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Lucas Mann is the author of Lord Fear: A Memoir, and Class A: Baseball in the Middle of Everywhere. His essays have appeared in TriQuarterly, Buzzfeed, Gawker, Barrelhouse, and The Kenyon Review, among others. He teaches writing at The University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. This interview appeared in STAND 02.
STAND: After your brother, Josh, died of a heroin overdose when you were thirteen years old, his writings—poems, songs, and more—were given to you. What impact did his writing have on your decision to become a writer and how did you come to the decision to write this memoir?
To be honest, I don’t think his writing ever influenced my own movement into writing. In fact, I hid from his writing for a long time. I had it and read it sometimes, but mostly what I felt when doing so was this weird, visceral rush, like I couldn’t believe these things still existed. It felt almost transgressive to look at them. But I never engaged with the writing, in terms of craft or even meaning. The inclusion of his works into Lord Fear didn’t happen until the very last draft. I managed to convince myself that it wasn’t necessary, mostly because I was scared of really dealing with it, of thinking of him sitting down to try to put words together to make his life make sense, the same way I was doing. But the book needed his voice. The moment I started dropping in snippets of his work, all the other perspectives began to clarify around them.
As for my decision to write this book, that’s hard to say. I think there are moments, figures, themes, that shape the way writers look at the world, that you can’t get over until you’ve really taken a shot at conveying them, and even then they still permeate into your sensibility. He has poked into everything I’ve ever written, always. According to my mother, in middle school (so he was still alive then) an English teacher was having us do descriptive exercises, and mine was, without me even thinking about it, a scene of me learning about his addiction for the first time. When I started trying to write short stories in college, absent brothers were always there, or at least some older, male figure that was captivating but shadowy. When I started working at a local paper, low and behold I was out in Tompkins Square Park interviewing kids about their friends’ ODs. In my first book, which is about minor league baseball in Iowa, I specifically put Lord Fear aside because it wasn’t working and I needed to try something new, and yet there are scenes in the book of me watching these young men play baseball, thinking of Josh.
STAND: We interviewed Swedish writer Ulf Peter Hallberg about his book European Trash, which is a remembrance of his father, and he described a sadness that overcame him after completing the book. It was as if he experienced another separation from his father at that point and Hallberg mentioned that he inserted his father as a character in his next novel in order to be with him again. What has the experience been like for you following the completion of Lord Fear, its publication, and subsequent readings and conversations about Josh?
STAND: As one reviewer put it, Josh could be “rude, sexist and a bully” yet there is an underlying tenderness that comes through in many of his interactions with you and in some of his writings that you share in the book. However, Josh seems uncomfortable with this part of himself and unsure of how to be tender and masculine at the same time. How do you think his understanding of what it meant to be a man impacted his relationships and contributed to the path his life took? And how did Josh influence your understanding of masculinity?
That’s a really good question.
This book is about masculinity as much as anything else, and particularly the toxic ways we internalize masculinity.
I think a lot of this comes from the fact that I was a kid when I knew Josh, and spent most of our relationship ogling his muscles and the physical power that he displayed, the girlfriends he brought around–all these qualities that fit into this nebulous idea I had of “cool.” Yet he was tender with me. And that combination seems to typify the way that boys are taught to worship men that they love: you feel special when someone cares for you while being gruff or threatening to the rest of the world. Like you’ve earned it; like you’re lucky to be worthy of them. And Josh died when I was thirteen, which is the most intense hormonal fault line there is. All I wanted to do was be a man in this confused, porn-induced concept of manhood, and he was the closest thing I thought I had to be a real-life model for that, and then he was gone. His life and death got instantly frozen in that perspective for a long time.
Then returning to his story as an adult, it became impossible to not think about how he tortured himself in the service of feeling like the ultimate man. So much of his writing revolved around feelings of emasculation, whether it was from our father or a boss, or women who he felt ignored him in some way. Often, he broke the world down into failure and triumph, pain and conquest. And I could read the pressure and the self-critique lifting when he was high. This all fundamentally changed the way I understood him. I think when I was younger, it was easier to see him as this Icarus figure, chasing as much awesomeness as possible and just overshooting. I somehow felt like less of a man in that shadow, because I was so frightened of consequences in a way that I imagined he never was. To read how weak he felt, and how much he needed to find ways to feel not weak–it was sad, but it was also beautiful. And I felt implicated in these feelings more than I thought I would. I really recognized in myself this need to feel powerful or validated, and the pain of feeling weak and also like you’re not allowed to express that. As a writer, these are things that I’m constantly trying to reconcile–the grossness of being this privileged white guy who demands validation.
