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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the New Books Network. I'm Chris Holmes and this is Burned by Books. Here you'll find interviews with writers you already love, like Jennifer Egan and Rebecca Mackay, mixed in with up and coming voices like Alexandra Kleeman and Roman Alam. You'll find us wherever you listen to podcasts, but check out previous episodes@burnedbybooks.com and on Instagram and Twitter at burnedbybooks. Let's start the show In Julie Bunton's most recent novel, Famous Men, she tells the story of Wilhelmina Miles Will to friends and family, a young woman suffocating in a tiny town in Michigan and desperate to become a poet. The path she decides on as her exit route from high school scandal and a predacious stepfather is one previously traveled by a now famous poet Nathaniel fellow who is 40 years her senior. Their lives will become entwined in ways that Will could never have imagined. Her understanding of writing, sex, romantic love, class and money will all be changed radically by her relationship with a man who is both much more and much less than his poems might suggest. In a first person narrative voice that is utterly consuming, Will tells the story of her flight to New York to be a college student living in relative squalor and then assistant to Nathaniel, pressing her way into his MFA seminar and later a writer of her own merits, but always shadowed by Nathaniel, who is both an invention and a reality. When the extent of Nathaniel's abuse of his power comes to light, Will must come to terms with her own agency and victimhood in ways that crumble easy answers and which color the story she has been telling about her own journey into the literary world. A campus novel for the MeToo era and its backlash, Famous Men introduces us to an unforgettable character who will face choices and challenges that discomfort and unsettle the reader while making them turn inward to understand their own potential complicity in a world where no writing is without its stains. Julie Bunton's debut novel, Marlena, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, released in 10 territories worldwide, and named a Best Book of the Year by over a dozen outlets including the Washington Post, NPR and Kirkus Review. She is the co editor of Notes to New Mothers, a collection of dispatches from postpartum life by 60 writers and artists. Previously, Bunten was an editor and director of writing programs at Catapult. Now she teaches and writes in Ann Arbor, where she is an assistant professor at the University of Michigan. Welcome to Burned by Books.
- [03:09]
B
Julie Bunton thank you so much for having me, Chris. And thanks for that beautiful description of my novel, I feel like I wish that that was actually. The jacket got me scream.
- [03:18]
A
Oh, well, that's so nice of you to say. Thank you. And this is a beautiful book. I still cannot get Wilhelmina Will out of my head. You really just captured her voice in with such unique. She's both precocious and naive at the same time, which I find wonderful. And she. Yeah, she just makes you want to, like, run along for whatever kind of adventure that she gets into, even if you know that she's going to kind of land on her face.
- [03:52]
B
Yeah.
- [03:53]
A
So I was wondering where her voice or how it came to you. And also so important to me that it's in first person. And I wonder if it's a response of sort to a moment in the novel when Will reveals that Nathaniel had joked to her that, quote, nobody likes a woman who talks about herself for too long, no matter the genre. And you gave will nearly 400 pages to talk about herself.
- [04:20]
B
Yeah. I love that you. That you picked up on that. You saw that moment. I mean, I think there's so many. There are so many little things in this book that are sort of, in some ways, me as a writer through the vessel of Will. Right. Which is like a. Which is like, experience through a filter of kind of invention or distortion, reacting to things that I internalize or that were part of the, like, education that I got kind of coming up as a writer at a specific time. Which is not to say that Will is me or that these were all the lessons that I got, but that I. I definitely was, like, was responding and reacting and maybe even pushing back to some things that I had heard, whether that was just from teachers specifically or even from, like, the kind of. The sort of trends of the time or what. What was considered sort of more artful. And that first person bit is one of those things. And I think even now, though there have been so many. There have been throughout history, so many incredible novels by women in first person. There still is sometimes, like, even. Even in 2026, like, a funny, like, weird way that that is still sort of called into question sometimes. Like, I'm thinking of all of this.
- [05:36]
A
It's funny how much it's, like, associated with. With male writers, which I'm only really realizing now. But you were gonna say something? Sorry, I couldn't.
- [05:45]
B
No, it's true. It's just. It's got a funny little charge to it. Like, I'm thinking of some of the coverage around Lost Lambs, Madeline Cash's.
- [05:52]
A
Oh, yeah. Yeah.
- [05:53]
B
And how there was like this whole thread of discourse about how like she didn't write a book in first. Like, that was like this, like, amazing. I don't know, there's just something about. I think it's so interesting that even kind of the position, like the sort of like point of view or perspective that a woman chooses to tell her story is also kind of can be called into question sometimes. I also, you know, I think you asked the kind of beginning part of your question was how does. How did Will's voice sort of come to. Come to be?
- [06:23]
A
Yeah, yeah. Did she come fully formed?
- [06:26]
B
Yeah, it's. That's such an interesting, like, hard question. Like, I have this sense that comes from my kind of like, teacher brain of like. Let me talk about this in a way that's like concrete and legible and specific so that listeners can understand. Because there is something so evasive about being like. I don't know, she just came to me and I, like, followed the music of her voice. It's just such a cop out. And it's not even exactly true because my experience of writing at least is one of like. Of like, intense consideration and strategy and like everything is thought out and every sentence is rewritten a million times. But at the same time, there is a way that, like, I just early on like, locked into something about the kind of music of Will's voice, which I would say comes from, you know, obviously the environments that she's in, how she was raised, how she thinks of herself, how she thinks of others. But like, also things like, tonally, the vantage point, like where she is in the present as she tells the story and how much retrospective distance there is. Like, those things create, like sort of sonic elements within the voice. Like, there's more elasticity or like tonal variation in a voice that's retrospective than one that's like first person present tense, for example. Or I find that maybe not first, maybe some would find the other more flexible. But for me, I like the. I like the kind of amplitude of a retrospective first person, I guess.
- [07:45]
A
Yeah. Because it gives you. It's sort of like a two hander. It gives you first person and third person kind of in the same. The same time.
