Michael talks with Lucas Mann about becoming a father after his third book, Reality TV, the different modes of his nonfiction work, the importance of friction in writing, his newest and upcoming work, whether fragmentary autobiographical literature is a gimmick (no), and more.
Michael talks with Lucas Mann about becoming a father after his third book, Reality TV, the different modes of his nonfiction work, the importance of friction in writing, his newest and upcoming work, whether fragmentary autobiographical literature is a gimmick (no), and more.
Lucas Mann is the author of three books: Captive Audience: On Love and Reality Television, Lord Fear: A Memoir, and Class A: Baseball in the Middle of Everywhere. His essays have appeared in outlets such as the LA Review of Books, Guernica, BuzzFeed, Slate, Barrelhouse, TriQuarterly, and The Kenyon Review. He teaches creative writing at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and lives in Providence, Rhode Island with his wife and daughter.
Podcast theme: DJ Garlik & Bertholet's "Favorite Sause" used with permission from Bertholet.
Michael Wheaton 00:06
Welcome back to The Lives of Writers, a podcast presented by Autofocus, an online lit mag dedicated to artful autobiographical writing, which you can read today at autofocuslit.com and follow on Twitter and Instagram @autofocuslit. I'm the publisher and editor of Autofocus, Michael Wheaton. Today on the show, I talk with Lucas Mann. Lucas Mann is the author of three books, Captive Audience: On Love and Reality Television, Lord Fear: A Memoir, and Class A: Baseball in the Middle of Everywhere. His essays have appeared in outlets such as the LA Review of Books, Guernica, BuzzFeed, Slate, Barrelhouse, Tri-Quarterly, and the Kenyon Review. Alright, let's get to it. This is my conversation with Lucas Mann.
Lucas Mann 00:56
You know, my wife and I wanted a kid for a while. It took us a while. And so it's a very strange thing in which she's two and a half. But it's like you add her two and a half with nine months of my wife's pregnancy and then the fear of the first three months of that where that just feels like not sure. . . so you know what I mean. Then there's those things and then like a year or nearly a year before that of uncertainty and disappointment and all those things, to be honest. So there's this strange sense where mentally it feels like a four year blast radius, which I don't think about often, but it's kind of crazy the way that plays tricks on you. I think I had lived an enormously ridiculously charmed working and creative life before my daughter. And so I think I kind of knew that it would be a pretty stark transition and also one that I think I really wanted. My daughter was born in December of 2018 and my third book came out in the spring of 2018 right as the book came out, and I went on book tour, and it was the strangest... I never felt like less torn up about a book or how it was doing or wracked about reviews or whatever because it was happening alongside the sense of like, is that really a positive? Is this happening? My wife came with me to Portland on book tour, and we got a call about the the sex of the child along with whatever they do, all those genetic testings, and we got the call while I was walking to do a local TV interview. And I just blacked out the interview, like I was on TV and don't remember what I said, right? So it was this very strange moment where it felt like one was in a really literal way taking over brain and emotional space from the other and this sort of baton kind of thing. And it was probably wasn't smart to essentialize it that way to myself, but it has been interesting. And then I had gotten an NEA fellowship that winter previously and used that to get some time off from teaching to write. So it was like the most intense output of young-writer-doing-pretty-well-without-many-responsibilities-decadence literally right until my wife gave birth. And it's been this kind of amazing reconfiguration of my life, I think in part because I was such a spoiled baby beforehand. Yeah, it feels sort of wild to think about the before-times.
Michael Wheaton 04:03
And your wife if I remember from the book, Captive Audience, she's an actress. Is that right?
Lucas Mann 04:11
She's a theatre actress. She works with an experimental theatre company in Providence. She also has a career in the wine industry as an importer/distributor, so she has a really busy, busy life. And the pandemic happened on our end when Matilda, my daughter, was a little over a year and it had felt like that year was sort of "wow, okay." And then it felt like we were starting to come up for air. I wrote a thing for the LA Review of Books and I was like, This is pretty good. And I was feeling it and I was feeling decent about teaching again. Into that semester, I was like, I'm doing my thing. My wife had been working the whole time, but then she started rehearsals for another play. After having taken time off, I was like, Alright, we are doing this. Our kid is alive and seems happy, and we are us, and we are still creative. And then like for everybody, the pandemic happened, and it's sort of been reimagining and re-getting ourselves back to that place now with the caveat of the enormous ways in which we have been fortunate to be able to manage that.
Michael Wheaton 05:19
Yeah, so what's it like living with an actor who can't act on the stage for a long time? Did you have to run lines a lot?
