How NY Times Bestselling Author Garrard Conley Writes

43 min • 15 mars 2024

New York Times bestselling memoirist turned novelist, Garrard Conley, spoke with me about going from activist to fictionist, the isolation of being an artist, and his debut novel All the World Beside.

Garrard Conley is the New York Times bestselling author of the memoir Boy Erased, as well as the creator and co-producer of the podcast UnErased: The History of Conversion Therapy in America. His memoir became a major motion picture starring Nicole Kidman, Russell Crowe, and Lucas Hedges, directed by Joel Edgerton.

His debut novel is titled All the World Beside and described as “... an electrifying, deeply moving novel about the love story between two men in Puritan New England.”

Tess Gunty, National Book Award-winning author of Rabbit Hutch, called the book an “... accomplishment of breathtaking prose, expert pacing, and extraordinary psychological intelligence...” Garth Greenwell wrote, “... this novel contains some of the finest writing I've encountered in recent American fiction.”

Garrard’s work has been published by The New York Times, Oxford American, Time, and Virginia Quarterly Review, among others. Conley is a graduate of Brooklyn College’s MFA program, where he was a Truman Capote Fellow specializing in fiction, and he is an assistant professor of creative writing at Kennesaw State University.

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In this file Garrard Conley and I discussed:

What it was like to work with Radiolab on a podcast

Setting out to write “The Queer Scarlett Letter”

His intense historical research process

How he inhabits his stories

Why writers can’t skimp on what the audience wants

How to un-Tik-Tok-ify your brain

And a lot more!

Show Notes:

garrardconley.com