Brandon Taylor

BTBrandon Taylor
JZJohanna Zwirner

Brandon Taylor is an American writer, editor and teacher whose works include the novels Real Life (2020) and The Late Americans (2023) and the short story collection Filthy Animals (2022). His writing frequently mines the tensions in friendships as seen through contexts that include the creative writing workshop itself, where group scenes come apart at the hard edges of his characters’ humor and insecurity. Central to his handling of characters and narrative is an acknowledgment of the shifting tensions between people, whether they are students in a classroom or a group of friends preparing a meal together—and the idea that those tensions are not just acceptable, but necessary to the shape of a story.

Taylor decided to pursue writing professionally after beginning a PhD in biochemistry; one can feel a sense of searching and a relentless urge for discovery in his fiction, whether it’s tracing a character coming to grips with the end of a relationship, or watching a young person finally mourn a loss that they’ve thus far compartmentalized. Now, as a writing instructor at NYU himself, Taylor acknowledges the harmful fallacies that can creep into the MFA framework and the best ways he has found to combat them in his own teaching, and speaks with humor, clarity, and empathy for selves past and present. We discuss the ways he sees his writing changing these days; the ever-present question of whether to include or disregard the internet when writing fiction; when one must acknowledge reaching a dead in a short story or novel; and why we love Edith Wharton. This conversation took place in April 2024.

BTBrandon Taylor
JZJohanna Zwirner

Can you tell me more about where and what you’re editing and teaching?

I’m at Unnamed Press, a small press based in LA. I also teach at NYU, in both the full residency MFA program and the low residency MFA program. There’s lots of good stuff out there, but it can be hard, if you don’t love it enough to fight for it tooth and nail. If you can’t find those books where your enthusiasm will be infectious for other people, you’ve just got to let it find its people. It’s tough, but so exciting.

What’s it like to be on the other side of the workshop table?

When NYU first contacted me and asked me if I would teach there, I had to do some soul searching and ask myself, do I want to—because I considered myself basically a workshop abolitionist. Like, this is an inherently violent structure. I don’t love it. I didn’t enjoy it as a student, I found workshops to be psychically, emotionally, and creatively harmful in many instances. So NYU came and asked, will you teach a workshop, and I thought, I don’t know that there should even be workshops. I had to consider what I had found harmful and violent in workshop and how to avoid that for my own students. I thought about my experiences as a student, trying to let that inform the choices I was going to make as an instructor. I decided that I was going to be a “first do no harm” kind of instructor. First and foremost, my goal for my students is that they leave class with their desire to write intact. I would do everything I could to make sure that happened. The other part was that I felt like in my workshops as a student, there was almost no real exposure to published stories. We didn’t really talk about theory or craft. I wanted my workshops to have a craft component, where we could talk about critical texts and about other kinds of stories and discuss writing in a thoughtful way. I thought about the things that I had read in my MFA outside of class that were helpful, and I started assigning those to my students as well. So actually, as a teacher, it’s been very healing of my own MFA trauma, watching my students take each other so seriously and be kind to each other. They honor the intentions of the author, always coming from a place of curiosity, rather than “You must do this, you must do that.”

As a writing student in college, I also found that it could be really counterproductive and confusing: you’re getting so many different opinions. You don’t really know necessarily who’s taking it seriously, or who might be coming from a weirdly vitriolic place.

Especially in those situations where the teachers don’t step in.

Exactly. In your book The Late Americans, that opening scene—first of all, it truly made me laugh out loud, because you have all of these different huge personalities in one room. But also, you’re looking at this teacher who’s just harmfully neutral, who becomes this real absence of an authority figure.

That was certainly my experience. A lot of my teachers were just kind of there. I think in their attempts to not be prescriptive, they weren’t really stepping in to guide conversations, which led to some really disruptive moments.

It’s wonderful to now approach teaching from this feeling of repair, where you’re undoing that lack or that absence. For me, after a certain amount of workshops over four years in undergrad, I was just exhausted, and I think in some ways it pushed me away from writing and more into an editorial lane.