Lucas Mann 05:28
That's been a part of our life. So her theatre company did, I think, a smart thing where at a certain point they were like, Alright, you know. And there was that weird moment of like, Oh, let's kick the can down the road for a month. And then when things are chill we'll do it. And then they ended up doing a sort of podcast about their product, they have sort of a particular movement based thing. And I can't speak for her, but I don't think that that, obviously, fulfills the same thing as acting. But she was on a Zoom with her collaborators talking about the work that they had done for years and wanted to keep doing and sort of talking about the way they had been conceptualizing this production that didn't end up happening in this sort of meta way. And so I could hear her some nights, and I felt just enormous envy. Where, you know, I think she was enormously disappointed, obviously, to have the rug pulled out from under her, but to be in the room, fucking around, reading or whatever, while being like, Oh, yeah, this is a person who loves their art and is good at their art, talking about it with their collaborators, even in the sort of stunted sense, that was kind of beautiful to hear and I admired the fact that they did that. And I think with parenthood in general it's a sense of trying to have any of that conversation be about these other things that you love and care about. And then in the pandemic, when so much of everything is just geared toward, like, next day, the next day, the next day, I think that's even been more of a challenge.
Michael Wheaton 07:01
Yeah, kind of reminds me of why I started the podcast. As a parent, in a pandemic, like, I just want to talk to people about writing.
Lucas Mann 07:12
Honestly, when I when I got your email, if you would have been like, Are you good in 15 minutes? I'd be like, Yeah, sure! Let's do it! Like, this is great. I would literally love to talk about this right now.
Michael Wheaton 07:20
Awesome. So as I mentioned, your book Captive Audience: On Love and Reality TV, that was my entryway into your work. And so I am wondering, in the pandemic, how much reality TV did you watch?
Lucas Mann 07:36
I had this experience with Class A, the first book, which was about minor league baseball, and baseball in general, where, you know, I love baseball and played baseball my whole life, and then was steeped in it writing this book, and then stopped watching baseball for four years and just had no interest in it. And a similar thing happened with reality TV. And I don't know if this is true, but it almost feels like if you're writing about a subject, and if you're immersing yourself in your passion for a subject, in some ways I take it as a good sign if you're sick of it at the end. That means you really saturated yourself. So there was a little bit of that. Even in the process... this is my experience with both Class A and Captive Audience, too, by the time the book was out, and I was talking to people about it, I was already in that phase. So people would be like, Oh my god, and bring up the person who had just joined the Real Housewives of Atlanta or whatever, and I feel like such a poser because I would be, you know, I've got like two-year-old references here. And I'm so sick of it. Which is funny, because it's not even my beat, right? It was an organic thing. And then I just beat the horse to death. So it's sort of in the process of getting back into it, to be honest. But I will say that I think the British Love Island is just the most wonderful thing in the world both as a show to watch during sleep training for an infant, regardless of the pandemic or not, and in the pandemic. I really cannot think of a better sort of innings eater, time company thing. And also I just think it's kind of brilliant. So yeah, my one reality TV plug that I have left in my bag is just watch every minute of Love Island.
Michael Wheaton 09:05
I can imagine. And the dive you take into it, it's what like a 250-260 page book or something? And I was impressed you could keep it going so interestingly. When I first got it I was like, Is he gonna be able to really talk about reality TV this long, and keep it interesting on an analytical level? And I was like, Yep, he did it.
Lucas Mann 09:28
That's good. I mean I was frantically trying to get that thing down. You know, I think I had in mind this romanticized something that somebody would call a slim volume. And I was like, Well, this isn't slim. So there was a ton of effort. Those 250 bloated pages was me being like, Can I lose this? Can I lose this? Can I lose this? Like, really trying.
Michael Wheaton 09:50
Yeah, well, like I said, I really enjoyed that book though I was a little bummed out when I was reading it because you're like, I don't like reality TV game shows. I'm a big Survivor guy. I was like, Oh man.
Lucas Mann 09:59
I think it comes up in the book, I was an early Survivor guy. But that's one of the things I talk about the book, is the sort of particular reality TV communities that people have. I also just don't care about The Bachelor. I never watched The Bachelor, which seems to be the show that has been most re-taken by self-considered smart people or whatever. That's why I feel like every time I've done anything about that and somebody mentions The Bachelor I've been like that, Sorry, that's not my bag. There's this enormous disappointment because everybody has their thing like, Well, I don't really like it, but I watch this. And then if you don't watch that it's like, Wait, what? You know, there's these particular personal attachments to it.
Michael Wheaton 10:38
Yeah, I've watched far too much Survivor in the pandemic. It was like my wife's thing for a while. When we were drinking way too much, and it was like, What season of Survivor do you want to try to kill the night with?
Lucas Mann 10:48
Yeah, sort of like, Oh, Micronesia! Here we go!
