“The literary world” is a phrase I’ve heard spoken too many times to count—and it’s a world I’ve been immersed in for all of my adult life. But never has that world been so thoughtfully dissected as in Julie Buntin’s sophomore novel, Famous Men (Random House, 2026).
A reimagined bildungsroman for the #MeToo age, Famous Men tells the story of Wilhelmina (Will) Miles, following her from rural Michigan to the Big Apple as she runs from her claustrophobic small-town life (and her mother’s inappropriate boyfriend), toward the literary world she’s long been dreaming of. When what Will finds in New York first exceeds and then demolishes her wildest expectations, Will is forced to reckon with the truth of her past—and, ultimately, to define for herself who she is, as a writer and as a woman. In other words: she’s forced to grow up.
If Buntin’s debut Marlena (Henry Holt, 2017) heralded her as a major new talent, Famous Men cements her as one of today’s foremost novelists. I spoke with Julie over Zoom in July about taking formal risks, the power a first-person retrospective narrator wields over time, and the secret ways we think about our own work.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The Rumpus: What is this book about for you? What’s the tl;dr synopsis you’d give to a friend?
Julie Buntin: There’s the public-facing thing you say about a book that’s a bit rehearsed: Famous Men tells the story of a young woman from a small town in Michigan. An offhand comment from her mother leads her to think this famous writer from her hometown might be the dad Will’s never known, which launches her on a journey of self-discovery where she falls in love with poetry and goes off looking for him. He’s not the person she wanted him to be, but they embark on a complicated relationship that changes the course of her life and forces her to confront who she is and what she might become. There’s that plot-focused answer.
Privately, I think about it differently: For me, this is so much a book about becoming a writer and what it means to find your voice, about the danger and seduction of influence. It takes aim at some conventions of creative writing and at institutions, at what we ask of writers in the making of their stories. I was trying to make sense of spaces I’d swum through in my own coming of age as a writer—the ways I’d been able to move through them and the ways I hadn’t. What I’d lost, as well as what I’d gained.
I also thought of it a little bit, structurally, as a writer’s biography. I wondered what would happen if you gave a peripheral character in a famous writer’s life the attention of a full-on writer’s biography—their origin story, their development as a writer. That felt sneaky and subversive, to me. But again, that’s part of the private scaffolding for the book.
Rumpus: Was that the impulse from which Famous Men sprung?
Buntin: This book started in the summer of 2019, a couple years after my first book came out. I’d begun a different project that had a character in it who would become Will, the protagonist in Famous Men. I was really stuck, mired in questions I think many people struggle with after first books: “What if that was all I had? Can I do this again?” All the things about writing that have nothing to do with the writing itself and are all about ego. I was at MacDowell for the first time, and I felt the pressure of that too, the intensity of this famous place that I’d gotten into because of, I assumed, my first book, which I didn’t know if I could follow up!
So I wasn’t writing very well, but then I found a copy of Philip Roth’s wonderfully energetic and fun Zuckerman Unbound in my studio. Separately, my studio had this giant window with no curtain that made me feel very exposed. There was something about the combination of those two things—the image of the crazy, curtainless window and my prickling sense that someone might be watching me; Philip Roth and his sensibility and freedom, the sense that he had worked through something and come out the other side as a writer who’d do or say anything he wanted—that gave me an unresolvable little knot of tension, which I was able to use to create the thrust of a story around this character from a different project.
It’s tricky to answer this question because it’s not super legible. The originating impulse was a mish mash of images and emotions and insecurities, and then, somehow, there was enough friction for me to create forward momentum. Within maybe a day, I’d settled on starting with this character, airlifted from that other project, who is looking for her father who she doesn’t know. That kickstarted the plot.
Rumpus: A key moment early in Famous Men finds Will feeling watched through a window. Does this mean you knew about Tray, and that dynamic, early in the drafting?
Buntin: I was always attached to starting with Will as an adolescent, before she meets Nathaniel [the famous writer]. Going back to the question of what I think this book is about, I wanted to question the rules I might’ve internalized about the most dynamic place to start a story. For me, starting with Will in adolescence changes in a big way what this book is about—you could say it’s about a relationship, but if you look at it structurally, it’s really the story of Will’s life, how she got herself into this mess and how she gets herself out of it—or tries to. It felt so important to me to start with young Will, with the awakening of Will as a writer, of thinking of herself as a writer. Nathaniel is involved, but only in her imagination.
