12 Questions for Sean Thor Conroe
The 21st century's enfant terrible of the literary world on purpose, fate, destiny, progressive ideals, nicotine, and more.
We were talking outside of Dean Kissick’s new space on Orchard St about movies and books and writing and scenes and the idea of getting away, removing one’s self so the writer could finally begin to focus on what matters, how the writer is always trying to finally begin and focus on what matters, but then when we’re far away, away from the scene, from the world of industry and media that allows writers to live and to eventually be read, we become so caught up in our own minds and myopic conceptions of reality, too deep in the aesthetic, if you will, and then we decide we must go back, back to the events with the scenesters and gallerists and writer types, but not really writers, all the editor types, but not really editors, people who mingle and flirt but don’t know how to edit or even what STET means, and then there’s all the publishing types and art-lit-media world whores and fourth-rate fame-fuckers who’ve read nothing new since Patti Smith in college and Sally Rooney perhaps when their grandfather died, or boyfriend or girlfriend disappeared with someone younger and more attractive. And that’s literature to them, and this is who we’re spending all our precious time around, our one chance at life, and then the cycle would persist; we’d go on and get away. Sean begins to mention ‘how hard’ I’d been going on my new interview series, how he admires when a writer really goes ‘in on something.’ ‘Thanks,’ I reply. ‘But man,’ he adds, ‘it’s bout time for you to drop. You gott’a drop, bro! Drop a book. It’s time, let’s go. How old are you?’ ‘About to turn thirty.’ ‘Wow. Drop time.’ He started to list several books that’d motivate me to get going, to finally drop.
Of course in this conversation with Sean, the language of the literary world and literary events began to coalesce, sans-effort, with the lexicon of streetwear, of a variety of baggy-legged brands like BAPE and Supreme, one could even say distinct brands like Conroe himself. But this brand of high and low, as Sean says, is merely part of his art, something innate he can’t control: ‘In my personal view there’s no great divide, the divide is actually a cultural imposition. I don’t agree with the assessment that Fuccboi is made up of some kooky slang that has nothing to do with my world. It straddles lines in my language and different parts have different flows. I think that every book should be representative of what it’s about. For example, I’m writing a new book that has a different rhythm and flow than Fuccboi. But the thing is, like, the tone is consistent, I just use different tools depending on the narrative’s aesthetic. At the end of the day, my voice is just my voice. And with whatever project I’m on I go full-speed, full-speed ahead.’
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Off a suggestion from Sean, I’ve spent the last few weeks reading one of Philip Roth’s nonfictions, Patrimony, about the sudden illness and eventual death of Roth’s father. I thought that this would be a good place to start with Roth (it’s my first), considering I’ve been coping with my own father’s incurable illness. There’s an idea that books like these can help us cope, or at least find solace. But that isn’t necessarily the case. I already know very well that it’s commonplace for fathers to get ill and die. Other than Roth and I both being Jews from the Atlantic Northeast, the tristate area, as they say, our fathers are/were incredibly different people who became ill at different points in their lives. I can’t relate to having a father like Roth’s, one who was strong-willed and predictable and reliable and worked in business as an insurance executive; that’s not even close to my situation. But I suppose there are still similarities, parallels in the process of watching one’s parent slowly decay. Reading novels where the narrator’s traumas and hardships have the possibility to be similar, or at least relative, to our own experience, has something to do with purpose; how can I find, in such a difficult period, a sense of purpose? Or, how can I extract meaning and purpose through something as obliterating as illness and death? Meaning is a personal interpretation of what exists behind the curtain and purpose, as Sean Conroe says in our interview, is ‘to be able to imagine a different future.’
Sean’s response on purpose is indeed interesting, and has gotten me thinking. Purpose is something that motivates us to get up out of bed and tackle the day ahead, brush our teeth and shower and exercise and begin work on something that can, perhaps, transcend reality and take us somewhere new, or, again, as Sean wrote, to have the ability to ‘imagine a different future.’ Purpose allows us to envision the possibility of change, big change, subtle change, all kinds of differences to keep us moving forward. Can I see something in the death of my father, the illness of my dog, or the general hardship of life (relationships, bills, work, commitments), that will allow me to progress into someone stronger, more reliable, more sturdy and wise? In Patrimony, Roth writes: ‘Everybody’s battle is different, and the battle never ends.’
