Ep 710 - A Boy's Own Story, by Edmund White

Summary

Podcast Summary: Overdue (Ep 710) - "A Boy's Own Story" by Edmund White

Introduction

In Episode 710 of Overdue, hosted by Headgum, Andrew and Craig delve into Edmund White's seminal work, A Boy's Own Story. Released on July 7, 2025, this episode provides an in-depth exploration of the novel, its themes, and its significance in LGBTQ literature.

Overview of Edmund White and A Boy's Own Story

Andrew and Craig begin by introducing Edmund White, a prominent American writer known for his impactful contributions to LGBTQ literature. They highlight his autobiographical approach in his novels, which blend fiction and reality to convey deeper truths about his experiences and the broader gay community.

Craig notes, “Edmund White’s work is split pretty evenly between fiction and nonfiction” (06:14). Andrew adds, “He likes novels because you can invent scenes that get to a true point better than like the truth would” (07:43), emphasizing White's preference for the novel format to explore complex emotional landscapes.

Themes and Analysis of the Book

The hosts delve into the core themes of A Boy's Own Story, discussing the protagonist's struggle with his sexual identity in the 1950s and 60s. Craig explains, “This novel is about a young boy growing up. He is gay. He is lusting after men, longing for love with men, working through that in the 50s” (27:39).

They explore the protagonist's relationships with adults and peers, illustrating how these interactions shape his understanding of himself and his place in society. Andrew reflects, “It's about his experience growing up... whether or not they have power over him, whether he has any agency” (27:50), highlighting the protagonist's internal conflict and quest for autonomy.

Character Dynamics and Relationships

Andrew and Craig analyze the intricate relationships depicted in the novel, particularly focusing on the protagonist's interactions with his father and stepmother. Craig shares a poignant moment from the book: “Whenever my mother put us kids on the train to go visit him, she invariably told us, 'Be nice to your father or he'll cut us off'” (37:37). This quote underscores the strained and complex family dynamics that influence the protagonist's journey.

They also discuss the protagonist's friendships and romantic interests, including his turbulent relationships with peers like Kevin and Tom. Craig remarks, “There are a series of relationships in the book between him and other boys closer to his age. None of them go well” (47:03), illustrating the challenges the protagonist faces in forming meaningful connections.

Adaptation into a Graphic Novel

The conversation shifts to the graphic novel adaptation of A Boy's Own Story. Andrew mentions, “There's nothing like fancy about what this book's doing” (15:27), praising White’s straightforward narrative style that lends itself well to visual storytelling. They discuss how the graphic novel modernizes the story, making it more accessible to contemporary audiences while staying true to the original themes.

Craig adds, “The graphic novel can be very bold in showing gay people engaged in sex. And that was something which you could do in words but not in images” (19:23), highlighting the benefits of the new medium in portraying explicit content more effectively.

Reflections on the Novel's Ending

Andrew and Craig ponder the novel’s conclusion, questioning whether it presents a positive or realistic outcome for the protagonist. Craig observes, “The feeling at the end of the book is that he is like, he has achieved a version of adulthood through sex that he has always wanted” (65:03). They debate the implications of this resolution, considering whether it signifies genuine growth or a hollow victory for the protagonist.

Andrew reflects, “How good an outcome? That's being gay in America in the 50s” (66:07), suggesting that the ending mirrors the limited options and societal pressures of the time.

Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Wrapping up the discussion, Andrew and Craig commend Edmund White for his unflinching portrayal of a young gay man's struggles and triumphs. Craig states, “This is what I've been thinking about. A lot of the stuff between him and the other kids his age is more like unrequited and messier and just kind of like” (68:05), emphasizing the novel's honest and raw depiction of adolescence.

Andrew concurs, “If you were a gay teenager and you found this book, like, there was a lot to see in yourself and things” (68:05), highlighting the novel's enduring relevance and its role in providing representation and validation for young LGBTQ individuals.

Notable Quotes

• Craig: “This novel is about a young boy growing up. He is gay. He is lusting after men, longing for love with men, working through that in the 50s” (27:39).
• Andrew: “It's about his experience growing up... whether or not they have power over him, whether he has any agency” (27:50).
• Craig: “Whenever my mother put us kids on the train to go visit him, she invariably told us, 'Be nice to your father or he'll cut us off'” (37:37).
• Craig: “There are a series of relationships in the book between him and other boys closer to his age. None of them go well” (47:03).
• Andrew: “How good an outcome? That's being gay in America in the 50s” (66:07).

Timestamp Reference

For easy navigation, notable quotes and key discussions are referenced with their corresponding timestamps.

Transcript

[Andrew]

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[Craig]

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[Andrew]

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[Craig]

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[Andrew]

They're getting burned by their old wireless bills. Can't be friends with them.

[Craig]

You're gonna be chillin'. Literally and financially.

[Andrew]

Craig, you've told me that I should switch to Mint Mobile, but surprise, I switched to Mint Mobile many years ago.

[Craig]

You pull this rug out from under me every time.

[Andrew]

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[Craig]

Mm.

[Andrew]

Yeah.

[Craig]

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[Andrew]

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[Craig]

I like that. So this year, skip breaking a sweat and breaking the bank. Get your summer savings and shop premium wireless [e-mail] overdue. That's mintmobile.com overdue. There's an upfront payment of $45 for three months of a five gigabyte plan required. It's equivalent to $15 a month new customer offer for first three months only. Then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. Please see Mint Mobile for details. While Andrew and Craig believe the joy of discovery is crucial to enjoying any well told tale, they will not shy.

[Andrew]

Away from spoiling specific story beats when necessary.

[Craig]

Plus, these are books you should have read by now. Hey everybody. Welcome to Overdue, a podcast about the books you've been meaning to read. My name is Craig.

[Andrew]

My name Is Andrew Overdue podcast. Two boys own story.

[Craig]

Yeah. Yes.

[Andrew]

Two boys own stories. Like, we own them. Like you own the libs or like people in a video game.

[Craig]

We are here.

[Andrew]

We just own these stories. We own these stories by talking about them. So good.

[Craig]

Yeah. We are always coming in with the freshest, hottest takes and takes and takedowns. That's what we're here.

[Andrew]

We're here to kick books, butts, and you are here to listen to it. And every week. Every. Every week is the books, but the spine or is it the part where the book opens? You ever think. You ever think about that?

[Craig]

Think about that for a second.

[Andrew]

But is right in, like, the exact middle page is the butt.

[Craig]

Well, that's the closest. I mean, that's the crack of the book, right?

[Andrew]

Yeah. Every week one of us reads a book that we've never read before, and then we bring it to the other person and to you, the audience, and we totally just tear it a new one. And by new one, I mean tear because it's made of paper and it's a book.

[Craig]

Oh, yeah.

[Andrew]

And we also talk about the author and we kick their butts too. And it's just. It's a butt kicking experience. I don't know why I'm bringing a very confrontational energy to the show this week.

[Craig]

I didn't say set out to bring confrontational energy to this episode. I do like it as just a counterbalance to whatever energy I was bringing in, which is kind of an unmoored.