So, the image of the window and what happens to Will, the question of Will’s being watched and what that violation is, and how it changes how she thinks of herself—the way that the male gaze is made so concrete—that was as foundational to this book as Nathaniel himself.
It felt to me that there was a more expected, immediately dramatic way of telling this story, which would begin with the moment Will and Nathaniel meet in real life. We’ve seen that before. But to me, Famous Men is really more interested in the different ways the male gaze can put pressure on a young woman’s life from early on, and how that might lead to a relationship like Will and Nathaniel’s. It felt like I could make choices structurally—around when I started, when I dilated time, when I chose to make cuts—that would allow me to play with, on a formal level, what we expect from stories about this kind of dynamic.
Rumpus: Speaking of form, the book is doled out in nine very intentional-seeming sections. How easily did you land on this structure?
Buntin: I was reading a lot of classics during the years I was working on this book, and in particular Dickens, a writer whose influence on my work is vast. I was thinking about how one of my great pleasures as a reader is a book where you start with a character in one place, where they’re young, and you experience the sweep of many years with them, and you get to a place at the end where you feel like you’ve been on a journey together. Or that sense you can get, which to me is such a specific pleasure that you can only get from novels, of “I have lived a lifetime in the seven days that it took me to read this book”—the sense of a novel giving you a door into a different way of experiencing time. I felt attracted to the idea of writing a book that unfolded over a long span of time. But if you do that, you encounter all these challenges, because you have to figure out how to move a character through time. You don’t want to show every single day of their lives, that’s boring! When do you zoom in, when do you zoom away, when do you cut? I tried to think of those different chunks of the book, those nine sections, as times that were in some way pivotal to Will’s development as a writer, or to her relationship with Nathaniel. Each one had to contain some kind of escalation, as well as a turn or deepening on both of those planes.
I also thought about the differences in effect of a pure cut—of a section that ends and we pick up some years later and we don’t know what’s happened in between—and something like the long montage section I have in second person, where I wondered what it would feel like to, in a coming of age story like this, gesture toward what’s happening in that breathless, overwhelmed way where you have a feeling of a character lost in the waves of their own life, like time’s passing but the character doesn’t have a grip on it. I was thinking about things like the section in To the Lighthouse when the house falls asleep.
Rumpus: That switch to second person felt like a notable risky—but ultimately such a successful—choice!
Buntin: I wanted to take formal risks. I love when you’re reading a novel and it shows you another dimension that it didn’t have before. I think of that moment in To the Lighthouse as being like that. I liked the emotional effect of trying to grasp that feeling I think we all have sometimes that life and time have gotten away from us. Second person is a perspective that allows for a lot of telling really fast, and there’s sort of a rhythmic thing that can happen with it—I found that when I settled on that, it added such a palpable feeling of Will’s stuckness.
There’s another section in the book that’s this aphoristic list-ish thing of stuff Will’s overheard Nathaniel say that she can’t shake, which is another way of interrupting time. We don’t know when she heard those things, how young she was, at what point in their relationship… we just know that they’re part of how this relationship has burrowed so totally into her psyche.
So, those were different ways of thinking about time in the book, and how to convey the impact of a relationship like this over the course of a person’s life.
Rumpus: As a writer, I felt so connected to Will; I wondered how a reader who isn’t connected to the literary world will move through the book.
Buntin: I remember, before I got really deep into it, having a lot of reservations about writing a book about writers and writing. Just feeling like, “Oh god I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to be a writer who writes a book about writers and writing.” And yet at the same time feeling really drawn to stare down some of the questions and complications that I experience around that in my professional life and creative life. I unfortunately am not a writer who can control my own interests. It’s so hard to write anyway! [Laughs] If I’m interested in something, I can’t let it go.
Marlena is a first-person retrospective narrator, and so is Famous Men. But for me, Will is such a different perspective because she is a character who is self-aware and wise in certain ways but who is completely incapable of transforming her self-awareness into change or action, which is something I think many of us struggle with.
Rumpus: Especially in our twenties!
Buntin: Especially in our twenties. That’s part of her coming of age, if you will. As self-aware as she can be, she’s also a character who is refusing to look directly at the truth about certain things.
Rumpus: I suspect that’s where readers will connect, whether or not they are writers. Those emotional beats will resonate.
