Introduction: Why Clancy Steadwell Matters
Clancy Steadwell writes like someone determined to prove that sincerity isn’t dead. His debut novel, The Big T, appeared not through a major press but serially on Substack, under the deliberately impersonal pseudonym Persona Non Propria—“in one’s improper person.” It’s a gesture that reads both as defiance and as discipline: a refusal of the personality cults that govern literary marketing and an insistence that the work speak first.
Across the interview that follows, Steadwell lays out the logic of that choice. He talks about anonymity not as performance but as a kind of self-protection—an attempt to preserve humility, to keep the writing clear of ego. He also traces the novel’s shape: how friendship becomes a moral apprenticeship, how class functions as a background hum, how millennial culture seeps through dead malls, coasters, and the slow decline of Rust Belt towns.
In the accompanying review, “The Big T and the Apprenticeship of Feeling,” I take a closer look at what Steadwell achieves on the page. The book’s polish hides a harder inquiry into witness—what it costs to be the one who remembers when everyone else looks away. It’s a story of boys and ethics, guilt and grace, and the long half-life of growing up American after the boom years ended.
Read the conversation first to hear Steadwell’s intelligence in motion; then the review, which follows, for what that intelligence builds: a quiet, consequential novel that sees friendship as both burden and form of love.
An Interview with Clancy Steadwell
NULL POINT: You chose to publish The Big T on Substack rather than through a traditional press, and you’ve done it under the pseudonym Persona Non Propria. Why that route, and what did anonymity allow you to do—or protect you from—that publishing under your own name might not?
CLANCY STEADWELL: It’s kind of you to think I could get published in a traditional press. I don’t think it’d quite be possible for me, mostly because I won’t deviate from publishing under the Clancy Steadwell moniker. I won’t ever acquiesce to the traditional personal branding needed to be cogent in that realm. If a publisher would allow me to be my Clancy Steadwell self and maintain what I have going on Substack, then maybe I’d entertain it.
Because “Clancy Steadwell” isn’t really a shield for my writing—it’s a shield for me, to protect my privacy and to protect myself from an inflated ego (not always successful). There’s nothing in any of my writing—including this book—so egregiously similar to or plucked from real life that I would be worried about it. The closest The Big T comes to reality is I had a friend who passed away, along with some minor characteristics and details shared by me and Jude. That’s it.
Real life isn’t interesting, or at least mine isn’t. My writing is, at the presentational level, divorced from me the author, and I like to keep it that way.
NULL POINT: One of the novel’s defining choices is how little of Tommy’s inner life we ever see. We only get him filtered through Jude’s account. Was that opacity deliberate from the beginning, and how do you think it affects readers’ empathy for him?
CLANCY STEADWELL: The “opacity” was one of my main choices for the novel. I wanted it to read as a sort of recounting of the legend of this kid who was larger than life, who was this foolish romantic. I was inspired by the lenses we get vis-à-vis Sal Paradise / Dean Moriarty and Nick Carraway / Jay Gatsby—the “comet and the scribe” relationship, as you put it.
I think it makes Tommy more of a mirage and more of a myth than an actual person, which I don’t think is a bad thing—it’s what I was going for. I didn’t really imagine readers empathizing with Tommy; I was more interested in them working out the reasons for his demise through Jude’s reporting. He can either be empathized with or pitied, depending on what you read from Jude. Tommy’s story from his own perspective would be biased. I think Jude’s telling—while incomplete—gives us Tommy’s story in a more interesting, roundabout way than any directness Tommy’s own perspective would afford.
NULL POINT: The book reads in vivid, almost self-contained episodes—skiing disasters, county-fair games, fireworks on the lake. It can feel serial in the Dickensian sense, even though it wasn’t released that way. Was this a conscious structural decision, and do you think the Substack format encourages that short-story rhythm?
CLANCY STEADWELL: It was 100 percent a conscious structural decision—and also one of my biggest regrets. I was nervous about writing and releasing a novel myself and thought, well, people love my short stories, so if I just make this thing a string of short stories, it’ll work out.
So I tried to create through-lines from story to story, but did some heavy unintentional recapping that I think was mostly unnecessary. It also left some fat in sections that either needed to be cut or replaced with a more momentous scene.
Vanya was nice enough to point out that because the novel covers a vast swath of time, it more or less had to be structured episodically, and I agree. I just wish I had paid a bit more attention to it or worked with someone to assemble the pieces differently.