[Andrew]

We just got back from vacation and it's like, now I have to work and I need. I still need a vacation from my vacation.

[Craig]

Yes, yes. And so here I am trying to make a podcast about Edmund White's A Boy's Own Story. And it's a book I enjoyed, but it's not a book I knew about prior to White's passing in June last month.

[Andrew]

And I like our sort of pride month extendo.

[Craig]

Yeah. I saw the news and I was reading about him and I was like, oh, if we hadn't already, you know, programmed the month, I definitely would have wanted to read something of his.

[Andrew]

So, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Craig]

You know, decided to take on this book and yeah, really grateful that you've brought like a fight club energy to the podcast this week because it does not relate.

[Andrew]

We're just. We're just gonna bring our. Our normals or confrontational in your face perspective to Very typical story by Edmund Waite.

[Craig]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

And we're gonna. We're just gonna see if it can. If it can hold up to the. The shellacking that we're about to give. The verbal and. And mental shellacking that we're going to give this book like we give every.

[Craig]

Book that we give every book. Peanuts destroyed.

[Andrew]

Yeah. Charles Schultz rolling over in your grave, baby.

[Craig]

Except Garfield. Garfield we love. Nothing wrong with Garfield.

[Andrew]

Garfield is the one so far that's made it out.

[Craig]

Animorphs wrecked, you know, but yeah, here we are. Let's talk about this book. Let's talk about this author. I've never read any work by Edmund White before. I had.

[Andrew]

I've never read anything by him either.

[Craig]

Yeah, you know, I had reading about his biography. You know, he died at the age of 85. So he had. He was already, you know, in his 40s as the AIDS, you know, epidemic starts really becoming a major crisis. And so this is an interesting book and that it depicts the life of a young gay man, his childhood without any. Like, there's no awareness of the coming like, epidemic. And that is like an interesting, like, just era in gay fiction and gay writing.

[Andrew]

Yeah, I encountered that a couple times when I was reading about him and about like, reviews of the. Of the book. Just. Just talking about how it. A lot of his early work, including his. His first two novels that he did earlier. This is. This is one's what, his third?

[Craig]

This is his third. Forgetting Elena and something else. Knights of Something. Oh, boy.

[Andrew]

I have the other two. This is the first of a trilogy of books. It was followed by the Beautiful Room is empty in 1988 and the Farewell Symphony in 1997, which trace the same characters journey into like adulthood and then like middle age.

[Craig]

And they're all like quasi autobiographical.

[Andrew]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Craig]

Oh, the other novel, Forgetting Elena and Nocturnes for the King of Naples.

[Andrew]

Sorry. Yeah. He. White talked a little bit about the. Just like the different ways that nonfiction, where you make a little bit of stuff up, is categorized. He likes novels because you can. I'm paraphrasing. But he likes novels because you can. You can invent scenes that get to a true point better than like the truth would. Or you can like remove characters because they're messy. Like it's. It's just a. Gives him more freedom to reconstruct the story and organize it the way he wants to without feeling like he is like lying to people, basically. So. So yeah, I read there was a piece, 1982 review of the book by Mark Moses in the Boston Phoenix that talks a little bit about some of the autobiographical elements. Just referring to an earlier book that White wrote and White in the New York Times obituary mentions like he. His work is split pretty evenly between fiction and nonfiction. So if you are looking for hints of the author in his fictional work, you have a lot of other books where you can go and look at stuff and be like, oh yeah, this is kind of familiar to me. But says judging by the protagonist's namelessness and the lightly reflexive title, you guessed that one of America's clearest gay literary voices had a mind to reclaim his own childhood into adolescence with this novel. Indeed, some of the details about a seductive camp counselor, a tight lipped father, and the Midwest locale and late 40s, early 50s setting pop up in White's expansive journalistic account States of Desire, whose subtitle Travels in Gay America barely suggests the range of gay experience he uncovered. Yeah, so you know, characters in this book clearly, clearly drawn from his real life, but also he likes the, the novel categorization because it just lets him, lets him play around a little bit more. He was born in 1940, died in June 2025. American writer and novelist best known for LGBTQ work. Not just writing, but he also co founded the Gay Men's Health Crisis nonprofit in response to the AIDS crisis in the 80s. He himself was since 1985, but he was, he had a. He, he was what was categorized as a non progressive or someone for whom the hiv, you know, infection does not, does not or takes a very long time to progress into like full grown, full blown AIDS without the need of medical intervention. And these people, there's like a 1 in 500 chance, I think I read of somebody with HIV, like being a non, having a non progressive case. And studying of them has been, you know, there's been a lot of study of them to try and find like what, what is it about these people's like makeup is making them like resistance to this disease and how can we use it to help other people. Winner of multiple awards, including Lambda Literary's Visionary Award, the National Book Foundation's lifetime achievement Award. Already talked about his debut for Getting Elena from 1973. He co wrote a book in 1977 called the Joy of Gay Sex. Yeah, he was, he was Charles Silverstein. But to, but I sometimes I start a thought and then I get into like supporting ideas for the thought and then I never get around to the end of the thought. The, to close the loop on what the beginning of this thought was is that these early books of his represent this interesting narrow window that is like post Stonewall in riot in June 1969. But pre HIV and AIDS in the 80s.

[Craig]

Yep. Yeah, because, like, just to do a little, like, he grew up in the Midwest, Cincinnati, Evanston. He attended the Cranbrook Academy in Detroit, Eaton Academy. In this novel is seem, I imagine, an analog. There's much written both covered in this novel and written by and about him, about his as a kid, shame for his sexuality. He was in therapy for a long.

[Andrew]

Time, saw many therapists who were trying to, quote, cure the, quote, mental illness that was homosexuality. Like, that's how it was categorized at the time.

[Craig]

And in. And in some of his tellings, you know, at least for a period of time, he wanted them to like it. You know, he has. His father was this civil engineer who was very wealthy and an entrepreneur. His mother was a child psychologist who encouraged him to seek therapy. There are depictions of them in this novel. He doesn't go to Harvard. He goes to University of Michigan studying Chinese. There was one obit I read in the Guardian, I think, where they quoted him, you know, found a quote of him saying he was very bad at Chinese, actually, and was a fraud. But he heads to New York City and falls in with the gay scene in New York City. And then. Yeah, from that part is not really depicted in this novel at all. Like, this novel is before any of that. So you don't get any of the. Like. Yeah. Then he goes off and he's writing. He's getting things published. He's working. You know, he lives in France for, like, 15 years after this book. Yeah. So he is living in New York. He's working at, you know, like, what is it? Time Life books to pay the rent. He's writing this book, takes off, and then he moves to France in the. In the mid-80s, so. And he didn't, like, move back full time, I think, until the late 90s, though. I know he was teaching and things like that. Sorry, what else do you have, Andrew?

[Andrew]

What else? You just got a little bit of. I think you. We talked about it a little bit in the Stonebush Blues episode. We've talked about it in other LGBTQ works that we've. That we've done. But a thing that comes up among writers of this age is just kind of that lost HIV generation, like the ny. The nyt. Obit talks a bit about an earlier interview where he's talking about living into old age while many of the gay men that he came up with died decades before. And he says, I do feel some degree of guilt. It's also hard not to feel numb. And the worst thing for a writer is to feel numb. Your natural tendency is to want to forget, but your deepest sense of duty and obligation is to history and to the people you knew and loved.

