Love as Solicitude: On Geoffrey Mak’s “Mean Boys”
Geoffrey Mak | Mean Boys | Bloomsbury | April 2024 | 259 Pages
The first time I met Geoffrey Mak, we were sitting on the back patio at a bar in Brooklyn where he told me that his first serious attempts at writing took the form of confessional Facebook posts, written in his early twenties. These were long-winded notes to a specific group of friends, he told me, that toed the line between testimony, fable, party favor, and status update. As I stuffed down a flaky croissant that kept falling into my lap, I wondered if he was telling the truth. Was this just some personal gimmick he’d adopted to enchant his writing with lore? Or was it really that basic, I wondered—writing seriously—could it be that humble, that contextual, that specific to audience, moment, voice?
Then I read his writing. It’s obvious that Geoff writes with a sensibility both internet-first and meaning capacious; a style singular, direct, and polyphonic; an instinct for eternity like a caveman etching testimony into rock. The description on the back cover calls the book “pyrotechnic,” and I think that’s accurate.
Geoff’s writing manages to be playful and funny without losing sincerity—a feat in our cultural moment, where play is equated with irony, and being earnest is seen as an empty, albeit pleasant, delusion. Geoff never loses sight of the writer’s responsibility to truth and meaning-making, so there’s little interest in performances of ambivalence or condescension. This is refreshing for a work of modern criticism: to read someone who says what they mean.
In our interview, I wanted to reach more of an under-the-hood understanding of this philosophy. In tones alternately serious and humorous, we discussed what makes a good personal essay in 2024, why psychosis as a style is an indicative convention for our age, and why the incel makes for an emblematic figure. In attempting to answer these questions, we traversed topics like social barbarism, Joan Didion, PTSD, and Descartes.
This interview was conducted with a mixture of conversation and written response. It’s been edited for brevity.
Sam Venis: To start off, I want to ask something we've spoken about. Tell me a little about how you see the current state of the personal essay: how it’s changed, its intellectual lineage.
Geoffrey Mak: I actually think the personal essay is thriving right now. It saw a renaissance with the birth of the internet and blogging, and in the last decade, it flourished in vernacular micro-writing happening on social media, like Facebook posts and Instagram captions written in the confessional mode. Publishing is late to the game. There are still very few books of personal essays that publishers will release—mainstream and independent—but it's flourishing online in magazines, which will always be more progressive than publishing because they can move faster. Today, the format has matured beyond some of the common criticisms in the past: that it was myopic, that it was trauma-obsessed, that it was narcissistic. Now, you see a lot of hybrid and formally inventive essays that use a personal narrative as a container to structure several genres at once: reporting, scholarship, criticism, theory. I think the personal essay is more capacious, free, and elastic than, say, the short story. I think some of the most exciting writing right now is happening in the personal essay, and it's happening almost entirely online.
SV: So what makes a great personal essay?
GM: There are two archetypes for the personal essay: one, a short story that’s entirely factual, and two, a writer working through a problem by using personal experience. Both are great. Joan Didion’s “Goodbye to All That” is the most famous example of the first. Although the second feels more contemporary, as well as more formally robust. In Zadie Smith’s “Joy,” she begins with the philosophical problem of the difference between pleasure and joy, and then dives into her memories of doing ecstasy at a club or going to Auschwitz with her husband, using personal experience the way scholars cite research or critics describe artworks. Either way, at the end of the day, I'm often looking for wisdom.
SV: You write in the introduction that the novel belongs to England or Russia, but the personal essay is distinctly American. Where do you see yourself in this tradition?
GM: I began writing a lot of these essays as composition studies to teach myself how to write. In the same way that painters today study the structure of Old Master paintings, I looked to Joan Didion and James Baldwin, two of the greatest personal essayists, to learn their approaches from the inside out. You'll find that the best personal essayists are often deft in multiple genres: reporting, criticism, fiction (as both Didion and Baldwin were). If the personal essay today has evolved from those earlier models, it might be due to the rise of what's sometimes called autotheory, the most famous example of which would be Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts. There are great personal essayists today who have influenced me: Jia Tolentino, Durga Chew-Bose, Zadie Smith. Mostly women.
SV: Why do you think that is?
GM: Honestly, I have no idea. Statistically, the personal essay boom in the last twenty years has been overwhelmingly female. There are more than I mentioned: Leslie Jamison, Emily Gould, Larissa Pham, Melissa Febos, Natasha Stagg, Cathy Park Hong, Mary Gaitskill, Lena Dunham, Meghan Daum, Roxane Gay, Rebecca Solnit, Eula Biss, Michelle Orange, Sloane Crosley, Terry Castle, Meghan O'Gieblyn. Can you even name male personal essayists? The only men I can think of—Hilton Als, Alexander Chee, David Sedaris—are gay. Christian Wiman is straight, he’s extremely good. Wesley Yang. I named nineteen women and five men.
SV: How would you describe the arc of the book? Do you see a throughline from “Edgelords” to “Mean Boys”?