- [07:54]
B
Yeah. And I loved your insight about how she's both precocious and naive. And that was like a really challenging and important element of her character for me. That was hard to balance across the book and hard to think about kind of when the story itself would put pressure on these places where she. Her naivete would be tested or her sense of self awareness would be tested. And like, that something about the voice allowed me to, like, be close to her in certain scenes. Let us kind of experience them as Will experienced them, as they happened, but with the opportunity within the voice for, like, analysis or interpretation or foreshadowing or into some kind of interruption from her. From her wiser, more adult perspective. And that is attractive. Like, kind of an attractive voice for me as a writer for those reasons.
- [08:39]
A
Yeah. And I'm going to come. I'm going to circle back around to a specific element of her retrospectiveness, but I want to start with. With Will's, you know, life in. In this small town in. In Michigan, because it is the. It is the site of both her kind of dreams and dream making, of kind of following Nathaniel's path out of this world and into something presumably larger that has to do with writing. But it is also the site of. Of a. A rumor that started about her having supposedly sex with one or multiple boys at a high school party. And that that rumor is really going to mark her in ways both visible and invisible for the rest of her time in the. In the novel. And, you know, you say in this sort of, like, opening letter that accompanies this book that this was in. In some ways a novel responding to Me too. And it's afterwards, and we get a couple different kinds of Me Too kind of ways in which Julie is either victim or part of a me too experience. And it begins with this one. So I wonder if you'd talk about the ways in which Will becomes victim to a kind of misogyny around sex in high school and then how it kind of leaks into the rest of the. No.
- [10:10]
B
Yeah. That's such an insightful question. And it's. I think you're. Again, you've just read the book with so much openness to its aims and, like, so much insight. I. I feel like you really understood what I was after. I think those. Those early moments were really key to me, like, starting with Will as a teenager and really showing, like, the kind of environment that she was sort of marinating in pre Nathaniel, which includes the influences of, like, her town, its gender dynamics, the sort of sexual politics of the place where she lives, and, like, her deep understanding of Nathaniel's work, which itself has sort of like a vexed relationship to gender. So she's taking in all of these different influences and she, Again, she has this. She's not a person who's taking in. She's not equipped with, like, like the tools to analyze this. She's a teenager. And those things to me were part of like, this balance where I felt like it was interesting and more complicated and maybe more true to how I understand the world or what I've experienced or what I've witnessed that she. That she wouldn't have like, a perfect response to having been victimized in these ways as a teenager that like, that in fact, she might have like a. A way like a response to it where she finds herself drawn to situations where that kind of thing can happen again in different ways. Like, I just think there's. That we don't always. Even if she knows, she thinks she is in control or she thinks she knows better, differently. So like this. The scene with the boys and even what's going on with her mom's boyfriend who becomes her stepfather where he's watching her. I also think I. I wanted to write about. I was interested in writing about the kinds of harm that are just like, impossible for a young person to like, hold onto the contours of like, she will. Doesn't understand, like, how to even talk about the violation that she feels happened to her. Because she doesn't understand it. Doesn't. It. It isn't in the stories that she's taking in. It isn't like, talked about as a kind of. In a kind of like in any. What happens with the boys. She doesn't know. She doesn't know. And you know, she has her. Her sort of instincts about it, but it's. She was blacked out. She doesn't. She doesn't have any concrete memories. She's kind of like subject to the rumors around her. So I. All of that felt really interesting to me and. And a little dangerous to write into and sort of true in an uncomfortable way. And again, like, more in tune with like, some of what I experienced as a teenager, which was that, like, when young women or girls were in these situations, they weren't like. And then I was like, what's happening to me is wrong. And I'm gonna, like, you know what I mean? I'm gonna react to it by doing like, these things. The kind of. But, you know, that makes for. That makes for fiction that can be really unsettling and uncomfortable and doesn't give readers necessarily the kind of closure that they want or characters kind of transformation
- [13:03]
A
you might create is true to the. To the fact of how confusing it is.
- [13:08]
B
Yeah.
- [13:09]
A
Because it's like a. You know, it. It's this strange. Both and where she both was violated physically and not. And. And. But that in itself is a violation. And so she can't parse it be in part because she was blacked out, but also because she's too young to, as you say, to understand all the like, gray area. The fact that, you know, girls pile on and add to the. Totally add to the rumor which, you know, is in a way them kind of defending themselves against having that directed at them, but is also so cruel.
- [13:46]
B
Yeah. In the context that she's in, she's the one who did the wrong thing. She should never have gotten herself into that situation. Whatever happened with the boys is her fault. And even if she can resist that in some way and remind her, tell herself that it doesn't bother her or, you know, the shame kind of gets baked into her, but she. There's. I think there's ways my understanding of her at least is that there's some part of her that's like. Knows that this is not the right. Like, people are not reacting to this in the right way. She. It's. That's still the kind of, again, this sort of like, soup that she's marinating in. And I. I was really interested in. In kind of writing right into the complexity of like, how that would. That kind of situation might really work its way into your psyche and. And to this thing too. I think that was true where I grew up, definitely in the time that I did, which I was unpacking a little bit maybe of like, there was a way that, like, as a young woman, you just, like, weren't allowed to be mad about stuff that happened to you. Like.
- [14:42]
A
Yeah. Yeah.
- [14:43]
B
Unless it was like, truly beyond the pale. Like. And those things are beyond the pale, actually. But if you know what I mean, like, there was a sense that, like, you just kind of like, this is part of life, like, deal with it.
- [14:55]
A
And I think we're back to that now. Yeah. Because the me too was, I think, you know, in a. In a horrible way just this brief opening of a window that now feels to be shut in a lot of ways. And I felt like the. That the fact that. Because this is the years that of the book are in the 2010s.
- [15:16]
B
Right.
- [15:17]
A
And. Well, it extends beyond that. But yeah, largely. And you know, so we're in. When it. In an era where there seems to be, like, potential for change. For change and for that specific thing that you mentioned to end. Like.
- [15:32]
B
Yeah.
- [15:32]
A
That, you know, not making too much noise about something, not complaining too much becomes a thing of the past. And. And. And yet it appears that. That we may have not have grown from it, which must, in retrospect, make this novel. Haven't been even, you know, painful for you in a way, I wonder.
