Sober Living: A Conversation with Novelist Michael Deagler, Author of EARLY SOBRIETIES
"I don't think the writer needs to be a hilarious person in order for the work to be funny. It all just comes from the characters, from knowing them well and getting them on the page..."
Before today’s interview, three quick items:
This fall I’m teaching a 10-week online short story workshop for Stanford Continuing Studies, “Four Beginnings, One Ending.” Registration opens Aug. 19 & class begins on Wednesday, 9/25, 6-8:30 PM PT—more information here.
Currently, yearly Bookish subscriptions are $39, monthly, $3.90. (Upcoming renewals can be changed to this rate if you subscribed at a higher rate—open your list of Substack newsletter subscriptions, click on Bookish, and it should bring up the relevant information.) 📗
Thursday, Sept. 19, 6:30 PM, Kendall Morgan of My Field Notes and I are cohosting a Substack meet-up at The Rose, 220 Rose Avenue, Venice Beach, CA (the credit goes to Kendall for this great idea). Please join us for a beverage, good food, and conversation! Link to register: lu.ma/f7s5jdio
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Several years ago, I met today’s featured writer, Michael Deagler, when he emailed to ask if I’d be interested in doing an interview with him about my story collection, The Virginity of Famous Men, for Hobart. (Today, happily, I get to return the favor.) He’d finished his MFA a couple of years earlier, and some of his short stories had begun to appear in notable literary magazines, among them, New England Review, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, Slice, and The Sun.
He was living in Pennsylvania, his home state, at the time, but in 2020, he moved to Los Angeles to enroll at USC for a Ph.D. in creative writing. In the program, he’s had the chance to work with Aimee Bender, Percival Everett, Dana Johnson, and Maggie Nelson, and is now a year or two from completing his doctorate.
His first novel, Early Sobrieties, was published on May 7, and I read it with admiration and joy. It’s funny and sad and knowing, the sentences supple, the main character, Dennis Monk, affable and compelling, and on occasion, hapless in a way that’s both sympathetic and interesting. I’m far from alone in my admiration of Early Sobrieties—Charlie Lee wrote a praise-filled review for the New York Times, and Percival Everett calls Michael “the real deal.”
In last week’s post, Agent List XXI, I shared a link to a chapter, “New Poets,” from Early Sobrieties that was first published in Harper’s—including it again here.
Christine/Bookish: Many of the chapter titles are different Philadelphia streets and neighborhoods, and we see Dennis Monk, your first-person narrator and main character, taking up residence in each of them. Were these locations always a unifying principle for Early Sobrieties?
Michael Deagler: When I was first drafting the book, I did kind of divide South Philadelphia up into neighborhoods as an organizing device. You know, this kind of character would live in this neighborhood, so I can work in this anecdote that happened to me there, or this spot or image that I've always liked, like the last Southwark housing tower or the fact that the ACME is on the site of the old Moyamensing Prison.
I've often used place as a kind of prompt that way—if you put the character in a specific place, with a specific street layout and specific buildings or businesses that they can interact with, it can help organically the fill out the story. Plot points just suggest themselves.
That's been my experience with neighborhoods in real life: when you're in a neighborhood, you see all these things you don't normally think about, places you used to go, or that have changed, that aren't there anymore, so the past and present—local history, personal memory, nostalgia, regret—they all mingle in a way that feels narratively rich.
CS: I couldn't help but think of Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son as I read Early Sobrieties. Is Johnson's now-canonical story collection one of your influences? Your main character, unlike Shithead, Jesus' Son's protagonist, is six months sober when your novel opens, however.
MD: Jesus' Son was a huge influence, though in kind of a narrow sense. I've always loved how Johnson manages to capture the existential experience of addiction without writing directly at it. Jesus' Son is a book about an addict, but we don't really see him taking drugs too often. It isn't a day-to-day documentation of addiction the way so many books are. It's more interested in the intangible state of addiction. I wanted to see if I could do that with sobriety: to not get caught up in the day-to-day of it, but to capture the existential experience.
In execution, the books are fairly different, in part because addiction and sobriety are so different. The prose and story structure aren't much like Jesus' Son. Johnson's writing is so spare and concise and avoidant.
Time is slippery. Monk's narration is kind of maximalist and neurotic, and time is almost oppressively concrete and unidirectional.
CS: Like you, Dennis is a writer, and I know some of the events in this novel are based on your own experiences. Would you comment on any challenges of writing fiction based in part on your own life--craft-related, personal, or both?
MD: I think the main issue is loosening your fidelity to "what really happened," since what really happened isn't always what works best in the story. When I started writing the book, I was the same age as Monk, and it was often unclear—in an unhelpful way —where I ended and he began.
In 2022, when I was revising the book for publication, I was seven years older than Monk, and that made it much easier to regard him as a fictional character, to allow his thoughts and actions to diverge from mine in ways that served the larger project of the book. A strange thing, though, when you work on a book for a long time, is that your fictionalized version of something can supplant the original in your mind. A memory ceases to be a memory and becomes a plot element in a story you wrote.
CS: Early Sobrieties is often very funny, but there's a palpable undercurrent of tragedy--several of Dennis's friends and familiars have died, some from drug overdoses, others from violent assaults. Did the humor come naturally or did you find yourself working hard at times to maintain a light touch?
MD: Thanks for saying it's funny. One of the comments I've gotten from people is that the book is much funnier than they were expecting.
I think it's just that I really enjoy my characters, even the tragic or unethical ones. I think that's maybe the key. If you enjoy your characters, then you will find the humor in them.
I don't think the writer needs to be a hilarious person in order for the work to be funny. It all just comes from the characters, from knowing them well and getting them on the page enough that the reader knows them too.
CS: What are you working on now?
MD: I'm working on a novel that is kind of the opposite of Early Sobrieties in every way. It's not at all autobiographical. It's set in a different time period and has a lot of genre elements. In some ways, it's been a lot harder to write on a technical level, but I've learned a lot from the process.
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Michael Deagler is the author of the novel Early Sobrieties. He lives in Los Angeles. One of his most recent stories, “The Pleasure of a Working Life,” appeared in Harper’s in May. You can find an excerpt here.
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Coda: I recently corresponded with Nina Schuyler (of Stunning Sentences) about her new story collection, In This Ravishing World. Like Early Sobrieties, it’s a terrific book, and I hope you’ll pick up a copy from your local bookstore and read it soon.
Wonderful interview. My early stories were definitely directed by place.