About a third of the way through the book, Lili, a graduate student of Nathaniel’s who Will slowly becomes close to, shares a story of a teen girl from her hometown who has been burning down barns out of boredom. This story glowed brightly for me even before I had a full sense of the novel’s scope, and I’d love to hear you talk about it.
Buntin: Again, part of the fabric of this book is an investigation of what it means to write—what are we doing when we write? What is fiction? What is poetry? What are we making? Where does it come from? What are we taking, what are we using, how are we using it? Lili has this story and she wants to write about it. But Will is like, you don’t know anything about that kind of feeling. They’re two characters who both hear this story and want to write about it, but they want to write about it in different ways, with different relationships to the material—and it didn’t happen to either of them. But they both see themselves in it and want to take it and use it and make it into something else.
I’m interested in the relationship between writing and life, what we think is okay to take and what isn’t. What we demand of writers in terms of their relationship to their own material, what’s appropriation and what isn’t. All of that is really fascinating to me.
Rumpus: This is likely me bringing my own preoccupations to the text, but there was also something about the barn-burning anecdote that seemed to speak to differing ideas of girlhood. The ways Lili and Will are thinking of this teenage girl, even though they’re not so much older than her, even though they’re still maybe burning down barns, metaphorically.
Buntin: Definitely. And the idea of what girlhood drives you to—Will is a character whose impulse to “burn the barn” has really turned inward, toward the destruction of herself. Lili, maybe, is a character who would metabolize that kind of impulse in a different way.
Rumpus: Talk to me about foreshadowing, which this novel does a lot of. How do you decide what to foreshadow, and when?
Buntin: I’ll answer that in an adjacent way. One reason I like a first-person retrospective voice versus, for instance, first-person present tense, is because you get that elasticity of time. Depending on where the narrator is in the telling—the vantage point from which they are telling the story—you have access, as a writer, to everything they know between the event and where they are as they tell about the event, which is a nice canvas for foreshadowing, if you want to add momentum for analysis, interpretation, contradicting those later when cutting events against each other. I’m a writer who likes tonal play and language; first-person retrospective gives me space to do things with tone and form that I couldn’t do if the perspective was fully aligned with the events as they happen.
And then there’s just the fact that if you have a character who is telling the story of something that’s happened to them in the past, they know as they tell it what happened. As a reader myself, I don’t like too many tricks; I don’t want a narrator to withhold for the sake of generating suspense. So I’m sensitive about when I foreshadow, and how. I try to keep it psychologically in tune with how it would feel to unpack a story beat by beat, chronologically, and not to get ahead of myself. It’s this fine dance of perspective and character, and then plot comes in a secondary way.
Rumpus: You wrangle some seriously complicated personalities in this novel. Were there characters who were particularly challenging to render?
Buntin: Will was the hardest. She’s the engine of the book, and the music of her voice came easily in some ways, but the balance of knowingness and unknowingness, of when she faces the truth and when she doesn’t, the scenes where she has to confront what she’s hiding from herself, those scenes were hard to write. I rewrote them many times.
Nathaniel was actually—fun is a weird word, he was very unpleasant to be around sometimes, but he was easier for me. Probably because of people I’ve known… I tried exceedingly hard to make a character who couldn’t be pinned to any one real person, living or dead, but I also wanted him to be recognizable for readers who’ve been in these spaces. I was playing with a type, but he couldn’t just be a type. Also, he himself has a persona, like many good teachers, and knows that he has a persona, and he himself plays to a type within the text itself. He had to feel like he had dimensions. He had to be surprising, to me and to Will. But once I figured him out, he sort of wrote himself. I didn’t struggle with knowing what he’d say or do. Even his backstory came easily to me.
Will’s mom was sometimes challenging. She’s a very Midwestern, repressed character who won’t talk about things, and I had to think about how that would work. But those scenes, the scenes with her and Will, especially in the latter half of the book, are some of the scenes I’m proudest of.
Rumpus: Those moments felt pivotal.
Buntin: Returning to the private ways I think about the book, there is the story of the violation of Nathaniel, but then there’s also this story about the violation with the window and the boyfriend and Will’s mom. And in some ways, that is the thing, of all the things, that Will has to resolve—this question of who did and didn’t protect her in that moment. That is one of the long balls of the book that is really internal to Will but undergirds everything about her.
You never know how readers will take things, but I think there’s one way of reading this book where you’re like, “Did Will change? What changes?” For me, it’s in these really interior shifts that those changes happen. And in the act of taking ownership of your story, telling it yourself, your way, which can allow for transformation.
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