[Craig]

Yep.

[Andrew]

And that reflects like an interesting thread specifically related to this book that he also pulls on a little bit in an interview with Interview magazine, which every time it comes up, I'm just. You guys really. You guys really nailed the title of this one from 2023, where he's talking about a graphic novel adaptation that his husband, he. His name is not on the front of it, except to be, you know, the author of A Boy's Own Story. Like, I don't know that he directly contributed to the. The adaptation other than that, but it's credited to his. White's husband, Michael Carroll. The writer Brian Alessandro and illustrator Igor Karash, who put together this graphic novel version in 2020, talks about the. Some of the changes that the graphic novel makes, but also like the process of writing it compared to writing his first two novels. And he says, when I wrote A Boy's Own Story, I thought to myself, this subject matter, gay life is already complicated and unfamiliar enough for most readers that it would be frivolous to add experimental touches to the writing. Should be very straightforward. So I kind of discovered realism with this book.

[Craig]

Yeah, I pulled that quote too. I. It isn't. I liked the voice of this book a lot. It was very easy to read. It's a very like. It slips in and out of kind of pretty direct dialogue and very literary minded prose when the character is kind of like waxing poetic. I found a. It was an In Memoriam in Vulture by Christopher Bolan, who said we all grew up idolizing him for his unsparing, unapologetic depictions of gay life, which managed the vertigenist double art of being both highly literary and deliciously explicit. And that's definitely the quality of the writing in this book. And yeah, it was. When I read that passage from the interview.com article, I was like, oh yeah, there's nothing like fancy about what this book is doing. Apparently forgetting Elena and Nocturne's for the King of Naples both had more like, fanciful elements.

[Andrew]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's what I gathered.

[Craig]

And it is. This is just kind of like, yeah, this is what it is. He also, I think it's that interviewer. He is pretty like, blunt about his assessment of writing. You know, a very early, if I don't know that we could say it's the first, but a very early coming out Novel, one of the first, like, you know, fictional memoir style novels that take. That is successful. Like, you know, he's had a very long. He had a very long successful career. He can assess that. He, you know, that how he's like. I think he claimed he doesn't have to be humble about it.

[Andrew]

You know, he claims a lot of firsts in that. In that interview. And I'm. I just, I hesitate to ever say the first because I feel like there's always some, like, proto version of something that's rolling around out there, and I'm not enough of a scholar in any of it to like, take his word.

[Craig]

But a pioneer.

[Andrew]

Certainly. Certainly a pioneer. Certainly massively influential. Certainly somebody whose work, like, influenced like Charles Schultz and the Peanuts gang. Someone whose work influenced all work that. That sort of followed after it. But yeah, I brought up that quote about him discovering realism and also the quote about, you know, his sense of duty and obligation to people who passed during the AIDS crisis. Yeah, just, he, he is a writer who really seems to have a strong sense of, like, what. What am I accomplishing with the work that I'm doing? Like, what. What am I helping to. Like, who, Who. Who am I helping give a voice to? Like, who am I trying to build a bridge to in terms of, like, people who might not understand homosexuality or, like, the experience of coming out? And he, he kind of lightly criticizes that some of the decisions made for the graphic novel in that. In that interview, he says, but. But he seems okay with it because it is changing the work to, like, keep it relevant to it to a new audience of queer people. He says primarily it's a book about coming out and showing a boy going through all the agonies of coming out, and that gets lost in all these flash forwards. This is him talking about the graphic novel. Changes. Yeah, changes made to the graphic novel. But that's my point of view. Michael says that now people aren't having so much trouble coming out and they're more interested in seeing a total life. And that is the advantage of the. This book. Also, he said that the graphic novel quote could be very bold in showing gay people engaged in sex. And that was something which you could do in my day in words but not in images. So, yeah, just. I just feel like it's a, It's a neat way to think about an adaptation and like, conversion and updating of your own, like, seminal work that you are, like, off to the side of.

[Craig]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

And leaving to your, like, much younger husband and other folks to kind of, you Know, say, okay, what, what still speaks to people about this? What could. What could change about this to make it speak to more people?

[Craig]

Well, and that's, that's interesting too because, yeah, they talk a lot in that interview about auto fiction and like, you know, the.

[Andrew]

He like the move, like the movie Cars.

[Craig]

And he talks about being a pioneer in.

[Andrew]

I just gotta roll the sign over to. It's been zero days since we made the Vader.

[Craig]

Like, comes up and like flips the sign and, you know, he's a pioneer in his own words in memoirs about ordinary people. This topic also gets touched on in a really nice article by Alan Holinghurst in the Guardian from 2016 about a boy's own story in their rereading series and just talks about it as a new direction for both white and just the emergence of the autobiographical kind of novel where you can take memoir and fiction and jam them up. But it is interesting to hear him assess it as like, yeah, I get it that now people want to know the whole, like, arc of someone's life.

[Andrew]

Yeah.

[Craig]

I was reminded in this novel, I guess a little bit of Nickel Boys and some other works we've read recently where, like, I kept expecting there to be more flash forwards in this novel. And it really resists that. Like, at most the writer will reference something like, you can presume he's writing it in his late 30s as he turns 40, whatever. Like analogous to the actual author. But the narrator will like, reference maybe when he's in his 20s sometimes. But you don't really have another sense of who he is as a person, as the author of the novel, other than a design like, who.

[Andrew]

Who is who. Yeah. Who is narrating these events to me.

[Craig]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

So it's, I mean, listen, that's where they get you. If you want the flash forwards, you have to read the Beautiful Room is Empty and the Farewell Symphony. You have to go buy the other book.

[Craig]

Yeah. Nick Fury show.

[Andrew]

He's not just going to give it.

[Craig]

Y. I get it.

[Andrew]

I think that's. That's most of the background.

[Craig]

Wrote like 30 novels. And like.

[Andrew]

He was writing. I mean, earlier this year he published a. What he called a sex memoir called the Loves of My Life that covers a slice of the sexual encounters with like 3,000 sexual partners that he claims to have had over the years. And one like brag much like, come on, how am I supposed to feel about that? Yeah, just, just very busy, very prolific. There was a funny. There was, there was a funny, very busy Craig in many way, in more Ways than one. Uh huh. But the one thing that made the sort of light grandiosity of claiming to have had so many firsts in that one Interview magazine interview is there was a point later on where he was talking about a boy's own story and was like, yeah, I was writing better. I think I was writing better than I was now.

[Craig]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

And it made me both, like, I both appreciated sort of the clear eyed version that he could have of his own writing. As somebody who, like, reads my own writing, and if I don't find some stupid typo that I made a full two years ago and didn't correct, I am just thinking like, oh, this is fine. I guess, like, it's, it's hard for me to read something and be like, oh, this is good. I like this.

[Craig]

Sure. Sure. Well, I think a lot of, like a lot.

[Andrew]

I think a lot.

[Craig]

The rest of his career.

