GCL Book Club: Julie Buntin, Famous Men

Welcome to the Gulf Coast Life Book Club. I'm your host, Cary Barbor. Today we hear from Julie Buntin, whose new novel is called Famous Men. It's the story of a young woman's involvement with an older, famous writer. Buntin's first novel, Malina, was named a best book of the year by many outlets, including NPR and The Washington Post. Both these novels are among my very favorites, and I am thrilled to talk with Julie Buntin today. Julie, welcome to the Gulf Coast Life Book Club. Thank you so much for having me, Carrie. So happy to be here. It's great to have you. Okay, let's let's dive in. You explore in this novel the dynamic between a successful, older, powerful man and a younger, greener woman. What made you want to write about that? Yeah, it's it's a great question. And when I feel like I should have, like, a quick ready answer for since it's sort of like the, the whole kind of purpose of the book. But I, I did kind of back into it as the, as the material for this novel. I started the book when I was at a writing residency, the MacDowell colony, 29th summer of 2019, and I was in a place in my writing life where I was working on a whole different book and really stuck. And I just had one of those kind of weird writerly experiences where I was like, stuck with a project, feeling really in over my head, struggling with some kind of imposter syndrome following my first novel. Like, I'll never write another one. I don't know what I'm doing. And I found a copy of Philip Roth Zuckerman Unbound in a drawer in the studio, just as if it were placed there for me and spent the whole day. I had not read it before, though I had read some other works of his, and I just loved it. Like it's funny and effervescent and free and kind of embarrassing, but that only makes it more fun. And it was like this complicated little initiating impulse because I read that book and was sort of like doused in his sensibility, which was so sort of different. And it's sort of free wheeling nature from the kind of like tight, blocked headspace that I had been in all day for weeks. And at the same time, my studio had this giant window that didn't have a curtain. And it was dark when I finished the book, and I experienced this feeling of like, just that feeling I think a lot of women really know of, of like, is someone like, who can see me? Am I totally safe here? Like, I'm in front of this window. It's in the middle of the woods. Of course, MacDowell is a very safe place, but just that kind of, like, very familiar thing of like, I feel like I could be be seen in some way, and I don't know. So there was something about, like, that kind of primal fear that was so foundational to my understanding of, like, what it was to be a woman. Like, I've, I've known that feeling, that kind of fear of like, walking alone or since I can remember, like butting up against that Philip Roth sensibility in that book and this feeling of, like, the freedom that certain writers have had, you know, kind of hitting my own sort of blocked thing, my own maybe ambition kind of swirled up in there. That was a sort of like weird motivating friction. And I wound up taking a character from the novel that I had was stuck in, who was his teacher character, who became Will and and finding my way into her story through sort of that, that funny confluence of like different, different feelings and sort of reactions. It wasn't like a, it wasn't like a super narrative trigger. But as I was writing that, it. I came into this question of kind of will search for her father, which is really kind of like the core opening question of the book, this question of like, who am I? Where do I come from? She doesn't know who her dad is, and that sets her off on this journey that ultimately leads her to this, this, this famous writer who becomes a really complicated and defining relationship in her life. Yes. Okay, great. All right, so the young woman's name is Will, which might get confusing because that sounds like it's a man's name, but which it's short for. Wilhelm. It. Right. Oh, Wilhelmina. Wilhelmina. Mina. Yeah. He calls her. He calls her Wilhelm. And the panel is the older man. And greening is the town they both come from. Just in case people haven't. Haven't read it yet. And I love that story because I think back on reading all that, like Philip Roth and Bello and stuff in college and think like, all we read was these old white men. Yeah, I get so annoyed. And being taught by all the old white men like that, that was there was just one little slice of literature that we learned. Yeah. So yeah, that's interesting. And too, like, I don't know if you felt this way about that literature, but I think one thing I was definitely thinking about in this book is like, like like bellow, I love and loved in my late, late teens, I remember reading her dog and having an experience reading that book of thinking like, this is like the most incredible novel that I've ever read. Like, it's so but but now when I look back on that, some of those books that were so formative to me, that were taught to me as kind of like the pinnacle of literary culture, I think what I am curious, what I became curious about through the vessel of this novel, maybe is like, what does it look like if those influences are like your main and only influences, or you're not like empowered or taught, or you don't find different teachers who allow you to, like, question what other ways of storytelling there might be. And and I think that kind