The WD Interview: Steven Rowley
[This interview first appeared in the July/August 2024 issue of Writer’s Digest.]
Steven Rowley’s novels are intimately epic—stories about people who are thrown into the deep end of life’s defining moments. Where there is love, there is loss, and with it, the unifying power of grief. In a word, Rowley writes about change, and while change is something many of us fear, it’s the very place he finds a way to infuse both comedy and sincerity.
“Even though I’m often writing about grief, I try to find the humor in the situation,” he says. It’s that signature blend of heart and humor that resonates with readers and critics alike. In 2023 alone, Rowley won the 22nd Thurber Prize for American Humor for The Guncle, and his novel The Celebrants was a Read With Jenna book club selection with Jenna Bush Hager, as well as earning a spot on the New York Times bestsellers list. While it was a gratifying and rewarding year, the stakes felt high for his next novel (and his first sequel) to deliver on the laughs.
“Winning the Thurber Prize halfway through writing The Guncle Abroad, I felt an enormous amount of pressure suddenly that the book had to be really funny,” he says. “Some days I would think, Oh my God, is the book too funny? Not that I was such a comedic genius, but rather, was I focusing too much on jokes and not enough on the other things that resonated with readers from The Guncle—the heartfelt, emotional moments? I was right back to trying to find that balance that I always do.”
In 2021’s The Guncle, we meet semi-retired television actor Patrick O’Hara who has temporary custody of his niece Maisie and nephew Grant while his brother, Greg, deals with a health crisis after the death of his wife and Patrick’s best friend, Sara. It’s a summer spent helping the children explore their grief through witticisms, wisdom, and warmth. For Patrick, not only do the children help him navigate his own immense loss, but they also instill in him that reinvention is not a faraway hope.
In The Guncle Abroad, we follow Patrick five years later across Europe, niece and nephew in tow, while he tries to persuade them through experiences that their father remarrying doesn’t have to be the nightmare they’re anticipating. It’s a natural continuation of one of Rowley’s most beloved characters, and a profound study on the difference between moving on and forward.
Character is where we begin our conversation.
I’m so happy to be back in Patrick O’Hara’s orbit. How did it feel for you to get back into these characters’ minds?
I think a lot of people assume that I wrote the sequel because I missed Patrick. There’s a large part of me in Patrick. Certainly, our senses of humor are the same. So, if I want a dose of Patrick, I can access that pretty easily. But I wasn’t able to tour for The Guncle; it came out in May of 2021. Although we were just getting vaccines, for the most part, events were still virtual. It wasn’t until I toured last summer with The Celebrants that I really noticed something had changed in my career. The crowds were different, the enthusiasm was different. There were people there who were passionate about The Guncle and they were as excited to talk about that book as The Celebrants. So, getting question after question about The Guncle really turned my attention back to the kids. Maisie and Grant are the reason I wrote the sequel because, for many reasons, their grief journey was just beginning at the end of that book. I needed to make sure that the kids were all right.
That’s true about The Guncle coming out during COVID, especially because your books in general are very much about community—however your characters define that—and you being able to feel that palpably, not just for the book that you were promoting at the time, it must have felt like a delayed satisfaction for you.
Yes. An author has absolutely no control over the state of the world when their book is released. And to the extent that this was a book about a character living in self-isolation for a time and finding his way back to the light—coming out at a moment when we were emerging after a dark year. It was an interesting book in an interesting moment.
This one is, too. The Guncle Abroad is your fifth published work, and it’s your first sequel.
Thank you for saying “published,” by the way. For aspiring writers who read this, I always want to be honest about that. I have several novels in a drawer that I wrote before my first novel, Lily and the Octopus, was published, and they should remain in that drawer. I did not officially study creative writing in school, so I consider those my education. And I’m grateful for them, even though they’re not—and should not be—published. I even have another one in the drawer that I wrote in 2020 after I wrote The Guncle, but before it was released. When people started to respond to The Guncle, I learned a lot about what resonated with my readership. And although I like that book a lot, it wasn’t the right one to follow up The Guncle with. So, we’ll see. We may revisit that one day.
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Well, in terms of your writing process, how did writing a sequel differ for you than writing your standalone novels?
This is my first time having books back-to-back in back-to-back years, and I’m not a book-a-year writer. I’ve learned that about myself, but I couldn’t have done it if I didn’t know the characters so well. That’s the number one way I was able to tackle an undertaking like this in a year like last year, which was so busy for me.
So, to write this book, it was really helpful to know the characters. And also, because these books are kind of a hat-tip to the Patrick Dennis Auntie Mame novels from the 1950s, the sequel to Auntie Mame was a book called Around the World With Auntie Mame. I never planned to write a sequel, but I had that idea in the back of my head if there were ever to be a sequel that I would take these characters abroad as a kind of homage to Patrick Dennis’ work. And then the third thing that helped my writing process was actually being a real-life guncle to kids who are growing much faster than I would like.
