Junah at the End of the World is about, well, Junah, a twelve-year old boy going through the uncertainty of Y2K. It’s funny to look back at that time and to think about how different things were, to think about how technology was still kept at a distance, and to think about what that distance meant for our relationship with it. Why did you decide to write a novel about Y2K?
I love your notion of distance here. Distance was always at the heart of the novel, mainly because I wrote it during the early frantic months of the COVID pandemic. This was, as I’m sure you recall, during the quarantines and during the shutdowns. This was during the panic. I had just moved to a new city for a teaching position, and the whole scene was a ghost town. Those who did show up wore masks and flinched if someone came within six feet. Everyone at home, everything online. It felt logical (even natural) during those months to write a novel about someone who feels distant from the world while also feeling desperate to connect through art. For me, that whole year was a swirl of apocalyptic narratives, political tensions, and weird religious takes (all of which converged during Y2K a good two decades before returning for an encore during COVID).
I never quite made that connection, although it makes sense. It’s interesting how technology played a role, albeit a very different one during COVID too. Rather than fearing technology, that’s what we used to close the distance. So when telling your story, I’m curious, why a twelve-year-old boy? How do you think the story may have changed if it was told from the point-of-view of a different character (age, gender, etc.)?
Why twelve? I needed the innocence. The hope, even. I needed someone who felt the world was ending just as he was coming to the age where he could actually participate in its best parts. I also needed someone who could get deeply sentimental and kind of obsessive about the assignment (filling a time capsule with, as his teacher puts it, “what it means to be alive in Carolina at the end of the world”). Why a boy? Probably because it’s such a viciously auto-biographical book, and because the voice is (though inflated and lyricized for the sake of preciousness) more or less my voice. I think if Junah were older, he’d be less scared of apocalypse, especially one as flimsily constructed as Y2K. I also think he’d be less tender in his end-time aspirations, which, in the book, are things like approaching your first crush, seeing your divorced parents reunite, facing down your bully, etc. Not sure how the book would be different if we tinkered with the gender, but I love having had the opportunity here to think about it. As is, I think Junah exhibits a lot of qualities that have been traditionally labeled as “feminine” (especially in the South), and his eventual relationship with Sadie features a fair amount of gender-bending and role-swapping, so that part of it might come out about the same.
I have to ask—what was your experience with the New Years Eve of 2000? Was it as concerning as Junah’s? Did your life change after it?
My actual experience with the millennium could hardly be described as apocalyptic. For one, I was sixteen years old and, by nature, way more skeptical than Junah. If I’m being brutally honest, I just remember thinking the entire concept—widespread chaos caused by computers’ inability to carry the extra zero—felt manufactured and absurd, something churches and news cycles would use to agitate boomers. I was deep into punk culture at that time, and the hysteria leading up to New Year’s Eve was just another part of “adult society” that I rolled my eyes at. Forgive the snobbery, yeah? I was sixteen and a mess. Junah’s far more curious. Open-minded even, especially where ambiguity is concerned. I will say this, though--the novel’s situation is wholly autobiographical. The religious mother building stockpiles in the garage; the dismissive father who shrugs the whole thing off; the eccentric teachers trying in their own way to help you survive the moment—all that was straight out of life.
I also felt like the world ending via computers in the year 2000 was unrealistic, although at that age, I probably didn’t know what could or couldn’t happen. That being said, Y2K doesn’t actually feel that long ago, but it’s been twenty-five years now! If you had to rewrite the book with Junah in a more modern-day conflict, what conflict would you choose?
I had occasion to think about this over the summer when my brother-in-law asked me if there would be a sequel to Junah at the End of the World. He’s an electrician who listens to about a hundred audiobooks a year, mainly series, so it seemed logical to him that I’d do a Junah at 9/11 and a Junah During the Trump Years, etc., etc. But I told him the truth--that, as much as I liked Junah’s voice, the whole project seemed inextricably tied to Y2K. Which is to say, the whole project seemed to rely on what it was like to be a kid in the nineties and what it was like to realize that, even if the world didn’t end, it was changing in some weird and irreversible way. But to be a good sport, I thought about it, and I told him that, if Junah were to return and narrate a different cultural event, it might be the Great Recession of 2008. The Recession feels appropriate, at least for millennials such as Junah. Most millennials recall Y2K as a defining event in their childhood or their teenage years, but it was the Recession that ushered into true adulthood. It happened, for most of us, around the time we graduated college or finished trade school or sat through whatever other rite-of-passage was supposed to deliver you into, if not happiness, then at least security. Except it didn’t. I feel like Junah’s optimism (or whatever’s left of it by then) would play nicely in that kind of economic and spiritual despair.
Ah, yes, despair. Speaking of despair and conflicts, Junah’s mother says “I’m saying you have to kill a bad word before a good one takes its place.” What an interesting, powerful line. I interpret this concept to be true for more than just words, but I’m curious to know if you have any examples of this word-sentiment in particular. What bad words do you think need to be killed? How does one kill a bad word?