In the very same answer to the question I asked Sean—Is there any purpose to having a purpose?—he continues to write that being able to imagine a different future is ‘what faith is, to be able to see your life in the context of a larger story, to trust that there is meaning in periods of darkness.’ He then goes on to say that faith, which stems from purpose, allows for hope, and that when all these factors in your constitution become durable and mighty, you become a ‘light' to those around you. And how does Sean define this ability to be a communal light? Grace, he writes. ‘This is grace.’ So in the world of Sean Conroe purpose leads to grace, by way of faith and hope and the embodiment of light. While of course these ideas are all vaguely connected, I’d have never thought of that specific direction myself.
Some of the most rewarding answers I’ve received through the course of conducting this series arrive when I ask people to define terms we all think we know and have a grasp on, like purpose, or faith, or romantic love, but in fact don’t. The big words we casually use on a daily basis and frankly take for granted, because we don’t really know what they mean, or, more specifically, what they mean to us. Banana means banana, chord means chord, but (and I’m sorry if this is cliche) does God mean God? Some words have definitions and other words are entire concepts of their own, with subjective worlds and disquisitions that stem from their consideration. What does God, or love, or purpose mean to you? This is the incredible subjectivity of language and its use; you get to know how somebody thinks, and when you know how someone thinks, you get a grasp on who they are, which is all to say their unique light, their personal form of grace.
Many of Sean’s answers in this interview are short and to the point. You could even, by definition, say laconic or coy, which both have negative connotations. But Sean’s laconic, coy answers didn’t annoy me the way other writer’s laconic and coy answers have. It didn’t seem like he was rushing through the questions or being brief to make a point that he was too cool or talented to really spend time with this interview. In fact, it’s taken Sean over fourteen months to complete the answers to my questions. When I emailed him last March to get an update on his progress, he told me he had to finish reading Homer’s Iliad ‘before I can say what fate and destiny are.’ And the answer? Drumroll. ‘We all have our own destinies, and we cannot take on the destinies of others. We must never tempt fate, we must respect it and fear it, like an unpredictable fickle god.’ He doesn’t waste words. And, like I said, laconic and coy, but incredibly succinct and somehow not annoying, an answer full of meaning with much to be considered. This is also a good way to describe Sean’s style.
His 2022 debut novel, Fuccboi, was almost written in verse. It has a colloquial style of a book written in the same casual form as a friendly text between two, say, drug dealers or skaters. In the beginning it’s irritating and one suspects it to be a shtick. But it isn’t so. The rhythm is alluring and draws you in to its protagonist and his supposedly interminable search for… purpose. The book was a relative success in New York’s new, modish, post-covid literary world full of readings and release-parties and overtly trendy quasi-religious movements where young seculars from Oregon would get drunk off whiskey and high off coke and baptize each other in the bathrooms of acquaintances, becoming Catholic, before getting a little more high and having premarital sex. In this world but not of it, Sean became somewhat of a fashionable, out and about downtown figure, an unusual embodiment of a new, nontraditional kind of literature unintentionally serving a paradoxical period of time where faith and nihilism somehow cohered. There’s a real ingenuity to Sean’s first novel. While reading Fuccboi, several years ago, I regularly paused and said things to myself, like: wow, this guy’s figured out and successfully executed an entirely new form, new way of storytelling that’s entirely his own. This is an impressive feat, as new forms usually come along only once every few centuries. But by the end of Fuccboi, however original it may be, I did wonder where Sean could go from there. Below is a good example of the way Fuccboi is composed:
When the ma picked me up at LAX in her Prius.
Man.
Soon as I exited those auto doors outta bag-claim.
Man!
That Pac Ocean air!
