“No one should be a writer unless they would die without doing it,” Nathaniel Fellow advises the students in his MFA workshop in Julie Buntin’s new novel, Famous Men.

The novel’s narrator, Wilhelmina Miles, who goes by Will, pursues writing and does not die. She instead goes to great lengths to enter Nathaniel’s orbit and keep writing.

Well before Nathaniel’s workshop, Will knows she wants to get as far away as possible from her hometown of Greening, Michigan, and the nearby art school, Rosendale Academy, where her mother works. Still, it is there that she first encounters Nathaniel’s words and endures trauma. When Will has the chance to flee to New York City after high school, she seeks freedom, her unknown father—who she presumes to be Nathaniel—and an education, which is how she finds herself sitting in on the workshop.

Will’s persistence in connecting with Nathaniel pays off. She becomes his unofficial employee in an arrangement that goes way beyond work. Her whole life becomes inextricable from Nathaniel, who is decidedly not her father and much older. When Nathaniel sees the dismal room where she is living, Will reflects on their relationship:

He’d become Nathaniel to me, the way New York had, without fanfare, become the difficult place where I lived instead of the city of my longed-for escape. And yet, just as New York could still crack me open with wonder at the most banal of moments—as when an express train whooshed by in a blur of people, people, people, the miracle of all of us, with our singular destinations and dreams—so could Nathaniel. Now, even, standing there in worn jeans I’d seen him slide to his ankles, he was both himself, concretely, and also a million other things at once: his teenage poems, those words I’d loved and followed all the way here; the name on the spine of the serious, decorative books on my mother’s shelf; those mornings in Rosendale, summer sunlight and the opening up, as I read, of some vast possibility. You could love someone for that alone. For holding both who you once were, and who you wanted to become. I could. I went to him, and he wrapped his arms around me, transmitting nothing but comfort—a first for me, that kind of hug, from a grown man.

Nathaniel grows to represent so many things to Will.

Later on, when Will goes on stage to read, she pauses briefly before speaking:

The audience didn’t like that I was up there without saying anything. I could feel what they wanted, even without seeing their faces; maybe that was my truest talent, shaping myself into whatever people wanted me to be.

Nathaniel is one of the recipients of that talent. Eventually, Will must reconsider and determine whether or how her path includes Nathaniel.

Buntin, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan, will celebrate the release of Famous Men and be in conversation with Lillian Li at Literati Bookstore on Tuesday, July 14, at 6:30 pm. Prior to Buntin's event, we caught up for an interview.

Q: When your first book, Marlena, was published, you were in New York. Now you teach at the University of Michigan. What brought you back to Michigan?
A: The job brought me back—I loved living in New York and working in publishing, but I dreamed of teaching full time, and when I heard about the position at U-M, I jumped for it with everything I had. It’s still my dream job, six years in.

Q: Famous Men is set partly in Michigan, like Marlena. What drew you to this setting again?
A: The simplest answer is that I love Michigan, especially northern Michigan, where I grew up and where I secretly wish I lived. I truly ache for Lake Michigan all summer long and feel most at peace and at home when I’m four hours north and west of Ann Arbor. I think I’m always writing a little bit out of homesickness for that place, which in some ways doesn’t fully exist anymore, as I miss most of all the northern Michigan of my childhood, which was less fancy and developed than the version that exists now. I also think it’s a wonderfully literary place, not just for the beauty and drama of the landscape and weather, but because of the many writers who have been called to it, and—perhaps!—because of how conducive both long winters and long summers are for deep reading.

Q: In your note to the reader in the advance copy, you share, “Writing my first novel, Marlena, meant submerging myself in a lot of unprocessed grief. Writing Famous Men meant submerging myself in a lot of unprocessed anger.” Tell us about this anger. Did writing the novel let you process it?
A: In some ways, yes, and in other ways, it’s all still there. I began writing this book during the first Trump administration and finished it in the second. When I started the book, my anger was unprocessed, but it felt sharp, like an arrow or a knife. The anger didn’t go away over those years of writing—if anything, it’s grown—but the birth of my son, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, Gisèle Pelicot, AI deep fakes of children, the birth of my daughter—these events have changed the anger. I thought I might be able to do something with that anger, through the vessel of the novel, understand it, maybe, make peace with it, see its sources more clearly. But as I wrote, I came to understand that the anger would always be part of me. It’s bigger now, more diffuse. It’s probably more afraid. At some point along the way, I realized one of the things the novel had to be able to hold was the question of how women can live in the face of this. And it felt like a live wire to me, a very interesting one, to find ways of exploring complicity in this context, and women who have been forced into making choices that are compromised from the start.