- [15:52]
B
Yeah, well, I wrote the book. I mean, I started the book in 2019 and I was still obsessively pissing off my publishing team by trying to change sentences as recently as, like, March. So like, so, you know, like, I, I think there's a, there's a part of me. It's been nine years since my last novel was published and I spent about 6ish years working on this one. So I guess, you know, if you want to count the fiddling with the copy edit even longer. And like, I think there's ways that I felt in some ways, like, frustrated by how long it took me. I had two children, I started a really hard job, whatever, whatever. Couldn't figure some things out about the book out. But the benefit of the time is that I, I, I lived that changing reaction to the C2 stuff and like, the book was able to be, to be in conversation in some ways with my own processing of that. And Will is a character who, this was always kind of consistent throughout each draft of the book. But I felt really drawn to again, what felt like maybe like a little bit more of a taboo spaced right into, of a character whose reaction to me too, in the moment of it was one of like, confusion and like, like a character who was not in sync. We can see around her and feel hopeful for her. But a character who might in that, in a conversation like the one she has with her friend is like out of sync in some way with what's happening because she can't. One of the questions of the book is if she's going to be able to kind of confront what that will make her have to face about her own story. Yeah.
- [17:26]
A
Yeah. So, and, and you know, thinking about the kind of mythology around her high school moment, I wanted to think for a second about the ways in which Nathaniel exists in kind of a haze of mythology around his figuration as a, as a writer of, of, of decent fame at what you call a prestigious university, a nameless, prestigious university in, in New York. And I wonder if you'd read a section for us where you really, I think you, you dramatize in an almost kind of stream of consciousness, recounting by Will all the rumors and conjectures about who Nathaniel is and, and might truly be as spoken by his graduate students. Would you be willing to read us that section?
- [18:17]
B
I would love to. Thank you. Okay, here we go. They had opinions about his Moods based on what he was wearing, whether he drank a cup of coffee during workshop. Overtly political writing is propaganda, not art, they'd declaim, mocking him. Everything he said was so outdated. The best thing you could do for your work was exactly the opposite. Did you know he punched a man in the face at a poker game hosted by Philip Roth, who called in a favor to keep him out of jail? His apartment has a big screen TV and no books at all. Except his own. He loves jeans. Skirts, too. Jackets? Doesn't matter. A few years ago, before your time, a first year tried to seduce him by wearing a pair of denim overalls with a jacket, Canadian tuxedo style. It worked. No. He called her out on it. No, it did work, but he told her after they fucked that onesies were for babies. He's obsessed with women's volleyball and suggested to Randall Wilbur, whose thesis was about porn addiction. He tried that instead. For almost a year, struggling with an undisclosed health condition, Nathaniel ate only adzuki beans. He had to eat them every three hours. I mean, imagine how hungry you'd be. He'd sit there in class with a Styrofoam bowl and a plastic spoon. In the old days, before he stopped caring, his seminars lasted 8, 10 hours. Deep into the night, students would piss themselves, they were so nervous about interrupting him to go to the bathroom. Last year, he asked Tim to read out loud from a Flannery o' Connor story. And when he skipped over a slur, Nathaniel held forth for an hour about judging the time, not the work. He had a kid with some woman before Vilma. The guy grew up to be an accountant. There's a famous rock on the campus of Tumbledown Mountain Writers Workshop where he used to receive blowjobs from his choice scholarship recipient. I've sat there. Of course, I didn't know I wouldn't now. That's why he doesn't get invited anymore. He was a draft dodger? No. A conscientious objector? No. He went to Vietnam, but he was sent home before even leaving the States because someone in his troop shot him in the foot during basic training. It was an accident. No. He paid the guy. He always gives money to homeless people. Take a walk with him. You'll see. He wrote his first novel, Blackout Drunk. He wooed her over email after Beauty and Mud wrapped. We're talking novel length letters. She scrolled through one for Leah at last year's MFA Christmas party. Yeah, I've met her. She's not as pretty in real life. More normal. Like someone Hot from high school. A lot of celebrities are like that, especially women. The camera does something to them. He's a millionaire. He can't pay his rent. Velma cheated on him. He's obsessed with her still. They wrote each other's stories just to fuck with people. Vilma's the only woman who's ever left him. They loved him, they hated him. They wanted to kill him or eat him or put on his skin. All of it at once. Sometimes people pretended they didn't like his work. But he was the most famous teacher in the program. Its biggest draw hired for poetry. He still primarily taught in that genre, but everyone wanted to take the memoir class. He almost never taught. God, I loved his poems when I was a kid. There's just something about them. So direct, like they're just for you. A gateway drug. He never forgets a student. Just last year he helped a grad from like the 90s sell his first book. Slipped it to an editor at Knopfs, one of the old guys. At the end of a long dinner. Two weeks later, book deal. They condemned his bad behavior, but almost affectionately. It was part of his lore, something to be accommodated, like a therapy dog. The price everyone paid for proximity to greatness. Or former greatness. Once I heard Leah talking about how many times Nathaniel had asked her where she was from. He means like my people, she said. He asked if I would describe my skin tone as swarthy. I could hear him asking this. He'd asked me a similar thing after all. Capture your favorite summer feeling with Pandora Jewelry. Discover a collection inspired by the sunshine, freedom, and moments that make the season unforgettable. From sun kissed metals to personalized pieces ready to be engraved with your summer mantra. Each design moves with you from beach days to golden nights and every memory in between. Shop Pandora Jewelry's new summer collection in store or online@pandora.net and let your summer unfold.
- [22:08]
A
Thank you so much. It's such a fascinating assortment of qualities that are assigned to him. And some are hysterically funny, some are upsetting and clearly wrong and. And misdirected. But I wonder if you talk a little bit about the importance of Nathaniel as kind of a cipher to be filled by lore that first, you know, we get from Will as she's thinking about this person who may have, you know, a trajectory that she herself could follow and then later by those around her and how that's important for what will happen later in the novel.
