Sean Thor Conroe is a troll. This is either an under-commented-on aspect of his work and literary persona, or else so glaringly obvious that no one even bothers to mention it. I can’t quite tell. From its very title, his debut novel Fuccboi dared readers not to take it seriously. But for those who cared enough to read past the “bae”s and “bruh”s and generous use of the enter key, past the AAVE-via-Twitter syntax, past the alt-lit infighting and the provocations about the state of masculinity in literary fiction, was a book with a strikingly earnest core. Conroe’s protagonist—called, of course, Sean Thor Conroe—was genuinely searching for some kernel of meaning about sex, relationships, family, and art. Conroe (the writer) was trying to push past what he saw as the fussy stuffiness of American letters and grasp around in the dark for something raw, uncomfortable, but true. And so he took the skeleton of the familiar, earnest künstlerroman, wrapped it with the specifics of his generation (anxieties about identity politics, SoundCloud rap), and fashioned himself a writerly persona that welcomed the ensuing controversy. That many readers were prepared to instantly dismiss someone who thought and spoke and acted like Sean (the character) was crucial to Fuccboi’s message and Conroe’s (the author’s) literary mission.
Fans of Fuccboi will remember The Walk Book, a diaristic novel-in-progress about Sean’s failed attempt at walking across the country. In the context of Fuccboi, The Walk Book is basically a plot device, a MacGuffin, the long-gestating manuscript that Sean refuses to give up on. The project is implied to be off-puttingly adolescent and probably unsellable (in one memorable scene, angling for a book deal, Sean cuts every “savage, ugly, testosterone-fueled” moment of the manuscript for the sake of making it more palatable for editors”). Yet it also encapsulates the core of Sean’s (and therefore, Conroe’s) literary mission. To Sean/Conroe, writers are heroes. Writing is heroic, and therefore it requires courage. And courage, in this calculus, can be brute-forced by enduring difficult, dramatic things. Like, say, walking across the country. Like, say, baring it all (like, you know, being unglamorously neglectful of one’s girlfriend, financial responsibilities, and personal hygiene) in a piece of unpublishable autofiction.
Except now it’s been published. From the pages of Fuccboi comes: The Walk Book, 230 heavily edited pages of the original manuscript, published by the small press Little Engines. And, contrary to its depiction as a slacker’s pipe dream in Fuccboi, this version of The Walk Book is good. The narrative opens with the same autofictional character of Sean—younger and thinking in full sentences, but still palpably the same guy as in Fuccboi—as a senior in college. He’s working on an overly ambitious thesis, a slightly unhinged attempt to “exist through every book” Roberto Bolaño ever wrote (powered by “5mgs of Adderall every five hours for up to 30 hour waking stretches”) to get himself “in direct contact with the greats, the immortals, the literature gods.” Sean finds a workable mania in this lifestyle, but his professors at Swarthmore don’t see the vision. At the end of the semester, they reject his thesis, which makes him ineligible to graduate, and because his loans won’t cover another school year, Sean is functionally forced to drop out. His first attempt at a book, and the academic-hermit-Adderall-wizard lifestyle he’d been cultivating to write the thing, is a failure. Sean understands: “it was time to move.”
Sean’s next plan is for a dramatic, Bolaño-y life- and literature-affirming act. He resolves to walk across the country, from his girlfriend’s house in West Philadelphia all the way to California. On March 13, 2014, he embarks on his quest. He packs light: “a backpacking backpack,” “a fleece hoodless sweater that would double […] as a pillow,” “sunscreen,” “a Kindle, books too heavy.” His plan is to camp on the side of the road most nights and to “carb load, eat Pop-Tarts,” since he’d burn it all off anyway. He spends the first few days walking west out of Philly’s sprawl, sleeping in a “bramble thicket” with icicles on the ceilings of his tent, sidling past standstill traffic on the shoulder of the road. By day three, he’s already out of food and “seriously considering throwing in the towel.”
But Sean keeps going. He loiters at McDonald’s for coffee refills and free WiFi, rips pods (WTF with Marc Maron, with special guest Lena Dunham, downloaded to a “Ziploc wrapped iPod Classic”), and slams sammies. He eventually scores a baby stroller and stashes his gear there, getting the weight of the walk off his back. He makes progress west. The Walk Book unfolds day by day, like a diary. Some entries are pages long, some are barely a paragraph. Day 15 reads like a hungover haiku:
“Wake up sick. Throat sore, head banging.
Call the front desk of the inn I crashed out at last night to charge another night.
Then right back to sleep.”