Nothin like it. Straight up. Frfr.
She looked so little and funny, older but more compact, features more refined and crystallized, than when I'd last seen her.
Or maybe more defined since her brow was so furrowed with worry, seeing me.
I don't know how I looked, at the time at least, since we never really see ourselves in the moment. We only see how others see us, although not even that second thing fully.
If we don't wanna.
If we set our minds to refusing to.
I wondered if Sean would continue writing books in the same acronym-filled, rhythmic colloquial style, or if he would transition to a more traditional, recognizable form of prose, whatever that entails. After all, a novel literary means ‘something new’, and genuine style is only the summary of one’s flaws, the unusual markers within a traditionally recognizable framework.
From Sean’s various book reviews and analyses that he’s published for the likes of Mars and The Paris Review, it seems there’s a kind of evolution, or perhaps purpose, in the style he’s consciously or unconsciously developing. Consider these paragraphs from an essay he wrote in April 2023, called Going Roth Mode, on attending a festival devoted to Philip Roth’s work:
I start trying to be a reporter. I’ve got too many layers on. My backpack isn’t helping. I go stand by the table the Harper’s correspondent is at, and nestle up to a well-dressed older man, professorial, with a glint in his eye. He’s a professor from Germany. Out here for a talk he gave the other day. This thing has been going for some days already, apparently. He’s an Auerbach scholar and he tells me that his case, in the book he’s working on, is that Goodbye, Columbus was influenced by Auerbach. The guy came out here, went to Roth’s reading room, his original, personal library, preserved across the hall, and found the Auerbach book, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, that Roth read around that time; went so far as to find the passages Roth underlined to support his argument.
“Unreal,” I say.
His case is that Goodbye, Columbus is a debate between the ethics of the Old Testament and of Homer. Roth’s narrator has a decision he’s weighing. Either take the Homeric route, go with Brenda, a nice girl, his summer fling, and live the life she leads him on. Running around the track every morning. Living a nice suburban life. “Settling on the nymph island,” I say, which makes his eyes light up.
Sean’s voice does essentially remain the same, but I sense he’s in a direction of some place new, suffering the very public process of figuring it out, as all frequently published writers endure. This is part of his purpose, growth, and change. There’s usually a project that exists as the crowning summary of any given phase in a writer’s career (there’s a vast difference between Martin Amis’s Money and Amis’s Inside Story, though of course, through voice and soul, one can tell it’s the same man who’s endured an odyssey of his own). Fuccboi was an approximation of Sean’s initial artistic phase, at least in the public eye. For several years now he’s been working on a project called The Gospel According to Ruth, a piece of fiction based on a recent relationship, as well as, he tells me, several other long-form projects. One of these may very well mark the signifying arrival, or denouement, of his next period. And no doubt, considering Sean’s distinct perspective, which makes him an ever-changing, morphing artist, there will be several distinct periods to come. Yet there are signifiers, still, that he’ll never leave behind the Sean who wrote Fuccboi. Consider this recent tweet:
Sean Thor Conroe 香村 翔宇 (12:56 AM) Venus Bright asf next to the moon tonight
Sean Conroe, no doubt, bright asf with the books rn. He’s a man filled with purpose. I’m excited, and hope for, a realization of Sean’s ability to imagine a different future. In good faith, I and many others are curious about what this future might be.
Sean Thor Conroe 香村 翔宇 (May 21, 2024) Idc what you have to say unless you’ve been nailed to a cross
GG: Is there any purpose to having a purpose? What about futility - any use in that?
STC: The purpose of having a purpose is to be able to imagine a different future. This is what faith is, to be able to see your life in the context of a larger story, to trust that there is meaning in periods of darkness. This allows for hope. When your faith is strong, you become a light, you have light to spare and give to others, and this is Grace.
Do you believe in destiny? How about fate? Where, in your opinion, do those two things meet and differ?
We all have our own destinies, and we cannot take on the destinies of others. We must never tempt fate, we must respect it and fear it, like an unpredictable fickle god.