I’m glad you mentioned that. Something that was really lovely about The Guncle Abroad was seeing how the characters changed off the page between books, and having young characters as part of the main cast really helps achieve that. The ways that Maisie and Grant are different from the first book really help this book stand on its own two feet. How did you go about building new characters out of characters that already exist?
Oh, I love how you phrased that—because there are brand-new characters to this, but you’re right, the kids for all intents and purposes are brand-new characters. They were 6 and 9 in the first book, 11 and 14 in this book. There’s a tremendous amount of growth in those years. Patrick relocates to New York at the end of the first book, and he’s been in their life for five years. Not only have they grown on their own, but they’ve grown under his tutelage in a way. They’re not as charmed by his antics as perhaps they once were. I liked seeing them grow and the way that all kids grow in that age, but also imagining how they would grow with his influence in their life.
Read The Guncle Abroad:
A through-line in your work is this contrast of experiences—how something can be life-affirming but also heartbreaking. Often, your characters experience life-changing moments, either on the page or off, that inform the comedy of their lives, but also the drama of their lives. How do you manage that tone?
The books are all very different. The characters are different, the plots are very different, they take place in different times. But you’re right, if there’s a through line, it’s tone and humor. That’s what I endeavor to nail with each book. And it’s not easy making somebody cry; and likewise, making someone truly laugh out loud. We say “LOL” all the time in our vernacular, but how many times are we actually laughing out loud? It’s the highwire act that I spend the most time perfecting. Because there are times on the page when you go one joke too many, and it really throws the balance of what you’re trying to do. Likewise, if I go too long without giving the reader the opportunity to take a breath through a joke, I think it can color the work in the other direction, perhaps make it feel darker than I intended. I’ve worked with my editor Sally Kim very carefully to get that balance just right.
Let’s go back to The Guncle Abroad. Something else that I would imagine is a challenge in writing a sequel is making the conflict feel unique to the new story and not the same exact conflict as the first book.
Yeah. 100 percent. I mean, I have complicated feelings about sequels in general, other than I will go to the grave insisting that Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again is a superior film to the first Mamma Mia!.
And it’s an 11th-hour tear-jerker.
Yeah! It’s amazing. The sequels that are cash grabs you can sort of feel are the ones that go back and undo a happy ending from the first book. And what I had going for me, I felt, was that while the first book ends on a on a high note, it wasn’t a happily ever after. There was still so much more story there. And so, you’re right, I wanted fresh conflict that was different from the original. The time jump was helpful in establishing fresh conflict. I needed Patrick to be in a different place in his life. He shouldn’t just be the magical caregiver who flies in on the wind like Mary Poppins and out when the wind changes.
Do some stories feel more comedic and other ones feel more dramatic?
I don’t approach them differently. Humor has always been my way through dark times. I think we’re particularly bad at grief as a Western society. It often can feel very isolating when we’re in the throes of it, or that we have to go through it alone, when in fact grief is one of the most uniting parts of the human experience. If we love, we’re going to no doubt lose one day. So, I really want to try to bring people together. And I think humor is the best way to do that.
Yeah. Loss is an inescapable quality of life.
Of being alive, yeah. It’s also in response to my age and the time that I came out in the early 1990s. I think of when I was first coming out and the stories that were available to me at that time were largely about lives lived in the shadows or lives cut short or lonely existences. And that’s what I feared my life would be. I do think it’s important for me to write stories that address sad things, but also infuse them with joy and with found family and community. I think that’s one reason why I think it’s so important to infuse my stories with humor. So many stories, while great and beautifully written, sometimes lack the joy that would’ve given me more confidence as a young person.
When you announced that you had written The Guncle Abroad, it immediately made sense to me. The first book really sets up for tons of stories for these characters. But I am curious: When did you feel like you knew that these characters did have more story to tell?
That’s a good question. I wish it were a more emotional answer, but the honest to God’s truth is when I found out that The Celebrants was picked as a Read With Jenna book club pick. I was afraid of being one of those writers who just repeats themselves. And the way those book club machines work, I knew in late 2022 that The Celebrants was going to be the June 2023 selection. That gave me the confidence to know that my other books could find an audience, that I wouldn’t just be known for The Guncle. And that gave me the confidence to revisit that in a way where I said, “OK, I can do other things too that people seem to find some value in. I don’t need to worry about being pegged as a one-trick pony.”
You mentioned location earlier, and your stories are so character-driven, but setting also does play a huge role in your books.