Yes. When I arrived at my MFA program, I had recently finished drafts of two manuscripts. I wasn’t sure I wanted to write anything anymore. I felt like I’d sort of tapped myself fully. So I was there thinking, man, what am I going to write for the next two years? I felt that my writing life was somewhat at an end. Everyone had a different experience; a workshop has twelve people in it, and there are twelve different workshops happening. I got a lot of work done, but it wasn’t because of anything particular that was happening in the classroom. I sort of wish that my teachers, if they were going to be that absent, I wish that they had also adopted a “first do no harm” approach, because that was not on the agenda. Now that I’m on the other side of it, there’s a way that I’m more sympathetic to that sort of disengagement from the faculty, and I see what it takes. It’s interesting—in my MFA program, there were really no classes dedicated to pedagogy. We’d get into workshops, and then they’d say, “Now you are qualified to teach creative writing.” How? We’ve barely seen anyone teach creative writing. So now I’m supposed to be in front of a class of like, 20 undergraduates, teaching them? You’ve given me no tools.

I want to hear a bit more about the “do no harm” policy—what are the guidelines that you give your students?

I thought about what had felt disempowering to me as a student, which was mainly this concept of people not honoring the author’s intentions, or discrediting the author, and a presupposition of reader superiority that felt icky. So now what I tell my students is, first and foremost, our goal is to understand what the author wants from this text. Let’s try to understand the text on its own terms. Then all of our suggestions are only to move the text further into accord with itself and with the author’s intentions. We’re not here to say, “Plot must be X, character must be Y.” When in doubt, let’s ask a question, rather than leaning on pointing out weaknesses. Can we instead say, my experience of the text at this point was the following. We’re asking questions that the author can either take or leave. And another thing: I let the students whose work is being discussed speak in class. It seemed crazy to me that when I was in grad school, we weren’t allowed to talk while our work was being discussed. I had teachers who took it to a really extreme place where they told us not to even look at the person. Don’t make eye contact, pretend they’re not in the room, don’t say their name. If you must refer to the author, refer to them as “the author.” I mean, it’s also somewhat silly—I have a background in science, and I was in a PhD program in biochemistry before I went to my MFA. In med school, you were expected to participate in your own education in order to engage in discourse about your work. You would present your findings and people would ask you questions about it. They would ask you for clarification as to your method. So it just seemed strange to me that the moment in which people are discussing your writing is the moment when you are least expected to engage. I think it comes from this paternalistic idea that you, as the author, are going to be defensive. So instead it’s, “We know what’s best for you, and you need to just sit here and listen and receive it.”

It presupposes that you can’t be trusted to be an adult and be receptive.

Right—instead we can say, let’s trust the room. No one expects the students to get it right one hundred percent of the time. I’m a professional author, and I don’t always like hearing when people talk about my work. But that’s what the teacher is there for, to help mediate and to create a space for discourse and discussion. So I lead an unsilenced workshop. But I find that my students very often don’t want to pipe in, because they want to hear what people have to say. Sometimes they’ll raise their hand, and they’ll say, “Hey, can I clarify real quick?” We don’t want to spend three hours talking in circles. That’s the other thing that will happen when you can’t speak: you’re going to get misinterpreted a thousand different ways.

I would love to hear about what prompted the leap from your biochemistry degree to creative writing?

