Around October 2025, when Sean Thor Conroe told me he was moving to the woods to finish his novel, Savior, I told him, “I always felt like I cared about writing, but compared to you I don’t, and it feels shameful.”
He smiled with his Carhartt balaclava on, scratched his head furiously, pulled at his long john sweater, and asked if it was still cool if he bummed a punch off me for the Russian Turkish Baths on 10th Street.
**
Back in 2022, I watched the hype unfold around Sean’s debut novel, Fuccboi: the Interview shoot where he came through like Hypervolt Pepe the LV Frog with the Balenci belt and Comme foams; the New York Times review that described his main character, also named Sean, as a “striver, burnout, lover, scrub.” He was supposed to be the answer to the dispossessed male reader — the guy who could write honestly about what it was like to be a guy, thereby appealing to other guys.
I read the book. And I texted my fantasy basketball commissioner-favorite downtown scene reporter, Ben Detrick, to get his read on it. “Yo random have u read or heard about this novel Fuccboi?” I wrote.
“I haven’t but he’s supposed to come on ‘Cookies’ next week. Might put him in the Friday run.” (“Cookies” is Ben’s podcast, and the Friday run is Ben’s run at P.S. 41, that he inherited from Aaron Bondaroff, and which everyone from the Schnabels to myself to Tremaine Emory to Dev Hynes to Josh Safdie has played in over the years.)
“From his writing he says he can ball,” I replied.
“How was the writing? Seemed like auto fiction that people are saying is emblematic of the young male haha.”
“I didn’t love the ‘voice’ but I think he has very poignant moments. It’s undeniable we’re all from the same world, and kind of flies in the face of the times which I like.”
In many ways, Fuccboi felt like the literary prologue to the Marty Supreme rollout. By which I mean that the boundaries between Sean the person, Sean the writer, and Sean the narrator could perhaps only be discerned by Sean himself. His narrator seemed designed to piss people off — to troll readers’ niminy-piminy expectations. I liked the idea of a literary bad-boy blowing up at a moment when everyone was hyper self-conscious. I was sick of watching artists self-edit and virtue signal to the detriment of their work. Sean was something different.
My agents mentioned that a lot of writers and directors were trying to option Fuccboi, but no one had nailed it down. I asked if they’d connect me, and in so many Hollywood words they told me I’d have a better shot trying myself. This happens frequently because agents never want to admit that they don’t know someone.
I DM’d Sean, and within days we were on the phone.
I pitched him a Californication-esque 30-minute dramedy adaptation of Fuccboi: his character in Philadelphia trying to figure his shit out in relationships while making no discernible progress in his career or financial situation. While most shows depict some version of a hero’s journey, I’d watched many of my most mediocre friends steal the prime years of women’s lives with their inaccessible emotions and unhealable sense of self-worth. And like them, it was clear that Sean couldn’t get out of his own way. Sean the person, the writer, and the character was going to burn his life down — and yours in the process — then write about it. But it’s hot, he’s hot, and who’s to say there’s a greater purpose in life than dying on this dick?
Sean ended up going with a different writer-director for the adaptation at the suggestion of his reps, which I respected. But we kept in touch.
**
The next four years were hard. My scripts in development all stalled as Hollywood tightened the belt, then went on strike, then fell into mergers, acquisitions, and antitrust hell. I also couldn’t be bothered to employ any type of conventional structure in my work so there was that too.
When I moved back to New York City in 2025, Sean and I got sukiyaki at Ootoya, gamjatang at Wonjo, played ball on 36th Street (he won 21 to 16), and kept meeting up at the Baths lamenting the fact that we were both in literary jail. I’d had a deal with One World Books since 2017 that I couldn’t service despite submitting several novels. Admittedly, they were all ass, but I was trying. Sean, meanwhile, was also unable to find a publisher.
As we sweat in the hottest Russian Room with towels over our heads and rubber sandals on our feet, we wondered what we’d done to end up here — and how we’d escape.
In March 2025, I gave up on my novel because I couldn’t figure out how to move it forward with my longtime editor. In an act of desperation, I gave Sean the pages. I told him that it felt like sending the homie a dick pic.
He read them and highlighted the chapter where Hubie, the main character, walks three miles to the canyon store to buy a sandwich for a homeless man while listening to Sky Ferreira’s “Everything Is Embarrassing” on loop because a girl he likes seems destined to be with someone else. “That’s good shit,” Sean texted me. “You joked that it was like sending your mans a dick pic lol but that’s how u know u got something, if it feels vulnerable like that.”
Hearing this gave me the confidence that what I was writing wasn’t trash so I kept going. I shared the pages with a new agent, Kirby Kim, and with my wife, Natashia, pushing further into feelings of embarrassment. Eventually, those feelings gave rise to the conflict and the villains that early versions of the novel had been missing.
When I finally got out of literary jail, I sent Sean this email:
“After I read Fuccboi I was really inspired. Fresh off the Boat was all true, memoir, whatever, but in this weird way writing nonfiction felt less truthful to me than reading what you were doing with Fuccboi cause when it’s nonfiction I try not to hit anyone with a stray. I protected my parents, but they were the villains in my life for a long time despite how much they loved me, and vice-versa. It’s been the hardest shit for me to understand how people who actually love me are so bad at doing it.”