NULL POINT: Jude and Tommy’s relationship feels like a study in how boys teach each other ethics—through shame, dares, and forgiveness more than through lessons or speeches. Did you set out to write a friendship novel, or did that focus emerge naturally as you followed them?
CLANCY STEADWELL: I definitely set out to write a friendship novel, more than anything. The initial conception was to establish a view of an extraordinary character from the perspective of a more ordinary boy, and between the two, the lessons exchanged and how they influenced each other into manhood—how one burned out by living through a set of pie-in-the-sky ideas.
There are very few chapters where Tommy is not the focus, and the ones where he isn’t, Emma Lightfoote is—and it becomes sort of a romance between her and Jude. That aspect of the novel did emerge naturally, and even though I didn’t set out to have a romance at all, it felt good when it emerged.
One of the main themes of the book is the problem of platonic male friendship and how estranged Tommy and Jude can feel from each other sometimes, despite their closeness. There’s a lack of communication between them, especially regarding Tommy’s troubles, that leaves them frustratingly distant. Their relationship, I think, is typical of what affects young men from their generation. One defining feature of their friendship is engaging in solitary activities as a pair—playing video games, running, reading—rather than active collaboration. Competition between them, both outward and unspoken, is another definer of such male friendships, explored intentionally throughout the novel.
NULL POINT: Class quietly inflects everything—skiing and lake houses, “victimless” thefts, the grocery inheritance. What interested you in making class a background hum rather than the loudest theme?
CLANCY STEADWELL: Any book about America (and I rather grandiosely think this is a book about America, however myopic its lens) will have class as at least a “background hum.”
But I didn’t want it in the foreground. I didn’t want Jude to preach or to have his interiority convey too much of whatever my internal philosophies. It’s not a philosophical novel—it’s a simple story about a boy relayed from another boy. What you get regarding class will differ from reader to reader.
To me, what the story says about class is this: when you’re blessed with privilege, if you’re not grateful for it, if you don’t utilize it fully or appropriately in the pursuit of helping others or gaining self-knowledge, then you risk an all-consuming unhappiness and guilt which can’t be sated by the pursuit of more money or greater class.
Because the Goodspeeds don’t understand or utilize their position as they should, nor allow or encourage Tommy to in his own right, there’s this karmic retribution against them in the form of what they perceive as bad luck; which of course, some of it is simply bad luck—but you also make your own luck.
Class is in the background, but to me it comes to the fore in any sort of real analysis of the novel.
NULL POINT: Jude often insists he “really saw” what happened, even when others deny it—the thumb-sucking fiasco, the lightning strike. How much do you trust him as a narrator? Did you ever think about letting readers see outside his memory, or was the single perspective essential to the story?
CLANCY STEADWELL: I don’t trust Jude as a narrator in the story of their friendship—at all. Certainly not any more than I’d trust myself, which is 0 percent. His retelling their friendship is rose-tinted in a way that absolves him of as much blame as possible. He’s made out to be this great guy—but is he really? I don’t think so, though he’s not evil. He was a kid doing the best he could.
He feels guilty about liking Emma, about not helping Tommy more, about abandoning him, at times, to save himself. He was inattentive, absorbed in his own life when Tommy needed shepherding.
His perspective was crucial to the story, so I never planned to write it outside that—in third person or whatever. I guess I could have written it from Tommy’s perspective as well and alternated chapters…but maybe Tommy’s chapters would be short poems? I think that’s how Tommy would have conveyed his side of the story, or at least his interior perspective.
One thing I thought about was maybe having that be bonus content for the novel posted online. But I’m just not great at writing poetry. Hey, maybe Tommy isn’t either though.
NULL POINT: Blockbuster rentals, Age of Empires II, dead malls, Auntie Anne’s pretzels—the details are exact but lightly worn, never just nostalgia. How did you decide which cultural markers to include, and what do you think they reveal about growing up Millennial in a declining town?
CLANCY STEADWELL: I included the references from the context of my own life, and they probably reveal a lot about me as a person. On their own, though, these nostalgic details don’t reveal much about growing up—other than, of course, rampant American consumerism through any decade.
The setting they create along with Veddersburgh does reveal a lot, though, about how growing up has changed for young people in towns like it: new distractions, new ambitions, new locales. The setting is crucial to the novel’s existence. Without it, its tropes and clichés are baked a bit stale, but what made it worth writing (for me) was the backdrop of its time period and how the zeitgeist or the culture of the time affected the characters in both real and superficial ways—guided their decisions, and inverted those tropes within their particular temporality.