of is one reason why I was really kind of interested in having will be from this really kind of small town socialized and really like, specific kind of way. She's not like a worldly character. She's probably more susceptible to like, those kinds of influences really taking route. She hasn't been exposed to, you know, other kinds of stories. Like a woman writer, for example. Yeah, she and she doesn't have those early teachers and like this. So and as Nathaniel is this famous writer who is from her hometown, so he has this kind of like, hometown legend saying that also adds this gravitas to his work. Yes, yes. Oh. So good. Okay. And as we as is clear from this conversation, the story is set in the world of literature and academia to to some degree. Do you think that world has, like, an extra dollop of misogyny, or do you did you just set it there because that's the world, you know, and you want to. Yeah. That's a that's a good question. I'm like, how do I answer this delicately as a professor? Oh yeah. You don't lose your job. I think that a lot of hierarchical systems of power and institutions have benefited from the patriarchy. Yes, yes, yes. And those that there is there real strides have been made to correct some of that. But that like those, it is hard. Those structures are really old and pervasive and like quite dominant. And and so I guess that's my like way of kind of side my sideways answer, I think, I think that like I was really interested. Will is a character who she finds her way into Nathaniel's orbit or sort of forces her way into Nathaniel's orbit. He is a professor himself at a kind of prestigious MFA program, and but she doesn't. She's not in the MFA program. She kind of like, is this peripheral character. She finds a way to work for him. She gets to attend his workshop, but she's not of it and in it and and I was really interested in having a character, maybe more so even than the kind of misogyny of some of those spaces, the sort of class differences in some of those spaces. Yeah. Like who gets to belong and how and why and how, you know, the difference is in funding and like who, how much it costs to make art and how those costs are different for different people depending on so many things about where they're from. So, so having will have this like weird position on academic academia or literary culture where she like gets to be very close to it, but she's definitely not of it and she desperately wants to be of it. But she doesn't have the kind of educational background to like to be fluent in. The language and like codes of the place gave me a lot of room to to, I think, try to talk about it a little bit or to write into it a little bit. Yes. That's so interesting. Yeah. You you really I loved what you did with class. I didn't even get to that. My questions are so this this book is so has so many layers. That's what I loved about it. And you say that in your author's note at the beginning of the book, you say that writing it submerged you into unprocessed anger, which I feel like sounds like a kind of a difficult place to write from. Can you say more about that? I think it was a difficult place to write from. I mean, this book took me six years to write. I started it that summer that I mentioned already in 2019, which was a complicated moment also because, you know, seven, eight months later, Covid happened, I moved, I had my first child, and then I had another child. So there were a lot of things going on in my life that kind of slowed down my writing process. But I think I think that one reason why it just was a sticky, complicated space to exist in over the long span of the writing. Was that, like Will herself as a character is challenging. Like she is like me in so many ways. We have so many things from our backgrounds that are overlap. I was definitely writing about worlds that I know, but at the same time, Will isn't isn't me, and she's not even really like a stand out of like a out of fictional stand in in any way. Like she's very much her own character and the ways in which we depart from each other and the places she had to go in this narrative for me to tell the story I wanted to tell were so hard sometimes, like, I think I'm interested and I hope that readers will have strong reactions to her. Like, why are you doing this? Will? You know, I think, I think if the novel works on a reader, there has to be a little sense of like, Will's life is barreling down this track and you as the audience are going like, oh my God, I understand why this is how she got stuck here. But like, I'm really hoping she's got a way to get off of this and to exist in a space where you're writing about a character who's, like, making these difficult choices, compromising a lot of things, making a lot of moral compromises for the sake of this relationship or proximity to this, like masculine, this male power. It's it's challenging. And like the question kind of I was asking myself over and over as I revised the book, especially once I was able to think a little bit more big picture about some of the thematics of the book was like, what do we make of of women who are maybe like the enforcers in some way of silences that harm other women? What do we make of women who choose relationships with seeming free will that are are harmful to them or to others? How much self-deception would be necessary in something like that? Would you even be aware of your own self-deception after opting into a certain degree? So I had to exist in her head, and that was sometimes