I was approaching the moment in my PhD when I was going to start serious work on my dissertation research, but I hit a rough patch. None of my experiments were working, and my advisor told me that I was going to have to get it together or leave the lab. I thought, I probably should have a backup plan, because I don’t have rich parents, and I don’t have any money at all. I should have a different fallback plan. I’d always written, and writing was really important to me. I had recently discovered this thing called an MFA. I thought, well, if all I’ve done is go to school my whole life, maybe the solution is more school. [Laughs.] I’ll apply to this MFA program, and then I’ll really knuckle down on the science, and if the science doesn’t start working, maybe I’ll get into this program. So I applied to an MFA. It turned out that the reason why the science wasn’t working was not due to my own negligence, but because of some stuff that was happening in the lab with somebody else. But I got into the MFA, and I elected to leave the PhD mainly because I had tried to live without writing, and I was miserable. It made me really unhappy. It felt like science had become wrapped up in all this other stuff in my life. So I left, and then very quickly, I got an agent and a book deal. I thought, life is happening. I should be writing. It made sense. For a while there, it was a really tough call, because these two pursuits are very different in many ways, and very similar in other ways. I think it has more to do with the structure of life under late capitalism. [Laughs.] Both of those enterprises involve spending many, many, many hours, weeks and months of your life in pursuit of some discernment, and an understanding of the order of the nature of things and the universe, and then you don’t know if you have failed to come to an answer because you designed your project wrong. You have to go back to the drawing board. Writing and science are kind of the same in that regard; you put all this time and energy into the project, and you may not get an answer—or an answer you understand. It’s just constantly trying to refine the method of inquiry.

Was there was there an end game to your PhD? Was it to be a researcher, or to be a practicing MD?

From a very young age, maybe three or four, I had decided I wanted to be a neurosurgeon. I worked my whole school life up through the end of high school maintaining this gung-ho excitement about med school, and then I got to college, and I met other pre meds and found myself thinking, I’m going to spend another twelve years with these people? [Laughs.] The final straw was a general chemistry class, which is the class you take freshman year of college. It was full of pre meds, since they also needed to take it to get to organic chemistry. I was getting high scores, and the pre meds were so resentful. Every conversation was, “What’d you get on the last exam?” I’m not a competitive person, so it was irritating. And then med school with these people? Forget it.

What strikes me in both Real Life and The Late Americans are your descriptions of these groups of people. You write these scenes that are unbelievably tense and feel so believable, and each character, in their own way, manages to do violence to the others. Where do the ideas for these scenes come from? Because you’re pulling at so many different strings, and of course as they attack each other, the characters also show their own vulnerabilities.

I feel like my fundamental conception of human relation is one of tension and conflict; every time I enter a new scenario, I’m just deeply aware of all the threads that are at play. One fairly benign example: I live in New York, and I’ve been taking these six-week tennis modules at Central Park Tennis. Every six weeks is a different group. I keep ending up in these groups where it’s me and three women. And usually their names are, like, Carla, Karen and Katie, these are the only women I’ve ever been in groups with. They’re these elite, Upper West Side or Upper East Side women who take tennis at 11 a.m. [Both Laugh.] The first thing I notice when I get there is that they’re all subtly sizing each other up. Where are your kids in school? Are you guys going to Southampton for the summer? And then when we’re playing, you can tell who’s been in lessons with whom before, and I’m just thinking, wow, this could make a really great short story.

I was about to say, I really hope you write a story about this.

I think it comes from growing up in a very large family where there were always alliances and petty grievances being aired in ways large and small. I’m very vigilant about that. So it extends to every scenario I find myself in, and when I sit down to write a scene, I always try to imagine: where did these people come from? What did they leave to be in the moment they’re in now? What is the pre-history of these characters? I’m often thinking, let’s throw them all together and see what comes out.

Who’s going to crack first?

I love it. A lot of my students often ask me about writing group scenes. They’ll say, “I’m so afraid of them.” I’m like, what do you mean—it’s so great! You get six people in one scene? Anything could happen.

They might not make it out alive.

Hopefully they don’t, or they’re going to be changed forever. I love group scenes because they’re these really great crucibles where you find out what matters to people when they’re thrust into scenarios with people they wouldn’t normally be with. You find out the important things quickly.

Right at the end of The Late Americans, they’re all going on that trip together. And this is always so fascinating for me—you think you know someone, and then you travel with them for the first time. All of a sudden, you get in the car, or you go to the grocery store, and this total wild card piece of their personality emerges that you didn’t see coming at all.

It’s amazing. A really great example of this is the Real Housewives, right? There’s always the girls’ trip. Their alliances and their patterns when they’re in whatever city might be one way...

You put them on that plane, and all bets are off. Chaos.

