Valentine” and “Little Birds,” has optioned D’Souza’s novel.

“I had my first meeting in Hollywood last week,” said D’Souza, who hopes to be tapped to write the screenplay for the film.

“I’m really excited,” he said. The producers “feel like the story of ‘Mule’ fits in with the stories they like to tell. These guys don’t option a lot, but they have a real budget between $6 million and $20 million. This isn’t a little million-dollar Sundance movie.”

Should “Mule” make it to the big screen, it will be vindication for both D’Souza and Lee. His agent wasn’t happy with the novel at first, but Lee “was the one who was really behind me. She’s like, ‘No, you have to pursue this project.’ If it wasn’t for my wife, I would have put it in a drawer. I’m enjoying the attention it’s getting, and so is my wife.”