- [22:49]
B
Yeah, yeah, that's was definitely something I was thinking about and I. You're I love that you just talked about all the different kind of ways those details hit. Like, one thing that was a little bit fun for me. Just kind of one of those little things you, you write to sort of make yourself laugh while you're working, is that some of those details are just like, nonsense. Like the one about, like, the idea that the grad students are just like complete, completely, just like totally making shit up was funny to me. And then the idea that I could also sprinkle in some things that would be quite sinister, some that might be true in some ways that places like that in the text are me doing like, language almost doing like some kind of like, language play with my book. But.
- [23:32]
A
But all of them seemed like reasonable. You know, having been to graduate school, I could totally imagine even the most insane ones, like counseling that you should just go to girls volleyball matches to get over your porn addiction. Like, I could see grad students, like, coming up with this about a faculty member. It all seemed very, very realistic.
- [23:54]
B
Well, you're. I mean, you're a college professor, so, like, you probably get this too, like, there. I think also part of me, I was thinking, one interesting thing about where I was as I read this book is that, like, I started it before I became a college professor as my, like, full time job. I had taught in college before, but I, I was not like a teacher, wasn't a part of my identity in the same way. So I had this experience of like, having been. When I started the book, I definitely related more to MFA students and understood more about, like, how they would think about these things. But then as I continued to work on it, I, I started to see things from the professor's point of view a little bit more. And one thing that has happened to me as a teacher is when you give a writer advice of some kind and then they come back around to you and they're like, I did this thing. You said it was this. And you're like, no, no, no, I didn't say that. Or something like something where you're like, where you watch that what you say can go kind of almost go through this game of telephone with your students in some way. And I've experienced that only in, like, minor ways, but I thought that Nathaniel would experience that all the time in all kinds of ways, because he just doesn't think very much about what he says or care. And I think he also benefits from this Persona where, like, no one really knows what the truth is. It was an interesting layer of friction for me that rumors and gossip and secrets and whispers are part of what destroys Will's life. But that for Nathaniel, they only in a weird way, build him up more.
- [25:28]
A
Yeah, they elevate him. And yet they stain her at every. At every moment. It doesn't matter where she is in her life. It's a stainless steel. Yes.
- [25:37]
B
And then later in the book, the idea that those whispered things about him would become un. Like they would become true. Like they would. You would. They would become. They would enter the text in a way that was. You couldn't argue with them and. But that the world around those statements would still argue with them. And then Nathaniel might find a way to once again, kind of like, wiggle out. Out of what, for those women were things that probably interfered with their life the way the rumors did with Will. So that was like a way of thinking about this mythology or these, this. These rumors or these, this gossip or this lore, as you want to call it, or as you described it as being like having almost kind of like a plot, a function in the text, related to the plot actually, in some way as much as it was related to the characters just in terms of what happens in the story and also maybe the themes and how they develop. But that all felt really sticky to me and interesting.
- [26:34]
A
Well, it so is. And clearly this. This moment was very sticky for me. I. I said I wanted to circle back around to that question of the retrospective nature of. Of Will's narration. And Famous Men operates semi chronologically with the plot moving forward in time, but with Will's narration coming to us retrospectively. And she marks the eras of her life, interestingly, by their relationship to Nathaniel, by proximity, by intertwinement, as though all things in her life were awaiting his entry. Quote, I've almost arrived now at where we began for Nathaniel, describe for us how the movement of time works in Famous Men and how it is guided and distorted by the presence of Nathaniel in Will's life.
- [27:28]
B
Yeah, I. I thought a lot about time when I was making this book, my first novel. The way time works is in pretty tight containers. Like, the narrative present takes place over, like, I'm probably going to remember it incorrectly, wrote it so long ago. The narrative present takes place over, like, three days or something. And the. The sort of. The past, there's sort of two timelines that unfolds over the course of, like, a year, and there is some movement between those two planes of time in terms of what the narrator can pull up, but the sort of storylines run on those two tracks, which are just containers. And with this Book. I think one of my ambitions, my sort of like, secret writerly ambitions with the project was just to try and bite off something bigger when it comes to how a novel unfolds in time or its scope. So we have Will here. I think of her vantage point as being like, two beats from the end as we experience it on the page. So she has, like, she's returning to the beginning of this story with the knowledge of what happens at the end. But the. The process of telling it is the. Is if you experience a transformation, it is from how Will chooses to tell. Like, I see her transformation. Whatever you. However you might interpret that, I understand it to be the act of telling according to her own rules and on her own terms as. As the trans. The transformation that can happen in the text. And I had to think about structure and shape and beats and what I dilate and what I cut and compress in such a different way. Because Will. I'm essentially kind of covering Will's entire life up until the till she's in, like, she's essentially like, close to 30. So I have all of these years to cover. And you can't obviously write out every single day of those 30 years. So I had to sort of try to organize.
- [29:23]
A
Unless you write just ducks of Newbury Porn. Yes.
- [29:26]
B
Right.
- [29:26]
A
Maybe someday, one day. One sentence.
- [29:29]
B
Yeah.
- [29:30]
A
Then you're fine.
- [29:31]
B
Right. Maybe. Maybe some other project. But for this one, I. And I also too, knew that one of the effects. I think I was going for something I love as a reader. One of the great pleasures of reading for me is the feeling when you read a book of, like, something strange happening to time. Like, I have been reading this book for three days, but I've experienced a lifetime or 14 years or, you know, three months at sea. Like, the fact that a book is a portal to another world, but a portal to a different way of existing in time is like, yeah, is why I think I. One of the things I love about reading so much. So I really wanted to give the reader that experience of, like, I have lived a lifetime with this person, or I've, Like, I've traveled along with them. And they are telling me this because where they end up is not where they thought they would. And, like, I want to get there with them and see why. Like, see what is the urgency of this telling, like, how. What are they trying to figure out? So as I was really aiming for all of that and in terms of how I personally.
- [30:27]
A
And you get it, because I think that it does add a really interesting urgency to. To Know that it will be so fundamental that she meet and begin to work and have this relationship. But we don't know why.
