There are infinite ways for our heroes to disappoint us. In Julie Buntin’s latest novel Famous Men, she explores an issue that too many women face: What happens when the men they look up to take advantage of their admiration?
The novel follows the life of Wilhelmina (Will) Miles, a girl who grows up in the same small Michigan town as celebrity writer Nathaniel Fellow. His many books are the star of her mother’s bookshelf, one of which is signed with a sentimental note that makes Will wonder if he is actually the father she grew up without. So, when she finally moves away from home, she seeks him out in New York City. He promptly hires her as an assistant, seemingly as a favor, and makes an exception to let her audit his MFA classes. It doesn’t take long for his mentorship to morph into a secret relationship that shapes Will’s whole life and career as a writer.
I have a fascination with narratives like Buntin’s that dive head-first into the murkiness of consent and coercion, whether that occurs in extreme circumstances (for, say, the women of the NXIVM cult) or divisive characters who hope to flip men’s predatory interest to their advantage (like Emma Cline’s The Guest). At the base of this fascination isn’t the question: Why do powerful men do this? But instead: What in these women’s lives led them to men like that? And what happens when they get to tell their side of the story?
Eager to explore this, I hopped on a video call with Julie Buntin to discuss the complexity of sexual agency, cultural influence, and the liberating power of storytelling.
In your first novel, Marlena doesn’t share that she’s sexually abused, but she does tell her closest friend about the betrayal she felt when their teacher tried to groom her. That scene always stood out to me because of how the narrator notes that “it could happen to any girl.” It made me feel like your second novel Famous Men would get into Will and Nathaniel’s dynamic in all the right ways. Was that a seed for this book?
It’s interesting to hear you say that because I remember revisiting Marlena at many years’ distance, and being taken aback, like: Wow, this has a lot in common with what I’m working on in Famous Men. I have a set of preoccupations that perpetually worm their way into what I’m writing. For me, it’s how girls and women navigate the world. It’s come up in essays I’ve written, and that’s, in part, because of experiences I’ve had, and what I’ve witnessed in my own girlhood. Whenever there’s something about the world I can’t reconcile—that’s what won’t let my imagination go.
What made you want to explore a murkier story around consent and coercion?
Although the book is very much about those things, I didn’t initially think to myself: This is what I’m going to write about. I come at novels through the characters first, and in this case, it was a character with a question around who her father is. The one thing thematically that was present early on was the notion of the male gaze and how that distorts you.
One of the weird bursts of inspiration I had for this book was when I was at MacDowell. It was my first time at a writer’s residency, and I was feeling all the pressures of that, along with some imposter syndrome. I was there off the heels of my first book, unsure if I could write another, and I was often a bit uncomfortable in that space because my room had a huge window which made me feel on display. I felt like people could see me when I couldn’t see them. And that was such a familiar anxiety. There was something about that, how we, as women, are shaped right away by the fact of being watched or viewed in certain ways from our earliest understandings of ourselves. That was part of the impulse for the book. But it was attached to the character of Will, a young woman from a small town, with a question of: “Who is my father? How can I figure out who I am if no one will tell me the truth about that?” And then, as I got deeper into her relationship with Nathaniel, those questions just became murky because of the nature of their relationship, and the things she aspired to, and all the things she wanted him to be for her, and all of her dependencies on him.
I have to ask about the dad stuff in the novel. That’s where it all begins for Will. She seeks out Nathaniel because she thinks he might actually be her father. What made you want to shape the narrative that way?
I am interested in how relationships between parents and children shape a life, and also how the absence of a parent can generate fantasy, confusion, and mystery for a person. I sincerely hope that readers don’t boil Will and Nathaniel’s relationship down to a “daddy issue.” But I do think it complicates things if you don’t have any sort of male figure in your life who is safe and trustworthy. Do you go looking for that, then? And how do you misunderstand that later? If you’re missing that blueprint for that type of relationship, what might you find yourself opting into?
