When it was first announced that Hannibal showrunner Bryan Fuller had been tapped to finally bring Neil Gaiman’s beloved—and, by the author’s own admission, largely unadaptable—novel American Gods to television, fans wondered: would this be another Hannibal? A fiercely adored, niche show that found its greatest inspiration in wildly diverging from the Thomas Harris novels? Or would Fuller and his partner, Michael Green, turn in a slavish adaptation that could please Gaiman fans, but no one else?

The answer, so far, is both. In Season 1 of American Gods, Fuller, Green, Gaiman, and company are still trying to figure out exactly what American Gods the TV show looks like. But while the first three episodes have been filled with peaks and valleys, scenes translated word-for-word from the page and flights of show-invented fantasy, in Episode 4, the whole grand experiment comes together. Gaiman agrees. He told Vanity Fair via phone call that this episode, centered on Shadow’s wife Laura Moon (Emily Browning), is his very favorite. Gaiman fanatics may be shocked to realize it contains almost nothing from the source novel.

That’s not exactly true. Gaiman says a lot of what we learn about this backstory episode focused on Laura is “implicit” in his text. Still he agrees that the show finally feels liberated in this lengthy exploration of a woman who got something of short shrift in the novel. Before you dive in here, be sure to watch Season 1, Episode 4 of American Gods, titled “Git Gone”—airing at 9pm E.T. on Starz, or currently available on demand and the network’s streaming app. Then enjoy as Gaiman waxes poetic on the nature of adaptation, defends George R.R. Martin, and gives a hint of what’s to come in Season 2.

Vanity Fair: I’m a long-time American Gods book fan, but when I got a sneak peak at the new episodes earlier this year, it was thi* one that really made me sit up and take notice. Whose idea was it to really flesh out Laura’s backstory?

Neil Gaiman: You know, it was something that we talked about from the word “go” and before. That may have even been on the table before we asked Bryan Fuller to be showrunner in April 2014. Laura is our female lead, and the joy of the TV show is they can do all the stuff I couldn’t do in the novel. In the book, I was kind of stuck in Shadow’s head, doling out information as he gave it to you. There’s so much you never got, and Laura—who she was and how she got there—seemed like this wonderful opportunity to do something the book couldn’t. Having said that, the way that they told the story was absolutely, 100 percent Bryan and Michael. In fact, I think one of the reasons why it’s my favorite episode is because there’s nothing that I wrote in there. It’s like I got to be an audience for something that felt completely like my world. And I loved it.

You weren’t involved at all in creating Laura’s backstory?

We talked a lot about it, and an awful lot of Laura’s story is actually implicit in the book. If you go back and look you’ll go, ‘Oh, okay, that is from there, that is from there, this thing that she says.” But, no, what I mostly did was look over their shoulder as an advisor. It was the first place that I really felt like they’d broken free of the book while being completely faithful to it. There were things that we knew that we were going to change right upfront, an example of which would be Laura’s profession. In the book, she’s a small-town travel agent. There are no more small-town travel agents. They have gone the way of the small-town buggy whip vendor. They have been subsumed into history. So we said, “Let’s come up with something which she can do, something that we can go back to, something that ties in with Shadow a little bit more.” I loved what they did with that. I love the sense of surprise. Also, I have to say, I love Emily Browning’s performance.