Michael Wheaton 10:51
It was ridiculous. But I almost think reality TV shows that aren't train wrecks, like Survivor, like most of the things people don't even think of as reality TV, like Queer Eye's reality TV. Or like people for some reason don't even, I don't think it registers to people that they're watching reality TV. And if you ask them, Do you like reality TV?, they'd be like, Oh, God, no. They watch this all the time and they just don't think about it.
Lucas Mann 11:15
There's like a way of finding a lack of shame in the thing. So, actually, I didn't even think of it because I don't think of it as reality TV in the same way. But Queer Eye and The Great British Bake Off and shows like that have been really nice pandemic watching as well. You know you have to write all these essays after a book comes out, tell people that you exist. And I wrote one about this, I think I called it "a kinder reality TV" and there was this moment where it was like people who had always hated reality TV - and I don't think it's a coincidence that the reality TV President had just been elected, and if there was ever a time for smart people to be like, TV sucks, it was then - there was this moment of people who think of themselves as decent hearted and smart and not reality TV people, just like freaking out over Queer Eye or freaking out over every season of The Great British Bake Off or even RuPaul's Drag Race early on. And the sense of these shows that take the same format and timing and pacing, all the things that make reality TV great, but in this aggressively kind way, in this way of you still get to feel all the shit that you feel in reality TV, but we're gonna not make you feel like a piece of shit for it. Like this is a good world, even though it's a fake world in the same way that every... you know, it's kind world, it felt like that was a real early Trump moment that I also love.
Michael Wheaton 12:27
It's like if a social media company tried to get you to stay on their app through positive emotions.
Lucas Mann 12:33
Right, like all the terrible and/or interesting shit that social media is doing reality TV did first. So I have to imagine that some Twitter algorithm is just going to start feeding me videos of like a dog rescuing a pig over and over and over again, you know?
Michael Wheaton 12:53
One thing - I mentioned Captive Audience so we'll just stay on that for a minute - is how many different things that book does, all of which I was a fan of and so when I got to your book, the content was right up my alley. One thing I love about the book is the direct address to your wife, and that form that it takes. Something about direct address in the past few years, for me has been like, I can read anything written in it. I don't know what it is. Well, I guess I could analyze it a little bit. I think it's just the urgency in direct address kind of literature. It's like the confessional in reality TV, it's a vehicle to get instant access and confession and closeness in a way that in more traditional forms of literature, you have to work harder to get to. And for me, these days, I don't really want to work hard. I want it now, I want it straight to the vein. As much as I sneer at myself for being so addictive in a way or not having patience. And one thing that runs through all your books is reportage and all the research you do and interviews and the way you incorporate that. And then also the autobiography. I like that it's about reality TV, it's about a third thing, but it's really about you and your relationship with your wife. And some of the analyses and insights about mediated reality, like reality TV and social media and obviously, the President at the time playing into that, hit all the bases for me. I do want to talk a little bit more about your reportage and all the interviewing you do. That's one thing I learned about you in your book, Lord Fear, which is a book where you play biographer and autobiographer at the same time, and you call it this work of collective memory. And I remember in that book you talked about, like ever since you were little, you always wanted to interview people and you were in a way like a born journalist. In a sense.
Lucas Mann 15:00
Which is funny because man, I don't feel like a journalist as an adult. But I feel like I'm a journalist at the level that a kid who wants to be a journalist is. That can be a fun conversation.
Michael Wheaton 15:10
That's the thread for me that runs through all your work. That being such a personal book, but you did so much research and talked to so many people. I guess I should qualify for the audience who's not familiar with a book, this is a book about your brother who had died from a overdose, was it? I can't remember. [Yeah.] And you have some journals leftover and your experiences with him. He was quite a bit older than you and you interview your own family, people who knew him in various different ways, and you're able to put it together, even though so much of the perspective is not yours in that book, I suppose. It's still deeply personal. All this is a very long way to ask. Where do you think that enjoyment comes from, of all this research and getting on the phone? It's something that's kind of amazing to me, getting on the phone and just calling random people and being like, Hey, I want to talk to you. Or even with Class A, your book, just go to the baseball team, and then somebody walks in the locker room and their like, Hey, this guy's gonna watch you. And they're like, Whatever. What is it about you, or where does that come from, that gives you the gumption to do that?