Suddenly it’s: can we talk about this long-buried grievance that I’m going to unearth now, in this new setting? At a luxury resort? It’s funny what comes to the fore when you change settings, it sort of allows all this other stuff to bubble up. I love it, I can’t get enough. I often hear from readers that my books are unbearably tense. I’m like, what do you mean? [Laughs.] That’s life! Don’t you sit there sometimes when you’re hanging out with people and think about the seven secrets you know about them? Isn’t that everybody? [Laughs.]

I love how the elephant in the room with those scenes is this question of, how much does this group of “friends” ostensibly like each other?

Every relationship has two distinct experiences in conversation, moment to moment. I always feel that when I’m writing, that’s something I’m trying to capture—that sense of constant changefulness of people’s understanding of what they want or need from their relationships to others. I’m trying to capture that constant changing of the state of things, because no relationship is entirely stable all the time.

Which brings to bear an interesting question about the truth—does it really matter? Does the truth exist, if you’re always cutting both ways, and there’s always change happening, and the more we revisit a memory, the less accurate our understanding of it becomes? That’s what I so appreciate about your writing—it never feels moralistic about “the facts” of how something went down. It’s very clearly being told from a specific perspective, with another character reacting or remembering in a different way. I love that there doesn’t need to be this sense of ironclad moral righteousness. These memories are truly flexible.

People betray themselves and others all the time. Somehow other people seem to know or have an idea of what happens when someone gets betrayed. That’s not something I’ve ever known. So when those moments happen, I have to write into them—like the moment after a betrayal, or the moment after something big happens in a relationship. It’s a way of writing about those spaces that feel unknown to me socially and trying to put some language to them. Over the past few years, I’ve discovered that other people actually don’t know how those moments go, either. I was going around thinking everybody had access to all these scripts that I just didn’t have. I try to write against received notions or ideas of what these moments can be. It’s good because I can’t take advantage of a preconceived back-and-forth. If none of us know, then great—we can be on a journey together.

That openness allows you more room for those scenes to unfold in what feels like a natural rhythm. I also feel like your books are terrifically—and very naturally—funny. You have moments by turns heartfelt and laugh-out-loud funny; are those just a byproduct of the conditions you’ve set up?

Well, thank you for saying that, because I laugh a lot when I’m writing. Especially in a book like The Late Americans, which concerns itself so deeply with a highly ironized milieu. Everything these graduate students do is ironic, for different emotionally protective reasons. I do take my work seriously, but I try to write with a sense of humor; humor to me humor is a system of intelligence, or a means of discernment. Every novel has its own organizing system of intelligence, and the humor comes from the worldview of the narrator. The moments that are funny in these books are the moments that the narrator finds funny—the moments that are naturally occurring, like anecdotes, and I think irony and sarcasm are big parts of that. In the same way that a playwright assembles scenarios that feel natural to them, if you’ve done it right as a novelist, you are also writing in a natural way, or writing to moments in life that happened randomly. If those are moments that are funny to us, they’ll be funny to the reader, hopefully. I try to let the text feel as much like life as possible, because life has these funny discordances in it, and those find their way into the text.

I feel you have a similarly light touch when bringing in real trauma; a death or a loss, or, in one case, the disappearance of one of the character’s sisters. These moments come in quickly, and then they’re kind of gone. The trauma is touched on, then left behind or assimilated. How do you write those moments? Especially when you’re working with so many characters, do you have any map of them as you go? Or is this something that reveals itself to you, where you’re thinking, oh, that loss tracks for that character?

I do discovery writing, and I think my writing is very discovery based, where things come up with characters and I let that information inform the subsequent directions it takes. I try never to let it overwhelm the story or the novel, because it feels cheesy to stop and do endless backstory. If something occurs in a place where it makes sense for that event to spread and deepen, then I let the text spread, but in places where that doesn’t feel right, or where it would feel cheesy to do, I say, that’s a fact I’ve discovered about this character, and now I’ll move on. The moment it appears in the text, the text is changed irrevocably. As the author, I am now writing with knowledge about the character that informs the choices I make. So suddenly, everything is charged with that information. For a book like The Late Americans, which has these different characters, it’s arranged like a relay: one character steps forward out of the background of the previous chapter. I would write the chapter as a way of getting to know these characters and get a sense for the dynamics and the deep background of their lives. For me, these losses come up in the text as moments of genuine surprise.