Place adds so much atmosphere to a story, especially for the kids in the first book. It was partly a fish-out-of-water story, right? Because the hippie-ish, Palm Springs desert is very different than suburban Connecticut. Where I set my stories is always important, but I try also only to write places I’ve been. A lot of the places in the sequel are places that I have traveled to myself, and I don’t know as extensively as I would like, or I’ve never lived in any of these places, but I’ve certainly been to all of them, and I think that’s important.
Something else you’re really good at is misdirection. I don’t want to give The Guncle Abroad’s ending away, but as the ending was happening, I went, “Oh, this is what it’s about.” Is misdirection something you keep in mind as you’re writing, or is it something that reveals itself along the way?
A little Column A, a little Column B, I think. I am not a plotter. I am the definition of a pantser. I usually have a sense of the ending or where I’m going. It’s the long middle stretch that I don’t plan out, mostly because for me—and I think for many writers—the hardest part of the job is butt in chair. So, if I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen that day, I’m more excited to show up to work to find out. In that sense, not planned. Conversely, I’m not a plot-heavy writer. I’m much more interested in character and tone and setting. I do think about little moments of misdirection because I don’t want it to feel flat. Even though I could never write a full-out mystery because I don’t know how to do those kinds of real twists, I can do emotional misdirection and reveals. If I can put in some element that will allow there to be some surprise for the reader, I think that’s important.
There’s also a moment in The Guncle Abroad where Patrick is reflecting on entering middle age, and he’s thinking about how challenging that can be for queer people, particularly gay men because almost an entire generation of gay men was lost due to the AIDS epidemic, leaving many of us without role models for how to navigate life’s middle. It’s a fleeting moment in the book, but it sort of encapsulates Patrick’s circumstances of having all of this life experience, but also the story itself feeling like a unique coming-of-age narrative for him to navigate. Why was this important for you to include in the story?
I feel the loss of that generation immensely; it’s the generation right above mine. I know but for the grace of God, if I were born five years earlier, I probably wouldn’t be here—10 years earlier, certainly. Not only do I mourn those people, but I think of them constantly. When I turned 50, the cliché thing was to sort of moan and groan and want to hide your age or go, “I’m 39 forever,” or whatever-ninth birthday again. And I was like, no, I’m going embrace this, because so many people were not able to celebrate this birthday, and what they wouldn’t do to still be here, you know? This is a great privilege, growing older. I try to do it with grace, but it’s strange to experience changes on your own face and in your own body when there’s not a lot of that generation above me to say, “Oh, this is normal. This happens to every gay person,” or whatnot. It’s difficult to reconcile sometimes what I see in the mirror with the way the natural progression should be because that natural progression was interrupted. It’s something I think about in my daily life a lot. And I think that’s what writers do, right? We explore things through our characters sometimes, and it leads to one of my favorite moments in the sequel, and I think one of the biggest laughs. I won’t give it away, but in that scene with his agent Cassie, when they’re having dinner.
I love his relationship with Cassie, and the storyline about gay men and lesbian friendships.
I love writing women. I will say, there is a slight misogyny sometimes with gay men, and certainly with Patrick’s dismissal of Cassie in the first book until she cannot be dismissed, until she becomes such a formidable presence. That’s something I did deliberately. And in this book too, there is a dismissal from Patrick of lesbians until there’s a reveal. The history of the relationship between lesbians and gay men is important to explore.
I thought that was really thoughtfully done, and not without humor.
Yeah, I try to walk a fine line with that, too. I said when I won the Thurber Prize, there are those who think it’s impossible to be funny in politically correct times. And I think those people are often mistaking humor for cruelty in the first place. It’s very important not to punch down. There is incredible room for humor and sometimes biting humor, but still kindness.
It’s funny you say that, because that part of your speech at the Thurber Prize awards was my next question.
Yeah! That doesn’t mean it’s always easy. I have jokes that go too far. I’m not perfect. Sometimes you take a swing, and you realize reading a draft back, you’re like, “Oh, this really tonally is not right.” And, I’ll take it out. But it’s always best for someone to get the best of Patrick, a little bit. [Laughs] He’s a character who deserves to be taken down a peg every once in a while.
What do you hope readers take away from Patrick’s story now that it’s been extended?
This is a punt, but I almost leave that to readers to tell me what they have taken away. But I will say for me there’s a new act for Patrick as he ages, and it’s a little bit of a mirror for me. I was a late bloomer in terms of finding career success. It’s one thing I value about writing and publishing is that it’s not as ageist as some other industries. It’s hard to become a movie star maybe at 50, but look at some of the biggest publishing phenomena of the past decade. Bonnie Garmus—debut writer at 60. It is something you can break through at any time. There is room for reinvention, whether that means emotional reinvention, new opportunity, or just room for growth. I think that’s what I would hope that people take away. It’s never too late.
Meet Steven Rowley at the Writer’s Digest Annual Conference in Cincinnati, Ohio this October!