Each chapter is accompanied by a hand-drawn map of the miles walked during those days: seven days from Philadelphia to Gettysburg, near the Maryland border; from there to the Potomac, the edge of West Virginia, another seven. Sean gets the hang of walking. Soon, he’s averaging twenty-mile days. He makes friends, each on similar treks. John is a hippie-ish kind soul carrying a guitar and “still reeling from the death of his brother.” Andrew is also an aspiring writer. Sean sees him as a sort of double, an eerie realization: “How is it possible we’re doing the exact same thing, at about the exact same amount of time since college? […] Coulda sworn we were the unique, original deciders of our respective destinies.” These fellow travelers reassure Sean, offer a sort of scrappy companionship, but their paths always diverge. Friendship isn’t the point of the walk. Everyone’s got their own mish. Like Sean snaps at his girlfriend Sophie over the phone one night, waiting out a storm in an EconoLodge: “I’ve gotta ‘do me’ a while, too.”
Sean/Conroe’s self-professed north star for the walk is Bolaño, and there are also obvious echoes of On the Road’s zigzagging around America, typing like mad. Yet reading The Walk Book, I’m reminded less of Kerouac’s energetic bohemianism than the plodding soul-searching of Cheryl Strayed’s Wild. Strayed’s memoir is also a walk book, an account of her experience kicking a heroin habit and disenchantment with her life by hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. Though Wild is a memoir and The Walk Book is fictionalized, Sean-the-character embarks on his journey for a similarly personal reason—self-actualization, not in the corny, corporate sense, but rather a willingness to sit with the uncomfortable parts of his mind for the sake of learning something essential about himself. Despite the ever-present menace of the outside world, the drama of The Walk Book is always in Sean’s head. Stomachs grumble, wheels break, and funds run low, but the earthly challenges Sean’s walk presents are always second to the battles he fights with his own willpower. He sleeps in, wastes money on hotel rooms he doesn’t need, and overthinks the few social interactions he stumbles into. Sean’s log for Day 49 is entirely one of these ruminations:
Trying to figure out why I’ve been such a cop when it comes to my walking mode, my schedule, my habits. Why I for a third time insisted on parting ways with John prematurely, before I learned all I could from him. […] Can’t help but sense something reactive or performative in how adamantly I’m trying to instill a sense of ‘rigor’ into my walk-grind. […] I lie to myself about the ways I’m supported—by strangers, by family, not to mention Sophie, who fields my calls and pleas for comfort whenever, even if I, pleading circumstance, don’t reciprocate—because…
Because why actually?
Sean’s self-critical impulse in these moments—to evaluate and narrativize the walk even while it’s still happening, to worry over what aim it serves—gradually becomes more compelling than the walk itself. If embarking on the walk was a sort of catharsis for Sean, a way to prove to himself that he is capable of noble sacrifice and struggle, these moments of doubt show reality creeping back into the frame. He’s on a mish, but to what end?
This reflexive anxiety recurs in Conroe’s work. Writing, for Conroe, is always at least partially an act of persona building. Autofiction (Fuccboi and The Walk Book might be considered discrete episodes of a longer Knausgård-y project) is a tool for figuring out where he fits in an arid, at times hostile literary landscape. The “stunt” of The Walk Book’s publication gestures toward this too. It marks the first original book-length release from Little Engines, surprise-dropped with little promo like a mixtape for $0.00 (shipping included). In a Substack post titled “THE WALK BOOK *FULL LORE*,” Conroe explicitly connects the dots between his new book’s guerrilla (non) marketing campaign and its literary goal: “an open, unpretentious, generous orientation toward the world.” The post rehashes the real-life events that would eventually become immortalized in The Walk Book and Fuccboi: the girlfriend drama and the super senior year of college and the publishing industry woes. He describes reading 2666 and trying to learn something from Bolaño’s “honest” fiction, a practice Conroe describes as “belligerently literal” and “barbarically unadorned.” None of this is new. These are the same ideas Sean-the-character grapples with in Conroe’s novels. Yet something—call it the grace of good fiction—is lost in the transition from novel page to Substack feed. When presented as nonfiction, the ideas come off as didactic and Conroe’s enthusiasm seems affected. Conroe (the 2026 Substacker) feels all too aware of his own literary reputation, as if he’s actively trying to shape his own mythology, while Sean (The Walk Book character) works through the same anxieties in real-time, in a manner that ironically feels more real than the non-fiction.
And so, the back half of The Walk Book becomes tinted with this sort of hindsight-as-foresight, the mythology of the walk superseding the walk itself. This is especially true once Sean “stopped talking in Terra Haute,” referring to him giving up on using the voice recorder that functioned as his note-taking device during the early sections of the walk. This means that, from day 50 onward, the “undeniable flow” of The Walk Book’s early pages, edited down from snippets of meandering speech, is gone, replaced with Sean’s best-written approximation of the style, composed from memory. (Day 63, also just a paragraph long, betrays some of the literary chops Conroe tries elsewhere in the book to obscure: “Hunched by the side of the road, beneath my umbrella, smoking, in the rain, when a horse approaches me. We make direct eye contact. It gets as close as it can, nuzzling its nose against my face.”)
