january3–16, 2022 | newyork 57sandwichesandchoppedcheesefroma
bodegafor mostmeals.
That’swhenhe metDiTrapano.Right
beforehis firstM.F.A.workshopin 2019,
Conroesenttheeditora coldemailthat
includedwhatwouldbecomehisthesis:
anearlyversionofFuccboi.DiTrapano
surprisedhimbyrespondinglessthana
day lateraskingto seea finishedbook.
Walkersaysthemanuscriptenergized
th e editor.“Giansentme twobooksin his
li fe,”he says.“OnewasFuccboi.Hewas
re allyhypedaboutit.”(Theotherwas
MichaelOndaatje’sThe CollectedWorks
ofBillytheKid.)
DiTrapanotookan interestin Conroe.
WhenthewriterandI trundleout-
sideto smokea cigaretteon thenear-
emptyboardwalk,Conroesaystheview
re mindshimof wherehe stayedwith
DiTrapanooverNewYear’s2021:at a
housein Italyoverlookingtheocean.By
March,Fuccboiwas essentiallyfinished.
DiTrapanowasplanningto putoutthe
bookon a newimpr int .Butthenhe died.
Suddenly,Conroesays,he didn’treally
careaboutFuccboianymore:“Shitgot
ki ndof realkindof quick,youknow?”Soon, though, one of the agents
DiTrapanohadcontactedon Conroe’s
behalfreachedoutto seeif he wantedto
continuetheprocess,andConroeagreed.
Hesayshe was“reallymanic”whenthe
agentsentthenoveloutto publishers;
hestayedup all nightandfinishedthe
si xthandfinalbookof KarlOveKnaus-
gaard’sMyStruggle.(“ I wassavingthe
la st 100 pages.”)Thenextday,theoffer
camein fromLittle,Brown;lessthan
24 hourslater,he accepted.He wouldn’t
sa y howmuchhisadvancewas,butthe
publisherconfirmedit wasa six-figure
deal.Conroetookoffshortlyafter,
drivinghisChevyvanto LosAngeles.
“Iwasgoingthroughsomeshit,”he says.
“Iwasjusttryingto changemy life.”
Acoupleof monthslater,a fiction
writerand artist named SamPink
publisheda blogpostclaimingConroestatement is the admission, early in
the novel, that a female editor (called
only “editor bae,” naturally) asked Sean
to cut the “rape-y parts” of a novel he
shared with her: “every savage, ugly,
testosterone-fueled, shameful thing it
had been the most difficult to write.”
Conroe won’t say whether this happened
in real life, abruptly citing the unreli-
ability of memory and the instability of
the self; he still doesn’t get why people
keep asking about that part of the book.
Fuccboi itself was the product of a very
different kind of editorial guidance.
Conroe describes DiTrapano’s editing
style as “like, ‘This chapter is kind of
weak. Make it better, bro.’”
Conroe was born in Japan to a Japa-
nese mother and an American father.
Both worked as caretakers, and Conroe
recalls spending time as a child at the
publicly funded disability and rehab-
ilitation communities in Europe where his
parents found gigs. “People had different
jobs according to their ability,” he says of
those communities. “So you might be in
the damn weavery or the candle-making
workshop.” The work took the family
from Japan to Sacramento to Scotland
to upstate New York. Conroe attended
middle school in Santa Cruz and, starting
in fifth grade, when his parents split up,
lived in a “house full of women,” includ-
ing his two sisters and mother. (He says
his mom liked the book but had to keep in
mind that the Sean Thor Conroe he was
writing about wasn’t literally the Sean
she had raised.) His father mostly absent,
Conroe got deeply into play ing basketball,
modeling himself on players like Allen
Iverson and rappers he admired. He was
recruited by Swarthmore but quit the col-
lege team as a sophomore (he jokesthatit
was because he started “smoking cigs and
reading a nd self-my tholog izing”); he stud-
ied writing with a minor in philosophy.
In 2014, a disagreement with the col-
lege about a missed credit a nd the ter ms of
his need-based scholarship made Conroe
so furious he decided to walk across the
country, beginning a period of tran-
sience. He says he spent the next 100 days
walking—that he went back to Santa Cruz
but felt so unsettled he didn’t really want
to live in a house, so he slept in a sleep-
ing bag on his bed. Eventually, he moved
to Philadelphia, where he startedpub-
lishing short stories in online magazines,
before relocating to New York to pursue
an M.F.A. at Columbia. A cousin who had
recently depa r ted the cit y gave Conroe his
set-building jobs in Greenpoint and Red
Hook, and Conroe moved into a Harlem
apartment without a kitchen, eating egg
had intentionally stolen his prose style,
using it to gain entry into a prestigious
writing program and then to secure
a hefty advance for his book. As evi-
dence, Pink provided a series of emails
in which he said Conroe alternately
thanked him for deeply inf luencing his
work and apologized for what might feel
like an adoption of his voice—attempts
to secure an endorsement Pink says
he rejected. “I can’t stress enough how
conniving he is with his thinking and
planning,” Pink wrote. “The man really
is a weasel mastermind, in the art of
snatching the crumb.” He accused
Conroe’s publisher of “riding Gian’s
ghost.” Conroe, who thanks Pink for
“lighting the way” in Fuccboi’s a ck nowl-
edgments, later tells me that Pink is a
“cited influence” and that he had con-
sidered him a friend. (When I reached
out to Pink to discuss these claims, he
told me only to get a real job. Then he
posted a screenshot of our email thread
to his Instagram and Twitter.)
Walking under the elevated subway
down Brighton Beach Avenue, looking
for a place to grab a beer, Conroe asks
whether I think it’s crazy for him to pub-
lish this book, whether he’s dropping
a “reckless bomb.” He tells me the way
DiTrapano was “kind of, like, hyping,
ga ssing the book up” ha s created a “weird
energy” with the release. Now he has to
navigate the aftermath without him.
When I asked Walker about the effect
DiTrapano had on his own career, he took
a beat. “I could really use Gian now,” he
sa id. He wa s sit ting on hundreds of pages
of writing he didn’t quite know what to
do with. For Conroe, the loss likewise
represents the absence of a confident
advocate. Looking out at the beach, get-
ting quiet, he tells me the book was really
the product of DiTrapano’s faith in him.
At some point, he had stopped caring
what his M.F.A. workshops said about it:
“Gian fucks with this. I don’t care what
you guys say.”
Conroe seems shaken by everything
that has happened since the beginning of
last year—the loss of DiTrapano, the book
deal, the attention, the criticism. These
days, he’s all about being in his body, he
says, taking pains to distance himself
f rom the f ic tiona l Sea n. “A lot of that book
is from a place of, like, Nothing matters.
I’m fucked up,” he says. “And, you know,
I was fucked up.” He doesn’t want to be
that guy. He recently moved to Brooklyn,
where it’s quieter. He’s playing a lot of bas-
ketball. He’s taking cold showers. “I’m on
my body-fa scism shit ,” he says. He pauses,
reconsiders. “That was a joke.” ■He decided to
write an unfiltered
novel about a
fuckboy “trying to
toxic-masc his
way through it.”