Q: For your character Wilhelmina Miles, the trajectory of her life is set in motion by encounters with men. In some ways, her interest in literature is difficult to disentangle from men—and one man in particular. Do you think Will’s interest in literature becomes her own, instead of a means to an end? Why or why not? 
A: This is such a dynamic question—in some ways, I hope it’s one of the questions that the reader might take away from the book, argue about. I see her initial interest in literature as something that is very much hers, even though it’s inspired by Nathaniel’s work—it’s a collaboration, in a sense, the way all reading is, but it’s completed in her mind and imagination, and she owns it. But once her life intersects with Nathaniel and she begins to bend her aspirations to his will, losing sight of herself in different ways—well that’s the conflict, really, one of the driving tensions of the book. I think of the text itself as her reclaiming her power through this act of telling their story on her terms, not his—that’s why I tried to call attention, in places, to how the story is structured, for example.

Q: As Will shapes her life around Nathaniel’s in New York, she notices, “It’s amazing, what a person can adjust to. Depending on how you read it, my life with Nathaniel was either the most unexpected situation I could find myself in, or proof of the existence of fate.” Still, Will is uneasy at times, and there are several turning points. How does Will start to see her decisions from other perspectives as the book progresses?
A: This was one of the hardest things about writing in Will’s perspective—she’s a character who is self-aware about so many things, but at the same time, there’s much she’s refusing to see, to acknowledge to herself, or to acknowledge fully. Those moments when something puts pressure on the story she wants to believe about herself, about Nathaniel, were some of the hardest to write—and I tried to structure the book so that they accumulate slowly and then with more density as the novel unfolds, until Will is almost backed into a corner, forced to confront the truth, which also means confronting herself. I know this quality in her makes her a difficult character to spend time with, in some ways—but that’s also what made her interesting to me, and what made her feel true.

Q: When the chance to expose Nathaniel’s behaviors arises, Will is torn. In what ways does this conundrum reflect the #MeToo movement?
A: I was—am—very interested in that pivot point of #MeToo, how there was a sense—at least I remember this—of like, cultural whiplash. Suddenly, the things that so many women had to deal with were no longer just things we whispered about amongst ourselves—we could say it, scream it. Demand better. I found that moment really exhilarating—there was grief in it, but it was so hopeful, too. I was fascinated by the idea of a character who might really struggle with that change … who can’t, for various reasons both internal and external, accept what that cultural reckoning makes her face about her own story.

Q: Famous Men questions writing and the writing world. Will laments, “If only there’d been more teenage girls in those pages. Or if someone had taught me it was okay to like them. Maybe then I wouldn’t be standing there in the dark, reading the same old books.” Do you wish what Will wishes, and why?
A: Unlike Will, who is really isolated in many ways in her world of Nathaniel’s influence, I was lucky to have some formative teachers who encouraged me to follow my own interests as a writer. My first novel was about girlhood—and I know it’s in part because of those teachers that I felt I could pursue that subject matter in a literary way. But that wasn’t a straightforward path for me, and I had to fight through a thicket of a lot of voices, especially in workshops questioning that material, its seriousness, its artistic value. In some ways, this novel is an exploration of what happens if those voices stop you, if you let them in too much. 

Q: Famous Men is not your only book this year. You co-edited Notes to New Mothers with Rebecca Knight, which will be out in September. How did this collection come about?
A: Yes! It’s such a different project, but in a lot of ways, it was essential to the making of Famous Men. After my first child was born, I really struggled to write fiction. I was, however, taking notes about postpartum life—my newborn’s daily routines, silly things he did, my own healing. My dear friend from my MFA program, novelist and screenwriter Rebecca Dinerstein Knight, was also a new mom and grappling with what that transition meant for her creative life. But she was also taking notes. We started exchanging some of those notes and found each other’s writing revelatory. We asked other writer-mothers if they had similar text—real-time dispatches about the process of becoming a mom. So many did! We stitched what we got together into a kind of communal record of the first postpartum year, built out of hundreds of entries, some as short as a few words, the longest a couple of pages. It’s a really special, beautiful book, and the pleasure of making it helped me find myself as a writer again during a difficult transition period in my life. It’s very much the book I would have wanted as a new mother—raw, wise, and so, so honest.

Q: What is on your stack to read?
A: I am looking forward to reading so many things—it’s an exciting year for books. I can’t wait for Louise Kennedy’s Stations, and I’m also looking forward to work by Helen Zell Writers’ Program alumni. Sarah Anderson’s debut, Fallow, is forthcoming from FSG in September, and early next year, Random House is publishing Jen Galvão’s gorgeous novel, Maria, Maria. Can’t wait for new books from some long-time favorites, too, including A Tender Age by Chang-Rae Lee.

Q: With two novels published and a forthcoming edited volume, what are you working on next?   
A: I’m working on another novel! This one has a larger cast and is told in third person. Right now, some of it is set in Ann Arbor.

Martha Stuit is a former reporter and current librarian.   

Julie Buntin discusses "Famous Men" with Lillian Li at Literati Bookstore, 124 East Washington Street,
Ann Arbor, on Tuesday, July 14, at 6:30 pm.