I first met Adam Ross on my front doorstep years ago, back when I hosted The Porch’s Lit Mag League, a literary journal reading club. We would invite contributors and editors to join us virtually to discuss writing and the editing experience. When we read the Sewanee Review, Ross, the magazine’s Editor-in-Chief, generously agreed to meet with us in person.
Ross has always been generous with his time, eager to talk writing with eager writers, happy to offer advice, tell stories, and point the writing community toward emerging writers he describes as "major." He has done so much to build the literary village in Nashville and beyond, and his latest novel, Playworld, a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice, is sure to go down as one of the major works of our time.
Ross is also the author of a story collection, Ladies and Gentlemen, and another novel, Mr. Peanut, which was selected as one of the best books of the year by The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Economist. He has been a fellow in fiction at the American Academy in Berlin and a Hodder Fellow for Fiction at Princeton University. This interview has been edited for clarity and condensed for brevity.
LB: Playworld is a robust novel loosely based on your personal experience growing up in New York as a child actor. It's also your first book published in over ten years. Can you tell us about the origins of the story? It reads like it's been bubbling in your psyche since adolescence. When did you feel ready to write the story?
AR: It's one of the really mysterious aspects of the creative process, which is… When are you ready to tackle something? Because as any writer knows, you may feel completely ready, and then you get into the mix of composing, and lo and behold, you're not ready at all. I had been thinking about the subject matter of Playworld, or the material, since before the early aughts. It was an extraordinarily long gestation period. I felt like the material of my childhood really required a lot of distance and also a lot of invention. Like, a lot of invention. After Mr. Peanut and Ladies and Gentlemen had their run, I was like, okay, I'm [ready.]
I wrote about 70 pages of an opening of Playworld, an Act One called "Gun." It takes place in 1999 and begins on this horrible day in the life of 33-year-old Griffin Hurt. I write these 70 pages, and I sell them to Knopf. And they give me a significant advance on this book about this kid at this age. I start to write Act Two called "Playworld," which was meant to be the backstory, and the novel grinds to a halt.
I spent a year trying to figure out how to get out of this terrible situation. I really felt stuck. And then I was talking to a friend about it, because I was sort of in despair, and I was like, "I don't know. I think I may have to abandon this." And that person was like, "Well, tell me about it." So I said, "Well, you know, it's about this crazy wrestling coach I had and these crazy relationships I had with adults, and the fact that our parents didn't know what we were doing with our lives. We were just roaming free in New York — but it didn't seem strange at the time." And my friend said, "That's a great line." I went back and wrote the prologue whole cloth. I mean, obviously it went through revisions.
But the point here is that readiness has everything to do with finding the voice for the novel, and finding the voice for the novel determines its content in ways you cannot anticipate. And this is where we get to something I think all apprentice writers have to learn. It's a grossly inefficient process. And if you don't have that voice, that lodestar on a sentence to sentence, paragraph to paragraph, chapter to chapter basis, you're going to be lost.
Once you establish that voice, level of style, content, and quality, anything that deviates from it is going to be glaringly problematic.
LB: Sometimes, when writing work based on traumatic events, it can be hard to find a true and authentic telling because our minds are still working hard to protect those unhealed parts of our consciousness. The unhealed parts on the page can then present like they're thin, mile high, very distant, or kept at an arm's length. But that really wasn't the case in Playworld. Everything feels vibrant and immediate. How were you able to create that vibrancy on that page? Were there times in revision when you caught yourself keeping that arm's length?
It's not autobiographical. I know certain settings like the back of my hand… in terms of talking about what New York smelled, tasted, and felt like in that era. I did research about the city I grew up in. There are scenes that take place in buildings in which I've never been, that I've invented. To make it work on the page, you're gonna have to invent. While I do have a younger brother, my younger brother never rode a horse bareback on a golf course in the snow.
LB: Great scene, by the way.
AR: Fiction has to defamiliarize the event. You have to figure out other ways to come at it. Because I think that autobiographical experience exerts such a gravitational force that deadens your language and you need to invent…. It's all fucking made up.
LB: I totally understand. And I get the frustration of putting something in a novel and then people ask if it really happened.
AR: But that's the compliment. You have to take it as a compliment because otherwise it drives you crazy. The illusion is that it's such a vibrant, lived, emotionally supercharged experience—but that's the illusion.
LB: I think what I'm getting at with that question is less about the discrete events that happened but the underlying spine of the story. There are essays, short stories, parts of novels that I've tried to write, but I just don't have the distance and the understanding yet. I haven't matured enough as a human to really see with a 360 view and render it on the page the way it needs to be done.
AR: It's partly distance, but I think the fictive element requires that you invent things in order to capture the meaning of something in all of its complexity. It just requires that you invent. It requires that defamiliarization. Defamiliarization is not "Oh, I changed it enough that it's not exactly what happened." Defamiliarization is creating every element of it because you're trying to approximate a feeling or an experience.