The time in which this novel takes place is inextricable from its content, for me. I think if you told the rough outline of this story about two boys in the 1970s, it’d be pretty trite. But this era is worth investigating because it has only just recently crossed the threshold of national temporal consciousness into the realm of, as you say, nostalgia.
NULL POINT: You’ve written The Big T under this pseudonym as a kind of first statement. Where do you want to take Persona Non Propria next? Do you see it as a single-project alias, or the start of a longer body of anonymous work?
CLANCY STEADWELL: Ideally, I will only ever publish under “Clancy Steadwell,” for the reasons I’ve mentioned. It’s going to be a big body of anonymous work. I’ve already got another “finished” novel I hope to rewrite early next year and a novella I’m working on now—not to mention the occasional short story. I’ve even decided to write essays lately.
The Persona Non Propria thing is probably not a phase. It’s me, and it’s going to keep going. If I’m not putting out writing as Clancy Steadwell, it means I’m not putting out writing at all.
Hope you stick around for the ride.
Review—“The Big T” and the Apprenticeship of Feeling
Clancy Steadwell’s The Big T is a deceptively simple novel about two boys who become men and the long shadow each casts over the other. It’s also a Rust Belt family chronicle, a Millennial formation story, and a study in how class, race, and sexual politics get learned—first as schoolyard choreography, later as life. The book’s surface is clean: tight scenes, a steady first-person voice from Jude Harris, clear chronology (middle school → high school → college → young adulthood). But beneath that polish runs a harder question: what does it cost to be the one who watches, who remembers, who “really saw,” when everyone else insists nothing happened?
Steadwell answers it without grand rhetoric or heroic arcs. He writes boys doing boy things—sleepovers, sledges, lifts, coasters, county-fair games—and uses those arenas to measure appetite, ethics, shame. The result is a quietly consequential novel that reads like a moral apprenticeship masquerading as friendship.
The Set-Up: A Friend Arrives Like Weather
The first paragraph is an epitaph masquerading as postcard: “the last time I saw Tommy” at sunset, on the last day of summer, a runner still “floating” across the ground in his “lessened, sickly state.” The line that follows—“It didn’t have to be the end”—does a great deal of work. It signals that contingency, not fate, will structure this story; that choices are made, then remembered, then argued with. From there we drop into middle school, cafeteria line, a kid with a book for armour—and a greeter with a handshake, a name, a script.
Tommy Goodspeed is charisma in sneakers. He introduces himself with options for what to call him (“T”, “Big T”) and folds grammar into bravado (“‘the’ is called an article”). He’s that early adolescent who looks like a “cool kid” and doesn’t act like one: braces gleam, jokes come too fast, obsessions spill into monologues. He’s generous, relentless, ridiculous, and (from the start) a problem—an almost mythic invitation to live above one’s level of steadiness.
Jude, by contrast, is a witness with instincts: shyness as intelligence, kindness as default, loyalty almost to a fault. If Tommy is propulsion, Jude is ballast. Their dynamic is recognisable—the comet and the scribe—but Steadwell refuses cliché by keeping the camera tight on Jude’s interior weather. He may be quiet, but he is not blank. He reads what people do with their power.
Sexual Politics Begin as Reputation
One of the early episodes—a sleepover, a secret, the cafeteria rumour mill—lays the book’s sexual-political groundwork in miniature. Jude, who still sucks his thumb at night, pleads with Tommy not to tell anyone; by Monday the girls are miming “biological binky” across the gym. Shame circulates. It’s petty and it isn’t: the sexed body enters the social world through gossip and surveillance long before the kids “do” anything. The detail matters because Steadwell repeats the pattern at adult scale later—concerning a “former stripper” administrator, “makeover” games, a chapter literally titled “the former stripper.” The book’s point isn’t shock; it’s transmission. Secrets are currency. Boys experiment with risk and repair; girls learn to arbitrate reputation and absorb fallout; mothers do the triage when the crowd gets hot. You could call that cynical. The novel calls it an early education.
And yet there’s tenderness moving under this economy. The same chapter that detonates Jude’s shame also gives Tommy the right line and the right look at the right time: “You’re a thumb sucker. You’ll stop eventually. It’s whatever.” It’s juvenile grace. Their friendship will run on versions of this exchange—Tommy’s impulsive injury and oddball apology (a stolen iced tea, a stolen giraffe), Jude’s anger, then his imperfect forgiveness.
