On finding a project that will never bore you

You’re a digital media veteran. What is it like being on the other side of the interview?

I’ve found myself endeavoring really pointedly to be helpful. The few times it’s happened [that I’m the interviewee], I’m like,”Let’s find a mutual location meet,” or, “I just want to make sure we can record this okay.” I talked to someone early on and I knew the bar we were meeting at was going to be a little noisy. So just instinctively I brought my own recorder as backup. It’s so silly, obviously, and I think the interviewer’s tape turned out just fine. But I feel like I’ve been informally media-training myself for so long.

You have to cede control. I’d be scared, to be honest.

I think my conscience is pretty clean. I feel like I’ve done a fairly good job trying to be fair and equitable with my own interviews, so there’s never been any sense of, “Finally I’m paying the tax for all my crimes against journalism.”

I’m curious how journalism informs your fiction. Your book is about a culture blogger, so the influence is there in the narrative. But how did your years in media affect you stylistically?

When I first started writing fiction, I had this maybe not uncommon feeling that fiction and nonfiction are very different. They have to sound and do something entirely different. I had a writing teacher once summarize it as, “Nonfiction is about figuring out what to put in and fiction is about figuring out what to take out.” In terms of the elegance and and the way that your mind can make intuitive leaps in fiction versus needing to lay it out there explicitly. But I had this revelation that, for better or worse, I am the writer who I am. I have my taste and my sensibility and things that I find funny and things I find interesting. Attempting to be really rigorously truthful about that when I was writing fiction, all of a sudden was way more freeing. I did obviously write from the perspective of a journalist blogger type so there was some natural stylistic overlap, but I think being aware of the extent to which it was all coming from the same place allowed me to unlock the tone.

On a more logistical level, working in journalism and being so custom to deadlines and revisions and editing was extraordinarily valuable. I’m proud to say that I never missed a deadline or a target or an edit at any point during the process, because I just have that awareness of, “I need to get it done and there’s no dawdling and that’s that.” I don’t know if that would have been possible without years and years and years of figuring out how to get my stuff done.

How much of writing the novel was self-directed and how much was collaborative with your editors or others?

It was definitely self-directed. I’ve spent time as a staffer for publications and for both you need an internal register of what you have going on and when you need to do it… The joke I often make is that I feel like it comes back to being good at doing my homework. I kind of want to make someone else’s life easier and I know how easily you can really jam up the works if you are all of a sudden very late on something that is a little timely. I’m also aware that there’s nothing worse than a writer who is not responding to an editor’s emails and it’s like, “I see you tweeting.” Just tell me that you’re late!

I am the person who cares most about this book. That’s just the way it’s always going to be by nature of having written it. For lots of other people involved, they care, but it’s also a job, literally. As much as I’d love to indulge a more diva-esque perspective on stuff getting done, I think I’m unfortunately very much conditioned to not make someone else irritated at their job.

I feel like Jacob [the protagonist of See Friendship] also has that in the back of his mind: how is everything going to be perceived? It’s the nature of being published. How much were you thinking about the reception of the book? Were you able to tune it out, or were there certain people that you would imagine, like, “I wonder what they’ll think”?

It wasn’t on my mind much. It’s a personal book and it is drawn from, or inspired by, dynamics that have happened in my own life, which I don’t think is too controversial to point out. I would work for whole long stretches without thinking about that real-life aspect, and then have this moment of, “Oh god, am I saying too much? Am I going to make people think that it’s about this or that?” And then I just got over it. There’s a bit of writerly entitlement that I have arrived at. This is what I do and I think I’m doing it in a way that is thoughtful and fair. That’s kind of all I can hope for. I’m literally about to quote another Jeremy, but Jeremy Strong said something about, “You naturally want to make the fearful choice because you’re worried about how it’s going to play out. You have to give up a little bit of control.” For me, it’s not about building a brand or an appearance or whatever. It’s so earnest to say but I was just trying to write something that came from a truthful place. Honestly, that was a crucial part of the writing process: I realized that earlier on, when I’d been writing other stuff, I was putting on airs. I had tried to write a book where the tone was not as not funny [as See Friendship] at all. It was very, very earnest and straightforward. Yet reading that today feels so much falser in terms of its style and aspirations, because ultimately it was not coming to a place that was authentic to my own interests. It was coming from a place of, “Here’s what I have to do to be taken seriously or to sound good.” And it wasn’t the case at all.

Do you think that you had to write that earlier book to be able to write this one?

Oh, 100 percent. One thing that I learned doing this is that if you want to write a book, you have to really like it. It sounds so basic but it’s true. I thought about See Friendship every day from the moment I started writing it seriously to the day that it was published. And for no more than maybe a total of three days inside of all that, did I think to myself, “This is a stupid idea and I shouldn’t do it.” There were moments where I doubted the writing or the execution, but as a holistic project, I was always convinced that it was something I wanted to pursue.

That was very different from previous attempts of writing books where I would get really far in—did a lot of prep work, research, outlining, then one day I woke up and I realized that it wasn’t working. It wasn’t just that the text wasn’t working; the whole concept of the project was not working. I lost faith in it completely. Gathering those attempts made it so that when I did find something that sustained my interest, I was like, “Oh, this is different. It feels different. This is worth investing in.”

How do you think the form of the novel differs from journalism? Or what did the novel allow you to do that felt new?

