And That Is Why Men Are Terrible: A Novel

As most of you are probably already aware, I recently published my second novel, And That Is Why Men Are Terrible, which is available now on Amazon. Thank you to everyone who already bought a copy, I hope you enjoy reading it at least a little bit more than being left alone with your own thoughts. If you have already read it and have anything kind to say, I’d love it if you could leave a nice review on Amazon or Goodreads (or, if you’re feeling particularly generous with your time, both). And if you read it and don’t have anything kind to say, then I’d love it if you would kindly keep those thoughts to yourself.

For anyone who may be interested, I thought it might be fun to take a few minutes and give you a look inside the making of the book. I started writing it shortly after I published my first novel, Dreams from the Slumber Yard, back in 2015. The second novel was a much slower and more arduous process than the first one, which I had adapted from an old screenplay as an experiment to see if novel writing and self-publishing would be a good fit for the sort of writing I was doing at the time. While a lot changed before the final version was published, the basic structure remained in place throughout, which saved a lot of time and allowed me to focus more on amping up the humor and toning down the creepiness. Conversely, And That Is Why Men Are Terrible began as an original story, built from the ground up as I was writing it. By the end, it had also become a much more complicated book, weaving together several disparate plot lines and major themes into a narrative that I’m tempted to describe as “sweeping,” but could probably be more accurately characterized as “rambling.” While I’m sure different people might have different opinions on which book is better, there is certainly a whole hell of a lot more of the new one.

As with most things I write, the original seed for the book began with a single joke. But unlike most things I write, that joke also happened to be the very first scene — and, in fact, the very first line — of the book. I had a vision of a bad internet date — something I had plenty of experience with by this point — where one person asked completely out of the blue if the other believed in God. The question was posed not because it was an essential criterion in determining compatibility, but simply because the person asking was so inept at small talk and lacked so much self-awareness that they didn’t mind asking disamring questions that made people deeply uncomfortable as a way of trying to make a good first impression. From there, the scene began to develop, the character on the other side of the table began to take shape, and the endless parade of freaks and weirdos I’d subject her to began to emerge.

The result was a picaresque journey through being a young person in New York City. At the end of my first draft, our heroine Eve had made it through through many uncomfortable encounters — some of which were based on true stories and some of which were entirely fictitious — but there were essentially only three main stories tying them all together: girl gets a weird job as a pen pal author, girl has an embarrassing moment that results in unwanted internet attention, and girl meets an older man who serves as an aspirational mentor until she is forced to reconcile her idealized version of him with his major shortcomings.

The first part was very loosely inspired by a story from This American Life (Episode 571, for anyone who might be interested). It detailed the business structure of a similar pen pal service that started as a thinly veiled excuse to take money from single men who were as lonely as they were horny. In that real-life story, the service eventually veered into an oddly fantastical direction, creating an entire mythos where the girls — described as “Angels” — would move en masse to a magical valley paradise called Chonda-za and live in perpetual harmony with any gentleman suitors who cared to join them. While I certainly appreciated the more absurdly unrealistic details about the Angels, for my book I wanted to focus on more grounded letters that revolved around the fundamental question that made it all so fascinating: are there people who are so lonely and desperate for a human connection that they will choose to believe the most blatant lies imaginable? The answer is, of course, yes. At one time or another, we’ve all been susceptible to letting our fantasies overcome our reason. For me, it was the time someone pretending to be the ex-girlfriend I’d never stopped loving messaged me on AIM and convinced me to send naked pictures of myself, despite bearing no particular linguistic or behavioral similarity to the girlfriend in question. For the man in the novel, it was a small-town seed saleswoman with boring anecdotes and worse grammar who convinced him he had a friend.

The second storyline about unwelcome internet celebrity was also inspired by a bit of real-life reporting: Jon Ronson’s 2015 book, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. That book details the positive and, quite frequently, negative repercussions of internet pile-ons, particularly the sort that can happen when an otherwise unknown individual is brought into the spotlight for a single poorly thought out joke, or some other minor transgression. Ronson profiles several people who probably deserve to have a bit of egg on their faces, but perhaps don’t deserve not the disproportionate public shaming that ends up destroying their lives and careers. There’s a lot to unpack in these stories, but the part that interested me the most was the fact that behind all this knee-jerk vitriol that gets bandied about on places like Twitter is a very relatable but deeply faulty idea that we are all guilty of all the time: we so frequently think we know and understand everything about someone based on a single fact. It’s the same instinct that leads to “love at first sight,” only in these stories, it’s more like “hate at first tweet.” We just want to sum people up and put them in our pre-defined boxes based on arbitrary measures like their look, their accent, a questionable opinion overheard at a party, whatever first piece of information we gather about them might be. And with the distance the internet brings, we can sometimes feel comfortable not just judging someone, but bashing them mercilessly until they have no choice but to drop out of society and hope that they can still somehow make rent without anyone googling their name.

The final storyline from that initial draft was based on a personal relationship I had with someone I looked up to for a lot of reasons, but had some serious personal demons that made it hard to keep them squarely on the pedestal I had built for them. Despite being the part of the book that ran closest to my own personal life, it ended up being the hardest to write because, well, my life is only really interesting in small doses. I have lots of weird and funny anecdotes about random things that have happened to me in passing, but taken as a whole, my life is exceptionally dull, and my thoughts on it are even duller. I wanted this part of the book to be more than just self-indulgent navel-gazing and have some significance for others, but after an objective re-reading, I didn’t think I was even close, and decided to shelve that particular tale until I was ready to tell it in a vaguely meaningful way.