Do you journal? Or do you do you have a regular practice of tapping into these discovery methods?

In my late teens and early 20s, when I would create characters, I’d do the deep biographies and backstory. I’m glad I did that, because I think it developed a facility for character, but I don’t do that anymore. Usually, I don’t start writing until I have a sense of a character and the five or ten characters who are part of their world. Once I have what feels like a constellation of lives, that’s when I really start writing. I usually have a strong sense of at least the surface of the character: their name, their style of dress. Clothes are actually really helpful. I have a series of assumptions about the way they dress, and as I write, those assumptions are confirmed or denied. Then I find my way deeper into their personalities. Often, I feel like my sense of character comes from action. I need to see the character in motion to really understand them. I need to put them into situations and see how they respond. So they’ll have arguments, and they fight as I’m writing and sometimes, I’ll write my way into a corner and realize, okay, this is a dead end. So I’ll excise it from the text and find a different situation. For me, the books come together that way, moment by moment, situation by situation, and I understand the characters more deeply as I go.

How do you how do you know when you’ve hit a dead end?

Gosh, when the text just seizes up. If I’m working on a novel and I write to a scene and there’s just nothing on the other side of it. I just can’t imagine what will come next.

You’re looking at the void.

Right. None of the actions are linking up. Then I go back and I think, where did I go wrong? I track my way back to the last place that felt fraught and freighted with possibility, and I cut everything after that, and keep going. It’s the idea that if the situation doesn’t give rise to more situations, it’s a dead end. If I lose the sense of the character’s voice, that’s a dead end. So these stopping points can happen narratively or emotionally.

As an editor now, looking at other people’s work for your own list, is it much easier to edit somebody else’s work than your own? Do you find that they’re synchronous?

I worked with one editor for my first three books, and he would tell me that I took the edits much further than he would have gone with them. [Laughs.] I think I have a real zeal and a love for editing. I feel that in my own work, and I feel it when I’m editing other folks’ work. But where it’s easier to edit other people—or the moments in editing my own work where it feels so much harder than anything else—is when I know that something radical needs to happen, and the book isn’t working, and it’s time to delete 50,000 words or something. Those moments are rare, but they’re fatal for me. I almost never have that feeling when I’m editing books that I’ve acquired, or even when I’m editing student work. I worked on a book for five years that I threw away last year! I had to start a new project, because it just wasn’t gelling. I kept writing 137 pages and throwing them away. I eventually sent them to my editor. I asked him, can you tell me if these pages suck? Because I thought maybe the writing was bad. And he said, “No, you’ve never written better.” The issue wasn’t my prose, or the fact that this story wasn’t working. It was that I didn’t want to write that book, for whatever reason. So I started over and wrote another book last year instead. Those are the moments where it’s not fun. Usually it’s more, delete this chapter, move this here, take out these little bits and bobs. [Laughs.] I love revising. I love structural edits. I get so excited, watching the text change.

Making something really the best that it can be.

I mean, that’s the hope!

When you said you entered Iowa with two projects already under your belt, were they ones that have now been published?

Yeah, they were my first novel, Real Life, and I would say 90% of my short story collection, Filthy Animals. Real Life changed very little overall. Filthy Animals changed a lot because I went in having written a bunch of stories, but I didn’t know anything about writing stories. I didn’t even know what point of view was. I read a lot when I started my MFA program, and I developed certain opinions about what stories could and should be, which helped me revise that collection quite a lot. It’s been strange publishing those books because I wrote Real Life in 2017, and I was finished with the first draft of Filthy Animals in 2016. The first thing that I published and worked on in workshop was The Late Americans, and even that book—the first chapter was done in 2019, and it came out in 2023. I’m slowly catching up to writing in sequence. I feel like those three books represent really concrete stages in mind. They feel historical.