Sean was in Japan at the time to bury his grandmother, but he still wrote me back. “Appreciate you saying all that about Fuccboi, I’m glad it pushed you to go in, that’s what it’s about, inspiring each other to push things further. Real as hell all the parental shit, confronting all of that all over in a different way right now on this trip.”
When Sean got back, he gave me a bound copy of Savior. The dynamic that struck me revolved around how badly the protagonist, John, wanted Ruth:
“After classes, John would catch her, stalling all unassuming in the downstairs vestibule area, joining her in stride through the rotating doors into the writing building, lingering just outside, smoking, waiting on her while she took her time gathering her things, tidying herself in the bathroom, staying longer in the classroom to ask the professor something, acting like he hadn’t been waiting on her when he clearly had been,” Sean wrote.
Later on, he wrote from Ruth’s point of view:
“You were the first man to ever want me decisively. My father hadn’t, my boyfriend didn’t. But you stood outside that subway station and missed two trains to tell me over and over again that you didn’t care what I said, you would keep waiting. Is it unfeminist that I loved how little you listened to me? ‘I won’t leave him,’ I kept saying. ‘I don’t care,’ you kept responding. I couldn’t even register myself as the wanted thing, I was so jealous of how you wanted it.”
The most annoying yet affirming thing about reading is when it reflects a felt yearning back to you. It doesn’t even matter where the yearning comes from. You’re simply exposed as an idiot with a broken heart who cares too much to operate with any sort of efficiency, but damn it feels good to yearn.
The other thing that became clear reading Savior was how Sean and his character yearned to be literary greats. It is very apparent that there is a masterpiece that will inevitably spill out of Sean one day in the way you can feel impending doom around people who yearn too hard and I have to say I envied that.
**
The author Sheila Heti also read several drafts of Savior, which she described as “painful and moving — sort of more tender than the last book.” Sean, she said, was “writing about masculinity and the contradictions in it and the complexity around being a man in this world trying to be good but knowing you’re not.”
Except he was still having trouble selling it, which neither of us understood.
While my stint in literary jail stemmed from being an ass writer, Sean’s seemed to be coming from forces within the literary community, which I found odd. Maybe because I don’t really participate in the literary community and don’t understand its machinations. Growing up in Florida, Carl Hiaasen was the best writer I came across. My first taste of the “literary world” was in 2004 when I got up in a Rollins College auditorium wearing a Rasheed Wallace Blazers jersey and started arguing with Richard Ford because he’d disparaged Ha Jin’s English in Waiting.
I started to ask questions. First to Sean’s homie, Harold Rogers, who I initially knew as the guy whose couch Sean would crash on when he was beefing with his girl. Then one day I saw Sean link to Harold’s’ Substack, and I realized they’d been classmates at Columbia. Harold himself was an established writer, having published his first novel, Tropicalia, at 24.
Harold told me that Sean “was the star of the Columbia program, though nobody was keen to acknowledge that. I read Fuccboi all through its gestation, and I thought it was awesome. Nobody had better theories of writing, either. [Sean] really stood out, with his passion & vibrance & work ethic in a sea of thumb-twiddling lames.”
I followed up by asking Harold why he thought Sean was in the publishing wilderness. “It’s a very simple story,” he replied. “People were rooting for
Fuccboi when it was being put out by a small maverick book publisher and Sean was gonna be an underground sensation.” The novel had originally been picked up by Tyrant Books, a small press run by Giancarlo DeTrapano.
Gian was the Tony Bourdain, Stretch and Bobbito, or maybe the Christine Vachon of independent literature; he identified writers like Sean, Atticus Lish, and Nico Walker early-on. He was also the rare person who understood things from the perspective of the tortured artist while also speaking the Ivory Tower dun language so that the work actually reached the people who needed to read it.
After Gian died in 2021, Fuccboi was sold to Little, Brown & Company “for a big advance,” Harold said, “and all the goodwill turned. Especially since a jealous Op invented an entire story about Sean being a rich kid who plagiarized and kissed ass on his way to a book deal, which could literally not be further from the truth.”
“Who’s the Op?” I asked.
“Sam Pink.”
I found the blog post Sam had written accusing Sean of plagiarizing his style. (Sean references Sam in Fuccboi and includes him by name in the acknowledgments.) So I DM’d him.
“Hey Sam. I’m writing about why Sean Thor Conroe is in literary jail. I got pointed to your blog post about him back in the dat (I misspelled “day”). Would you be down to talk?”
He responded 11 minutes later. “Hey what’s up man. Probably not. I said what I had to say back in the day and haven’t followed what he’s doing/what people think of him since then. I’m not interested in the matter anymore and don’t have much to add.”
At that point, I felt it would be prudent to call Sean’s agent, Julie Flanagan. I told her that I felt like something was off.
“It’s been off for quite some time,” she said. “Sean is one of the most willfully misunderstood writers I can think of.”