GM: The book isn’t structured chronologically, so the arc is less biographical than it is personal, or even affective. “Edgelords” opens with a very classic postmodern paranoid mindset. It’s a systems essay, attempting to explain “how everything works.” Only the most deluded of paranoid people think this is possible to do in 10,000 words or less. By the time we get to “California Gothic,” we have a narrator who has a profoundly mystic relationship to the world, and accepts that most things in life are not for him to know. “Mean Boys,” the final essay, turns to love. Anyone who says, “I love the world,” or commits to that notion, must necessarily love evil, which is essential to being human. It’s not unlike how I see the trajectory of Dante’s Inferno—to get to heaven, you have to travel through the heart of Satan first, charting a straight line through the very center of the earth. After I wrote that essay, I physically felt like a different person.
SV: Your answer suggests there was a different person writing each essay, which to some extent there was, in the sense that we’re always changing. But here it seems more discrete. Do you see a consistent voice between your essays, or does each moment demand a different type of performance, a different writer altogether?
GM: I have had dramatic changes happen in my life during the years I write about—sexual assault by a homeless man, drug addiction, moving to a different country, a psychotic breakdown, leaving and then rediscovering Christianity—and after each of those events, I was a changed person. I’m diagnosed with PTSD, which should surprise no one. I like that I wrote this essay collection in real time. I wrote some of them as an atheist and I wrote some of them as a Christian. The voice sometimes shifts drastically between essays, which is an intentional choice—me playing around with this idea of “code-switching,” and also this postmodern aesthetic of schizophrenia, where I don’t just write from a singular voice, but multiple.
SV: In some of your essays, you do something kind of unusual. You leave in passages that seem designed mainly as a form of witness—of people, of places—almost like a Proustian style of roving observation. Is there a philosophy guiding that approach? Does description do something that more formal argument does not?
GM: I really appreciate this question. Several readers, including mentors, think those descriptive passages are an example of bad writing, and told me so. I don’t disagree with them. If I was a better writer, I might have written differently, but I wrote in the only way I knew how at the time. It also models, though, a definition of love as solicitude, nothing more or nothing less, which strikes me as similar to the eyes of a silent God. Love as a quality of attention. In these sections, I wanted to demonstrate how I saw people, took in their image, persisted beyond my preconceived notions of who a person was, and pressed on to look deeper. What we know of another person can only ever be surface, but nature is inscribed on the surface of things. To love is to look. And keep looking.
SV: But it’s also a form of education, right? Throughout “Mean Boys,” for example, you describe the behaviors that you picked up from the people in your life, the subtle ways they taught you how to see and act. It seems like these observations are the lessons you wish you could deliver to Anders Breivik. So attention can also be prescriptive?
GM: I think this is a slight misreading. No, I don’t think there’s any lesson I wanted to deliver Breivik. He seemed beyond saving. I’m critical of a lot of what I observed in that Berlin section: social barbarism, phoniness, sycophancy, climbing, and obsequious behavior. The “subtle ways” they taught me how to “see an act” were a trap, because none of it saved me in the end. I call that whole sequence a “morality tale”—a note that if you try to play this game, it’ll come up useless in the end.
SV: What makes the incel an emblematic figure for the time period you’re writing about?
GM: Looking at the past few decades, the incel seems to be the inevitable outcome of several historical forces. The social fragmentation exacerbated by algorithmically tailored social feeds and search results. The vacuum for social status in lieu of vanishing economic opportunity in late capitalism. The cementing of the Cartesian split by technology—epitomized by video games, an over $200 billion industry—alienating minds from bodies. The reactionary right is clinging to outmoded, heteronormative models during a time of progressive change around notions of gender and consent. Statistics show we’re simultaneously in a sex recession and a loneliness epidemic. Drug overdoses in isolation are at record highs. The incel appears to me as a vessel for all these historic forces, and to look closely at the incel is to look closely at the last twenty, forty years in America.
SV: In “Mean Boys,” one idea that really struck me was that when everything else fades away, what lasts, culturally, is a “virtuosity of spirit,” by which I think you mean something personal that transcends any given artifact or form. What exactly do you mean by that? How does it influence your work?
GM: At the time, I was reading the psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster’s book, The Life and Death of Psychoanalysis (2011), where she writes: “there is only one virtue: modesty.” The three artists I write about who exemplify that are Wolfgang Tillmans, L., and Anne Imhof. I put an intentionally absurdist emphasis on what I call “courtesy” or “tact,” which I use not to mean table manners, of which I have none, but in the same sense that Webster uses “modesty”—an intervention upon narcissism. In her view, the point of her practice as an analyst is to push “the patient as far as is possible across the threshold of his narcissism.” Tact, shame, humility, courtesy—all of this opposes narcissism, which can be defined as a frozen, caged individuality rotating in a hall of mirrors. I think the art that lasts in my mind, or that has meant the most to me, pushes me to transcend my own narcissism, discredits or corrodes the boundaries of the self, that transgresses the authority of the individual, or breaks open a new relationality for empathy, communion, love.