What has it been like to write not from a place of being a student, or operating within—or just outside of—a workshop framework? How has your perspective on writing changed?

Now I’m writing fiction that’s set in New York, versus my Midwestern phase, which feels like a real change. But I’m asking very similar questions, I’m concerned with the same things—just the milieu is different. I think American critics in many ways are so enamored of milieu, and they think that, if you’re writing about graduate students, your concerns are ultimately shallow and not deeply invested in what it means to be a person. There’s a very infantilizing, paternalistic attitude toward milieu in this country. Which is funny because I consider myself as writing serious novels, but people say, “Oh, you’re writing about such young people.” These characters are in their 30s! So I’m hoping that by writing characters in New York City, they will realize that my characters are in their 30s, they’re adults. It’s fun now to be able publish my work closer to when it’s been written. I can see a real development in my own treatment of my concerns as an artist. Those books reflect a very different phase of my development as an artist, but because that’s when the book comes out, people assume that’s where you are now as the writer.

I loved the linking of stories and characters in The Late Americans. Is that a form you would want to pursue again? Or are you taking on a more traditional novel structure in your next project?

On the one hand, the linked stories are really the only way I can write short stories; I have manuscript brain. I don’t write a short story until I have an idea of the other five or six stories that will come in its wake. I just finished a short story manuscript in the winter that is exactly like that, so that’s the form I thinkall my stories will take, for better or for worse. The novels that I’ve worked on recently have been more “novel-novels,” they’ve been much more traditional—one orienting POV over a period of time. Publishing The Late Americans showed me that the modern reader seems unable to read a book with multiple characters. It was interesting watching many of the critical and reader responses to that book, people saying, “There are so many characters in this!” And really, there are five—it’s not so many. They recur all the time, you see them in every chapter. Or readers would say, “I can’t tell these characters apart, they’re identical.” They have different names and different jobs. So I can’t help you there. We used to read Anna Karenina! [Laughs.]

We’ve gotten very lazy.

If it’s in third person? Forget it. “This is so cold. How am I supposed to keep all of this straight in my head?” And I’m thinking, maybe reading is not for you? [Laughs.]

Not for nothing, they say novels are good for the brain because they make you hold all these of these arcs and characters in your mind. But obviously as attention spans have changed, that’s shifted.

And with the stories in Filthy Animals, people would ask, “Why are these stories connected?” They were so upset. So the novels I’m working on now are much more like my first novel, Real Life, where it’s one mind over an extended period. It’s close to one character, and you don’t get different narrators. That’s what I’ve been writing lately, and I’m glad I’ve been doing that, because watching people struggle to remember five characters with distinctly different interiorities was hard. I recently read all 20 of Emile Zola’s Les Rougon Macquart novels, and he sometimes doesn’t even differentiate jobs. It’ll be seven people with the same job, just slightly different, and I have no trouble distinguishing between them. Contemporary readers are at an interesting phase of development at this moment in time.

Do you feel like we’re at an inflection point with contemporary fiction? I just had a whole Edith Wharton phase, and now I’m fully in Somerset Maugham’s world. I find myself gravitating towards older literature, but maybe that’s also because one needs a different kind of reading for fun?

Oh, absolutely—I haven’t read contemporary literature for a long time. I read it for events and things like that. I’ve loved Jhumpa Lahiri for a long time, and other short story writers. I really loved Morgan Talty’s new novel, Fire Exit. So I read in that way, to prepare for events or to blurb. Zadie Smith’s new novel, The Fraud, was great as well, and Emma Cline’s The Guest was wonderful. But most of my reading is older. Edith Wharton is my girl. She’s my mother. [Laughs.]

I mean, The House of Mirth, my goodness.

I’m teaching a class on the novel of manners at NYU right now—The House of Mirth was in the curriculum. Class meets on Mondays and so in our next class, we have our first two contemporary novels. But I think it says a lot that I gave them a whole week to read just The House of Mirth, versus one week for two contemporary novels.

What were the two contemporary novels?

One was Kiley Reid’s Such a Fun Age, and the other was Andrew Martin’s Early Work. Kiley and I went to grad school together.