- [30:40]
B
Yeah. And she. She's still. I think there's like, parts of she knows why, but there's also things she still doesn't understand about how it happened. And so it felt like, to me that I could show that the tensions of the story and the questions it's asking and what it says about Will would be more unexpected and more complicated if I started. When she first encounters Nathaniel's work, when he has an idea, a fantasy text, like something she's invented in her mind more than anything real. And what happens when that invented thing smashes into reality? And she. At that point, I see her as a character who, like, had tremendous, sort of tremendous agency as a young person pre Nathaniel, and then gets like, sucked into this power system. She can't. She can't rest, control out. She can't kind of take control within that system, even if she thinks she can. And I. I really thought about, like, where I move in time once she meets him as being kind of connected to escalations in the plot around. Around their relationship and her sort of stuckness in it. So a lot of them have to do with, like, when she's living with him or when she's not. When she has to live with him again is when we meet her again and after a big time jump. And so those were just. Those were some of the ways I was playing with it. And then I also was interested in. I played around with different things in terms of kind of cutting. Like, I had. There's a second person section in this novel that spans a lot of time. And at various drafts, in various drafts, I had just cuts. Like, I would. I just was like, what if I just cut? I mean, that happens all the time in fiction. But there was something about the idea of, like, letting the reader experience some of the, like, undertow of Nathaniel's orbit with Will, how she gets sort of, like, pulled in and she no longer. It's like she can't hold on. She can't find, like a. Something to hold on to in her own life. She's just kind of caught up in this, like, swirl of the days and life that felt like true to explaining or rendering what it's like in your 20s to just get like, a bit lost. And I was definitely thinking about how I could evoke that with perspective and tone and on the page, what. What I might need to do to kind of give the reader that feeling of Time passing in that particular kind of way. And then there's another section in the office section where we have Will kind of like, rattling off these aphoristic things that Nathaniel told her, and we don't know when he told her. Them. At what point in their relationship, but the kind of cumulative effect of them is just like, kind of realizing how much of her worldview has just been kind of, like, distorted by his presence. Really?
- [33:20]
A
Yeah. I love. I was gonna ask you about office hours because I love it as a chapter, because it feels like it. It feels like this, a kind of bulging out from the. From the narrative. It's. It exists in a time that is unclear and its own, and it's supposed to be kind of a pause and a hesitation in plot. And you rest with these things, you know, on a. On a park bench, off iced coffee sweating in his hand. Women dress like that because they want to be looked at by. By men like me. And again and again, we get these kind of little sort of blips from somewhere in their time together that have. Clearly, their largeness within. Her consciousness is so much bigger than this contained chapter, but it is. You know, it. You. You've trapped it in this. In this moment that is timeless, and yet we understand that it has this huge way of eclipsing everything else. So I wonder if you'd talk about office hours as a. A description of the way in which, you know, we can contain these timeless things that people have said to us that shape us in. In ways that distort time.
- [34:35]
B
Yeah, I. I said that thing earlier in the conversation about just some of the things I became aware of when I became a teacher myself and my sense of sort of response. I suddenly felt like I had this much greater responsibility than I had realized when it comes to, like, what I say to my students and how I say it. Like, the stakes are always so much higher for the person who's coming in with their draft, looking for feedback from the person who's already. You know, I'm no Nathaniel, but someone who's, like, already published a book or has already done the thing that they want to do. And I think it's hard to remember that sometimes, like, the. The number of things my teacher said offhandedly to me that I. Again, I am certain that they don't even remember or is so. So. So many, like, things that were said to me in graduate school but probably
- [35:27]
A
landed like a ton of bricks.
- [35:30]
B
Oh, yeah. I mean, that actually are so. So have been. Oh, I've almost had to do work to undo what I thought they meant about me as a writer. Like, I feel like a lot of my post MFA life was about going, like, how can I take back my own, like, self sort of definition of, like, what I want to do, what I am and separate myself from, like, what. How. What I've been told about who I am as a writer.
- [35:54]
A
Yeah.
- [35:55]
B
And I think that Office Hours isn't. Again, like, I'm making too many comparisons to my own artistic journey and wills. Like, I really don't mean to conflate them because this is not. This is really.
- [36:06]
A
No listeners are gonna get.
- [36:07]
B
Yeah, this is just not. It's not my story. But. But those parts of the story do feel really definitely like me kind of like staring at a knot of questions that I. I'm still kind of trying to come to terms with. And that section just felt like a way of. It felt like a way of capturing that. It also felt like. It felt like by Will's almost like exercising that. Like, she's, like, getting rid of them. Like, she's trying to get them out and, like, look at them.
- [36:35]
A
They need to be in that pain or altogether. So.
- [36:39]
B
Yeah. So she can see them, like, just looking at them one like that and kind of where they come in the book. I thought about that a lot. Like, it was a time when that chapter came way earlier, like, before the second person section. And there were things about that that were beneficial, I think. Like you. I think you leave that section with a. Maybe an even deeper sense of the kind of intimacy and entanglement of these two characters. And there was something kind of nice about that happening even earlier in the book. But there was a way that, like, it didn't. It felt like part of her stuckness instead of part of her getting out or something. When I had it that early in the book, and then when I put it after certain things, like after. You know, after. After Nathaniel's. Well, I don't want to give a spoiler. When I put it later, after certain events, I thought it suddenly took on a whole different charge. And that charge felt like it moved the book towards this sort of sense. I want to leave a reader with at the end of the book, which is one of, I think, like, hopefulness, though I suspect readers might. Some readers might not take that away from this. But I. That's my personal take on it.
- [37:46]
A
Yeah. And I'll just say, you know, to your excellent point about, you know, as teachers, I think we. We reflect back on the things that were told to us by our teachers. That maybe were very hard to get over and how much that sort of guides hopefully are. Are being a little bit more attentive and a little bit more caring. But I, you know, I. It took me ages to get over Paul Muldoon saying about, you know, a couple of lines in a poem of mine that it was a little bit like a. A Hallmark car. I mean, that. I mean, that sat in the back of my brain. I mean, it still does, to be honest, but, you know, and so little things, little, you know, things that we dash off as. As teachers.
