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WORK TITLE: Anyone’s Ghost
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WEBSITE: https://www.august-thompson.com/
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PERSONAL
Born in NH.
EDUCATION:Holds bachelor’s degree; New York University, M.F.A.
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CAREER
Educator and writer. Taught English in Spain, two years.
AWARDS:Goldwater Fellow, NYU.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
[open new]August Thompson is an author of fiction exploring intimate relations in the context of identity in flux. Born and raised in New Hampshire, he attended high school in Los Angeles. As a youth he was fond of fantasy and adventure books and especially admired Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” series. Speaking with Nick Levine of AnOther, Thompson described himself as “a pretty neurotic person and pretty socially anxious,” and during his adolescence he often found himself admiring both female and male peers in such a way that he was unsure whether he wanted to be with them or be them. Thompson was closeted until around age twenty-five, at which time he came out as bisexual. Connecting a sense of yearning with his sexual identity as well as his orientation as a writer, Thompson told Alim Kheraj of Dazed: “I think being bisexual, it’s a whole non-stop yearn-fest. You yearn for the men in your life or the women in your life. I’ve had times where I wish I could be more feminine or more masculine. For me it’s about never being truly satisfied. That’s where good drama comes from.” Seeking to kickstart a writing career, Thompson earned a master of fine arts degree from New York University, where Joyce Carol Oates was a noteworthy mentor. About the influence of many a teacher over the years, Thompson said to Kheraj, “I’ve had such an amazing education. Along with the books they’ve shown me, teachers have filled the gap in my own self-confidence and guided me towards fulfilling my ambition. They have affirmed me not only as a writer but as a person.”
Thompson made his fiction debut with the novel Anyone’s Ghost. Still adapting to his parents’ divorce, fifteen-year-old Theron leaves his mother behind in Los Angeles to spend the summer with his no-nonsense father. His dad’s discovery of pot brownies results in Theron enlisting at the local hardware store, where seventeen-year-old overseer Jake is likewise an aficionado of weed and heavy metal. Stealing from the till and drinking in the Wal-mart parking lot, Jake and Theron get closer than Theron might have expected, since Jake is engaged to a woman back in Texas. Suddenly split up by summer’s end, the two young men reunite years later for a concert in New York. By then NYU grad Theron is romancing a woman, Jake is addled by intoxicants, and the fate prefigured in the novel’s opening line—that the third car crash would end Jake’s life—comes poignantly into view.
About his impetus in writing his debut, Thompson told Kheraj, “I wanted the reader’s attention to be on the granularity of falling for someone. … To me, the book is about intimations and those tiny moments.” A Publishers Weekly reviewer observed that Thompson “skillfully captures Theron’s vulnerability, especially when the two men finally act on their mutual attraction.” A Kirkus Reviews writer was impressed with Thompson’s ability to write “with a sense of tension about having nothing to do—no simple trick.” The reviewer found Thompson “graceful” in addressing faulty masculinity and appreciated how, despite looming tragedy, “the mood is bighearted, revealing the power of the first flush” of romance. The Kirkus Reviews writer deemed Thompson’s debut a “brash and well-turned coming-of-age tale.” Praising the “beautifully crafted” prose and natural dialogue, Laura Chanoux declared in Booklist that Anyone’s Ghost “captures the joy and agony of first love alongside the struggle to understand and become oneself.”[close new]
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, July, 2024, Laura Chanoux, review of Anyone’s Ghost, p. 22.
Kirkus Reviews, June 1, 2024, review of Anyone’s Ghost.
Publishers Weekly, May 13, 2024, review of Anyone’s Ghost, p. 72.
ONLINE
AnOther, https://www.anothermag.com/ (July 8, 2024), Nick Levine, “August Thompson’s Debut Novel Dives Headlong into the Pool of Queer Desire,” author interview.
August Thompson website, https://www.august-thompson.com (December 29, 2024).
Dazed, https://www.dazeddigital.com/ (July 5, 2024), Alim Kheraj, “August Thompson’s Debut Novel Is a Non-stop Yearn-Fest,” author interview.
Hobart Pulp, https://www.hobartpulp.com/ (July 9, 2024), Anna Dorn, “August Thompson on His Debut Novel Anyone’s Ghost.”
August Thompson was born and raised in the middle of nowhere, New Hampshire, before he attended middle school in West LA. After surviving California optimism, he moved to NYC for his bachelor’s, studied in Berlin, and taught English in Spain for two years. He recently received his MFA at New York University’s creative writing program as a Goldwater Fellow.
August Thompson’s debut novel is a non-stop yearn-fest
The up-and-coming author discusses his first book, Anyone’s Ghost, and shares his advice for aspiring writers
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As a teenager, there’s perhaps no feeling as potent as falling in love for the first time. It can feel transformative, maybe even a little disarming, when someone ignores the awkward doughiness of adolescence and draws out the person you might one day become. With insecurity and the flush of hormones gnawing at your psyche, you might remodel who you are moulding your behaviour or interests to mirror theirs in order to ingratiate yourself further. If things get really intense, you might even find yourself asking: do I just want this person or do I want to be them?