She says this in response to the word “Christian,” and her basic point is that, in many Western contexts, including the strangely evangelical American South that Junah finds himself in, the word “Christian” (and, more broadly, “Christianity”) has come to signify the exact opposite of its original denotation. Hate instead of love. Greed instead of generosity. General creepiness and insufferable amounts of bullshit instead of what you see in the life of Christ and in the early church, which is radical social justice, first-rate sincerity, and insane amounts of good art. Like Junah’s mom, I could stand to see this word die so that a more honest one could take its place. To your question about how to kill a bad word, I think it begins with simply acknowledging the etymological drift (i.e., “This used to signify X, but now it seems to point at Y”). I’m not a deconstructionist, per se, but I am interested in distancing myself from careless and/or manipulative handling of words; and I’m thrilled by any opportunity to renew the language. You asked what bad terms I thought were due a death/rebirth? All of them. The tribal/political designations (which seem to me to obscure rather than illuminate someone’s priorities). The cancerous double-speak of corporations (I was told last week by someone whose annual bonus is twice my entire salary that “Leadership is looking forward to having an honest conversation about the next steps involved in improving compensation.”) And probably—and I say this as someone who just celebrated sixteen years of marriage—a lot of the abstractions we toss around with the people we love. Words like “intimacy” and “forgiveness” and “trust.” The realities of marriage have always felt (to me) too complex (and too concrete) for glib abstractions.
While Junah’s mother has some words of wisdom she passes on to him, Junah’s father is particularly full of profound ideas that he shares with his son, one being the use of pockets. He thinks that pockets hold all our secrets and that you can learn the most from a man from his pockets. What about you? If you emptied your pockets, what would we find? What do those things say about you?
My pockets are, most days, empty. And this emptiness is, now that I’m thinking about it, at least somewhat emblematic. The truth is, I’m eternally broke, and the little money I make I tend to spend on my kids or wife in some sweet-but-shortsighted kind of way. So there’s nothing of any real value in my pockets. I’m also not a big cellphone guy, since that kind of accessibility to easy entertainment would ruin me. So if I can move through the day with nothing in there, or maybe just a pen or a mint—wonderful. What does this say about me? I’d like it to say, “He travelled lightly and didn’t get too attached.” More likely it says, “Here is someone who thinks little of the future.”
I love that. I don’t carry a purse because I don’t need to lug around a ton of stuff, so my pocket holds my wallet, keys, and phone—and to top that off, I, like you, think a smartphone would ruin me, so I only have a flip phone.
On a kind-of-barely-related note, you sometimes include conversations signaled with colons as opposed to quotes in the story. What would you say is different about those conversations than the ones written in a typical prose style? Why did you choose to format them differently?
I appreciate you noticing that. The goal with this book was to write an anti-novel. Not pure fragmentation but close to it. I wanted to achieve cohesion via Junah’s voice, some recurring metaphors, and the countdown to December 31st. Otherwise, though, I wanted to rip out anything that felt like connective tissue, and I wanted to let the voice “jump” from scrap to scrap, movement based less in linear logic and more in associative play. Just drop the riffs in there like Junah drops the artifacts into the time capsule. The colons (paired with the bald, untagged dialogue) work in this mode. They felt especially appropriate for Junah’s conversations with his father, nearly all of which take place late at night and over the phone. One reader said, “The dad felt disembodied.” That’s true. Most dads back then did.
I love how rooted in place this is. The school, his home, the place he hides out in... Why do you feel the settings are important to the story?
I’d echo what I said earlier about setting out to write an anti-novel. Whereas a traditional novel generates energy through linear plot, generously-developed characters, and well-timed doses of dramatic action; an anti-novel has to woo readers based on its language (usually snappy lyrical fragments) and its concepts (something substantive enough to justify the static quality of the text). I knew that by structuring the book in this way I would lose some of those traditional/conventional mechanisms (especially the dramatic action), and that as a result I’d lose most traditional/conventional readers. I’m thinking of my own mother here, who loves a good page-turner, and who said of this book, “I’m not sure I got it.” But setting—by which I mean the sense of place achieved largely through distinctive concrete nouns, or what Tony Hoagland calls the “material imagination”—seems to be just as available to short and punchy anti-novels (like Junah) as 300-page bestsellers. So setting was important in the regard that it was a tool available to this kind of a narrowly-idiosyncratic project. But it was also important because of the book’s premise. Junah’s assignment is to capture “Carolina” in his time capsule. He, as the novel’s organizing intelligence, is under the pressure to curate a vivid set of place-based artifacts.
In Junah’s story, there is frequently a disconnect between him and everyone else: Rusty the bully, Sadie his girlfriend, his mother the evangelist, and even God. You’ve also got a few short stories published online (which I love, by the way). This includes, “Florida Man,” “Self-Portrait at Thirty-Three,” and “Wasp Queen.” These all also seem to have characters who feel lonely and disconnected from others. What about this topic interests you?