[Andrew]

Yeah, I think a lot of writers struggle with that. I think that, I think that there is an element of like hearing your own recorded voice to it because it's like, what is. Who did this? Like, what are the. Why is my brain existing over here, like, outside of my head? It's. It's a strange, It's a strange thing.

[Craig]

That was the sense I got of Percival Everett when we were researching for James where he's like, I don't know, I wrote that book and now I'm somewhere else. Now I'm over here. Somebody else wrote over here.

[Andrew]

Thinking about the 500 IQ, baby.

[Craig]

Yes. And we got to go back to that book.

[Andrew]

We gotta go. We have to go back.

[Craig]

All right.

[Andrew]

Anything else about. About White that you wanted to mention before we just talk about what the book is?

[Craig]

No, I don't think so. I have some thoughts on, you know, I have some stuff to quote from the book and folks should read the articles that we've talked about so far and then read a bit more about them. But yeah, let's take a quick break and.

[Andrew]

And then. Time to kick this book's butt.

[Craig]

We're gonna get.

[Andrew]

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[Craig]

And you don't even need to.

[Andrew]

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[Craig]

Yes it is.

[Andrew]

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[Craig]

Whoa. Snap.

[Andrew]

Craig, tear this book apart.

[Craig]

I'm gonna tear it open and read it.

[Andrew]

Yes, carefully tear it open. Observing the sort of pre cut pages.

[Craig]

Yes.

[Andrew]

That the. That the publisher has built into the to the physical object. And then read me what is on the pages and tell me about it.

[Craig]

Sure. So I have to tell you Andrew, I read this whole book. I don't know this boy's name.

[Andrew]

You don't know this boy's name.

[Craig]

I tried real Hard. I don't know his name.

[Andrew]

Is it because you forgot, kept forgetting it, or is because it doesn't tell you?

[Craig]

No, it's because it doesn't tell you. I was being kind of silly.

[Andrew]

What are we gonna call this boy?

[Craig]

We call him the boy. Call him a boy.

[Andrew]

The boy. We could call him a boy.

[Craig]

Oh, boy.

[Andrew]

I saw a movie about this guy.

[Craig]

What?

[Andrew]

The movie about a boy. Tell me. Tell me about it. Tell me about a boy. So tell me about Hugh Grant and this boy.

[Craig]

So this novel is about a couple of different things. It's about, you know, a young boy growing up. He is g. He is lusting after men, longing for love with men, working through that, you know, in the 50s and I guess maybe into the 60s. And, you know, he is in the closet. He does tell multiple people throughout, you know, later in the novel about how he feels and about himself, but not initially. And so it's about his experience kind of growing up both. I think the youngest he is in the. There's a scene where he's three, watching a puppet show. But mostly it's like seven to 15 and then into high school age. And then it's a. It's a lot of. A lot of the book to me that like really landed was about children's relationship to a. Adults and like his relationship to the adults. Not just men, but adults in his life. And like, whether or not they have power over him, whether or not he has any agency or power as a child and how that overlaps with his experience as a, like, you know, to use his words, a sissy boy who does not, you know, map onto traditional masculinity, who does. Feels that that makes him an outcast and he's lonely. And if. If somehow he could be either free of that or have some other version of that experience, he would be happier or feel more at peace. And it, like that powerlessness overlaps with the I'm a young person and don't have power over my life because all these adults do instead. And then the novel is like, hey, sex is this like, explicit and illicit form of power that adults engage in. And as he is a young boy kind of coming to his sexual awakening, he realizes that there's power in that as well. So it's this. It's not a very long novel. And you could imagine a version of it that is way longer, I think.

[Andrew]

Yeah, I read the. The Boston Phoenix piece said. Just mentioned how. What it cost and how long it was. And it was like. Like low. 200.

[Craig]

220 pages or something like that, you know, and it's. Some of. That might be that like a. More. A contemporary writer might be more interested to do some of the flash forwards like they do in the graphic novel. It might be. There are some scenes that I think are handled pretty quickly as a. Like. And here's a character and I had feelings for and a relationship with them. And here's what happened with that. Like that.

[Andrew]

Sure.

[Craig]

There's a pretty pivotal scene with a gym teacher, like later in the book. That is, you could imagine a longer dialogue, scenes longer, like, you know, the feelings revealed through action a bit more. And instead the book is like, nah, this is how I felt about it. This is what I did about it. This is what happened. Which I guess is sort of that memoir feeling like he's not writing it to flesh out all of these other people in his life necessarily. It's much more about what this boy is like observing about them and thinking about them and feeling about them.

[Andrew]

Okay.

[Craig]

But it. It starts with him at the age of 15. He's spending the summer with his dad and his stepmother, I think at their lake house. There's water nearby. They go out on a boat. His dad has this like. He's a weird religion with his dad. His dad, oh, boy, that seems like a weird guy. He's got like a successful, I guess, engineering business, you know, borrowing from White's biography, I suppose. But he like, doesn't work during the. He only works at night. It's not a night job. He's just a man who needs to be awake at night to. To work. I. I don't know anyone like that. I don't. You know, I say this out loud with what sounds like judgment, but I suppose I've. I guess I do know people in my life. Like that is what I'm saying.

[Andrew]

Just like if I could accomplish between the hours of 9am and noon what I can do between the hours of like 11pm and 2 in the morning, I would be unstoppable. It would not be possible to stop me.

[Craig]

Yeah, you're way better than this guy's dad. I'll say, but thank you. But this guy's dad, it sounds like that sounds okay.

[Andrew]

Sure, I'll take it. Praise is praise.

[Craig]

He does. Yeah, he just like, you know, was out all night. He. Which means like he's got like a literal absent father thing happening. And also the main character is the boy's parents are divorced. The father was definitely cheating on his wife. He's married this other woman and so he's with them and the opening scene is he and his father are going to take out these two younger boys, Kevin and his younger brother. I don't remember his younger brother's name. They're like 12 and 8. Narrator's 15. And like, the stepmother kind of fancies herself a socialite. And so they're always inviting like, people up, you know, over the summer to like, stay with them. And they're gonna take these boys out on their boat. And so you get some observations about the boy's father and you also get his own, like, self assessment as like a sissy failing multiple. Like, you know, his own, like, masculinity tests of just like how he moves through the world.

[Andrew]

Sure.

[Craig]

And seeing a little bit of that in his father, but not all of it. Not really knowing how to relate to his dad. And this Little kid, this 12 year old, talks to him about baseball and it goes over very well and, you know, kind of stuff like that. And he's just ruminating on the difference between himself and these, you know, other boys who are, you know, more typical, let's say. And then they're, you know, hanging out in the house. All the boys have to sleep in the extra room on some cots. And he, he's 15. And the other boy, Kevin, who's 12, they're just like hanging out. And Kevin's like, hey, you know, there are no girls around. Do you ever, you know, you know, yeah, sure. And with. Pretty quickly in the book, there is a very explicit physical scene between these two boys that is very like, oh, is this, this is what the book's gonna be like. They are engaging in sex by themselves in this room and the. Their relationship. What's tough for the narrator is he is, despite being the older boy, he is letting Kevin take the lead because he doesn't want to reveal himself as actually being gay. Kevin is like, I'm, you know, whatever. I'm not old enough to do other stuff. Like, I can't be with girl. What are we doing? Let's just like, hang out.