Class, Leisure, and the Grammar of Envy
Steadwell is very good at class without making a speech about it. Consider skiing. Jude shows up at the lodge in a Columbia jacket three sizes too big; the room glitters Patagonia. He’s lied—he’s “technically” skied before—but the lift exposes him. Faceplant at the dismount. Ten yards. Crash. Ten yards. Crash. Meanwhile Tommy is narrating the art of the turn like a boy-poet of the slopes. You feel Jude’s humiliation physically. And then—crucially—Tommy leaves the black diamond to sit by a fire with his friend and read Pendragon. The pairing is the novel in Morse code: classed leisure as gatekeeping; classed loyalty as counterweight.
Same lesson, different arena: the county-fair water-gun game. Jude, for once, is better. He wins the big bears for Tommy’s cousins while Tommy spirals at the idea the gun is “BROKEN!” The meltdown is comic, then revealing, then corrected with a grotesque peace-offering (a giant stuffed giraffe “for you, Jude-dude”). The boy who cannot tolerate losing is also the boy who cannot tolerate losing you. Steadwell refuses to make this pathology merely charming; he lets you like Tommy and fear what his intensity will become when the stakes are not souvenirs.
The book’s economics hum underneath these set-pieces. Mr. Goodspeed’s “entrepreneur” catechism turns golf-ball scavenging into a lesson in extraction. His “victimless” gasoline theft—pumped at a station not yet open, rationalised as technicality—mirrors Tommy’s iced-tea heist and foreshadows later casuistry. Jude’s instinct is simpler and harder: pay for what you take; be grateful; don’t let cleverness smother truth. Steadwell doesn’t preach. He builds a ledger and keeps scoring.
The Firepit and the Poet
Everything that matters for the next three hundred pages happens in a single Fourth of July chapter. We get a WASP clan in full costume—clam bake, Chicago dogs, the “big ballyhoo” firework launched from a glacial rock—and then a hard turn: the conversation slides from dead-town jokes to slurs. Aunt Liz (biochemist, blue streak, family dissident) forces her brothers to say it out loud. They oblige. It’s ugly. It’s also accurate about how racism functions in families: as the “obvious” talk no one examines until someone makes them. Jude watches and catalogues. Emma, Maddie/Maggie, the uncles—everyone processes as they were trained.
Then the plot-move Steadwell’s been winding: Grandpa accidentally reveals Albany Academy, the prep school plan. Tommy refuses. The scene goes operatic in the best way. “I want to be a POET!” he shouts. You could roll your eyes at the capital letters. Jude doesn’t. For him it is execution by courage: everything he wants to say about art and life and money, said by a body that can take the blow. A lesser novel would treat this as an endpoint or a manifesto. Steadwell turns the page and takes the boys up an attic staircase.
Grandpa’s studio—still lifes of fruit and ham painted in broad acrylics—is the counter-lesson. “It’s about your loved ones and your passions,” he tells Tommy. “But if you’re going to go to college, go for something useful. You’ve got to play the game. And win it, if you can. Then enjoy the spoils.” Permission and leash in the same breath. The food paintings aren’t only charming; they’re a theory of Millennial adulthood: creativity deferred to the long after. Tommy nods and doesn’t comply. When school starts, he’s at Veddersburgh, not the Academy. It’s the book’s moral risk. Steadwell honours it.
Lightning, or How Memory Works
In the same chapter, a storm comes in off the lake. Jude watches Mrs. Goodspeed at the sink; her hair lifts “as if by a ghost,” lightning flashes, a bang shakes the house, she’s on the floor. The family talks it down in minutes—she’s “fine,” “strange” but fine—with Liz the only one open to Jude’s hypothesis. Doctors later find nothing. Then Mrs. Goodspeed slowly begins to change.
Is she struck? We aren’t allowed certainty. What matters is Jude believes he saw something and that his belief will receive doubt and jokes for years. It’s a neat preview of the book’s later tragedies. Witness is lonely.
