From Napkin to Notoriety: The Meteoric Rise of That Writer You Can’t Stand

Image may contain Human Person Electronics Pc Computer Laptop Finger Glasses Accessories and Accessory
Photograph by Blend Images / Alamy

He wrote it on a napkin: a thought. A word. A phrase.

And from such humble beginnings, a six-figure book deal. And from that six-figure book deal, a seven-figure movie deal. And from that seven-figure movie deal, well, only he can write his future.

And write it he will. Because he’s that writer you can’t stand.

The napkin now hangs framed in the home office of his Boerum Hill brownstone, around the corner from his “second office,” the specialty coffee shop where we meet up. “It’s technically my dad’s brownstone,” he whispers, a glimmer of torment in his eye. “But the napkin’s all mine.”

He likes to take up two chairs at the shop when he writes, because creative freedom, he asserts, requires space. He knows his artistic process like the back of his hand, and doesn’t seem to mind that I have no place to sit. But I shouldn’t mind, either, because he’s an artist, and he needs what he needs.

With his hair crisply cut back from the man-bun that was once his signature look, he drops his head in his hands and says, “It’s tough, you know? Because I finally made it. And I was starting to think that I never would.”

After spending two and a half arduous years writing occasionally in his tiny black Moleskine, [THAT WRITER YOU CAN’T STAND], twenty-six, almost gave up. He relentlessly foisted his half-baked poems on any publishing-world gatekeeper, and spent the rest of his time thinking many deep thoughts. He never even considered getting a job—partially because he didn’t need to, but mostly because he knew in his heart that he was going to be a success.

But that ardent knowledge didn’t stop him from feeling oppressed, or from expressing that feeling to everyone around him. “It was like no one saw the me that was inside of me,” he tells me. “The rejection was hard. Really hard. I even cried about it once. You’d think that it would get easier over time, but it doesn’t. I mean, two and a half years, and more than twenty poems submitted—and nothing.”

Until nothing became something.

“A buddy of mine from college rose through the ranks really quickly at a big publishing house, and I was, like, ‘Can you help me get a book deal?’ And he was, like, ‘Yeah.’ And then he did.” All those months toiling away had finally led him to his destiny. He goes on, “I had never written a book before, but I knew I could do it. I didn’t have a doubt in my mind.”

In the two published poems I have to go off of, [THAT WRITER YOU CAN’T STAND]’s work weaves together the personal and the universal. “I love stories,” he says. “All of my poems are really stories. Didn’t cavemen tell stories? I think so. I’m just like the cavemen. We all are.”

His poem “Pater Paternal Pat” is only three words long, but he wouldn’t let us reprint them. “Dad/Bad,” which is the work he’s most famous for, and also the only other poem he’s ever published, illuminates the relationship between all fathers and sons throughout time, especially the fathers who are top executives at multinational corporations.

When his book is released, in 2019, it will likely be reviewed kindly, and with great enthusiasm. Then he will, doubtlessly, go on to achieve great success in this and other fields. “I’m pretty sure I can do some pretty big things,” he says to me, while winking.

Before I leave the coffee shop, I ask him what was on that original napkin. He replies with a Grinch-like smirk: “Magicians never reveal their secrets, and neither do I.”