[Andrew]

Sure.

[Craig]

And then once Kevin kind of catches wind that the narrator is a little different and isn't, you know, a stereotypical boy, then he actually kind of cools on him and the relationship sours. And like, that's okay. That isn't a, a good introduction, I think, to like, you have this teenage boy narrating the story, or at least an older version of him narrating the story, who is like, into sex, wants to experience it. Can't really. Does Occasionally, but struggles to engage in it and also is just really wrestling with. Okay, my dad's attractive. Okay. I don't know that I like that thought. Okay, this boy is staying with me. We're gonna fool around. Also, a year ago, when I was working at my dad's office, I, like, spent money on a. On, like, on a hustler that this. This guy hooked me up with. Like, okay, he's just kind of looking for any sort of actualization for himself, and he doesn't. He doesn't know where to find it. Okay, here's just a note about this guy's dad. Let me just share this with you.

[Andrew]

Hit me with a dad note.

[Craig]

The divorce is an interesting thing. I'm gonna dive into the divorce a little bit. But this is a quote. Whenever my mother put us kids on the train to go visit him, she invariably told us, be nice to your father or he'll cut us off. When my sister was graduated from college, he presented her with a, quote, life bill, the itemized expenses he'd incurred in raising her over 21 years, a huge sum that was intended to discourage her from thoughtlessly spawning children of her own.

[Andrew]

One of these guys.

[Craig]

One of those guys.

[Andrew]

One of these guys.

[Craig]

Woofada.

[Andrew]

Like, you're. You're. You're my flesh and blood, but also, you're a. You're a tenant of mine.

[Craig]

Yeah. Not great. We don't. We don't care for this man. No, we're not meant to. Really. No.

[Andrew]

Because then, then not only is he a bad dad, but he's also kind of putting him in position of being a landlord. And I'm not saying all landlords are bad. There's good landlords.

[Craig]

I think that anecdote actually crops up after.

[Andrew]

But it's just really. It's really easy for landlords to be.

[Craig]

Very easy for landlords. About. Yes, I think that anecdote crops up after he is in. In the year prior to the Kevin episode, been working in his dad's office and, like, now has a, like, a fiscal relationship with his dad that, like, actually clarifies things in a way which.

[Andrew]

Is weird and not. Not physical. Right.

[Craig]

Yes. Yeah. Sorry.

[Andrew]

Okay.

[Craig]

But he's also, like, working alongside a secretary that his dad has definitely slept with and scorned. You know, and so it's just some interesting overlapping stuff. We jump. Yeah, we jump back to. He does at one point, like, wistfully, like, try. He. He gets taken, like, you know, money. A guy takes his money for a fake plan to, you know, help him Run away to New York. And that's like the closest he gets to going off and living the life that you might imagine White will wind up living. We jump back in time to him being a younger kid and he is seven when his parents get divorced. He has an older sister who's a bit of a bossy pants. She's not a huge figure in the novel, but like one little anecdote of her is. She, like, organizes a whole gang of girls who are hanging out and she says, go, everybody has to bring your dad's belt to our next meeting.

[Andrew]

And what are you gonna do with that?

[Craig]

She whips all of them with their own dad's belts. It's like, whoa. And then she gets in trouble for it and doesn't make any. It's very like, I don't know. I don't know how to feel about her. She doesn't factor into the latter part of the novel very much at all. But again, it's like, I think it's a. It's on this theme of, like, children grasping at any attempt to have authority over themselves and each other.

[Andrew]

Yeah, sure.

[Craig]

The thing about the divorce where, you know, his parents are getting separated, he's at the top of the stairs hearing his mom, his dad and his soon to be stepmother talking through, like, what's going to happen, where they're going to live. And he has this light bulb moment. And this for me, kicked off like a thematic thing in the novel where he's like, oh, like, life is a thing that you make choices about and can be shaped. Quote. The real excitement, of course, lay in learning that a life could be changed and that one could enter a brand new, better world. He's quoting his mom. I shall move wherever the children will have the cultural and educational advantages of a major metropolis. That a life could be changed posited the still more thrilling notion that one had a thing called a life. A wonderful being that was growing silently inside like an infant. How its body would be formed and what its temperament would be would surely remain unknown up to the moment of birth. Until I heard the three adults discussing their lives and our lives, I never suspected that I'd been impregnated with this life, this tragic embryo. The divorce for me was primarily an accession into self consciousness. I thought was just an interesting. Like, I've never thought about when a kid think other than like the constant what do you want to be when you grow up? Nonsense.

[Andrew]

Yeah, right, right.

[Craig]

But just a window into a kid's thinking of, huh? Life isn't Just a thing. Life is a thing that happens to you, but also there is agency to be had, whether or not you have whatever small.

[Andrew]

Yeah. In whatever small way you can. You can figure out.

[Craig]

And. And this, I think, is the. The book ends on, like, a pretty transgressive, pretty messed up enactment of his own agency that I think you can tie directly backwards to this in the sense that, like, oh, adults can, like, change my life whenever they want. They can make choices about me, and my life can change based on what they do. The final thing that he does in the book is, like, make a choice about an adult's life and, like, change an adult's life. So that's just like, I want to plant that because that. That comes across a number of times in the book.

[Andrew]

Okay, sure. Yeah.

[Craig]

Then he spent some time. We get like, a little bit of a window into his life with his mom because his mom moves them into the city. They're, like, living in hotels. They're living in random suburbs. It's not a settled situation.

[Andrew]

Yeah.

[Craig]

The. The narrator talks about her as, like, always looking for another man.

[Andrew]

The New York Times review talked about that aspect of it a lot. It's like. It's this. This mix of, like, financially, these children are taken care of, basically.

[Craig]

Yes.

[Andrew]

But, like. But they don't have access to their parents. They don't have access to, like, role models who can. Who can walk them through anything. They're just kind of, like, feeling their way through all this stuff themselves. And in that way, they are deprived. And that's where kind of the action of the. Of the novel is found. Yeah.

[Craig]

And I think it would be too pat to say that the novel is directly accusing his parents of. Of setting him on a particular path because he's. The novel is also willing to indict a lot of other adults along the way.

[Andrew]

Oh, sure.

[Craig]

Or.

[Andrew]

Or at least plenty of blame to.

[Craig]

Go around or at least to just show them as complicating factors. You know, another thing that. That struck me is, you know, he's with his mom. He's in the city. He's spending a lot of time after school. This is all like, before the opening scene at his dad's, like, place in the summer.

[Andrew]

Okay.