- [38:32]
B
Oh, yeah. I have. I have a. Like a picture, like a photographically perfect memory of a set of comments that Zadie Smith wrote in the march of a story of mine in grad school that come into my head when I'm working on different texts. Like, just, like, I can just hear her. I can see her.
- [38:51]
A
She can be direct.
- [38:52]
B
I can. Yeah, I can see her pen. You know, I can see the sort of. The shape of her letter is like, I can just. I just can't let it go. And again, like, this is what you learn with you to become a professor. And this is not exactly what Nathaniel is doing. He's. Sometimes he's using that space as a space to actively manipulate people, but.
- [39:09]
A
Right.
- [39:10]
B
But, like, there's, you know, you're just like a person who, like, dropped your kid off at daycare and, like, maybe hasn't eaten lunch yet, like, is trying to get through your stack of stories. You know what I mean?
- [39:20]
A
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
- [39:22]
B
So I'm really like. Like, this isn't. This isn't the easiest sell for a novel, so I don't usually lead with this when I describe this book, but I. I really do think one of the things it's about is, like, what is going on when we teach creative writing? What happens in those spaces? What. What can be taught? What can't be taught? What are we talking about when we talk about a story? What's at stake? Who's it at stake for?
- [39:44]
A
Yeah, you're. You're leading me into actually a question I had, which is about the. Your representation of the MFA workshop, which is often done off stage in. In books that have, you know, creative writers in them. You'll hear about things about a workshop later or. Or they're just by people who have no idea what a workshop is. And so they're, like, totally crazy. And. But yours are. Are very. You. You sit with them, you allow action to happen within the. The actual workshop, and they are very realistic. And. And I think they don't paint a great picture of MFA education, which is funny from a professor of creative writing. And they're full of pettiness and rivalries and often medio, mediocre literary work. And yet Will is desperate to be part of its ranks. And so I want you to talk about both, like, what the MFA workshop does to our sense of the literary world of your novel, and also why, even in its worst form, it might still be appealing to Will.
- [40:56]
B
I, you know, I have a little, I almost have a little itchy sort of guilt about some of that, because I, it's like you always criticize hard as the thing. How do I want to put this? It's like when I was a kid and my mom would get really mad at me and my sister, and my sister would always be like, have you ever noticed she always gets mad at us for the things that she does. Like, the things that she like. You always, you're always quickest to critique the things that you, like, love the most or, like, the ways that you have failed or something. And I am a, I am like a product of a workshop. I mean, that's a, that's an uncomfortable thing for writer to say because, like, you don't want to claim your great debt to workshops. But, like, I, I was always interested in creative writing. I've taken a million workshops. I was a quite lost kid, a really destructive, self destructive teen. I, I, in workshops, that's where I found, like, everything that has, like, truly given me my life. So I love them.
- [41:57]
A
Like, I, I grist for the mill, as Nathaniel says.
- [42:02]
B
Yeah. So I love them. And I will tell you, like, when I started this book, I just kept thinking, oh, I'm not gonna do this. Right? Like, I'm not gonna write about writers. Like, can I write about anything else? Like, no one wants to read about writers. But the thing is, I do.
- [42:16]
A
Yeah. I mean, I think actually the truth is, a lot of people do.
- [42:21]
B
We don't want to admit it, but, like, and a lot of people who read seriously also have written or have been in a workshop before. And in my many years of workshopping, I have been in great workshops. I've been in transformative workshops, revelatory workshops, workshops that are among the most amazing experiences of my life. There's an intimacy that can happen in workshop that's, like, really extraordinary. There's also, they're also just like, fascinating spaces for drama. Like, people want things from each other that are not clear. Like, they're personal. They are, again, they're intimate. There's a way that you know people at the end of a workshop, if you've never met anyone before and you come into the space and you meet once a week and you share writing, even if the writing is not autobiographical, there's a way that sometimes after 12 weeks or 10 weeks or whatever, you feel like you know these people in a way that other people don't. And that felt so kind of fun and exciting to write about and write about directly and to stay in those spaces and, and a space like that where the stakes are so high internally but so low externally. Kind of like funny to me. Like, it's not like those scenes are funny, but there's something like, so I feel so much tenderness for the characters in those moments. Like they care so much about what's going on there, but in the grand scheme of things, like, who cares? And we're all like that, right? In our lives, whether it's in workshop or not. That's such a human thing to be like, this is everything to me. But if you take four steps back, you're like, wait, what? And when you're young and in graduate school, all of that felt really broad. And I also think too, because of the sort of stakes of that space and because of all the things I've been talking about, the intimacy of it, the drama of it, the fact that people are revealing things about themselves whether they want to or not, and work that's up for critique. The facilitator, again, has a responsibility and for a certain kind of personality. Nathaniel's personality. Yeah, being like being the center of that space, controlling that space, sort of like absorbing the energy of it and like using it as self fuel is all. Like, I, I, I was definitely, definitely kind of drawn to tracing those dynamics and really looking at them. And, you know, it is a little bit more sort of like spicy and fun to write a bad workshop than like a good workshop, you know. And I do think workshops, at least in my experience, used to be, I used to be worse. Like, there was a time, like, they're so much more thoughtful pedagogy now about how workshop can be. And Will too, is a character who I liked how she could offer kind of a, both an insider and an outsider lens on that space. Like she's in the workshop as Nathaniel's assistant, which is just so weird. Like, like, I would almost say you could not believe that it could happen. Except that I have also been in academia for long enough to know that there are some people who can do anything. So, like, I do actually Would I would, like, stand my ground on that being, like, very possible.
- [45:22]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [45:23]
B
But just the idea of, like, how outraged MFA students would be and how confused they would be by her presence, but how, for a certain kind of writer, people would roll with it, and how that would give her the opportunity to see things that they couldn't. How she'll never get to be part of that, I felt like, was a way of also underscoring some of the class stuff. So that was just. It just became like an. An arena for. For drama and for showing the characters in different ways. It felt really important. Like, even if Will has a great workshop in that space, she's never going to be part of that.
