Julie Buntin is the author of famous menOut now from Random House. Below, she discusses what drew her to write about power imbalances in education.
In the early stages of writing this book, I accepted a teaching position at UM. I was young and so fresh into academia that I had more connections to MFA students than other faculty members, but I was on the other side of the table.
From that vantage, I could see with disarming clarity how the intensity and ambition I felt as a graduate student was, in many cases, a front for something much more vulnerable, and how easy it would be for a teacher to channel those feelings in toxic ways.
A story is rarely just a story, especially to the author. Real harm happens in workshops all the time, and as teachers we have a huge responsibility to make them productive rather than violating.
famous men became a medium to explore these complexities and illuminate my own artistic education and early adulthood. Moments when, in my eagerness to impress, I abandoned my interest as a writer and tried only to please deeper, more complex experiences.
I wanted to explore those insidious losses that are hardest to measure, the ones that weaken your sense of self, destroy your boundaries, make you question reality.
I’m interested in tropes. A way to describe the plot of famous men That is to say, it is about a young woman whose affair with a much older man – a famous writer and professor – derails her life.
I’m attracted to these patterns in fiction because I think we’re attracted to these patterns in life. Do the stories compel us to seek them out, or does the fact that people keep falling into them bleed into the stories?
The metatextual implications of that question are also part of the fabric of this novel. How can we break free from these compelling, formidable patterns? And when we assume we already understand everything about how they work, what are we missing? Is it possible that double-checking, interrogating every detail, is the way to find an escape route?