[Craig]

I think he's probably still maybe 8 or 9. Maybe he's like 10 or 11. He's going to this bookstore after school a lot that is like, run by a woman who maybe used to be an opera singer or tried to be in Failed or something. And she's. And the manager of the Store is this like kind of older, probably middle aged gay man and later, you know, she's also gay. He comes to learn and he says, in our imaginations, the adults of our childhood remain extreme, essential, we might say, radical, since they are the roots that feed luxuriant later systems. Those first bohemians, for instance, stay operatic in memory, even though, were we to meet them today, well, what would we think? We who've elaborated our eccentricities with a patience, a professionalism they never knew. And similar to the divorce thing, like, I just like, come across this passage and go, huh, yeah. There are a lot of adults that I can think of from when I was in school who are like, yeah, that person played a pivotal role in my life. They're frozen in ember because I haven't seen them since and. Frozen in ember. Frozen in amber.

[Andrew]

You could be frozen and ember too.

[Craig]

Well, most embers are meant for burning, so. Not a great idiom that I'm trying to think.

[Andrew]

If things get like, don't try to help me. Like, preserved in, like, lava. Like Pompeii. Like Pompeii. Those are some.

[Craig]

Those are embers, but not, not frozen necessarily.

[Andrew]

Well, I mean, they're kind of arrested, you know, in the sense that they're. They're kind of as they. As they were when they were covered in embers.

[Craig]

Thank you for helping me out.

[Andrew]

I. Yeah, that's. That's what I. That. That's one of two things I could have done in that situation.

[Craig]

Are there, like.

[Andrew]

And then. And you did the first one to yourself when you realized the d. Yeah.

[Craig]

Are there like, folks off the top of your dome you can think of that are like, whether it's a teacher, you know, don't dox people. But like, no, no, no. You know, I got.

[Andrew]

I mean, there are a couple. Couple of English teachers who really sort of nurtured some kind of spark in me with respect to, like, reading and writing stuff. I don't know. There's probably some small amount of like a couple of church people who, you know, who. Who like, did our family a kindness in a. Like, I think about the people who, like, gave us our first computers and they were like, bad computers, but they were also the only ones that we could possibly have access to. Sure. Yeah.

[Craig]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

For sure.

[Craig]

It. And to me.

[Andrew]

And like. And then you grow up and you find out that many of these people are, like, flawed in their own specific ways.

[Craig]

Yes, well. And I think this book also does a good job of like. It doesn't. Also doesn't have to be the positive influences either that you remember as like. And those people stand out. And I'm not even saying that these folks are positive or negative. I just have very indelible memories of all the failed musicians in that music store I worked in high school that are like. I don't know that any of them were bad guys. I didn't get great vibes for most of them. I was like 15, going, like, why are you like this? But they do have, like, this outsized, you know, place in my memory just by. I had met people like that before or whatever. And that's another. Like, this novel is an exercise and kind of exploring those relationships as well. There's a. There's a series of relationships in the. In the book between him and other boys closer to his age. None of them go well. And they all, like, run the gamut from, you know, a very strange, almost predatory boy who he hooks up with at a summer camp to this boy named Tom, who nothing ever happens because Tom never really acknowledges anything between them. Probably I don't even know that Tom has any gay feelings. But the authority when watching him play guitar is like, and then Tom was free and we were emotionally connected. And you're like, I guess so. I don't know if that's true. It's very romanticized. But if it worked for you at the time.

[Andrew]

He.

[Craig]

Then he goes to school and his sister's helping him be popular by literally just learning how to, like, talk to people and ask questions about them and, like, try to make friends. He had. He has a friendship with another boy. They decide to go on a double date. And he's like, oh, this girl Helen, she is cool. I like her. What if I could like a girl.

[Andrew]

That would be like, what if I could?

[Craig]

Because up. Up to now, his feelings have not given him any real lasting happiness.

[Andrew]

Yeah, right.

[Craig]

He's a book. He's a kid also who reads a lot of books, reads a lot of capital L literature, but also kind of romantic literature.

[Andrew]

See, kick any of the heats. He kicking butts.

[Craig]

He might be kicking ski cane book, but he might have been kicking Ballsack's butt. You don't know. Okay, okay, well, kicking.

[Andrew]

Kicking, other stuff.

[Craig]

Yeah, him, probably. Yeah. Yeah, well, sure. Just also, the. At one point, the boys in this game, like, the younger boys in this game in this game, in this novel, play a game called squirrel, which just involves grabbing each other's crotches and then running away because of nuts, because you.

[Andrew]

Gotta grab them and you gotta bury them in the ground.

[Craig]

For the winter. Yeah, it's funny sometimes to just read a book about preteen and teen boys and be like, man, we're all so dumb. Whatever our. We're all so dumb. Whatever our lives were like, we were all just dumb.

[Andrew]

Things have changed. Whether you're talking about like hoop and stick times or smartphone times, boys of this age are pretty dumb. And some of them choose not to grow out of it ever.

[Craig]

Which is.

[Andrew]

Which is worse.

[Craig]

And I cast aside my skibidi toilets. You know, I just.

[Andrew]

I just feel like 45 year old men have ruined boys will be boys for actual boys.

[Craig]

You're right.

[Andrew]

You know what I mean? It sucks.

[Craig]

I think you're totally right about that. So this thing with this girl Helen, he thinks he's convincing himself he loves her and he writes her this long winded marriage letter basically, as a teen, as a preteen. And she very politely goes, hello, my best friend. No, and we should stop hanging out because I don't want to hurt you anymore. And he goes, all right, none of this is working. I have to go to an all male boarding school where hopefully being around other heterosexual boys will cure me of whatever is happening to me because I can't exist in society. He makes this decision himself. He writes to his dad, he calls his dad and he's like, hey, will you help send me to this boarding school that I'm demanding to go to? And his dad's like, write it out like a business proposal. And he does. And it works. There is like this thing where he does recognize that like at other boarding schools there's a lot of, you know, potential same sex fraternization and things like that. He's like, not at this school. At least as I understand it. All right, well, good for you. Good luck. And there's just. This is like the back half to third of the novel is him at this academy. And there's a lot of different. There's little things, like there's this kid named Howie who when you first meet him, he's literally engaging in Nazi stuff, like in the 50s. And you're like, what is this little creep? What is his deal? And you don't spend a lot of time with him. But then later in the book, like a year later, he's gone full like workers of the world unite.

[Andrew]

Sure.

[Craig]

You know, but he also thinks he's going to die by 20. And then of course he does, you know, like that's kind of how his little arc there. But we get a couple of different, like, adults now that Our narrator interacts with There. There are other boys that he tries to have relationships with. There's. There's Chuck, who's the leader of the Butt Club. Now, the Butt club is the smoker. He's the. It's the smokers club.

[Andrew]

Dang, man. I thought it was going to be the sickest club ever.

[Craig]

No, it's this. It's the cool smoker kids who don't care about anything.

[Andrew]

The Butt Club.

[Craig]

They all got their, like, parents to sign or they forged parent, like, parent letters that said they could join a smoking club.

[Andrew]

I read a landmark work of gay fiction, and it mentions a butt club. But it's not as exciting as you think.

[Craig]

Nope.

[Andrew]

That's a thing that you get to experience now.

[Craig]

No.

[Andrew]

In your life. And I just wondered if that. Wonder how you feel about that.

[Craig]

You know, Chuck. Chuck has his problems. Chuck does take our narrator and a few other boys to, like, a brothel at one point.

[Andrew]

Okay?