It’s a question that Theron David Alden, the narrator of Anyone’s Ghost, the debut novel from American writer August Thompson, grapples with when he meets the beautiful, older and enigmatic Jake during a lazy New Hampshire summer as a teenager. With a shared affinity for Metallica and metal music, drinking to excess and getting high out of their minds, they begin a deep friendship coloured by Theron’s yearning for Jake and both boys’ nihilistic tendencies.
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Following an explosive end to their summer together, the pair go their separate ways, drifting apart as Theron finishes high school and then moves to New York for college. It’s there, six years later, that Jake re-enters his life for a brief but life-altering few days where old vulnerabilities rear their head, new intimacies are explored and fresh wounds are inflicted.
Tragedy, however, casts a shadow over the novel – from the first line, we learn that Jake will die in a car crash. Anyone’s Ghost forces you to live side-by-side with Theron as his feelings for Jake unspool or stack on top of one another with growing intensity. “I wanted the reader’s attention to be on the granularity of falling for someone,” Thompson explains. “To me, the book is about intimations and those tiny moments, not the artificial drama of whether Theron and Jake get together or not.”
Below, Dazed speaks to August Thompson about writing Anyone’s Ghost, the significance of yearning, the language of grief and his advice for young writers.
Yearning colours every aspect of Theron’s internal world. Why was that something you wanted to explore?
August Thompson: I would say outside of loneliness, yearning is the most familiar emotion and experience to me. The book is not very autobiographical, but the emotional aspect of yearning for basically everything, to be someone else, to be somewhere else felt very true to me as a young person who did not fit in. And then I think being bisexual, it’s a whole non-stop yearn-fest. You yearn for the men in your life or the women in your life. I’ve had times where I wish I could be more feminine or more masculine. For me it’s about never being truly satisfied. That’s where good drama comes from.
Anyone's Ghost
Courtesy Picador
Even though there are brief moments of internalised homophobia, Theron doesn’t really spiral or panic about his queerness. Was there a reason why you swerved that?
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August Thompson: I wanted to show it more in his actions and to put that more in scene. There’s a lot of flinching away from the things that he does, and a dishonesty he builds as a reaction to that. But I was very aware of trying to avoid what I viewed as the potential pitfalls of a queer coming-of-age story. I wanted to create characters for who queerness is a very integral part of their lives, but it’s not everything. I view that as realistic. We’re all so dynamic and being queer is one of the great parts of my life, but I can’t say that I think about it all the time, even when I was tortured by it. There’s a lot of other shit to worry about.
Jake and Theron have these nihilistic qualities. There’s a sense that even as they’re yearning for the future, the future isn’t necessarily for them, which felt very true to the feelings of young people. Why do you think that that is such a pervasive mentality amongst people like our generation?
August Thompson: With these characters, they all have different types of mental difference, and I wanted to give that its time and space. But I also didn’t want to diagnose them. But I mean, it’s hard to be excited about a world that’s exhibiting signs of catastrophic change and countries that feeling as though they’re moving backwards. These are the least original thoughts in the world, but it’s like there’s a mosquito in my brain that’s always buzzing around being like, ‘Man, this is getting bad.’ And I think we do everything we can to ignore it and stay present, but it’s hard not to feel exasperated.
Death – the threat of it and the way we flirt with it – hangs over everything, as does grief, not just for people who have died, but for ourselves and our parents. Why were you drawn to those themes?
August Thompson: I think that grief is the only guarantee in life. We all grieve someone and yet we are so bad at it, at least in America. There is no language for it and it really fascinates me just how unprepared we all are. So a lot of it was just giving myself time to reflect on that and try and turn those emotions into action. I didn’t really find any answers, just more questions. But I found great solace in knowing that the questions lead to more questions. It just is what it is.
“I think that grief is the only guarantee in life [...] There is no language for it and it really fascinates me just how unprepared we all are” – August Thompson
Towards the end of the novel, I got the sense that this thing between Theron and Jake was ultimately more significant for Theron. Would you say that’s fair?
August Thompson: It’s ambiguous. I’m not sure that Theron ever knows. I think Jake is this character who has a great need for external validation and attention, but once he gets it, it starts to repulse him. I think that’s a very common trait among attractive people, but it’s also tied to his fatalism and his proximity to destruction. He’s incapable of creating real relationships and that’s part of what makes him so alluring. All you want from these people, or all I’ve ever wanted from these types of hyper-charismatic and beautiful people, is to be the exception. I wanted to be the person that they would change for. And I think that’s part of what’s so torturous for Theron. He feels as if he’s close but he’ll never know.
