56 new york | january 3–16, 2022
hand over my recorder, as if to swat away
what he just said.
Out January 25,Fuccboiwas among
the last projects championed by
Giancarlo DiTrapano, the founder of
the beloved small press Tyrant Books.
The book’s themes are autofictional, the
cadence staccato. It’s also just experi-
mental enough that it’s hard to imagine
its getting a wide release if DiTrapano
hadn’t been involved. Now it stands as
a kind of monument to his influence:
DiTrapano died suddenly in March 2021
as he and Conroe were making the final
touches. They had just landed on a cover
illustration of the author with his eyes
rolled back in his head—“like the fuckboy
demon taking over,” says Conroe.
For over a decade, Tyrant had carved
out a rare countercultural space in the
increa singly st er i le world of New York pub -Sean thor conroe is outlining what he calls the “four
pillars” of fuckboy-hood—the different ways you can be a self-
aggrandizing, duplicitous, and otherwise distasteful man. First, there’s
what he calls the classic spineless, “bitch-ass dude,” whom other men look
down on because they’re not living up to the “masculine standard of
toughness and integ r it y.” There’s the “untr ust wor thy ma le in the romantic
context.” There’s the “hypebeast fuckboy” decked out in Balenciaga. And
finally, there’s the guy who uses sex with more powerful men for
protection. ¶ I ask Conroe—the author of Fuccboi, a novel about a
fuckboy who shares his name and some of his biography—whether he
identifies as a fuckboy. He looks incredulous. “No, hell no,” he says.
lishing, favoring internet-native writers
and harrowing, explicit stories about vice.
DiTrapa no “made w r iting cool aga in,” says
Nico Walker, another DiTrapano protégé
and the author of the autobiographical
novel Cherry. The editor and publisher—
who would sometimes act as a kind of
middleman, connecting writers with
larger presses than his own—often went
to bat for books in which authors wrote
painfully intimate portraits of the worst
parts of themselves. Cherry is about a ma n
cracking up after a tour of Iraq; The Sarah
Book,by Scott McClanahan, is about a
man cracking up after a divorce. Fuccboi
is the story of a man cracking up because
he’s a man—an “examination of mascu-
linity under late capitalism,” according to
the promotional materials. Conroe tells
me The Sarah Book was what made him
decide to “investigate this whole thing,” to
write an unfiltered novel about a fuckboy
“trying to toxic-masc his way through it.”
(“Like, okay, yes—dudes have been shitty
for all time; but so, what, now the move
was to ... out-shitty them?” he writes.
“I don’t know, bro.”) He calls Fuccboi a
“self-help book.”
The protagonist, Sean, will be familiar
to anyone who has been to an off-campus
party at a liberal-arts college in the past
decade: a swaggering, Adderall-fueled
presence who turns out to have paper-
thin skin. As the novel opens, Sean is in
his late 20s and living in Philadelphia,
doing bike delivery for Postmates. He
has failed to turn any of his recent life
experiences—trimming weed in Califor-
nia, walking across the country, being
obsessed with Roberto Bolaño—into a
piece of art. His self-inf licted wounds
make up the bulk of the book: the inter-
nalized gender politics that might be “sus
af ” as Sean obsesses over the woman he
refers to only as “ex-bae” and wonders
whether “roomie bae” is trying to seduce
him by taking a shower in her own home;
the insistence that the literary world is full
of phonies coupled with a works-cited list
that includes Guy Debord, Eileen Myles,
Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sheila Heti, of
whom Conroe is a huge fan. (Heti, whose
real emails to the real Conroe appear in
the book, says she was initially upset that
he had included their correspondence
without asking her. But since reading his
“poetic and propulsive” writing, she has
decided she doesn’t mind. She gave the
book a blurb.)
The closest thing to a redemption nar-
rative comes when Sean suffers an awful
skin condition and returns home to be
nursed back to health by his mother and
sisters. The nearest thing to a missionIt’s Black Friday, and we’re sitting over
plates of potatoes and smoked salmon in
one of those outdoor-dining boxes with
plastic windows in Brighton Beach,
so close to the ocean our conversation
keeps getting interrupted by gulls. The
30-year-old eventually concedes that if
you had done a 23andMe test on him at
the time he was writing the book, he
would have been something like one-
16th fuckboy. It’s that part of him—the
old him—that the book is about. “Ah,
I shouldn’t be saying this,” he says, and
that’s probably correct, but what else can
you expect from a first-time novelist
doing an initial round of press barely
six months after a modest deal with
an independent publisher turned into
a six-figure contract with Little, Brown?
Conroe, wearing a Patagonia vest and a
Carhartt hat in muted tones, waves his
The CULTURE PAGES