Lucas Mann 16:29
I don't really think of myself as a person with a ton of gumption. I think it has to do with - I guess the cynical way to say it or the most self-deprecating way to say it - is that I don't think I'm a good enough reporter, or a good enough memorist who has lived an interesting enough life, or a good enough cultural critic, to do any of those things on its own. I can do a third of a good book of each maybe. But at my most what-the-fuck-am-I-doing-here? moments, that's the most comforting thing to think of. This isn't particularly smart analysis, but it's smart enough analysis for somebody who's also writing a personal book. But the less cynical thing is that it's hard to write something for me without feeling tension and uncertainty. And in nonfiction, which maybe this isn't a good analogy, but it's so much more of a collage than a painting. It's that feeling of the art happening on how the boundaries of things push up against each other and work together or don't. And so it feels like, for whatever reason, always that act has felt like a point of ignition. That if I'm just trying to do reportage, it feels like I'm searching for a moment in which there is a memory or a personal thing or whatever that hits that and then challenges it and makes it take on new life. Or if I'm writing about a personal story, I have a hard time going that many pages without just feeling the gears grind and the gears grind and the gears grind, right? And then, like a five minute conversation with somebody who's like, I disagree with you, the act of their disagreement, not even from a good journalistic practice to get more perspectives, but just it's something to bump off. It's friction. I think this can be talked about more in the nonfiction classroom. But I think what you're looking for is friction. And I think even thorough, smart nonfiction, when it feels limp, or when it feels dead, is when we just feel ourselves moving in a direction that continues to reinforce itself. Whether that is through stacking research that leads to the same thing, whether that is through telling a story that you said, This is my story to tell, and I'm gonna just keep telling the story. At least for me, there's a fear when that one thing is happening. Because that because I don't trust that one thing. And I'm sort of looking to be jarred a little bit. And I think if I'm not, I'll just sort of ramble in one direction. And I'm just trying to check myself, basically. And so I think in every book that I've written, even though they're all different, like Lord fear is, I don't know, maybe the most personal book I've written, I don't really know. It's more that you could just call it a memoir. But that book took iterations, like when I was really young and wanted to start thinking about that as a project, I was like, Fuck that, I'm not a memoirist, this isn't about me. And I tried to write a draft of that that was literally just a collection of interviews. And then me being like, Oh, yeah, I'm his brother. And that was, I think, a worthwhile exercise, but kind of dead. And then I was sort of told, Well, this is what people like, memoirs. So I tried to write a version of it that was just like, super sceney memoir, just like 25 pages of me and my family at the funeral homebusting each other's chops and like, Look at our personality, and This is this like a novel except it happened. And that felt limp. And it only felt like it worked when the two aspects challenged each other. And I think in different ways that sort of happened with Class A and doing all that research about baseball and then being like, Why am I telling the story? Why is it that I give a fuck if I'm sitting here? And if I don't give a fuck, if I'm just a person being like, Look, I happened to see this and you didn't, then who cares? And then in some ways Captive Audience felt like the ultimate challenge, in retrospect, that was dumb to take on. Of everything that I felt like could be maligned in my writing or could be maligned in creative nonfiction, or just culture in general, I'm going to write about theoretically, trash culture. I'm going to write about love. I'm gonna write about professions of romantic love. I'm going to do it in a confessional love letter form. All these things that, if you isolate any one of these things in an elevator pitch, or even isolate it and try to write it, I could feel myself being like, This is dumb. And so then the challenge becomes, how do you push on all these things? To make them, for me at least as the writer, transcend what feels like built-in limitations. And when it feels like a book maybe does that, as a reader and as a writer, when you read a book that becomes something that you didn't expect it to be, that feels like the moment of excitement for me as a reader. So then I guess I just try to chase that as a writer.
Michael Wheaton 21:09
Yeah, I like the idea. It's something about your work that inspired me and I've started to try to incorporate more, is to use people and their thoughts and their stories because like you said, it's something to bounce off of. If you kind of draft well, it's always improvisational. You're just playing off the cuff of yourself. I don't know if this is a bad comparison but if you were to go to see improv comedy, and it was one person improving on a stage by themself, it's far less interesting than other people being there. And in nonfiction, it's like, I find some of my own thoughts interesting, I guess. But I don't find myself interesting comparatively. I'm just another general 35 year old, straight white man, but with a podcast. It's like I'm a cliche.
Lucas Mann 22:04
Yeah, I'm exactly the same only I don't have a podcast yet.
Michael Wheaton 22:07
You should, you like talking to people so much. So, it seems like an obvious revelation to me, but it was a revelation to me at the time. I don't have to do this by myself. As a nonfiction writer, I'm stupid if I don't try to access all all this other experience that people have.
