The enduring allure of failure
An interview with Andrew Ewell about his debut novel "Set For Life"
The story of someone bumbling from one mistake to the next is well-worn, but the reason we keep ones where people make one mishap after another (usually created by trying to fix a previous error) is because the stories are relatable. Who hasn’t had a moment where they can’t get out of their own way? Maybe it doesn’t cause us to lose our job, our marriage and friendships, but it’s easy to imagine how one slip could send us spiraling into a personal abyss.
That feeling radiates out of Andrew Ewell’s debut novel Set For Life, which is not to be confused with a self-help book. In fact, the unnamed narrator in Ewell’s book goes from a comfortable but unfulfilling life to something far from set over the course of a single fall semester. The narrator, who remains unnamed, falls apart and decides to turns his life upside down with one choice after another — starting with failing to write during a fellowship in France and sleeping with his best friend’s wife the night he returns. It goes downhill quickly: a lost job, a divorce, a failed relationship and moving back home to your parents’ faraway and beat down motel in Florida.
Ewell’s novel has been compared to Frederick Exley’s 1968 novel A Fan’s Notes (which is where the name of this newsletter comes from) by Jay McInerney.
"Set for Life is a hilarious novel about failure, lost youth and squandered dreams,” McInerney writes in his blurb. “Andrew Ewell seems to be an expert on bad decisions, self destructive behavior and hangovers. His hugely entertaining debut reminds me of Frederick Exley's classic A Fan's Notes."
Exley’s classic is a semi-autobiographical story of an alcoholic, fledgling writer who suffers from mental illness issues and becomes obsessed with the New York Giants. It’s based closely on Exley’s own life and is a marvelous and painful book. And not a character in it is likable in the modern sense of the word. But it works because we’re willing to follow Exley down to the darkest depths of his psyche and through each mistake because it’s weirdly funny, gut-retching and so well written that it goes down a little too easily at times.
Ewell’s novel shares a lot of that, especially an unlikable narrator who you still somehow root for (or I did at least), but who you know will make every wrong turn. Ewell’s sentences breeze because they’re clean, but layered. They’re filled with the propulsive drive of plot and economical without missing deeper points and sly moments of uncomfortable humor. While there are similarities between Set For Life and A Fan’s Notes (struggling writers narrating a story about struggling to write, alcohol, obsession), Ewell’s portrayal has a bit more of a midlife crisis feel to it in and feels like mid-career Bill Murray would be hired to portrayal the narrator instead of a cut-loose mid-career Jack Nicholson, who would have played an exceptional Exley. Ewell’s narrator will put off plenty of readers while others, like myself, will find him a bit charming.
Set for Life is Ewell’s first novel.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How long did you work on this book? It reads like a book that you dug into for a long time, as both through thinking about it and on a sentence by sentence level.
I would say the actual composition of the thing was probably shy of two years. I probably gave it to my agent after maybe 18 months of straight work, and then he and I went through a couple of rounds before sending it out.
But, how long does any book take to write? I mean, these ideas are percolating for who knows how much time and a lot of the subject of the book was themes that were probably on my mind for a decade.
Yeah. Well, so how long ago did you go to BU for your grad school, for an MFA?
2010.
So not too long ago.
Yeah, I mean, an MFA is a weird thing. I was going to say, I went sort of late-ish. I mean, I was 30 by the time I went to grad school.
I went at like 32.
I think that's actually kind of normal, maybe, for grad school.
I think writing is one of the few art forms — fiction writing anyway — that's not for the young. It's sort of an old person’s game. The more life you've seen, the more stuff you've done, the more you've got to draw on. And that's not the case for actors or musicians.
I agree, and I actually think the best writing of writers is usually once they hit 40, when you can finally figure out how this thing works. A certain just, oh, that's why that does that. You've read enough. You've tried and failed. You have to fail, I think, to be a good writer.
I would agree with that. I mean, it's not for me to say whether or not I'm any good at this yet, but I feel like what you just said describes my experience. I think that I always had a knack for words, but I think it took a while to find out if I had anything to say with them
What were you doing before you got an MFA?