- [45:56]
A
Yeah, no. And this leads me nicely to the question of this novel as a certain kind of campus novel and one in which you end up having Will always circling at the periphery of what a campus is and what an institutional education is. She's both part of and not part of that workshop at the prestigious university. And she attends Barth College, a middling city college, but it barely marks her. And we learn of her classes basically only in passing. And it seems, you know, that she is never really able to shed the lack of cultural capital that her class background means that she, you know, that she has trouble attaining. And so the people in that MFA class, for them, it's an armor. They have, you know, professor parents and, you know, worldly childhoods. And so I wanted to know, first, what's your relationship to the idea of that sub genre of the campus novel as a reader and a writer? And secondly, how does Will's story shift what we think of as the ability for someone to participate in that world who isn't of that class?
- [47:17]
B
Chris, that's such a good question. Again, like, if you want to cut me saying that over and over in response to every question you ask me to go through and edit this, that's fine. I imagine it would get boring for people to hear, but there's, like, part of me that just wants to say I grew up in a. I grew up in a household where it wasn't, like, a foregone conclusion that you would go to college. I. I had access to a lot of privilege in some ways. I got. I got to go to private school and later high school. I had a scholarship, and I suddenly found myself with access to this, like, whole other world that in some ways only showed me. It only made more stark in ways I hadn't understood, like, just how sort of, like, maybe different my family life was from like those, those worlds. And I also moved to New York City when I was young and lived there in my late teens, actually in early 20s, all the way up until I was about 31. And anyone who's been in the New York literary world in any capacity has probably experienced this thing where you kind of start out with people at one place where you're all kind of like striving together. And then as the years go on, some people have more success than others and people start to kind of fall away and leave the city. And it's true that the more sort of cultural capital and connections and wealth and safety net and institutional affiliations that you might have is like. It allows you to stay. It allows you to like, it makes it easier. It's not the only way. But it, it. I did kind of witness like, ways in which like someone who was not from that world or was like a real outsider to it would like be there for a couple years and then have to move home or whatever. So I was thinking about how to. Like there was something that felt a little transgressive and interesting to me about writing a campus novel where there really is no campus. Like, Will isn't. Like, I very deliberately didn't. I think at one, at some early draft I had a couple scenes at Barth and then I was like, this is so much more fraught if Will just. Is never. If we just never see her there. If we see the ways that like her having to survive in this environment means that she can't even really like, engage with that place.
- [49:25]
A
Yeah.
- [49:25]
B
Because the things she wants feel separate from it in some way. That felt interesting to me and maybe like an, like an angle into this world that was fresh or something. And giving her this proximity to the prestigious university and this high ranked MFA program kind of. But again, very much from the outside where she'll never. Even if she knows more about Nathaniel than any other person, she'll never have what they have. Which is like the ability to say, I have my MFA from this place. Like, I. She'll never have those things. And that, that just. That felt again like ground that maybe hadn't been. Hadn't been covered. The way that you can feel like these worlds are closed to you if you don't have certain connections already or something. And like how far you might go to build your own road in. Even if that's like a little, you know, the way Will does it is. Is again, it's not like the way I would advise anyone do that, but it's a way that she sees of kind of puncturing a system that is otherwise really opaque to her and, like, hard for her to understand that she has no. You know, she has no kind of frame of reference for.
- [50:29]
A
I want to talk about the. I. I guess the great moral crux of the novel, which is that there is a. A. A great inequity of power in the relationship between Nathaniel and Will, who begins as a. A fantasy of a literary figure, becomes somewhat of a literary guide and mentor, and then is a. A lover. And, you know, he is both taking advantage of her. And there is in some ways the implication that she is willing to be complicit in this because it gives her access to something that she believes Will will launch her into a world that she feels like otherwise she cannot be a part of. And then the kind of unveiling of how broad and how kind of really vile his use of that power imbalance has been before her and with her causes her to question what her agency has been in this relationship. So I wonder if you'd talk a little bit about that really naughty, morally difficult core of the novel.
- [51:50]
B
Every choice I made in this book, throughout the writing of it was a. Was really a step towards complexity. My own discomfort sometimes, and not for the sake of just, like, complexity and discomfort, but within the context of kind of what Will wants, what she's willing to do for it. And again, we talked earlier in this conversation about kind of where she comes from and how it makes her understand herself in the world and. And those. The distortions of those experiences. So I. But what I didn't do in the writing, which I know sounds a little weird to say, is, like, make. I try when I'm writing to sort of, like, not make moral decisions while I'm writing, if that makes sense. Like. Which is not to say that I don't have my own opinions about these things, but that. That, like, in the world of the book, as I am making the book, I am in Will's perspective. And Will's perspective is I'm trying to embody the story through her. So I'm like, really kind of like, with her in those moments when she's feeling those things and I'm. And then as I'm revising, I'm trying to. There are places where I tried very deliberately to, like, give the reader the opportunity to sort of see around Will or to, like, question something with her. It felt like, to me, this notion of kind of these questions of complicity, on the one hand, they're really simple, like, Will is a young person. She, like, they're not actually. It's not actually complicated. Right. Like, it's clear, like, who's wrong and who.
- [53:17]
A
Yes, yeah.
- [53:18]
B
But at the same time.
- [53:19]
A
But not for her. But not for her in the moment.
- [53:22]
B
But not for her. Not in the moment. And also. And in some ways, not later. And I also think there's a way that it's. That she would chase against saying it simple. Like, if she were here in this conversation with us, like, she would say, I was smarter than that. Like, I chose this.
- [53:37]
A
And yeah, she might say, don't reduce me.
- [53:40]
B
Yes.
- [53:40]
A
I think she, like, a victim of something that I didn't.