I try to avoid generalizations in interviews, but I’m in a mood, so here goes: I think loneliness (or, more accurately, alienation) is the basis for all literature. I think when someone feels connected (or, heaven forbid, validated/empowered) in their lived existence, you probably don’t feel the need to spend time constructing linguistic worlds. You’re too busy (and happy) living in the real one. Writers, though, usually turn to language because reality is coming up short. Barry Hannah once said, “I write out of a greed for lives and language.” But what precedes that “greed”? For me, it was loneliness and disconnection. Conversations, in particular, were always such a let down. No one seemed to be saying anything. No one seemed to be telling the truth. And so you replay that stuff in your head, and you begin (years before ever entertaining the idea of becoming a writer) to revise the bad writing of reality. You think to yourself, “It would have been more interesting if he’d said this…” or “Wouldn’t it have been crazy if that had happened?” The impulse to create, then, is responding to the world’s failure to entertain. If tedium wasn’t so damn tedious, probably no one would create anything.
Are there any other themes you’d say you commonly explore?
Nostalgia. Work. Neighborhoods. Depression. Sex. You know: all the typical sad white boy stuff.
Are you working on anything new? If so, what themes does that text explore?
I’m currently working on a non-fiction book called Married Sex. Hobart actually ran two of its essays (“Perfect Sex” and “Ugly Sex”). Image published another one, and the reception was provocative. This project doesn’t share much with Junah, outside of being fragmented/essayistic, but I’ve been told that my voice carries across both books. It’s been a fun book to write, and it’s dedicated to wife, who’s been putting up with my weird shit for sixteen years. It is, as the title implies, about sex and the role of sex in a marriage. But it’s also a fairly existential book, and I once pitched it to an agent as “A book about dying pretending to be a book about living dressed up as a book about fucking.” Naturally, the agent passed.
It definitely sounds quite different from Junah, but I don’t know why the agent ‘naturally’ passed. I think that’s a great pitch. Tell me about your process for writing Junah’s book though—particularly getting in the head of an adolescent boy.
I channeled two influences for this. Edisto by Padgett Powell and The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger. The philosophical preciousness came from Simons Manigault in Edisto (and you’ll notice the homage in Junah’s surname). The wounded-but-still-hoping direct address was all Holden. Junah’s voice doesn’t happen if, twenty years ago, I don’t get obsessed with both of these books.
The major task that Junah takes on (very seriously, in fact) is putting together a time-capsule, then many time capsules. Have you ever put together a time-capsule? Do you remember what was in it?
I’m such a good and thorough liar that, at this point, I can’t remember if the time capsule assignment was (a) something that actually happened to me, (b) something I saw in a movie or read in a book, or (c) something I came up with solely for the sake of this project. I’d love to stand behind option a, but I’m honestly leaning towards option b. The truth is, my teachers were never quite as eccentric as Miss Meechum or Coach Mac. During the time I was growing up, the nineties, the public schools in South Carolina were at the absolute bottom of the nation in every conceivable metric, and administrators all across the state brilliantly concluded that a healthy diet of standardized tests was the way out of last place. That’s what I actually remember from my early school years—the sense of desperation surrounding the curriculum. In that sense, Junah at the End of the World is almost a kind of wish fulfillment, as I would’ve given anything for an assignment as personal and quirky as the time capsule.
If you had to put together a time capsule now, what would you put in it?
Because I could spend months writing an entire essay in response to this question, let’s put a constraint in place, can we? Let’s say this time capsule has exactly enough space to accommodate the following: one book, one album, one snack, one mini-bottle, and one sentimental item. The book: Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. The album: Diamond Jubilee by Cindy Lee. The snack: green apple Hi-Chew. The mini-bottle: Tanqueray. The sentimental item: a photograph of my kids playing in the first/only snow Charleston has seen in seven years (it’s night there, and no one has a winter coat, but everyone’s happy anyway). Not sure what this inventory would suggest to whoever dug it up, but there it is.
I loved the ending. The last lines say, “I could not decide how I felt, or even what I was expected to feel, mainly because I did not know what the light was supposed to signify when it hit the ground—a world about to end, or a world hardly begun. It was because I did not know that I looked even harder.” We never get to learn what Jonah thinks post-Y2K fiasco, so I want to know what you think. Would you say that the world ended? Or that it hardly just begun once that ball dropped on the eve of 2000?
At the time of this interview, I’m feeling optimistic. So let’s say that Junah wakes up in the new year and realizes that, although the assignment has reached its technical end, his desire to look and to experience and to curate and to share—all that’s still exactly where it’s always been.
That’s certainly optimistic, and beautiful. Full of the hope you mentioned Junah having. All right, last question: what do you hope people take away from your writing?
Music.