Lucas Mann 22:28
And there's a sense when if you tell people that you write nonfiction, or if you ever write something that's called a memoir, and you tell someone that it's called a memoir, and you don't look old as shit when you tell them that, there's this automatic reaction like, You must have lived a life. And there are some really great memoirs that are based on the intensity of experience. But, by and large, as a writer or reader of creative nonfiction, I don't want my writer to think of themselves as that interesting. I am a very, very boring person with some medium good insights. But it's the act of moving from not understanding yourself or not understanding a phenomenon to understanding it slightly more. It's the effort of starting there and moving forward that is so much more interesting, or just its own mode of writing. It's an entirely different essayistic mode than that of information transfer. Instead, it is the mode of watching somebody try to understand the information of their life, of the world, better. And that distinction of what the goal is, I think, is really important to me. The idea of somebody being like, I'm not really sure if my life is interesting or worth anything, being a problem in writing, personally, I just don't understand. When I teach and a student is smart and talented and is worried that they don't have anything to say, I'm like, Great! Cool! Then we're here! That's the starting point, I think. Most of the really good essays from memoirists or nonfiction writers that I know are constantly questioning what stories are theirs to tell, what they know, what the value of their own life is. That's the job. I read them doing that and I'm like, Awesome. This is cool. You're watching somebody wrestle with the limitations of their personhood. It's the wrestling, I think, that's exciting as a reader, for me anyway.
Michael Wheaton 24:13
Absolutely. I was wondering, with some of the reportage in the book, Class A, you've got to get access and you have to be allowed it to be with the team for a year. Do you write on proposal first, or...I imagine, Lord Fear wasn't on proposal, I mean that didn't seem like it at all. But Class A especially seemed like something you might have pitched first and then maybe sold it and then you're like, Okay, well, now I can use this to go get the access I want.
Lucas Mann 24:43
Only recently was I like, Jesus Christ! What am I doing? All these other people are selling books off of like 20 pages and a song. I mean, that's unfair, but like I've done things really backwards and naively, I think. The way Class A worked out was that I was in my MFA and one of the sort of low-key amazing things about a funded nonfiction MFA that I've talked about before is if you want it to be, it is like a funded incubation room for journalism. And there was this moment when I was at the University of Iowa doing nonfiction where I was working on Class A. Kerry Howley was an amazing, successful writer writing this book about MMA fighting. Jen Percy who's now like a national magazine award winning Times writer, she was there writing a book called Demon Camp, about PTSD in the soldier community. And we were literally all there at the same time uncredentialled. But we each had the same fellowship that was a really generous and lucky fellowship and we had two years to show up. So I never even really learned how to do the credentialed journalism thing. And like Class A, I literally drove there and was like, I want to do this, to the front office of the minor league team. And they were like, Hell yeah! Cool! The team has to say okay. I really lucked out in that the manager of the team happened to be a sort of salty old dude who was still in his 60s, a guy named John Tamargo, he's a gruff dude, but a wonderful guy that was really good to me in some ways. If it had been a 30 year old trying-to-rise-up-the-ranks manager or a really buttoned up team, they would have been like, Go away. I never officially got permission. I honestly just wasn't told to leave. And at a certain point, people started protecting me, when people from the sort of larger organization with the Seattle Mariners team would come through town who might have an issue with it, people were kind of like, Hey, man, stay on the side for this one. So yeah, it was super lucky, and also it was this kind of like magazine journalism project, except without any of both the benefits of having fancy institutional support, but also without any of the drawbacks of time, or limits, or that sort of, I'm a reporter, you're a player, kind of disconnect. It came from entirely different perspective. And it was only after those first two books came out where I was like, if I want to try it as a magazine story, I was like, Oh, so I'm just gonna pitch it and I've done things before, so they'll at least read my email, and then there's a chance they'll say yes. That was honestly kind of a revelation to me. But then I'm still trying to work myself up towards being like, if I have an idea, I should just say it to somebody. That still feels odd.
Michael Wheaton 27:16
So what about processes? Was it different for each book? In what way was the process for the books different? But also, being a parent now, and your last book you wrote, when you weren't a parent, how has the process changed, and if you're working on anything, and how do you do it?