I was playing music mostly. I was teaching guitar lessons and playing in a band and writing stories and sending them off in a manila envelope and doing the thing. And I think I always imagined I would probably go and get an MFA and I just didn't do it early on.
So where did you grow up and where were you playing music?
I was born in Atlanta and I lived for my early years in the Caribbean. My parents were sort of old hippies and they bought a sailboat and decided we should live on it and that's what we did. Then we ran out of money in Annapolis, Maryland, and so that's where I grew up and went to high school. Then I went to college in Minnesota. I dunno, it seemed like the thing to do then.
College or Minnesota seemed like the thing to do?
Well, college was the thing to do, and I liked the look of Carleton College when I went out there, and I liked the idea of going someplace that I figured I didn't have any other reason to go to. I imagined I wouldn't have much reason to go to the upper Midwest other than to try it out for college. That's what I did.
A couple years later, I moved to Charlottesville to go to grad school in English at the University of Virginia and then I quit that program and spent the next seven, eight years in Virginia playing music and teaching guitar lessons and working at a wine shop. And that’s the sort of stuff you do to cobble together an income or something resembling one.
Also, just the jobs I think are very important for a writer. I don't think you should just go to publishing right away.
Yeah. That's a mystery to me. I don't even really understand how people find their way into that.
How did you end up in the Boston University MFA program?
They let me in and they had a good funding package.
It's a cliche, but I mean that's one of those things that I do say to people thinking about getting an MFA is the only hard and fast rule is don't pay for it.
So anyway, I got in and I didn't know this beforehand or going in, but it turned out to be a good program for me. Leslie Epstein, who has been running the thing forever, has a reputation for being kind of a hard ass and that was great for me. He was stellar.
Did you write other books and or were you a short story writer? Was there a novel there that you just are sitting in the drawer that was your first attempt?
I wrote two novels over the decade of my 30s and, at the time, I wanted them published. I guess you'd say they were both close calls. I had an agent they got sent out and nobody wanted to publish them.
Looking back, I guess you'd say they're books in a drawer, but I don't have any interest in anyone ever reading them at this point. Looking back, I rank it as apprentice work that was necessary for figuring out how to do the thing.
I ask because the book reads somebody that has written a lot and I read the McInerney blurb and I was like A Fan's Notes, that's one of my favorite books ever and a big name drop. But I kind of see it in that both books center around a bumbling kind of idiot story, but both are more than that because it’s more someone stumbling through life and making mistakes as they try to fix the previous mistake I know where that come from for Exley, but where how did this come to you? Where did the first sentence come from? Or did you outline it? Where did it originate?
In some ways I didn't really mean to write this book. That sounds coy, but I left a tenure track teaching job and I got divorced. I was sort of in the middle of some big changes in my life trying to figure out what the hell I was going to do, and I'd written two books that didn't sell, and it was just sort of feeling like maybe this isn't working out. Anyway, so I moved back to Virginia and was working at the bar at my parents' restaurant, and I sort of half thinking, you know what? I'm going to throw in the towel on this writing thing. It's not working. I'm done with it. But I had all these sort of questions lingering about what I'd been up to the last 10 years: teaching, academia, writing, publishing, marriage, divorce, friendship, and a lot of severed ties and things like that. All that stuff was sort of on my mind and this guy started talking in my head as they do, and he just kind of became, I don't know, a sort of foil or an avatar, a sort of way for me to get into talking about that stuff that was on my mind or asking questions about it or just finding my way into it. That's sort of how it started.
It doesn't feel like you outlined.
I think at some point there was for sure an outline roughly. For me, you can find your way into a book length story, maybe 40, 50, 60, 70 pages. You can find your way about that far before you need to know where you're going. At least that's the way it's been for me. At that point, you kind of need a firmer sense of what the hell it is you're saying and what you're trying to get to and where you're going to and where the story's going to go.