High School: Desire, Group Theory, and the Administrative Test
By ninth grade the boys have a circle—Cynthia and Danveer, and Emma Lightfoote, who is (Jude writes) “a feminine mirror to Tommy.” The book’s sexual politics sharpen. Emma and Tommy make a natural pair (beauty, brains, brand). Jude knows this and chooses loyalty. He notices his own pairing with Cynthia as a possibility and does almost nothing with it. A knee rests against his thigh during Napoleon Dynamite; electricity. He breathes it in and then becomes the sort of conscientious seventeen-year-old who thinks Napoleon Dynamite is beneath him because it’s “goofy.” Tommy and Emma talk him out of it, reading the film as a parable of friendship and connection, capitalism and confidence. It’s a deft little scene—pop culture used as an ethics seminar, very of its time—and it reads as lightly comic until you remember the themes are not abstract. Tommy’s definition of courage (“If you’re not afraid to die, are you really living?”) holds both ski slope and future overdose in its mouth.
Then the “former stripper” arrives as rumour. Mrs. Vincenzo is poised to be principal; her résumé is clean; the joke about omission comes from her own lips. Steadwell puts Emma, Jude, and Tommy on the student selection committee and makes them choose between cold competence (Vincenzo) and warm inexperience (Mr. Nowak from the suburbs). The choice becomes a referendum on what kind of institution you want: one that knows this town or one that will try to make it another town. It’s a more interesting problem than it sounds, and the process is genuinely funny; it’s also Steadwell’s way of letting teenage governance practise adult politics: whispers about female sexual past; progressive hope vs. administrative steel; who gets to rule poor kids.
This thread matters because it trains your ear for how the novel treats women. Emma is not a prize; she’s an interpreter and a campaigner (mascot politics, cafeteria equity). Cynthia is not quirk; she’s a counter-current of steadiness, wit, appetite. Aunt Liz is not only comic relief; she’s a structural conscience. Mrs. Goodspeed was once the family’s moral check; after the storm she becomes a problem no one wants to name. In each case, women hold the cost of male appetite while refusing to be reduced to it.
The Long Arc: What Friendship Can and Cannot Do
Across college and into young adulthood (I’m compressing to spare you the beat-by-beat), Steadwell keeps faith with his set-up. Tommy’s gifts—speed, appetite, charisma, totalising focus—win races and friendships and also corrode. The book returns, a little ruthlessly, to its first sentence. The last run at summer’s end isn’t a twist; it’s a fulfilment of everything we’ve been shown: the boy who chased thrill to feel alive cannot keep paying the premium; the boy who tried to hold him cannot hold forever.
Two things make the arc land.
First, form. Steadwell’s structure is episodic without feeling modular. Each set-piece reads like a “moral lab”: sleepover, lodge, fair game, firepit, lightning, principal search, prom, dead malls, “legacy of parade day,” “a hideous game,” “zero,” “paralysed,” “the avocado.” The risk of this design is the “RPG problem”—progress through chapters that play like boss levels with a stat upgrade at the end. Some readers will feel that itch here, especially as we move into college. But Steadwell keeps stitching his labs into one tapestry: motifs repeat and develop (speed, exposure, inheritance, boundaries), and the voice never breaks its ethic of witness. It’s what saves the book from sameness.
Second, tone. A slower, more sentimental novel would bathe Jude’s loyalty in glow. Steadwell keeps him honest. Jude’s virtues are not always noble. He loves Tommy’s attention. He resents losing it. He enjoys being chosen instead of Albany Academy. He weaponises his own decencies now and then. This frankness is part of why the late chapters hurt. You feel how many tiny “It didn’t have to be the end”s the boys lived through before the big one.
Millennial Texture Without Nostalgia
One of the novel’s quiet strengths is its commitment to time. The references are precise but almost never underlined: Blockbuster, PG-13 hand-wringing, AoE2, PS3s, mall brands, WWE, Auntie Anne’s, the minor-third whistle (the book’s analogue “Find My”), dead malls, the slow turn to Substack-ish art life later. Veddersburgh itself is an argument in brick and vacancy: “Monte Carlo of the Mohawk” turned case study in disinvestment, the kind of place your macroeconomics professor uses to explain what happened to American manufacturing while you try not to feel offended.
The book sees what that does to boys. Institutions thin (church, private schools closing, public schools running on fumes), so friendship becomes the social insurance plan. Risk has to be self-invented (coasters, woods, cars) because all the traditional routes to adulthood are either corroded or too expensive. Work versus art becomes the master binary, and the boys wrap their identity in the argument. Tommy’s “I want to be a POET” isn’t only a juvenile cry; it’s a Millennial thesis: the money path and the meaning path were sundered; you could pick one, make yourself sick, and later try to paint fruit in an attic.
Where It Falters
A book this steady invites quibbles rather than takedowns.