I interviewed Kiley a few years ago, actually!

One of the nicest, smartest people.

Such a Fun Age is brutal, too. It’s a great example of the novel of manners.

I hadn’t read it since it first came out. The dialogue is still incredibly snappy. This time, I was struck by—and I don’t mean this in a bad way—but how “2016” it feels? It reads like a critique of a very particular strain of white feminism, and that critique has aged so rapidly in the last few years, I think.

Have you noticed this—I feel like we’ve wound back the clock and a lot of the concerns of our writers kind of mirror those from 2018?

One thousand percent. We’re in a very 2018 moment. No, that’s very astute. Someone online was talking about this feeling of reading a book from 2020 that’s set in 2016, and how dated it feels, how our writers need to stop writing about SoulCycle and Twitter and go back to writing about the pains of living in a family. And I had to agree!

Give me the family saga. [Laughs.]

Which is also a form that’s having a crazy moment. I think what makes 2024 feel so 2018 is that in 2018, all the books were about 2016. And right now, in 2024, all the books are about 2020 or 2019. And the particular approach 2024 is having to 2019 and 2020 is very scolding—it’s “I’m smarter than you, you’re so naive.”

It’s moralistic, and I’m struck by the fact that it often feels like we aren’t really moving forward, which is a strange feeling. The concerns are being recycled.

I think it’s about going back to writing about these eternal questions in ways that feel contemporary. One of the reasons that this sprawling multi-decade family saga is having a moment is that it talks about what it is to live in a family, and it scratches that familiar itch of toiling over familiar ground, but inflected through a very contemporary gaze, which is why we love the Gilded Age. I think that probably the solution: to write about these eternal concerns, but in ways that are not so tied to this moment. We’ve got to get our writers to stop writing about the internet. I think that was a mistake. I know that was the critique of 2018 and 2019: “Why don’t our greatest writers write about the internet? Why are there no phones?” Now people are doing it—and it turns out, it’s not great! [Laughs.] It’s not fun. It’s not interesting. I don’t want to read your funny pithy writing observing some obscure subculture. It will age like milk. Give that character a job and send them on their way. Maybe there have been a couple of books that have done it really well. But ultimately...

It’s just not that interesting at the end of the day.

It’s not interesting! Who cares? I’m willing to read it, but am I going to remember it for 10 years? Probably not.

How have you handled the presence or absence of the phone in your next few projects?

My next novel is about a painter in New York, and there are moments when he talks about this dynamic of “close friends” on Instagram, and how it’s a form of currency. But it doesn’t overwhelm the book, it’s just a facet of his life. My approach is just to treat it like any other stream in the character’s life. It doesn’t take up any more or any less room than anything else. When it becomes the actual mode of the book—unless you have something really compelling to tell me about that mode—I don’t care. Is it riveting that this character spends two hours a day looking at his phone? I don’t have anything good to say about that. It’s like pooping. [Laughs.] We all have to go, but do you really have anything interesting to say about it? I’m not going to spend my time and energy rendering it. Some people do have things to say there. Book Three of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle: so much poop in that. But he can do that and make it important to the story.

Are there contemporary writers you’re excited about right now?

Many—especially now, as an editor. Patrick Langley is a British writer who wrote this incredible book called The Variations, and his first novel was called Arkady. He’s got such a singular and strange and wonderful voice, and I love his stuff. Another is a writer named Jeremy Cooper, who wrote a book called Brian. It’s about a lonely old man in London who starts watching movies because his life is so solitary, and he finds a community at this movie theater. He’s great, so every time I see a new book by him, I have to read it. And then I have my saints: Tessa Hadley, Claire Keegan, absolutely Jamaica Kincaid.

She’s a genius, and also just so funny.

She’s one of those writers who literally can do anything with prose. She makes it seem like breathing. It’s so effortless. I’m hanging out in Francophone land these days, so I love Marie NDiaye, and I love Scholastique Mukasonga. Those are some of the writers I’m reading and thinking a lot about when I sit down to write my own stuff.