Certainly dialogue is a big thing… but frankly [I was excited] to make it totally fictional. My memory of how things went down is suspect. I know I don’t have a perfect memory and I don’t think it would be necessarily fair to attempt to render entire scenes or entire interactions. It would convey some kind of egotistical message. I think if I was actually to break down things in the book that were directly inspired by things that happened to me, it’s like three percent. A lot of it is all original, hopefully depicted in a way that feels truthful. Again, it’s a very basic truth—fiction is fictional!—but having the freedom to make connections and gesture at themes or ideas or feelings without having to be worried about their fidelity is very important.

It does seem obvious, but talking about “fiction is fiction” is relevant when you consider the debates about autofiction and memoiristic writing and what we’re allowed to do.

I’ve never ever been hung up on truthfulness in a manuscript, even if it’s been pitched as one thing and not the other. When I was in San Francisco, I ended up meeting the writer Laura Albert, who wrote under the pen name JT LeRoy. We were talking to Jay Kang, who had done the event with me, and Jay [said to Laura], “When I read your books, I was trying to understand what the controversy was, because I could not fathom it from a slightly removed perspective a few years later. Why did people get so mad just because you said you were one person but you were really another? Why would you be upset to learn that a fictional novel was written by one person versus another?” There still is a reality bias in society despite all attempts to make it otherwise… It’d be one thing if someone is pretending to be an extremely disadvantaged minority of some sort and in reality, they’re a rich Harvard guy. There’s a difference between being playful and fraud. I think it’s important to remember the former.

What is your setup like for sitting down and writing?

I’ve always been really lucky in that I can work from almost anywhere as long as it’s quiet. I can’t work in a coffee shop but I can work from bed. That was really convenient, especially because so much of the book was written during the part of the pandemic where we didn’t have the vaccine and we were just kind of sitting around… I had started the book when I was working at The Outline around the summer of 2019. I was just doing a lot of mornings and nights and weekends. I can say this now because The Outline doesn’t exist, but we were entering a phase where some days we honestly didn’t have that much work going on. It wasn’t me slacking on my job, I just ran out of stuff to do. And so I would find myself with that little bit of extra time. When we did all get laid off right at the start of the pandemic, I found myself with a third of a manuscript and pretty good momentum, in terms of just getting it done. I had severance, I was freelancing, and things were just financially justifiable enough for me to spend a few months drilling down into this thing.

That’s in the book’s acknowledgements, right? I think that’s really special because it rejects the idea that a novelist needs to lock themselves away for a year.

I wish. There’s been no point in my writing life in which I haven’t had to work for money. I think some people are probably more comfortable not earning money and just working on their art—and not in the sense of, “I need to be rolling in it,” because it is journalism. But I’ve steadily held to a mindset of, “I should not be spending more than I’m making,” which to me has always required having a job. I think it did help the book and was helpful to the discipline of hitting my deadlines because I knew I had only a window to work. Of course there are moments when you’re writing and you do need idle space to just fart around and figure something out. Then there are just as many times where I would finish writing and know, “Okay, this is the thing I need to work on revising.” It’s dorky to say that I was looking forward to it, but I really would feel like, “I can’t wait to wake up in the morning with a head of steam and get my coffee and bang it out for two hours before I have to work on this freelance piece.” It’s very Virgo-brained, I’m told.

I love a deadline but it’s hard to impose them on myself.

The worst thing an editor can tell me is, “Turn it in whenever.” But if someone has a firm date, I will do everything to hit that, as best I can.

What were some of the cultural references that informed the book?

Music is a big one. I think I was very sensitive to the tonal register of a song, where it can lock you inside of a world for however long it is. I was reading quite a lot. The negative experience would be reading a book that was too good, and I’d be like, “I gotta stop this. I gotta quit what I’m doing.” I literally would put down a book after reading a few pages and turn to my wife and say, “This book is too good. I need to read something a little worse.” But it wasn’t the fact that the book was too good, it’s that it was too good in a totally different direction, in a way that made me think to myself, “Why doesn’t my book sound like this?” And the answer is, “Because I am writing a different book.”

Do you have any guardrails for yourself when it comes to revisions? I feel like that can be a part where it’s difficult for novelists to restrain themselves.

I had to remember the source of what I was attempting to do. See Friendship came from a certain place and I need to be fair to that when I’m revising as opposed to attempting to change my mind about the idea or the goal. The reality is that you’re always changing as a writer or as any sort of artist. It’s wasting your own time to be constantly doing a Ship of Theseus thing with your original idea, adding and replacing parts until it is technically the same thing and yet somehow completely different.

I would keep an original copy of everything I was working on so that I would not get too crazy. At one point I knew I was fiddling just to fiddle because my editor asked me, “I noticed you took out this passage. Why is that?” And I just looked at it and I had no good answer. This is also where a background in journalism is very helpful: knowing that at some point it comes out. You have to just be done with it. You can’t continue revising and fiddling forever. I mean, you can, of course. But then it’s not going to come out and you’re going to be working on something until it’s perfect in your head for the rest of your life. I don’t believe anything is going to be perfect. That said, when I was rereading the book just before it came out, there were a couple things in the book I would have tweaked today. But there weren’t chunks I was unhappy with. It’s like, literally one word. It was the fact that I’d italicized something instead of letting it stand. You know, I can live with it.