Opacity around Tommy’s interior. By design we rarely get deep inside him. We’re held to Jude’s line of sight. The upside is moral clarity; the downside is a real hunger for more of Tommy’s private mind in the middle stretch, especially when the stakes tilt from “antics” to “damage.” There are moments where his compulsion feels like a narrative device rather than a person’s pain.
Familiar scaffolding. Troubled golden boy; faithful witness; Rust Belt decline; college defection; young-adult drift. These are well-trodden roads. What keeps the book alive is its particularisation (iced tea, giraffe, avocado, the minor third of “Hey Jude,” the milk slot now used for Amazon). Still, some scenes will feel déjà vu to anyone who’s read contemporary coming-of-age fiction: fights under bleachers, choice to leave town or stay, legacy vs. self.
Episodic slack. The moral labs model occasionally yields a lull—especially between middle-school spark and late-college reckoning—where the plot’s forward pressure drops. If you’re in it for “what happens,” you may misread those quiet scenes as filler; they’re doing character work, but the pacing does wobble.
Moments of melodrama. The Fourth of July confrontation skirts the edge. So does the final run, though it’s earned. Steadwell usually rescues these by countering with irony or aftermath, but now and then you will hear the strings.
These are not disqualifying. They’re part of the price of telling a clean, accessible story about complicated, unclean forces.
Why It Matters
Because The Big T gets right what many novels about boys and damage get wrong. It knows that male friendship is sometimes protection and sometimes pressure; that shame is a group sport; that the ethics you end up living come not from a single speech but from ten thousand tiny choices in basements, parking lots, and checkout lines. It sees how class works on the body—what you wear, what you pretend to know, what you won’t admit—and how race works in families, not as a thesis but as the “obvious” opinion that goes unchallenged until someone like Aunt Liz sits forward and asks you to say it.
It also understands the Millennial mood without parody or elegy. There’s no “we grew up with the Internet” slab here; there are kids whistling two notes to find each other in crowds; there are dead malls and scholarship hopes and the slow shift from “Maybe I’ll be a lawyer” to “Maybe I’ll write, adjunct, cobble, survive.” That long arc isn’t special or tragic. It’s lived-in, and the book respects it enough not to sentimentalise.
And there is, finally, the business of witness. Jude is not a hero. He’s a decent boy who becomes a decent man and does the hard work of holding another life in mind without entirely losing his own. In a culture that loves spectacular self-destruction and tidy redemption, that stance is radical. The novel never pretends that friendship saves the unsaveable. It does insist that friendship is a way of seeing—a way of not letting someone vanish into their worst day.
Quotables (Because You’ll Want Them)
“It didn’t have to be the end.”
“If you’re not afraid to die, then are you really living?”
“Is that all friendship is? People who find each other tolerably un-boring?”
Aunt Liz, to the clan: “Because it sounds like you mean people, seeing as garbage doesn’t really walk around.”
Tommy, naive and right: “If the world was the way it’s supposed to be, no one would have to work, we would just be free to pursue our creativity.”
These aren’t just lines. They’re keys to the book’s thinking: contingency; thrill; boredom as bond; naming harm; art as claim.
Verdict
The Big T is a strong, unshowy novel that understands how boys learn to live—how they practise appetite and restraint, shame and repair, loyalty and departure—and how class and race press into those lessons. It’s not reinventing the bildungsroman. It is renovating its moral interior: swapping out the sermon for a minor third whistled across a noisy fairground and answered—faithfully, for years—until one day it isn’t.
You could read it for the Rust Belt textures, the clean scenes, the excellent parents (both the good and the bad), the millennial detritus arranged just so. You could read it because you know a Tommy, because you were a Jude, because you were a Cynthia who watched and wondered why the boys’ dramas took up so much room. Read it, mostly, because Steadwell has the restraint to let one boy carry another without making a myth of either.
It didn’t have to be the end. The book honours that sentence. It gives you the series of almosts and maybes that draw a life to its line. It doesn’t mistake witness for cure. It does, more quietly, insist that witness is a form of love—and that love, even when it fails, is still the truest record we get.
Support Clancy Steadwell and his work by purchasing a copy of The Big T, now available here.
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Having read the book—which I loved—this is a great additional perspective. So often I read books wondering what the author was thinking. More of these interviews would be excellent.
Love that Substack has this grassroots, spontaneously organized ecosystem of fiction and engagement with that fiction.