Is the book supposed to read as a memoir Will has written about her secret relationship with Nathaniel? Once I saw it as that, all I could think was: Is it her #MeToo moment?
That’s interesting. Kind of, sure. There is an awareness within first-person retrospective voices, and Marlena does this a little bit too, where the text can feel like a document that the narrator is creating. I think of it as a confessional. Or as a record. Whether or not it’s something she intends for public intake is whatever—that’s almost not the point.
Another interior bit of scaffolding for me was the book itself being a biography of a minor figure in a famous person’s life. What if we gave a really thorough, artistic biography of somebody who wouldn’t otherwise get one? Will is not exactly a minor figure in Nathaniel’s life, but he’s a bigger figure in her life than she is in his. He defines her life in so many ways up until the point that the novel closes. Whereas—and this is just true for so many men—he gets to have a million versions of a life. She is just one of the many stories that he’s lived and experienced. And I was really interested in this idea, almost in a cheeky way, of starting with a biographer wanting to talk about him and then giving readers her story, charting her early artistic development, and playing with the notion of who gets to tell their story.
One tricky thing structurally was that the fireworks of the plot really start when Will meets Nathaniel, but that would have been a different book than starting with when she meets Nathaniel in her mind, which felt essential for this story. Especially with the questions around consent and coercion. So, I started with her as a teenager with a fantasy of who he is, and then tracing what happens when fantasy and real life collide, and how that early fantasy might distort the choices that one would make when presented with the real person.
Speaking of which, would you call what Nathaniel does to Will “grooming” in this book?
I think it’s really complicated. One thing that still feels really sticky and uncomfortable about the novel is that I think Will’s grooming starts before she meets Nathaniel. She’s been groomed culturally by the world that she lives in. She is groomed by other characters who aren’t even him. That grooming has happened in a way that she’s not aware of at all. She’s a child when it begins. So, that all makes her the person she is when she walks into his office. And because of that, she’s kind of the initiator in those early scenes with Nathaniel. But I do think that Nathaniel is a predator character who’s groomed many people and some of that turns on as autopilot for him, no matter what.
Yeah, and that brings me to the question—how else would he have access to her if he wasn’t her mentor?
I think that’s an uneasy space for the book to exist in. I was really interested in how most women don’t have one #MeToo story. We have an intersecting web of experiences—from confusing things, to explicitly bad things—and then, how do you move through a world where those things are happening all the time and what choices are you making within that system? Especially as a very young person who might not have the tools to analyze what’s happening to you.
Were there moments as you were writing when you were like: Oh my god, is she really gonna do this?
Yes, I was! One question I’ve gotten a lot about this book is: Why did it take you so long to write? And there are a lot of answers to that. I had babies, I moved, I started a really hard job, and it was COVID. Mostly, it was my babies. But, also it was hard to live inside of Will’s head. We have a shared background in certain senses. She’s not me, but she’s like a version of me in an alternate universe where some things went really differently. So I feel close to her. And yet I did not always. Some moments, I felt exhausted by her, and then other times felt really exhilarating as I got towards something that I hadn’t otherwise figured out how to talk or think about. So it was a push and pull.
FMF: One of my favorite scenes is when Nathaniel critiques a story Will has written as atmospheric, but says “nobody is doing anything.” The story is about a young girl who thinks she sees her mom’s boyfriend touching himself while she is plucking her brows at a mirror. The thing is, there’s so much going on in that scene. It’s creepy as hell. But Nathaniel urges her to write a rape scene instead, and it’s as if the behavior isn’t obvious or violent enough to matter. It’s so enraging, especially coming from him. Can you talk about that scene and how it came to you as you were writing?