quite hard. And the anger that I felt Will couldn't always feel yet, because that wasn't the story that I do. You know, like if she had been able to feel that anger righteously and had been sort of empowered to feel the anger that I was able to feel on her behalf, there would be no story because she would have found a way out sooner or something. Like, she doesn't even feel like she has access to that kind of. And that was really interesting to me. I think, like trying to trying to capture that in a character was like a complicated challenge and felt like it was a way of talking about something real that I hadn't, I still think could be maybe explored more in fiction Today we are talking with Julie Buntin author of the new novel Famous Men. I was thinking that Will is accepting kind of accepting crumbs from Nathaniel, but she doesn't realize they're crumbs, which I think is what you were saying. Like, she's she hasn't come through yet to realize that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. She doesn't have that sense. She's not definitely not valuing herself enough to understand that she could ask for more. Yeah. And at the same time, one aspect of Nathaniel is that he. I thought when I was reading that he doesn't realize how biased he is or how condescending he can be. I mean, I think that's that's the position of a lot of people in, in privilege where they've they've never had to question it. And it occurred to me like, do you think they are somehow feeding each other's delusions like she's she thinks she's getting more than a crumb, and he thinks he's really mentoring a young writer or I don't know how it would go. Yeah, that is such a thoughtful question. And like, for me, that's a really sort of astute reading of their dynamic. Like, I think definitely like I think will I kind of to loop back to some of the things we were talking about earlier with Will and these ideas of like being influenced maybe by writers who don't always like being influenced by a particular set of writers, or identifying first with like, male characters instead of women, and how that might sort of tilt your sense of who you can become if you are yourself a young woman, like I think will, one of Will's ideas of what like womanhood looks like is from Nathaniel's work, which means that her models for what kind of person to be are like to be characters. Like, she sort of contorts herself into a character that he would, that he would value, or because she wants to stay close to him because what she believes she's getting is access to this world that she wouldn't otherwise have access to this, like literary world. His mentorship, which she sees as like a path to to becoming like a writer, becoming a person who can make art the way that he does. Of course, there's a million other ways she could have tried to figure out how to do that, but she has all these different things that have kind of pushed her there from her love to for his work to like her. She has some health challenges that make her really vulnerable and maybe like a little more fearful of taking a risk. She doesn't have any kind of financial safety net. And I think for Nathaniel, one trick of his character that was interesting to me and that I really tried hard to capture, is that like, I think he does think of himself as he does not think of himself as a monster, you know what I mean? Like he sees a real difference between like between like these, you know, like Harvey Weinstein type figures. And he doesn't think he is like that. He thinks he's like a mentor to women. He thinks that, you know, maybe he's a little bit of like a bad boy or whatever, but he doesn't see those. So I had to be able to kind of like to hold that part of his character at the for again, even though I myself have a very different diagnosis of like what he is and will of course can't see like she is very under his thumb sort of and kind of the power is really out of whack. So she can't really see that until it's quite late in the story. But yeah, I definitely think they kind of they kind of feed each other. And that that to me also was maybe an interesting way of talking about something else in this book that felt really sticky and uncomfortable, which is this idea of complicity. If if Will is like even as she gained self-awareness and grows up and is still kind of allowing this dynamic to continue, at what point does she become kind of in her own harm, the harm that happens to other women in Nathaniel's orbit? And that that felt like a really, like, live wire or something to write about for me. Yes. Oh my gosh, I'm so I admire you so much for taking this on because it's every time I think about it, it's just another it's like another layer of the onion to, to look at. Because another thing is Will's upbringing. I mean, there's so many lines in this novel that punched me in the gut, and one was, quote in Greening the unspoken rule most women followed was to take up as little space as possible, unquote. So I think that's a rule that a lot of us women grew up with. But it's something that's in her psyche. And so she's she's also operating from that. I mean, you can't you can't remove her background from the effect that it has on the decisions she makes. Yeah. And that was really like I think like one kind of structural thing I felt really attached to with this book is, you know, the book starts it. Does this like come like little move structurally where it starts kind of the story proper starts with Will in her adolescence when she discovers