Coinciding with this shift is Sean’s voice from the present/future starting to slip into the narrative, editorializing his memories as he articulates them. Walking through Venice, Missouri, Sean from “ten years later” chimes in to add that it is “three months to the day before the shooting of Michael Brown and subsequent protests” in Ferguson, one town to the north. In Kansas, “nine years later,” he’ll be driving the opposite direction down the same roads “headed back cross-country in a pickup [after covering] a truck camping festival for GQ.” This timeline-jumbling stylistic quirk makes the book feel more self-consciously constructed, aware of the fact of its own editorial design and omissions. It gives Sean’s walk a sense of forward momentum, of something like destiny, as he treks deeper into the heart of America. But it also feels like Sean (the character) getting talked over and ultimately instrumentalized by the shadow of Sean Thor Conroe (the writer). Has The Walk Book, like the walk itself, become just another tool? Is he writing it for the wrong reasons?
This commentary from the present day appears at the same time as Sean’s first real moments of doubt about the walk. He’s approaching a hundred days on his feet, and the looming Rockies, a feat to walk through even via the least mountainous path. He’s low on funds, not to mention morale. His family is literally calling him, asking for help, telling him to come home. What keeps Sean going—throughout the whole walk, but especially in these last few weeks—is the generosity of other people. People on the street point him toward soup kitchens and dry camping spots. They push dollar bills and motel vouchers into his hands. Men, especially older men, love him. They buy him beers in bars and gush over his willingness to put his life on pause to do something extreme. Women, mostly, just worry.
For every weary driver and pedestrian who side-eyes Sean creeping along the edge of a county highway, two more are overly, insanely, generous. The matriarch of an Ozark clan lets him spend the night in the family basement. Before bed, they watch The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, rented from a Redbox. Joe and Kathy, in Sylvia, Kansas, ferry Sean from tire shop to tire shop to Wal-Mart to replace the busted wheel of his baby stroller push cart. Present-day Sean chimes in to tell the story of returning to Joe and Kathy’s house a decade later. “Did you ever get married like you said?” 2024 Joe keeps asking. 2024 Sean says no, but he did write a book out of that whole experience: “I’ve been living off the money I made from that book.”
•
Sean eventually fails his walk. But loreheads already knew that much. In La Junta, Colorado, when he’s “still in denial, with $7 left to [his] name,” Sophie calls. She’s road-tripping to Phoenix, planning on passing the same roads he’s been walking, and he understands that’s his sign to tap out. He and Sophie reunite outside a Comfort Inn. She’s crying: “You were… all alone… by the highway.” Sean doesn’t know what to do but laugh. Three days later, on what would have been day 100, Sean wakes up in his childhood bedroom. His mom had booked him a Greyhound the rest of the way to California. “I’ve traveled all this way for what[?]” Sean writes, “there’s nothing left to do but start reading again.” The walk, and whatever he was trying to prove to himself by doing it, will be left unresolved.
As a key early episode in the ongoing saga of Sean Thor Conroe, the “so what?” of The Walk Book’s abrupt end is clear: The künstlerroman is incomplete, Sean (and Conroe) have a lot more growing up to do. And yet everything that comes next—the events that will be depicted in Fuccboi, the scene-y drama to follow—real- and autofictionalized detail that readers are subtly expected to know, inevitably color what’s literally happening on the page. This unresolvedness feels like a cliffhanger contrived to stage future autofictions, its effect being the alt-lit equivalent of the ultra-nerd telling his friends after the movie that, if they’d read all the comics, they’d know that the hero isn’t actually dead.
I think Conroe’s instinct to fold The Walk Book’s ending back into his own mythology comes at the expense of the novel we’re already actually reading. Because the “how did I get here?” prequel-ness of The Walk Book is actually far less interesting than the boots-on-the-ground physical and mental grind of it. The most compelling parts of The Walk Book aren’t the ones that gesture toward the character Sean becomes in Fuccboi. They are the ones where he bears it all on the page, the moments where he is able to work past the character he is playing—to his readers and to himself—and get at something essential about the walk, and about the anxieties and ennui driving him. The moments where, even if he does have foresight of everything to come, Conroe keeps his avatar’s eyes leveled on the few feet of road directly in front of him.
Martin Dolan
Martin Dolan is a writer from Upstate New York. His writing has appeared in The Baffler, The Point, the Cleveland Review of Books, and more.