Lucas Mann 27:38
I've been sort of amazed at how each book, the process feels so different, almost like different cells, particularly looking back to Class A. Whenever I talk about Class A, I am just delighted that I did that. And honestly don't know if it happened. You know what I mean? Right? Where you're just like, Well, who is that person? That person was young as hell. That person was just sleeping in the car and doing all this shit. So each feels like its moment where in my experience to write about something - I'm not a very good multitasker - so to write about something is to be really, really in that thing. And then it sort of makes a moment in time around it that feels almost unrelated to the other one. So Class A was just totally immersive, more fully like journalistic experience. That book was all about the ambition of these players and the potentially doomed ambition of these players. And I felt like a young, doomed ambitious person. I was 23 into 24 when I was researching that book, and the way that I wrote it and the immersiveness of the research and the speed with which I tried to get everything done was steeped in this sense of like, What am I going to do if this doesn't work out? I'm in grad school, what happens, what happens, what happens. There was this sort of immersive anxiety to that thing. I recently had a conversation with a former grad professor and she was like, My memory of you is just sitting in the graduate student lounge as noise was going on around you just typing. I could not do that now. I think the memory that people have of me then it's just working, working, working, working, and just this sort of like cub reporter out hustling, and I don't feel like that at all, and it's hard to believe that I ever was that. Lord Fear was different because I wrote it first. That was going to be the book where I was like, This is the book that I need to write, if I have a book to write, it's this and maybe I'll never write one again. And then it wasn't working. And then when I went to graduate school, I was like, I'm not gonna spend my time just trying to do this one thing and then not know how to write otherwise. So I shelved it, literally, for Class A, and came back to it. So that almost felt like this weird re-editing myself process almost. And then Captive Audience feels like the first book that I wrote as a grown up, or just a person with a life, I mean like a writing life. You know what I mean? And that feels like a continual process to me of trying to figure out the role of writing in my life in writing, and what I expect of myself and what I should expect of myself, and frankly, what makes me happy. Captive Audience was sort of figuring that out, and then put a period on this moment in my life. And now, to be honest, I'm going through that process again. And one of the things that now, as I'm starting to feel myself come up for water a little bit... I'll say I was starting to work more again and then when the pandemic happened, my wife never stopped going to the office. So, we ended up in the fall, last fall, sending my daughter back to daycare, and we sort of felt comfortable, but I had to go back to teach. But there was like seven months where it was like, Alright, the pandemic was happening and there was this uncertainty, and it was just me and my daughter. And that was the first time in my life where I gave myself permission to not write, and to not beat myself up about it. And also to be like, Fuck writing. Where it was like, This is fucking crazy what's happening. And it's just me and this, at the time, 18 month old kid, or I guess a little younger and she was still learning how to walk and she was furious about everything. And it was like us walking around and hanging out all day. And then at the end, I'd be super tired. And then you know, me and my wife just trying to enjoy each other and be like, What's happening here, what's happening here?, and for the first time in my life I got really into cooking. And I started playing the guitar again more because it made me happy and it made my kid happy to listen to it. And these thing were like, I'd never been good at that. I never let myself do anything with free time, other than writing and freaking out about writing. So that was the first moment in time where I was like, This shit is not that important, to be honest. And now my daughter has been back in daycare and now it feels like coming back to it, looking at what I got. And now I'm writing essays with with a collection in mind. And I think that was one of the, on just sort of a nuts and bolts thing, for whatever reason, I'd always thought in books, and the way my time laid out was like I could teach, I could do whatever, I could do my thing. And then I'd have these long, uninterrupted stretches of just letting the gears turn and this immersion that felt really nicely tuned to books, into letting things sort of linger. And the past nine months or so have been me being, Alright, what is the most healthy way for a project to look in the reality of my life right now? And that was just sort of like thinking about this piece that I wrote for the LARB and a few others of just sort of like, I can take what I do and try to get 15 smart - hopefully - pages about something and that, even though the the enormity of the project of writing remains what it is, allowing myself to think in chunks for the moment. It sort of feels like it's bringing me back a little bit. I'm actually really excited about writing for the first time in a while. And it really has been like, Alright, this is act four. And each one feels really weirdly distinct. I think maybe you're taught to think, or I felt like I was saying, Cool, once you start your writing life, as long as you're in it, then then you write and you live. And these sorts of things elegantly move forward. Thinking about it now, it's sort of this series of compartments with trapdoors within a continuous life. It's fascinating to me.
Michael Wheaton 33:05
What are some of the essays about? Do you mind talking a little bit about...
Lucas Mann 33:09
No, no, I mean I've long governed myself with a strict no jinxes policy, which was honestly a weird thing early on. I didn't tell anybody when I got a book deal for Class A.
Michael Wheaton 33:20
Really? Were you afraid it was gonna go away?
Lucas Mann 33:22
Yeah. There's a Yiddish expression, I think, that my family passed down to me called "Kinehora". I don't know how it's spelled, but it's like you just don't vocalize something that might be positive. Or it's just like everything is jinxed, everything is jinxed. So it's that. So, thinking the way that you mentioned that I think about in books, but in these sort of individual essays that have to do with popular culture, and books and TV and movies, and music and all these things, and then ideas of sort of masculinity and toxic masculinity, but also, in some essays more overtly, and in some essays less overtly, fatherhood and the prospect of fatherhood in the way we imagined fatherhood in popular culture or often don't, being a through line bouncing between the two. So there's one that is mostly obsessed with watching Brad Pitt eat in movies.
Michael Wheaton 34:12
I always think of Ocean's 11, he's munching on something in every scene.
Lucas Mann 34:17
He has an ice cream cone in an otherwise totally unrelated scene. So some of that more like goofy stuff. There's an essay that I'm working on now about being really obsessed with public performance of being dads from athletes, like watching LeBron James and his kids, this real sense of athletes being hashtag dads, and why that's such a thing and why it's so fascinating to me. The one that I wrote that ended up going into Los Angeles Review of Books was about rewatching The Office.