[Craig]

And they hire some women. And our narrator is not interested in women. Nothing happens. And she, you know, humors him by saying that she will tell them all he was fine. And they all know that that's not gonna happen.

[Andrew]

Okay?

[Craig]

But at least he did it, you know?

[Andrew]

At least he did it.

[Craig]

But the adults that factor into this, there is a gym teacher. There is a psychotherapist. There is a house master who I guess like. I guess an RA but like an adult.

[Andrew]

Sure.

[Craig]

A priest and a jazz instructor. Now, I can't tell you the jazz instructor is at the end of the novel, but who do you want to hear about first out of that list? The priest, the housemaster, the therapist, or the gym teacher?

[Andrew]

I don't know about the priest, okay? I need to know about the priest. The priest is the one who makes it sound the most like that set up for a joke.

[Craig]

Well, that's true. The priest is, like, second to last in. In this list chronologically in the novel. He enters the novel through the housemaster and Mr. Scott and his wife, who our narrator tells that he is gay at one point, and they're like, huh, after our whole thing with you, why don't you meet our friend, this priest and talk about it? And the priest, like, kind of has, like, tries to have a homosexuality is a sin conversation with him. And the interesting thing about that scene that really stood out to me is that, like, he finds himself defending himself in a way that he didn't expect to, where he, like, you know, confesses to this priest or whatever, is not moved at all by the language of sin. He Is aspiring to be a Buddhist, of all things. The kid is. And he's like, listen, I. I don't know. Like, this is what I do. These are my actions. This is what I have done in my life. And he challenges the priest by asking the priest what he does when he has sexual impulses.

[Andrew]

Sure.

[Craig]

And the priest doesn't really have a good answer. You know, he has his vow of celibacy, but then kind of just kind of makes that noise a little bit. And there's a later reveal that. That the priest was closeted as well. But the boy, it's interesting that he kind of comes into a defense of his own autonomy when confronted with this, like, religious figure who's, like, meant to maybe, like, shame him back into silence or whatever it is, Whatever the reason that he enters the story, and it just doesn't work. That's, like, an interesting mark marker on his journey towards, you know, agency.

[Andrew]

Sure.

[Craig]

So we have the housemaster, the therapist, and the gym teacher left. Andrew, before I tell you, the gym teacher.

[Andrew]

Gym teacher.

[Craig]

Me, Gym teacher. Gym teacher. Mr. Pouchet, is. This is the scene I alluded to earlier as being like, this could have been a whole long chapter where they spend a lot of time together. And instead it's like, hey, a hot former Olympian gym teacher showed up and starts working at the school.

[Andrew]

Okay.

[Craig]

And all the other boys are like, you were in the Olympics. And our main character is like, I don't know what the Olympics are. I don't care about sports. And so he actually, you know, bonds with him a little bit. There's, like, a neat little. The book White is very good at just, like, human behavior and human psychology. The Olympian, he says his success had been neither major nor minor, which means it's actually a little irksome when all the other kids are like, let me tell us about the Olympics. And he's like. He has to go through a feeling of, like, well, I wasn't that great. But also, like, he's enough to be notable. You know, he's good enough that you might recognize him or that there are photos of him at the Olympics, but he's actually, like, didn't have enough success to want to ever boast about it, ever.

[Andrew]

Yeah. Like, oh, listen, all the Browns medalists have to go somewhere.

[Craig]

Yeah. Yeah. That's kind of what it is. And they actually bond by, like, not going to the Anglican services on campus and instead just kind of touring around the other local religious establishments every Sunday together. Okay. And he finds himself falling for the gym teacher. I pulled A passage here because, like, one of the hallmarks of this book is the way that the narrator describes the, you know, men in the world. Just very keen observer of their physicality. Mr. Boucher had very full lips, the color of raspberry ice when it's still in the carton before it's licked. Lighter and slightly protuberant. Eyes as liquid as a spaniel's. His skin was very thin and olive. And his mustache, though shaved close every morning, appeared as a black band by noon. Nor did it grow close to his lip, but well above the sort of narrow, absolutely horizontal dash a child might charcoal in on Halloween. Like, just, like, really fun stuff. And it goes on there to also talk about his. The, you know, the soft, lustrous black hair on his chest and his muscles. And, you know, the. His. Those famous legs were surprisingly lean. They were not the massive machinery I would have anticipated. Like, okay, just really good and interesting physical descriptions of all the men in the book that he's interested in. He decides to write him a love letter. Or not a love letter, a love poem similar to the letter he wrote to Helen. But he doesn't sign it. He just slides it under his door. He just writes a poem. You don't know what's in the poem, but he signed. He signs it on the door and he goes, I wonder if that's gonna work. And it doesn't. It definitely doesn't, because he. At that point, he has invit. He has imagined this man as a sexual creature. He has imagined what this man thinks of when he pleasures himself. And he is just like, if I could just be in that guy's head. I would like to know what it's like to, like, care, like, be attracted to women or what if he's attracted to me? Like, he doesn't even know what he wants. So he writes this. Let this poem. And Jim teacher never invites him to tour churches again. And that's that. Bingo bag and oops, I'll speed run. The therapist and the. And the other one before we get. Yeah, the therapist, he goes to the psychotherapist to, you know, talk about homosexuality. The therapist, not a great therapist, is pretty bad at it, actually. Doesn't really listen. Kind of harps on the you're too close to your mom stuff. For me, the main takeaway of that whole chapter is another version of the divorce becoming self. Like a version of wow. I. I have a self and a life. How thrilling to discover one had depths. How consoling to find them less polluted than the Shallows. How encouraging to identify the enemy not as a fissure in the will, but as a dead fetus in the specimen jar of the unconscious. The psychotherapy is like, wow, I'm a person with things inside me that's interesting. Like I am more of a person than I thought I was before. Like, that's. To me, that's one of the main takeaways from the psychotherapy stuff. The Housemaster stuff is there's a guy who's like, basically he's Mr. Belding, but with less power and influence. He is an authority figure who gets kick me signs taped on him and like laughs at it self deprecatingly because what else is he gonna do, you know?

[Andrew]

Sure, okay.

[Craig]

He starts babysitting for that guy's like four year old boy and finds himself involved with both him and his wife. There's a fun little bit where Mrs. Scott was a poet. Her husband also wrote verse. As they do not have a great marriage.

[Andrew]

That is very funny.

[Craig]

Yeah, they don't have a great marriage, but they do decide to entice this high schooler into a sexual encounter with them.

[Andrew]

Oh boy.

[Craig]

Where they don't actually do anything with him. He just sits there while they have sex with each other. Because that's really what they want. They just want it to be weird so that they can actually have feelings for each other. Because wouldn't you know that the, the man, the housemaster also claims he used to be gay, but then it is revealed that he had a long relationship with that priest. Hey, so you know. And finally the part time jazz instructor, Mr. Beatty shows up. This is the end of the novel. He's a white jazz instructor. The novel is very keenly observant of this fact. As a 1950s part time jazz instructor.

[Andrew]

That does feel like a burn. The both of those feels like a burn.

