Lucas Mann has spent his writing career establishing himself in a niche of creative writing that combines personal introspection with cultural criticism. He has written on a range of topics: His first book, “Class A: Baseball in the Middle of Everywhere,” is about his year playing minor league baseball in a small town in Iowa; “Lord Fear” is about his brother’s death from a heroin overdose when Mann was 13; “Captive Audience” is a mediation on reality TV and an intimate portrait of his own marriage. His latest, “Attachments: Essays on Fatherhood and Other Performances” investigates his own experiences with fatherhood as shaped by culture and politics. Mann also teaches creative writing at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth and owns and operates Riffraff, a bookstore and bar in Providence, Rhode Island, with his wife. “Attachments” comes out Monday, and he will speak at Harvard Book Store on May 20. We interviewed Mann on Friday; his words have been edited for length and clarity.
You’ve written books that are all personal but on a range of topics: minor league baseball, your brother’s death, reality TV. How does “Attachments” fit in?
This creative nonfiction genre is weird and malleable in that to the outside, it looks like I’m researching and writing about a lot of different subjects. Although that’s true to some extent, the themes and personal curiosities that I find within these things are always at the heart of this. All of my work has really been about looking closely at my own life and my own experiences, then trying to think of those within the larger context. I don’t think I’m the kind of memoir writer that thinks I have a particularly interesting life or even that much to say about my own life, but it’s this gesture every time of taking something that I’m thinking about, or a relationship that I have, or something that I’m going through, and in its commonness, realizing that it might be an interesting thing to explore. Ultimately it becomes this investigation into something larger that people might recognize or find something in.
Do you ever struggle with writing about such personal topics?
I only struggle with it after the fact! Genuinely, when I’m writing, I don’t think that I’m revealing anything. I’m just writing about something I’m curious about and what it means. I sort of figure out what I think and what I have to say about it as I go along, so any sort of personal stuff that comes up in the writing really just feels like it’s woven into the process of writing, a process that almost feels outside of myself. Obviously that’s me lying to myself, but that’s sort of the only way I know how to do it. Then right about now, when I remember people are going to read the book, I go through the process of feeling like, what am I doing?
The full title is “Attachments: Essays on Fatherhood and Other Performances.” What do you mean by “other performances”?
My hope is that the title is a nod in two directions. A bunch of different essays in this book, even if they are about personal material, are also about other things: One of them is about Brad Pitt eating on screen, one of them is all about LeBron James, one of them is about Andy Warhol’s diaries. Part of the “and Other Performances” is a literal nod to a reader in an attempt to tell them that this is a book that is doing a weird cultural studies thing – like, “please be prepared for that.”
“And Other Performances” also points to the fact that fatherhood is performance, an experience that is being lived in this really intense way while also being publicly performed. So much it is a performance of the kind of person you want to be, or be seen as, until that becomes real. It’s an experience that is incredibly intimate and more genuine than any I’ve ever had, but it’s also mediated through these constant ideas of how fathers are seen or should be seen, and how you want to be seen.
Has your writing process been similar for each book?
This was the first collection of essays I’ve written, so there was something really different in getting to sort out these different formal things or different ideas and work on them until those 12 pages, or whatever it is, feel right – and then think of something else. It was a different way of conceiving it and managing my time, because previously, everything had to feel productive in a linear way. It was really freeing from that standpoint.
The other thing that was different was a product of the fact that the circumstances of my life have changed. I wrote my first book in graduate school, when I was incredibly stressed and ambitious and had all the time in the world. I was totally this cliché of a young ambitious writer: writing at all hours and being kind of a lunatic about it. This book grew out of being my kid’s primary caregiver for the first two years of her life, during pandemic lockdown. I didn’t have time to write, and I didn’t even know if I was interested in writing. My brain didn’t feel the same; I felt like an entirely different person than the person I knew who was a writer. I had to figure out what writing meant to me and how it was going to fit into my life now that I’m this new version of myself.
So, what is your aim with this book? Did you have an audience in mind while writing it?
Almost always to my detriment, I never really have a good reader in mind while I’m writing. And every book of mine has had this weird balance between the subject that it is about and then the kind of book that it actually is. My first book was about minor league baseball, and it was very much a book that didn’t feel like it was written for baseball people, even though it was about baseball. So some people were reading it as baseball people and other people were reading it despite the fact that it was about baseball. In other words, different people had different reasons to be annoyed. For whatever reason, that’s kind of the situation I always find myself in.
With this book, maybe more than any one I’ve ever written, I did feel like I would love for somebody to read this and feel a little less alone in an experience they are having. That doesn’t mean this book was written “for dads,” and in a lot of ways, it feels, writing-wise, more in conversation with a lot of women writers that I really admire. But I do want it to feel like it captures some of the overwhelming emotional experience that is fatherhood. If it does find its way into a dad’s hands or even a skeptical dad’s hands, then my hope is that it resonates as something that felt really intense and went unspoken in my life.
You’re also a bookstore owner and a professor of creative writing. Do these pursuits have an impact on your writing or influence the way you think about writing and books?
From a nuts and bolts, time-that-I-have-to-do-things perspective, I’m sure it’s all a net negative. But on more of a spiritual level, writing is a lonely experience, and to me, one that always felt about myself. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, but it doesn’t feel particularly sustaining for me; it doesn’t feel worth it.
At the bookstore, my wife Ottavia really runs everything and is responsible for it being wonderful. One of the things I do is organize and host events with writers. We’ve been having a lot of those, and being on the other side of things – asking folks to share their work, trying to cultivate an audience to appreciate that work, seeing how much cool work people have, and then seeing the people that come out of the woodwork because they believe in art — feels really good. Teaching makes me feel the same way. I have no idea if either of these ventures changes who I am as a writer, but it does make me feel better about the overall idea of it and the overall act of it. It makes me feel good to be out of my own head and out of my own concerns, while still being surrounded by words.
- Lucas Mann reads from “Attachments: Essays on Fatherhood and Other Performances” in conversation with Nina MacLaughlin, author of “Wake, Siren: Ovid Resung” at 7 p.m. May 20 at Harvard Book Store, 1256 Massachusetts Ave., Harvard Square, Cambridge. Free. Information is here.
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