Michael Wheaton 34:53
I read that one actually.
Lucas Mann 34:55
Oh good! OK. So it's sort of like that new vein but bouncing around. I still don't really know yet but it feels like each one is an entry point into the kind of thinking I like to do as a writer with a more defined exit point. And then it's a process of thinking about how they relate to each other.
Michael Wheaton 35:11
And your work was already fragmentary in a way to begin with, especially Lord Fear, but each book, Chunks, Whitespace, even in chapters in Class A. Do you find as a parent, is the world getting more fragmentary, or the opposite, more sustained?
Lucas Mann 35:29
I don't know. I mean, I guess what I'm trying to do now, or what it feels like now, is loose. It almost feels like writing from a place of like, appreciating the time to sit down and think and also not really feeling like I have much to lose. So in a weird way, it feels much more long and risky. Maybe that's because I know that they're shorter essays and it's not like how do I stay succinct in moments in books.
Michael Wheaton 35:54
Like, the essay is the fragment now.
Lucas Mann 35:56
You're right, exactly. But it feels more like trusting myself to riff and hopefully letting moments be just sort of funny, instead of trying to let go of a sense of like, I should be a professional, smart person. I'm almost daring myself to have a little fun on the page.
Michael Wheaton 36:21
And I do know from The Office piece that you're a re-reader. A re-watcher. Same with me. With music, I basically just listen to the same like 50 albums or something. I'll get really into a song and listen to the song 10 times a day for two weeks.
Lucas Mann 36:39
Me, too!
Michael Wheaton 36:41
What are some books, literary nonfiction books, that you return to?
Lucas Mann 36:48
Some of it I feel like just comes from teaching. And so there's sort of foundational texts, like James Baldwin essays, that everybody returns to and that are famous. But the act of teaching them to new people provide this lens to be like, Hell, yeah! Like, That still is awesome! Let's do that. Let's do that, again. Currently, a ton of Jia Tolentino essays that I've already read, just because she's amazing at the kind of work that I aspire to do. And it feels like so much of her stuff - and I feel the same way about Wesley Morris, and Hilton Als is kind of different, but I've been reading old pieces of his - like when something has a pop culture connection, you read it one time because it feels insightful and relevant, and then it's really that nonfiction that is both pop and also timely, but also artful and timeless. To go back and reread these pieces that like, man, I fucking love that! And I think I loved it for a reason then. But to come back to it when that doesn't feel as visceral and sort of ground yourself in what they're doing and how they're thinking. That's been really nice to do at the moment.
Michael Wheaton 38:05
Like Trick Mirror. In that Office piece, you defend her work from some of the criticisms...
Lucas Mann 38:15
Oh yeah, from that Lauren Oyler fuckin' hit piece.
Michael Wheaton 38:19
Lauren Oyler seems to hate a lot of the stuff I love. From what I read, she's super smart, really good writer, but I disagree with most of her takes regarding nonfiction, so I was pleased to see you take her on in the piece.
Lucas Mann 38:33
It feels like there's a weird niche that only a few people are able to adopt, where they are super smart but they shit on other smart people, but then nobody quite feels comfortable shitting on them back. And it seems like I would never have the courage to do it. But God damn, if it works, it works. So, you know, hats off.
Michael Wheaton 38:51
These new modes of popular literary... not popular literary nonfiction, I guess what's popular in alternative literary nonfiction... I find that running an online magazine that takes these really short autobiographical things, and I just noticed a lot more people are working in collage forms, more fragmentary. But my question is kind of about how you view where it seems alternative literary nonfiction is going and like, is it a gimmick? In one sense you almost need a gimmick to sell it, but you don't want it to be the gimmick. Oyler even talks about stuff like, Eula Biss's work is not good, it pretends to be smart, but isn't, and all this, I don't know...