Nathaniel's work. It doesn't start when you might imagine a story like this. The most dramatically straightforward way to tell us where like, this would be. Maybe to start when she meets Nathaniel, right? Like, but because to me, that that wasn't that then means this book is only the story of Will and Nathanael. If it starts. There were mostly that or something or like that. That is the whole. But actually I see this book as like the story of, of of will and like how these forces shape might shape a woman across the course of her life and make it impossible or really challenging for her to, you know, ever kind of take ownership of who she is. And I think that's all tied up in like, I love that you quoted that bit, this sense of like kind of, you know, where she comes from, what she it's almost like a level of grooming has happened far before she meets him and not and not via him, you know. Right. Oh my gosh. That's I'm sorry to laugh. That's not really funny, but it's kind of funny. Yeah I mean, it's like I think a lot of us I know that feeling, right. Like. Yes. You know. And also he has the patina of the famous writer that everybody, they've all been talking about him since in school. And, you know, it is a level of grooming that's such an interesting way of putting it. Wow. And the other thing, I mean, another thing is that Nathaniel is very practiced at this. Like he has his moves ready, he has his lines ready, but he, like, he knows what will work in this circumstance. And yet he still plays the kind of all shucks. Yeah. Innocent. Yeah. Which I thought was so interesting. Yeah, I think that's true. He definitely. And Will doesn't understand. I mean, she might understand sort of some of the dynamics as one tricky layer of her self-awareness, I think, is that she's like, I can I know a little bit about what's happening right now because I read his work and I understand the broad strokes of this story, but it's she thinks she that by opting and she will get what she wants. But actually there is no that isn't she can't like, overpower it in that way. He's too far beyond her, I think, in that sense. But I do hope that by the over the course of the novel, that starts to change a little bit as the years unfold and their relationship lasts a really long time. So it like changes shape as she gets older. Yes, yes. And she's I mean, part of what's driving her to is her own ambition, which is a dirty. Word for, yeah, for young women. But it's not a dirty word. Like she just wants what she wants, you know, she wants to have this, this career. She's she's has a gift and she wants to, like, explore it. So. Yeah, it's just very. Oh, it's just very thorny. It's it's great. I loved it. And another just just to bring up another gut punch line was when after they fool around one night. I hope that's not a spoiler. But I think it happens pretty early. He says we got a bit carried away the other night, didn't we? Which I became enraged when I read that line because I was like, he's not taking any responsibility. It's like passive voice. Well, it's not passive voice, but it's like he just kind of it's like, yeah, it's like he never planned. Oh, he didn't know that was going to happen. And yeah, he there's no power differential. And oh it just kind of it just kind of happened you know. And it just shows how I mean I think it shows his manipulation. But it also maybe it doesn't maybe he doesn't even know how manipulative he is. I'm not really sure. I don't know if he fully does. Like I think he I think he does. I think there's he has this quality of like of like, oh, this is like, yes. You, you know, you 20 like you to have power here obviously. Like but I think he understands her ability. But also yeah I don't think that he that he's, that he honestly it's like I don't think he even thinks about it that hard, you know. And I think in that moment to he's really one thing that is delicate for him is that he doesn't want to get in trouble. And if he can, like, play it down, play it in some way that, that that might help with that larger project of like getting away with it, right. To keep her from like going to. The. Dean or whatever. Yeah. Oh my gosh. Okay, Julia, I'm afraid we are running out of time already, but is there anything else that you want to make sure we talk about around this book? I loved all of your questions, and I really appreciate all the things that you pulled out about the novel. I think. I think maybe the only thing I would add is just that, like, I, I think that there is something like so when I read, I look for work that provokes me in some way that, like, forces me to kind of challenge my own assumptions about things, or maybe like unsettles me in a way where I can't stop thinking about it. And I think, I hope that this book is like a little bit of a provocation in that manner like that, it sweeps you up and transports you on a kind of journey that's maybe not always pleasant, but that it leaves you with questions that force you to sort of like, look back at the world and, and take like, maybe like a closer look or something. That's my goal. It's just. It's just beautiful. I really I really take my hat off to you. It's just a fantastic book. Julie Buntin thank you so much for joining us on the Gulf Coast Life Book Club. Thank you for having me. It was a joy to be here. Thanks, Cary. I'm your host, Carrie Barber. We had production help today from Emma Rodriguez and Mike Kiniry. This is WGCU-FM Fort Myers 90.1 WMKO Marco Island 91.7 FM, NPR for Southwest Florida.