LB: Reading Playworld, I admired your ability to remain in the first-person mind of a 14 year-old and balance that with the adult looking back. There were so many times when Griffin's voice would sound like an adult—the opening sentence is the obvious example. I've got a few others that I marked, if you don't mind… In "A Crisis of Confidence," the father is playing the piano, and the mother has her wine glass cradled to her chest:
"When my father performed, her expression was always an odd combination of admiration and melancholy, as if the melody reminded her of something from long ago, or a place to which you were sure, upon leaving, you'd never return."
I just loved that image, because it is very much like a child watching their mother and working through something they're not quite grasping yet. But the subtext is there. Or in "The Agony of Defeat," the boiler room scene… That one is rough to read. It took me a while to get through it, because again, the details—everything is so vibrant and real seeming:
"Oh, how dutifully I played along, certain that he was listening to my footfalls, sure that if I were to stop in my tracks, the slack between us would go taut. Not that I ever stopped."
How'd you manage the balance while staying true to the voice?
AR: This is such a good question. It was the biggest technical challenge of the novel. When we were first editing it, I had two really great editors. Eric Smith, who is also my managing editor at The Sewanee Review, is as trusted as my editor at Knopf, Todd Portnowitz. [Eric] read through the novel and asked, "What do you think the through line of the novel is?" I thought the through line was Griffin's relationship with Naomi. He said the through line is the relationship between Griffin future and Griffin present. There are going to be times where Griffin future has to clearly distinguish himself from Griffin in the present.
You pointed out some really good moments there. Griffin future, in that moment with the mother, is remembering that unexplainable, inexplicable wistfulness and melancholy in her expression that he clocked as a kid. Because he's a perceptive kid but he doesn't have language for what's going on. Griffin future, at that moment, has to indicate that the melancholy he perceives with his mother is a kind of foreshadowing of a relational dynamic between the mother and the father that you're going to come to understand later that is so bound up with Griffin's father's talent and genius and character flaws, right? So that is just another way to say, Lisa… It's really fucking hard. It's really, really hard, and it's part of the reason it takes a long time.
Because you feel like you have to tell it in the first person, and then you realize you have to establish a point of telling that is recollection—but not in tranquility. The other scene you point out, the really horrific dungeon scene where the wrestling coach is doing things to Griffin and his cohorts that they don't have language for—that is the tightrope of the novel. Part of the book's intention was to write about a structural fact of childhood, which is that we don't have the language for certain kinds of experiences. And something that is even more historically apropos, which is that we definitely didn't have a cultural language for abuse, predation… And so it seemed normal at the time.I wanted to get at that very particular kind of Gen X experience, which was that horrific shit would happen to you and you just kept going.
LB: Playworld is a big, thick book, but at no point did I feel like I was dragging through it. I never got bored. You have an acting background, so I wonder: Did any experience with screenwriting or acting feed your storytelling here?
AR: I have written a couple of screenplays. A really good friend of mine and I made a short film that was in a few different festivals back in 1999. I have worked with many directors like Jerry Schatzberg and Randall Kleiser. I know what a movie set feels like, tastes like, smells like, looks like. I wanted to take a Woody Allen-like character who is freighted with all sorts of associations about predation and sex abuse and the whole thing, but I wanted to make this guy go against type. The [reader] can say, "Oh, that's sort of like Woody Allen-ish, but where's the abuse?" You know what I mean. That's another way of saying, [when writing], you're amalgamating your experiences in order to create something completely new, and a person that's really new
LB: Everybody's process is different. When I'm writing something and I don't know what it's going to be yet or the point I'm moving towards, I have to write until I figure out what it is I'm trying to say. You said you originally thought Playworld was going to be a three-act book, starting with Griffin in 1999. But after Eric pointed out what the throughline truly was… What was it like to come to that realization?
AR: The process is throwing a lot of shit against the wall. At a certain point, I got so frustrated with how slowly things were going. I have what I call "emotional coordinates," seven or eight things that the novel is about. The hard part is inventing the ligature, the connective tissue between those seven/eight things, right? I knew there was an extended sequence where they go to Virginia for Christmas. There were certain things I wanted to happen in that chapter. Rather than allow myself to be stalled by getting it perfect, I switched from writing on a computer to writing longhand, and I just started writing basically everything. I swear to God, I think the first draft of that chapter was like 18,000 words. I am, on balance, an overwriter. I write too much and then I pare it down. My suggestion, if you’re struggling, is to worry less about chronology. If there's just one part you want to write about, then sit down and write that. And you know what? It will be a big, hot mess, yes. But invariably, I find that what it does is point to the throughline, to what really belongs in that chapter.There was a whole part in "Twelve Days of Christmas" with a sub-motif about Griffin's uncle, who's a racist, and it's the first time Griffin hears the N-word. It was just one of those things that didn't belong. Adjacent, but off-topic. I think it's really valuable to look at other arts and see how these are related. Watch how the sculptor goes at the rock from different angles, or watch how the great draftsman refines and refines and refines the drawing. Trust the messiness.