Writing about Josh presented the challenge of acknowledging how toxic that perspective can be, how it can hurt others, while also acknowledging and trying to understand the enormous amount of real pain that he was in.
STAND: Another aspect to that weakness you talked about relates to grief and how men and boys are expected to grieve. As you mentioned, Josh died just as you were entering your teen years. How did your understanding of masculinity, along with the examples of your father and older brother (and other men), impact your ability to appropriately grieve the loss of your brother? And, as an adult, did you experience a different form of that grieving during the writing of this book?
I don’t know if there’s a way to appropriately grieve anyone. Although, I think when he died and I was this insecure boy entering my teenage years, I felt compelled to figure out what was appropriate. I didn’t think I should show too much emotion, so I would only grieve openly when I was alone. I didn’t want to seem weak or self-indulgent; I thought other people knew Josh better or had more legitimate reasons to be sad, so I didn’t want to overstep my allotted emotion or something. A lot of the feeling felt stunted, and I was proud of that for a long time, in this horribly misunderstanding macho way. Writing about Josh definitely broke through a lot of the numbness, but I still felt removed from the act of grieving. During the interview process, it felt like there was a multitude of different versions of grief coming at me and I had to navigate them. It was confusing and overwhelming, intellectually and emotionally stimulating, but I was trying to figure everything out more than anything. It was emotional information overload. And then in the writing, through all the drafts, the act of reconstruction either became or subsumed the act of grieving. I think that’s inevitable. When you write about somebody, you’re remaking them, and the emotion you feel toward them hopefully comes out on the page through that effort, but it’s impossible to feel for them directly. Does that make sense? On the day the book came out, though, I felt this momentary release. There was no more going back and editing; it was over. My wife went to work and I sat on my couch and read a little of the beginning of the book, and I surprised myself with how clearly I pictured his face and how deeply I mourned his loss. I felt grateful for his life and for the time I spent wrestling with him on the page. Then I left and went to the campus where I teach for a department meeting and life continued, but that little moment felt significant.
STAND: In Lord Fear, you write that you wanted Josh “to feel better than he felt.” Can you talk about how feelings of guilt might have accompanied the grief for you or your family? Was there much talk of “what if” following Josh’s death? And how can families find some healing without self-blame or constantly questioning whether they contributed to the addiction?
The guilt was, and probably still is, a constant undercurrent. It’s the flip side to the coin of the way addiction makes us think. There’s blame–what is wrong with them to keep doing this?–and then there’s guilt–what did I do wrong to make them do this? That’s part of what makes overdose deaths so tragic: they complicate the tragedy. It’s never just sad. It’s also enraging and confusing.
I think it’s hard not to internalize the ways that, societally, we haven’t quite gotten to the point where we can look at addiction as a disease, without all the moralizing and accusations.
People say the phrase “addiction is a disease” a lot, but rarely do you see someone actually behaving like it is. We feel comfortable preaching tough love and giving one’s self over to a higher power like those are prescriptions. I know that some people read Lord Fear that way. I got a letter from a reader who felt compelled to tell me that if one person had just given Josh a good smack early on and told him to cut the crap, maybe none of this would have happened.
Part of the project of the book, for me, was laying out all these different relationships that he had, each person with their own feelings of guilt or anger, their own explanations. There’s a lot of messy shit in there–people remembering the ways that they behaved toward him that now, after all these years, might be different. But nobody is culpable. These are all just moments, random moments in which people were trying their best. Every life is made up of so many of these moments, but addiction and overdose make us look back through what could so easily be forgotten, digging for evidence, patterns. And with that, of course, comes blame. Guilt. How could it not? That line about wanting him “to feel better than he felt” represents, for me, the most basic attempt at compassion, without all the other noise. There are no specifics; no one is at fault. It’s looking at a life that was filled with pain and wishing that it was less so. Everyone deserves that, addicts included.
Previously published on STAND Magazine
By: Dwayne D Hayes- Managing Editor
Photo: GettyImages