I guess the way I think of it, and maybe this is why it doesn't feel outlined or whatever, if that's the case, the feeling for me is I kind of like those novels that sort of feel like they're relayed to you from a bar stool — a conversational tone, a guy talking to you. It seems to me you would think that would have to be a kind of not outlined, not plotted kind of narrative, but to my mind when you're telling a story you know the ending. When you're talking to somebody, you're saying, ‘let me tell you about this thing that happened’, and that's kind of the feeling I like to go for. So yeah, there was roughly an outline at some point in the writing process, though, I'm hard pressed to remember exactly when.
Those stories are also well practiced. A person that's really good at telling a story at a bar has told that story a thousand times. I mean, the outline makes sense, you have to practice telling the story.
And part of that practice too is getting that 60, 70 pages into it where you find out what the tone is, how this narrator speaks. In some ways, you're getting the practice by writing the book itself.,
So you write this book, you send it to your agent. Had that agent stuck with you through the other two books, or was it somebody new?
I parted ways with my agent before I wrote this book and then got this agent after this book. But before that, I hadn't had anything. It had been probably four or five years since I had something to send out.
So you write it, and then how does it end up at Simon and Schuster?
We sent it out and we sent it out, and they were the first to get back to us, first to take a meeting. They really liked it. They totally got it and had a couple of ideas that resonated, that felt right.
So you're going through this process again. The previous two books don't get purchased and they're sitting, I mean bit, it sounds like your life kind of fell apart. I don't know how to ask that question, but what's the feeling like the day you finally signed a contract? You're like, this is the thing I tried so hard to do, and I almost gave up on it.
It's fucking great. It's awesome. I mean, I think the way I joked about it at the time was, “this is awesome, now I don't have to kill myself,” but that's only sort of half a joke. I mean, part of what I wrote the book about, or part of what I was exploring in the book itself is what happens when you have an idea of yourself, or an idea of what you're going to do with your life and it doesn't pan out, not only does it not pan out, it goes disastrously wrong. I mean, I wrote the book in a kind of state of transition and confusion, or something like that, and getting it published and getting to work with a great editor and all of that was awesome. It was great.
What set you down that path to want to be a writer?
Well, I was an only child. I spent a lot of time by myself when I was growing up, and went to a school that prioritized the arts. So I suppose in some ways I was kind of conditioned to be creative or whatever. But I think, I came to books pretty early on, but I don't think any differently than most people do who continue to be readers. I guess I'd put it this way: as I said, I spent a lot of time alone when I was young and the time that I wasn't alone, I spent a lot of time around adults, which is to say my parents and their friends, and they had a lot of weird friends and a lot of strange people were coming in and out of my life, and they were interesting and curious, and I didn't really get what was going on, but I found myself wondering a lot about it. I think when I first came to age it is that you start reading real books, I want to say maybe early high school or something, and when I was first read Kafka and Gogol and that kind of stuff, there was something about those books that made more sense to me than the real world. I don't mean that in any kind of escapist way.
I started reading books in a way that they organized things for my mind that didn't make sense in the real world. So you read enough of that kind of stuff and then you want to imitate it. I suppose that's how I started writing.
And the reason I went to UVA for grad school to study English is the same misguided reason that a lot of people who want to be writers go to grad school and study literature and theory and criticism, and it was an error. It's a different field of work. It's just a very different practice. I should say, for me anyway, certainly there are critics who are also good writers and writers of fiction and poetry and that sort of writing. But for me, it's just a different side of the brain. And going to MLA conferences and writing a monograph on Yeats turned out not to be what I wanted to do. I guess it's as simple as that.
So are you going to be tenured now?
Well, I haven't taught in four or five years at this point.
Really?
Yeah. I left in 2019. I left right before the pandemic, and then the pandemic happened, and then I don't know. I mean, at some point I imagine I'll probably have to get a straight job again, but I don't know, truth be told, it would not be the end of the world for me to bartend at night and write books during the day. In a lot of ways, that's maybe preferable. Although that said, I do like teaching. I like being in a classroom. I like students and all of that business. But the tenure track thing and having a dean's office breathing down your neck and all that is just not for me.