Lucas Mann 39:47
Yeah, you know, so I was in grad school when Reality Hunger came out, and I was at the University of Iowa and John D'Agata was sort of in that same vein and his Lifespan of a Fact book came out and then was just sort of dumped on by a lot of folks within the nonfiction community at the same time. So it felt really intense then. And it's interesting to think of how those things have lasted or not, now, because it's like a decade on. And one of the things that I think is a testament to that kind of work is that you can't call something a gimmick for a decade. And frankly, those things people were already calling those things, the last version of shit that Joe Wenderoth was doing or Anne Carson or all these things. So really, almost the entire millennium. At a certain point, if you don't like it, you don't like it. And that is a valid criticism. And I think whatever you want to call it, fragmentary writing, bad versions of it are easier to isolate as bad because they're just something naked about it. In a weird way, that kind of artifice leaves the writer and the ideas really naked, when it's dumb. Because it's like an Emperor's New Clothes thing. But I think that there's an action to be like, Well, then things that look like that are the Emperor, they're all the Emperor. Just to beat the metaphor. And I find that to just be really, really dumb. To be honest, what I think people are calling lyric essays, or experimental nonfiction, or whatever a decade ago, is kind of just being folded into the mode of what nonfiction is, and what popular nonfiction can be, I think, and I hope. And I think that can be a good thing. Again, just a decade ago, the idea of people being like, Essay is an art, essay is an art. This is an experimental essay, all these things, that felt like this underdog thing for me, yelling in this honestly, in retrospect, irritating and evangelist kind of way. And even the idea of people being like, Uh, an essay is not just something you write for college, that feels ridiculous. Because there have been so many popular and interesting and multi... I mean look, fucking like Maggie Nelson was a best seller. People I know who aren't writer people are like, Have you read Maggie Nelson? These are weird, challenging books that are both a hybrid of... or you know, Rankine, right? These people that are taking what could be thought of as an experimental, quasi-poetic, quasi-academic mode, and just making that part of mainstream culture. Yeah, a long way to say it's not a fad in the same way that like, I'm not a huge fantasy guy, but I'm not gonna be like, Can't wait till fantasy's over. It just is. It just fucking is, and it doesn't have to be my thing. I don't know if you've ever been - maybe this is just like a projection thing - I don't know if you've ever been like - I'm sure you have - like a reading where there's different people reading from multiple genres. If there's a bad essay, I find it always plays worse than if there's a bad anything else. Because again, there's a predisposition, if somebody is like, This is an essay about real life, this is something about my life or what I think. But this is my artful version of it. Like, this is my life as a diner menu or whatever. There's still an ingrained thing in people to be like, Who the fuck are you? What is this? Like, this is the lesser genre, this is whatever. And so I do think when something like that, a) autobiographical or b) something that would deign to call itself experimental, fails, people are more excited to be like, Hell, yeah, that failed, fuck you. And I think the kind of writing that we're talking about combines those two things. And I think that people read a certain pretentiousness into the idea of I'm going to write about myself and also I'm going to write something that's called experimental. Because, you know, at its worst, both of those things can be really obnoxious. But it feels so silly, right? It's kind of like when you go on Twitter and you read people being like, The realist novel is just like sad people having an affair and then thinking about it. And it's like, Yes, some of those novels rule! And some of those novels don't. But I think we've been doing this long enough now and people have been thinking about this long enough now and people have been doing good and bad versions of this long enough now that it just is a valid mode of what the kind of nonfiction that people are interested in can be. And I've almost felt like, previously, like 10 years ago, it felt more like this community where if somebody was shitting on... and like the instinct that you're talking about, where it's like you read Lauren Oyler and you'll be like, I do work that wants to be like Eula Biss, and then this person who's smart said that Eula Biss is dumb, and if Eula Biss is dumb, by the transitive property I'm like really fucking dumb.
Michael Wheaton 44:16
Then I’m very dumb.
Lucas Mann 44:17
Totally! But it feels like that instinct hopefully is moving less and less away because it's like, this is just a type of writing. Eula Biss, this is one of the many writers doing this kind of work that are just popular and interesting and beloved by some and not beloved by others. Now, I'm just rambling, but I do think there was a - I forget who wrote it, it might have been Dwight Garner, I don't know - but there was a New York Times sort of hit piece about fragmentary writing a couple years ago, that was more focusing on novels, you know, those kind of fragmentary novels are often considered autobiographical and people think of them in this sort of similar vein as fragmentary nonfiction that all sort of got popular at the same time. And I think it was, maybe it was Colm Tóibín, but it was a male novelist, a famous male novelist who was writing fragmentary for the first time. And it felt like the reviewer, to me, it felt like the reviewer was using this famous old white man trying this mode to go after why this mode was being dumb as sort of a cover for being like, I hate a mode that's mostly written by women, frankly. And so I do think that that's wrapped up in it, too. And it feels sort of not my place to say, you know, straight white man working in this genre, but it does feel like that kind of work both on the experimental end, and also anything considered personal essay or autobiographical. I write about this in Class A, that these are historically, I think, feminized forms in the way that people talk about them. And I do think that there is part of that sort of undercurrent of, I don't think there's any rigor to this, is tied up in that way that people don't fully acknowledge enough. And then also the other side of it is that, I love Shields, and D'Agata was my thesis advisor on all these things, but the fact that often some of the people that we look at sort of the scholarly totems for this kind of writing happened to be these two white men when this is work that is being done primarily by people not like them. It's all wrapped up in that and again, this is a very long winded way to say, I wouldn't feel too anxious about it.
Michael Wheaton 46:35
All right. That's my conversation with Lucas Mann. You can visit his website at lucasmann.com and buy his books wherever you buy books. I would do that. Okay, that's it. Till next time.