He’s “the most likely person on my list to get an eye roll,” Flanagan added. “But I find him to be an easy person to understand if you don’t have something invested in hating him.”
A few days after our first conversation, Heti sent me a voice memo while she was driving. “Hey, I was just thinking, Eddie, that maybe what rubs people the wrong way about Sean is that he’s so super sincere about wanting to be a great artist,” she said. “I think that’s hard to see for some people. Either they have to feel bad about not being as sincere, or they have to doubt his sincerity, which in many cases means mocking it. No one wants to think there’s another writer out there who’s more committed than they are.”
Sean ended up selling Savior to Dalkey Archive Press. He announced it in April on Instagram: a “Publishers Marketplace Deal Report” screenshot that included a quote from Heti: “A transfixing and deeply moving horror story, written from the most trembling center of the heart.”
**
In January, I met up with Sean and Harold at the Chinese Carryout across the street from the 92nd Street Y where Sean was going to be on a panel. Sean was wearing a blazer that gave 2012 Lupe Fiasco, but it made sense for the audience. I had a wonton soup, Sean and Harold had a couple Tsingtaos, then Sean bounced to get ready for his talk with Andrew Lipstein (Something Rotten), Phil Klay (Redeployment), and Daniel Lefferts (Ways and Means). The panel was called “The Trouble with Men.”
After a circuitous 30-minute conversation in which Lipstein and Klay agreed it was hard to single out any specific “male traits,” Lipstein read an audience question: “Do you think men are underrepresented in literature today?”
Klay said he didn’t and went on a diatribe about how much he disliked Cormac McCarthy, the author of two plays, three short stories, five screenplays, and twelve novels, including No Country For Old Men.
Sean side-eye’d him and said, “I think Cormac’s a pretty good writer.”
“I do think men are underrepresented,” he added. “I think most men don’t read, and for those men that do read, there are not many male writers.”
It was the most Sean-ass response on a panel where no one wanted to acknowledge the existence of stereotypical — or at least classical — “male traits” because doing so would derail their own virtue-signaling.
As an author who also writes for a non-book-buying audience, I understood what Sean was trying to say: We’re all writing for the youths at Derek Zoolander’s School for Kids Who Don’t Read Good.
Sean’s strength comes from living his truth on the ground level, then translating it into bro-speak and working-class narratives. When Sean wades into socially polite waters like the 92nd Street Y, he struggles to code switch. His words become a discombobulated gumbo.
At his core, Sean is a genuine alien. He cares about explaining the truth of his experience so much that it blinds him to the fact that some people don’t want to understand.
Lefferts offered a kind of middle ground. “I don’t think men are underrepresented,” he said, “but one type of man has taken the spotlight: the paralytically self-conscious man. Sometimes, I just prefer an asshole.”
**
A few weeks after the panel, Natashia and I showed up at Hudson Bar and Books to celebrate Sean’s birthday. I thought it was funny that he’d gone for a literary theme, but when I arrived and saw people smoking inside, I realized that maybe he just wanted to rip cigs.
Harold and Sean were drinking beers and talking about writing. I ordered the “Bar and Books Pizza,” which was about as satisfying as a frozen Totino’s thin crust.
Around the time the pizza arrived, the conversation turned to Sean’s career. Natashia and I smiled politely, Harold quietly sipped, and Sean went into his usual routine complaining about the industry. Everything he said seemed to mirror Gian’s quote about the difference between water and publishing, which wasn’t wrong, but it was a little sad.
As a recent exoneree from literary jail who’d benefitted greatly from Sean’s help, I just wanted him to be OK. I worried that his exile to the woods had focused his attention even further on Sean the writer, to the detriment of Sean the person. And I really wanted my friend back.
That’s when a harrowing thought started to percolate in my mind: Were we even friends? Were we just using each other as sounding boards and confidants while we struggled? Were we playing ball, eating sukiyaki, and shvitzing as homies, or as two writers talking past each other who’d rather be doing something else? I’d rather be a friend than a co-worker, but I wasn’t so sure about Sean.
A few minutes later, Sean asked me a question. “How many copies of Fresh Off the Boat did you sell?”
I smiled, trying to avoid the question, knowing it was a big number, but he just stared at me waiting for the answer.
I love Sean, and I want to take my walls down when we hang, but he makes it really fucking hard sometimes. Like, bro, the book spawned a historic six-season sitcom that got Asians on television. The number will sound vulgar in this setting, but if you want me to kick you in the dick, I will. So I told him.
“Damn,” he said.
There was a pause. I picked at the pizza. Then, he came for me.
“Your shit is cool,” he said. “It’s cool, but I’m writing about people in literature that people know and care about. It’s not the same thing.”
I didn’t respond. I know I write mostly about my family and friends. I’ve always recognized that Sean is part of a literary scene full of micro-famous people that I understand but am not a part of. But I, like Groucho Marx, refuse to join any club that would have me as a member.
A few minutes later, I got the check and split it with Harold.
“Yo, you don’t have to get it bro. You barely had anything to drink,” Sean said.
I gave him a hug.
“It’s your birthday. I love you, bro,” I said. Because I also prefer an asshole.
