‘How I Met Your Mother’ Co-Creator Craig Thomas on Spotlighting Disability and Family in His Debut Novel: ‘There’s a Lot of Me in There’

Craig Thomas, the co-creator of “How I Met Your Mother” is now a novelist. His debut book, “That’s Not How It Happened,” releases Nov. 4 from Hanover Square Press. Told from four different perspectives, the book is a family dramedy about a young man with Down Syndrome, his parents and his teenaged sister — and how their lives are upended when Hollywood decides to adapt their story into a film. It’s a funny, heartfelt story filled with meta-moments from Thomas’ own experiences as a TV writer and a parent of a child with disabilities. “ This family is not my family,…