[Craig]

It talks about how he like has the affect of like, you know, like the crotch grab and other like moves that he would do while performing that he clearly is like taking from, you know, black performers and things like that, which is whatever that means. But the fact that he is like doing something that black performers do but not well and as a white man is like kind of the assessment of this guy.

[Andrew]

Sure.

[Craig]

Word on the street is that this guy's gonna have some marijuana and maybe the Buck Club should buy some. And our narrator gets in his head that, what if I could get this guy in trouble? What if I could tell the school that he was gonna have drugs? And then before he got in trouble, I could seduce him and then I could have sex with him and then he would be ejected from my life and I would have power over that. And that's basically what he does.

[Andrew]

Cool.

[Craig]

That rationale is. I kind of read this passage a few times to try and figure it out. The first time I read it, it seemed way more calculated than I think it actually is. Like he is attracted to this man or he is attracted to the idea of being attracted to him. He is just interested to. At this. He's learned through the encounter with the. The Housemaster couple about like sex being a tool for power and an agency. So now he wants to do that himself. He also wants to, you know, he tells himself maybe he wants to do what his father did, which is like use people and then discard them. Ultimately he wants to like have power over an adult in some way, shape or form.

[Andrew]

Yeah.

[Craig]

And it doesn't go as cleanly as he expected. Like, the guy does get in trouble, but they don't kick him out right away. And the guy tries to get him in trouble for like having sex with another teacher. And that never comes to light. And so the feeling at the end of the book is that he is like, he has achieved a version of adulthood through sex that he has always wanted. But I don't know that we're supposed to be like. And good job. Like, it's not. It is a coming of age novel that ends with a. Like, is that a good situation for you moving forward? Like, I'm glad that you have some sort of. Doesn't even sound like self worth. It just is like, I guess you've had a little victory here that you didn't think was possible.

[Andrew]

Yeah. It's just like it. I. It's being gay in the, in America in the 50s.

[Craig]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

How. How good. How good an outcome?

[Craig]

No, that's true.

[Andrew]

That's true. Can you. Could you possibly realistically, like expect and.

[Craig]

Then especially without like being in a community of people with any understanding.

[Andrew]

Right. Yes. Yes.

[Craig]

That's, you know that, that's something that I think, think I've taken away from reading something like Stone Butch Blues, which is like the communities were there. Many of them were just like very wisely, not very public about it at all. And that's not what this book is about at all. This book is about like a very lonely person dealing with these feelings almost completely on their own, saying them out loud to certain people, assessing that the impact of that choice and then like coming to a understanding of sexual power that does probably mess up that dude's life for a little bit, though not as badly as he may be hoped. And a version of adulthood that up until that point the book has kind of been impugning. And that has its own, like, little mini tragedy to it.

[Andrew]

Yeah.

[Craig]

Though I don't think that erases. Erase is not even the right word. It exists alongside the other parts of the novel that are like, very earnest and honest depictions of like, a young boy having feelings for other young boys and trying to sort out how to do that. That. That stuff doesn't. Doesn't have all of the same power coding to it that I've been harping on a lot because I just found the. That to. Because that's how the novel ends. That's really what I've been thinking about. A lot of the stuff between him and the other kids his age is more like unrequited and messier and just kind of like. I think a couple of the pieces I read about this book were like, if you were a gay teenager and you found this book, like, there was a lot to see in yourself and things.

[Andrew]

Yeah, that's what I was going to say. Just to close about the. Well, is this. Is this an out. Is this a good outcome for anybody situation of it? Like, I think that's thinking of it with like, novel brain where clearly is coming into it with like, how can I make people feel seen, especially in this. To bring it back to the stonewitch Blues thing. Especially in this situation where they don't have a. They don't have a community, they don't have other people in, in real life. They don't. They don't have any barometer really for like, for. For whether people. Other people feel the way they do or have had the other experiences that they have. And then maybe like the. The not okayness of the relationships in this book helps people recognize and avoid not okay things in their own lives. That seems to be more what the novel's project is to the extent that it has one.

[Craig]

Yep. There are like one or two, as I said, the early, earlier one or two very brief flash forwards where he encounters a couple of these characters no more than five or six years hence. And like, so you know, that the kid ends up like, moving on to other stuff. But aside from that, it's, you know, it resists a. And here's where this kid ends up. And I think, you know, to White's interview, you might expect a different. A more contemporary book doing it differently. So this is interesting to read. I really like it.

[Andrew]

Yeah.

[Craig]

And yeah, really found. Really found the voice very compelling. Would be interested to read more White in the future. Even though he thinks that this is the best one. So, you know.

[Andrew]

Sure. But you know, go back, go back. I feel like going back to the first one and like what is, what is that voicier version of. Of. Of this that is coming from kind of the same or.

[Craig]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

You know, the. A similar version of White in his perspective or like what. What does some of the non fiction look like? I don't know, like maybe. Yeah. Something to talk about.

[Craig]

Well, thanks for. Let me tell you about this book, Andrew.

[Andrew]

Thanks for telling me about it. I think we kicked his butt and we did it again.

[Craig]

We love to kick a book's butt. I love to be in the book club.

[Andrew]

Own stories.

[Craig]

The book club.

[Andrew]

Mm.

[Craig]

You're right. I can't believe that that's what the club is called in this novel. It's very funny.

[Andrew]

It's like, wait, does this. Does this. Is this about to lack a lot of subtlety or is this something else?

[Craig]

Yeah, yeah. If you, the listener, have other white that you'd recommend to us, please write in overdue podmail.com hit us up on social media at Overdue Pod. Nick Lauren just composed our theme music. Andrew. If folks want to know more about the show, where do they go?

[Andrew]

Overdue Podcast.com is our Internet website. We're going to have the schedule for July up imminently. Craig can tell you about the rest of that here in a sec. I also want to tell you, join The Buck Club. Patreon.com overduepod Support the show financially with cold hard cash that helps us pay for books and equipment and childcare and all kinds of other stuff that makes the show go. We say this every time, so maybe with repetition, it's lost a little bit of. It's like meaning for you at home. But it does literally make it possible to do the show.

[Craig]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

While people support us via Patreon or anywhere else. But Patreon is the most direct way to do it. So patreon.com/overdue pod you get access to our Discord server bonus episodes early. Our first episodes of the Silver Silly Marillion about the silmarillion just. Just hit that feed and the newsletter which should be coming out today, even if it's not, you know, like first thing in the morning. It's gonna come out. Gonna come out today. And yeah, some other stuff too. Patreon.com overdupod Craig hit us with the July schedule and then we'll get out here.

[Craig]

So we just read A Boy's Own Story by Em and White. We're gonna be talking about Upright Women Wanted by Sarah Galley next week. Then the Trial by Franz Kafka. He is Franz Kafka. And then Bonjour Tristess by Francois Sagan. Yeah, I look forward to knowing if I'm allowed to do Ho, Ho, Ho in that episode.

[Andrew]

Of course you're allowed.

[Craig]

But will they be relevant?

[Andrew]

It's all part of kicking that book's butt, like we do every.

[Craig]

Yeah, there it is.

[Andrew]

All right, everybody. Until we kick your. But. But next week, please try to be happy. That was a Headgum podcast.