With those chunks removed, the book became incredibly short, but it didn’t take long before it fleshed itself back out. As I’m sure happened with a lot of creative projects that started in 2015, my book was put in a whole new perspective by the election of Donald J. Trump. Like a lot of people, I was appalled by this development, and it took quite a while before the shock wore off and I could even begin working my way back out of the ensuing existential funk. While a lot of factors explain the rise of Trumpism — racism, sexism, a legitimately dysfunctional political system that leaves a lot of people feeling resentful, a fractured news landscape that lets us all live in our pre-determined echo chambers — I think one of the central reasons that Trump was able to get elected against the will of a majority of Americans is that good people simply don’t do enough to bring their ideals to life. (There’s also the incredibly screwed math of the Electoral College, but we’ll let that go for the moment). A lot of people I know simply didn’t vote because Bernie wasn’t on the ballot, and watching the system burn seemed like a better choice to them than picking what they saw as the (significantly) lesser of two evils yet again. I didn’t fall into that particular trap, but if I’m being honest, I’m still a perfect example of the limits of liberal idealism. I vote, but I don’t volunteer for causes that I believe in, and only give the most paltry financial contributions to them. I like to read about politics and pontificate amongst my closer friends, but I never engage in political conversations with people who don’t agree with me. In fact, if a point of contention arises, I usually go out of my way to avoid diving deeper into them because anger and confrontation make me incredibly stressed and shut down the speech centers of my brain. And while I like to think I consider the merits of opposing viewpoints more than the average person in my Facebook bubble, I still don’t do it all that much and rarely make an effort to seek out those kinds of views for discussion. I am essentially a partially-informed, well-intentioned do-nothing, and while it would certainly be overstating my power or importance to say that it’s my fault Donald Trump got elected, I think it’s fair to say that people like me are a big part of the problem. People like me want to talk and speculate and virtue-signal from their high horses, but we’re too afraid of experiencing even minorest social discomfort to actually do anything constructive with all our indignity.

So I started thinking a lot about what it means to not just consider yourself as a good person, but to actually be one. As Eve struggles with that question, so do I. In writing my book, I don’t know if I found any particularly insightful answers that will lead me or anyone else to a life-long career in activism — it is, after all, a lot easier to criticize than to come up with practical solutions, and usually a lot funnier, too — but it was important for me to at least try and engage this line of thinking and challenge myself to be at least a little bit better.

One of the areas in particular where I’ve been trying to be better is feminism. In the wake of the #MeToo movement, I found myself thinking a lot about my own shortcomings regarding the treatment of women, and while those shortcomings may pale in comparison to the high profile celebrity abuse cases that kickstarted the movement, I can’t exactly claim to have always been the Mary Poppins of equality either. I’ve held backwards views, I’ve hurt friends by expressing them, and I’ve failed to notice when I was being hypocritical in my treatment of people I professed to like, love, or believe in. In short, I’ve been a terrible person sometimes. Not all the time, certainly, but enough of that the room for improvement is clear. And if I’ve found any real answer in writing this novel as to how you go about being a good person, it’s simply to be honest about your failings and try to be better about them in future. That’s something we all seem to have a very hard time doing when it comes to any of our shortcomings, be they racism, sexism, or just basic politeness. It can be very tempting to rail against the entirety of “cancel culture” as a way of defending ourselves against the very suggestion that we might personally need to change our thinking or behavior in the slightest — I was definitely guilty of that kind of knee-jerk dismissiveness when we first started discussing cancel culture, and it’s the same basic impulse that led people to spend the last couple years throwing tantrums about mask mandates under the auspices of freedom, drawing the mistaken conclusion that mild inconvenience is the same thing as oppression: we don’t want to consider the possibility that we might not know everything, and we certainly don’t want to alter our lives in any way that wasn’t our own idea, whether or not that idea might be a good one. But — much like dismissing medical science because it interferes with our bowling plans — dismissing the entirety of cancel culture can be pretty unhealthy. Sure, most of us aren’t in the same league of monstrousness as your Cosbys and your Weinsteins, but it’s still important to pay attention to the discussions that surround them. If we listen to the broader points, we can distill these extreme examples down to lessons that we can apply in the microcosm of our own incredibly dull lives. And whether it’s a big picture problem like racism and sexism, or a more mundane problem like some jerk cutting you off in traffic or eating three fish filet sandwiches next to you on an airplane, wouldn’t the world be a better place if everyone could figure out how to be just a little bit less terrible? Just a bit?

I certainly wouldn’t call And That is Why Men Are Terrible the definitive text on feminism in the post #MeToo Era, the importance of political engagement, or even how to be a little less terrible in your day to day life. At its heart, the book is a comedy, and while I tried to make it a thoughtful one and firmly believe in the power of humor to make big discussions more easily digestible, you can’t fix the world with silliness alone. (And besides, if anyone is going to write such an impactful, generation-defining treatise on the ills of modern society and how we can fix them, I highly doubt it will be a man.) Instead, I’d call it one person’s attempt to work through some new and evolving thoughts, and have a few good laughs along the way.

I hope you all enjoy the book in the spirit in which it was written and take away at least a couple useful thoughts on how we can all be the kind of better people we aspire to be.

Or, to quote the inimitable Jay Sherman…

-TC