Fiction has to defamiliarize the event. You have to figure out other ways to come at it. Because I think that autobiographical experience exerts such a gravitational force that deadens your language and you need to invent…
LB: The structure is interesting to me. The first half focuses on the coach. If you're thinking of a traditional three-act structure, you've got the inciting incident, you've got the dark night of the soul. So you imagine the point of this book is that we've got to defeat this coach. But then he's dealt with before the first half of the book is over. And that's a risk. Will the reader read the next half of the book? (I certainly did.) Decisions like that are risky, but in Playworld, they work so well.
AR: This is very much a subject of Playworld, which is that life is not like art. The misinterpretation or the mistake of life being like art is that there would be justice, yeah? There would be some kind of confrontation with the coach and it would be really dramatic. The closest thing Griffin gets to a confrontation with the coach is when he makes weight. That horrific scene where he sucks all that weight so quickly and his only revenge, his only "fuck you" to his coach, is that he can make this weight. How many times, especially for fiction writers, if after somebody says something rude to you at a dinner party, you go home, sit in bed, stare at the ceiling, and you're like, man, really, what I should have said is….
LB: As in Seinfeld: ‘The jerk store called and they're out of you?’
AR: We don't get that kind of satisfaction. People do terrible things and get away with it. Some people get away with it for their whole lives.
LB: We've all been raised on these stories where there's an inciting incident, and we have to answer the quest, and we have to go to war, and the good guys will always win. I see people watching things that are happening right now in real life, convincing themselves that the cavalry is coming. But it's not always like that.
AR: We are the cavalry. And the only thing that's going to change [the current moment] is that we get up off our asses and be the cavalry. And there you are at another human truth, which is that it's hard, it takes time, and people often assume it can't happen here.
LB: Somebody else will take care of it. A hero will come to save us all.
AR: There's art and there's life. That's the truth. And that truth is not easy to swallow. The deeper we get into the current administration, this book that I wrote seems more and more of a fucking harbinger of what's going on right now. Predators at a predator's ball, yeah. Going nuts.
LB: No accountability. No grownups in charge.
AR: No grownups in charge. There was a great review in The Bulwark Online of Playworld, which just got it completely right about what the transition from Carter to Reagan meant. Those things were very intentionally put in the book, because, I mean, we're having the same discussion about tax policy now that we had with Reagan in 1981. What is the 'Big Beautiful Bill?' It's just another tax cut on the backs of people who aren't going to benefit from it and are going to be hurt by it. It's the same shit.
I have what I call "emotional coordinates," seven or eight things that the novel is about. The hard part is inventing the ligature, the connective tissue between those seven/eight things, right?
LB: How has your tenure as the Editor-in-Chief of the Sewanee Review impacted your writing? I imagine it's got to be very inspiring because you're seeing all of these new voices on the page. But I also imagine it can be debilitating. How do you switch from the editorial hat to the writer hat and back again?
My managing editor and I talk all the time about all the books we are terrified we won't read by the time we die. When I took over the Sewanee Review, we were only getting about 800 submissions a year. Now we get over 8000. The amount of reading we have to do is really overwhelming and intense. It's just a big job. So in terms of my reading… People ask me all the time, have you seen this one show? I'm like… Watch a show? At night is when I read what I want to read. (laughs) But I have a unicorn job. They're gonna have to pry me from that desk.
We really conscientiously edit everything we accept, whether it's by Pulitzer-Prize winners or first-time published people. Nearly 99% of the people we edit take 99% of our edits. A trusted reader, a trusted editor, is so integral to the process of making something better. When it comes time for your story to be edited or read by your reading group—if you are sitting down with that person hoping to get sunshine blown up your ass, then you are in the wrong business. You are there to have somebody show you more clearly what you're trying to say, and you've got to trust it. We have edited stories by first-time writers that have then gone on to end up in Best American Short Stories, and they were better stories after we edited them. That is the gift of working at the Sewanee Review. It's very busy. I'm going to get off this interview with you and continue editing a story. But the takeaway is that I have, like, 10 or 15 close readers. These people do not tell me I'm great. I rely on these people to tell me where the problems are so I can address them.
LB: Thank you so much for your time. Is there anything you want to add that we haven't discussed?
AR: No, but I do have a request, which is to please go on Goodreads and leave a review.
For more on Adam Ross, check out:
In conversation with Taffy Brodesser-Akner, for Interview