Do you believe in generational trauma? If so, and I’m sorry if this is an insensitive or too direct of a question, how has it played out in your own life? If you don’t really believe in the idea of generational trauma, what way has your heritage had an effect on you? Do our pasts really matter?
The first ever writings were simply lists of family and marriage trees down our generational line, that is to say family burial records, it is those humans who began burying and consecrating the dead, rather than leaving them out to rot on the primeval forest, who formed civil society. We are shaped on a material level by our forebears. On a group level, this is why the earliest stories were histories of the group or nation. The best novels of the past century continue this tradition, that’s all Faulkner was doing his whole life, trying to write novels to understand and parse through all that generational trauma of where and who he came from (Absalom Absalom is just him and his bro sitting in a dorm room trying to figure out who his psychotic great grandfather Thomas Sutpen was).
To quote you - “talking like discussing versus talking like flirting.” How would you describe the difference between those two styles of conversation? Is the flirt always sexual? Is a mere discussion devoid of sex?
I’m not sure what the difference is, something to do with boundaries. But all good writing, the type of writing you can’t look away from, that makes your hair stand on end, that you can’t get out of your head once you’ve finished reading it, has, on some level, to do with seduction and sex.
How would you define romantic love? Can someone exist without it?
Romance is one thing; but love, the challenge of moving in a committed, monogamous unit, or loving someone from a distance, without getting anything in return, is something else entirely. Romance is easy. I’m sure one can live without it. I’d like to believe one can, anyway, I’m much too romantic.
You’ve written that writing is, “the private self, the hidden self”… which I think is a lovely way to put it. Where and how does the private, hidden self meet the public self? Which of your own selves do you like better?
I’m drawn to writing that, if not explicitly, is very apparently a navigation of the line between our private and public selves. This doesn’t necessarily mean unhinged oversharing, and ignoring the propriety of public life. But navigating that line. It can mean respecting the boundary of public life, but for a reason that is being explored. If I don’t sense any navigation of that line, I tend to find the writing uninteresting.
They meet on the page, in good writing.
Michel Houellebecq or Emmanuel Carrere? Who else?
Houellebecq is the current living goat. Love that boy Carrere too tho.
Do you think the nuclear family is still a realistic ideal? Was it ever?
Family is the cornerstone of civil society. That is, humans who formed families and engaged in marriage and respected their parents as individual humans who lived their own lives apart from them and properly buried their dead are the humans who survived to create the world we live in today; those who did not, the primeval giants, are no longer with us.
It’s realistic insofar as it literally created our reality.
What’s your relationship with nicotine? How does it intersect with writing, with reading?
Of all the cash crops, tobacco happens to be my personal favorite, though coffee is a close second. Sugar is last.
Why do you write? Is this something a writer should know about themselves?
To undergo transformation, to die and be reborn.
The great enemy of progressive ideals is not the establishment but the limitless dullness of those who take them up.” Saul Bellow said this in 1976, obviously back then the establishment was something different. Nonetheless, there’s still some truth to this. I bring this up because you are, rightfully so, oft-critical about how progressive ideals, especially the obsession with identity, have ruined the fun exploration of art. In what way could progressive ideals be something positive for art? What even is a progressive ideal?
I disagree. I am not against progressive ideals. I’m against racism—fixing people in a certain way because of their race. Against sexism—fixing people in a certain way based on their sex. And against authoritarianism. I’m not sure what you mean by progressive ideals, but art should open the mind of the reader, change the way they view the world, positively progress humans into greater humanity—that’s my progressive ideal.
What’s the difference between fear and respect? What do you want? What do you get?
As the great Richard Ford once said, Your only job, as a novelist, is to get the reader to start reading and read to the end. If they read to the end, you did your job. Any reaction they have along the way is irrelevant.
I don’t seek any specific reaction from the reader in terms of how they view me, just that they read the writing, and are challenged to confront all that’s contained in it. If they don’t respect it, that’s on them; and if they fear me, there’s nothing to fear, I’m a nice boy.
Nice