JB: It’s hard to talk about the ineffable moment when I just knew that Nathaniel would not find her story dramatic enough. Will is drawing from her own experience of being watched as a teenager by her mom’s boyfriend. And that is a question that haunts her. What did he see? All she sees are pictures that were taken of her when she didn’t know someone was watching her. And there’s nothing incriminating in them, but the violation of it plays a profound part in all the things that happen later to her. One thing that makes that experience for her so unmooring is that she doesn’t understand what the story is. What really happened to her? How bad was it? Who would she tell? How would she even explain it? Is what bothered her being watched, or that her mom maybe knew and didn’t do anything? She doesn’t know how to square it. And that’s why it comes up in her first attempts at writing something fictional, in part because Nathaniel has urged her to use her own experience to tell a story.
Women get all these messages around how to tell their stories, and what’s the most palatable version of their story. There’s encouragement to draw from their own experience, but then, actually, when they do, their experience isn’t enough. It’s too passive. Or it’s too quiet. In having this friction between the two of them, I wanted to prompt the reader to ask some questions about what we ask of narratives of victimhood. What do they need to look like in order for us to understand the harm that was done? How straightforward does it need to be? What’s lost when we ask these stories to only be the most escalated version of what they could be? It felt really interesting to me that Nathaniel wouldn’t understand it. And that he would be like: So what?
You make a reference to the movie Black Swan in the book. Was that purposeful because of the grooming and assault in that? It kind of goes unmentioned. Were there earlier drafts of the manuscript that got into that? Or did you want to have it simmer under the surface—just how pervasive that can be in our culture?
Aside from being a good time stamp, there are things in that movie that felt resonant to the novel, like the dynamic between Mila Kunis’s and Natalie Portman’s characters, and how women are often pitted against each other. And also, the question of: How far would you go for your art? There were a lot of things that made me imagine that if there was one movie from that time period, that would be the one they’d be seeing.
One narrative trope that never sits right with me is that of a beautiful, young woman who seduces an older man who “can’t help himself.” It removes any accountability. But your book doesn’t do that. You had a very delicate task of holding Nathaniel accountable through the perspective of a young woman who adored him. How did you go about that?
Yeah, well, that’s really hard, right? One of the ways I tried to approach it is to make it clear that Will doesn’t want that kind of relationship with him in the earlier parts of the book. It’s never that. That’s not what she wants. But the closeness she does want from him might be powerful enough to distort that.
I feel like Will would know that script you’re talking about. And that she might even, in some naive way, understand that she could get Nathaniel’s attention through some interaction with that trope in those early meeting scenes. But I also wanted to make sure to show the cultural grooming that has happened to her prior to that moment, that she is not aware of, and how she thinks she’s in control, or she thinks she’s self-aware, but she’s not. That was a fine line. And then showing how quickly Nathaniel starts to steer and control everything that happens afterward.
It was complicated to convey a character like Will who shows a tremendous amount of agency early in the novel, and then, once she does encounter the person she’s seeking, she loses that agency really quickly. Even if she thinks she might have retained some of it. Part of the emotional journey is the slow blooming realization of how much she has lost and how much their relationship has cost her.
Yeah, it’s interesting because he shapes so much of her life, even her writing. It both puts her at a great advantage and disadvantage. So that even when she gets what she wants, it feels half empty. Obviously, she’s a fictional character, but what were some of the hopes for her that you had when you imagined the novel?
There are plenty of beautiful novels with great closure, but I resist it in my own work. My experience with the world is that closure is really hard to come by. What was really interesting to me about the circular structure of the book was to have the reader question: Wait, is this pattern going to begin again? Or has something changed and is another outcome now possible because of it? I personally believe that there is something hopeful to be taken away from that. You asked whether this is Will’s memoir of what happened to her, right? What I hope for her, and hope the reader will take away from this, is that in the act of telling everything truthfully, in all of its difficulty, specificity, and ugliness, is that she’s able to move through it, so that when that circle begins again, she and it can be different. I believe that in storytelling, art, and life—that if you really look at a story and tell it as truthfully as you can, you can become free of it in some way. You can find a different way to live in the world if you do that. So that’s what I hope for her.
Photo: Sylvie Rosokoff