- [53:44]
B
I think she would. And that's. That's the. That's what she's up against as she, like, takes in some of the turns of the novel. Like, how do you. How do you look at the stories of what this person has done? See the contours of your own story in these stories that are undeniably just, like, despicable and then. But then. But feel that you are in some way different? And that uneasiness is just. I just found myself sort of, like, very drawn to. To thinking into that. I think probably a lot of women have also had this experience that's hard to talk about where you. Especially during these me too years where you. You can think of, like, things that happen in college or friends that, you know, your friend who behaved badly with his girlfriend or something, and you, like, took his side. And I mean, that's very different than what's happening. That's hap. With what's happening with Will. And I, I'm not even, like, naming any one specific thing, but these moments where you're just kind of like, what was my relationship to that, to those, to those actions, and how did I diagnose those then? And did I do the right thing? And, And I, I. I wanted to kind of draw some of that on the page and have the reader maybe be in a situation where they have to face some of these questions themselves. I mean, another way that I kind of at least tried in this book to turn some of these questions back on the reader is like, through the. Through the sort of deployment of Jerry, Nathaniel's previous assistant, who sort of haunts the story. And Will. She's part of the story from the very beginning. Like, Will kind of always knows about her. She's even part of the story before Will meets Nathaniel. In fact, she encounters her concretely before she ever meets Nathaniel. But we never see Jerry. But I think There's a suggestion presented by the structure of the novel that, like, we will get Jerry's story because we deserve it after, like, knowing that it exists. And then we will be able to judge something once we know.
- [55:51]
A
Yeah.
- [55:51]
B
Like, we will understand some bigger thing about, like, we'll have more evidence either way. Or like, that we'll understand, you know, more about Will or more about Nathaniel and what was happening there. And I very intentionally didn't give it. Don't give it. I mean, I guess that's a spoiler, but if anyone's listening.
- [56:09]
A
What we deserved. Yeah.
- [56:10]
B
Anyone's, you know, reading. Sorry. For anyone listening who is for whom that spoils something. But. But I really was interested in the idea that, like, a reader might be, like, what? Like, might be mad. You know, like, might. Might have to. Might be. Feel frustrated with me. Like, I was kind of frustrated with myself. Like, when Might feel like, oh, I should get that. And then when you take a step back and you're like, why do I feel like I should get that? The way that kind of intersects with some of these complicated questions was really, really, I think, something I was aiming for just again, putting this back, putting some of that back on the reader to have to, like, unpack their own reactions to.
- [56:53]
A
Before I let you go, would you be willing to tell us some of the things that you've been reading and loving recently? And I know my listeners really enjoy some recommendations from writers they love. Yeah.
- [57:07]
B
I recently read and loved Duray Aziz Amna's second novel, Splintering, which follows a woman from rural Pakistan as she kind of sort of. She has ambitions for a different life and she's willing to go very far to get them in ways that will shock you. It's so gripping and propulsive. It's incredible. It's not getting enough tension. I highly recommend it. It came out from Zank, I think, Independent Press in maybe February, April or something.
- [57:36]
A
And it's called the Splintering.
- [57:38]
B
It's called us Splintering.
- [57:39]
A
Us Splintering. Okay.
- [57:41]
B
Yes. I just started Chloe Benjamin's new novel Understory, which I'm really, really liking. And it's out in the fall. I have not started it yet, but another thing that's on my list to begin soon is Louise Kennedy's Stations. And then maybe I'll give one more recommendation. Just kind of like an all time phase one book that is really important to me, that's definitely in conversation fanatically with famous men and is just sort of an aspirationally brilliant text. Like, I'm like, How did she do it? Is the Stone Diaries by Carol Shields.
- [58:14]
A
Oh my gosh, I loved that book,
- [58:16]
B
which is a masterpiece. And I don't think people talk about it enough.
- [58:19]
A
I haven't heard anybody talk about it in years. And it was such a, like, fundamental book for me when it came out.
- [58:27]
B
It is perfect. I've been thinking about it a lot lately actually, because of the kind of like phenomenon of the Correspondent, the Virginia Evans novel which I read. I bought a copy from my mother in law for Christmas and then I read it and found it really warm and lovely. But it reminds me actually in a way of the section in the Stone Diaries. Like it made me miss reading the Stone Diaries because there is a section in that book that's letters between the sort of woman at the center of the story and this like gardening column that she, like the editor of this paper, this gardening thing she's writing. And you kind of experience her, this section of her life through those letters alone. It's just such a good book. It's so moving and formally inventive and surprising. The ending is incredible.
- [59:12]
A
Yeah, yeah, it really is one of
- [59:14]
B
the great endings in literature. Along with the ending of Mrs. Bridge by Evan. Evan Connell. Evan S. Connell.
- [59:19]
A
Oh, I don't know.
- [59:20]
B
Mrs. Bridge, oh my God, the ending of Mrs. Bridge is great, is a great book. But the ending of that book, that and the ending of Stone Diaries are like the two endings that are. They just. I bow to them. I could go on and on like in this vein for a million years. But I'll leave reader, I'll leave listeners with those, with those suggestions.
- [59:37]
A
Well, I mean, now listeners who haven't had a chance to read the Stone Diaries will get their chance and maybe there'll be a proper rehanding of the flowers for that novel. And these are great and I'm excited for readers to find them. But I really would love for my listeners to go out to their indie bookstore and get Famous Men by Julie Bunton, which is already receiving such wonderful responses. But you just once you are in Wilhelmina's voice and in her head, you are going to find yourself wishing to stay longer than. Than you get to in this novel and remembering her life in all of its troubles and wonders for time to come. And thank you so much, Julie, for coming on to talk to me about it.
- [60:32]
B
Thank you so much, Chris. Thank you for your gorgeous, insightful questions. It was really, really a pleasure. So thank you.
- [60:38]
A
Well, thank you. Well, that's all from me for now. My thanks to Julie Bunton. For coming on to talk about her latest novel, Famous Men. You can find links to purchase Famous Men and all of Julie's recommended books at the website burnedbybooks.com there you'll find all of our previous episodes, links to buy a podcast, T shirt, and ways to get in contact as you listen. Take a moment to rate the show on itunes, Spotify, and now YouTube or wherever you find your podcasts. Until next time, this has been burned by Books.