I guess for Jake, how much of it is real? He’s going through all these emotions with Theron, but does it mean anything?
August Thompson: It’s clear, at least to me, that Jake is a user. But something I wanted to resist in the book was creating clear throughlines via trauma. I’m glad that novels explore trauma so thoroughly now, but I am suspicious of books that have Dramatic Incident A lead to Self-destructive Behaviour B. I just don’t think people are that clean.
In the acknowledgements, you spend a lot of time thanking the teachers in your life. What impact have they had on you?
August Thompson: The acknowledgements are so indulgent, but I’ve had such an amazing education. Along with the books they’ve shown me, teachers have filled the gap in my own self-confidence and guided me towards fulfilling my ambition. They have affirmed me not only as a writer but as a person. And I think as a country, America treats its educators terribly. There’s this broad idea that they don’t impact our lives that much, but, damn, they practically raise you. So I do feel indebted to them.
“Don’t get caught revising those first pages over and over. It’s very tempting, but it’s ultimately a form of procrastination, even if it feels like productive procrastination. You need barrel through and finish it” – August Thompson
You mention some of the teachers you had while completing your MFA. It must have been nuts to be taught by people like Joyce Carol Oates and Jeffrey Eugenides.
August Thompson: It’s absolutely wild getting advice and validation from some of the great American writers. I remember Joyce Carol Oates sending me an email being like, ‘Hey, I actually liked this.’ I have that saved in a folder somewhere that I can look at when I’m feeling down. But when criticism came it was tough because it’s not some random person criticising you, it’s a Pulitzer Prize winner.
MFA programmes are expensive and aren’t accessible to everyone. What advice do you have for people who want to pursue writing fiction outside of them?
August Thompson: I recognise that this is coming from a very privileged place because I was able to afford the time to go and get a degree and to pursue this. It’s hard for me to be like, ‘Just make time for it,’ because I have a lot more time than some people might. But honestly, the only advice I can give is just to write much as you can, to read as much as you can and to push yourself into uncomfortable places of thinking. I think all that stuff about making a community and networking is great, but if the work isn’t there then, ultimately, all of that is just socialising at the end of the day. I’m very pro that, but you have to just put in a brutal number of hours. I mean, with this book, I worked for three years, writing for at least three hours a day, six days a week. That is a stupendous amount of unpaid work, and you don’t know if anything is going to become of it.
Right, you have to treat it like a job.
August Thompson: Yeah. I think letting go of the fantasy of inspiration is important. As is finishing things. To bring up Joyce Carol Oates again, one of the best things she ever said in my class was, ‘You can’t know what something is until it’s finished.’ We all want our books to become something, but they usually end up, in many ways, unrelated to that initial vision. Don’t get caught revising those first pages over and over. It’s very tempting, but it’s ultimately a form of procrastination, even if it feels like productive procrastination. You need barrel through and finish it.
Anyone’s Ghost by August Thompson is published by Picador on 11 July. Thompson will be in conversation with writer Oisín McKenna on 28 August in London. Tickets are available now.
July 9, 2024 Interview
August Thompson on his debut novel Anyone's Ghost
Anna Dorn
August Thompson on his debut novel Anyone's Ghost photo
Anyone's Ghost opens with a gut punch: it took three car crashes to kill Jake. August Thompson's electrifying debut begins with 15-year-old Theron moving from LA to New Hampshire after his parents' split. Working at the local hardware store, he meets Jake, his charismatic manager who quickly becomes the center of Theron's world—the way cool older people become near-religious idols when you're 15. Their summer unfolds in a haze of weed and Metallica, forging a bond that's passionate and devastating.
Years later, Theron is navigating young adulthood in New York City when Jake reappears. Thompson captures the raw intensity of their connection with poetic precision. Anyone's Ghost is an addictive novel about desire, masculinity, and the lasting mark of our first loves. Read my conversation with the uber-talented August Thompson below.
I DM’d you after I inhaled the book to say I love how you compassionately grapple with masculinity without condemning it. Is this an accurate read? (You can say no.)
I think I’d say yes more than no, if that’s an answer. My take is that this is a book about the many forms of love we feel towards people of different genders and how conventional masculinity restricts a lot of boys and men from expressing their platonic adoration and/or their queerness.
That said, there are also things that I find really beautiful about fraternity and just generally being a guy? I’ve managed to wrangle a group of compassionate, moral, loving male friends and I have bonds with them I don’t with anyone else. Many of the best nights of my life have been at metal bars with my guy friends, talking very quickly about movies.
It’s very easy to write from the perspective of masculinity as purely evil, but I think it’s a shortcut in a way. To avoid something investigating that is nuanced in the service of creating more straightforward, sometimes obvious, drama.
There’s a lot of music in this book, which I loved. If Anyone’s Ghost were a song, what would it be?
It’s referenced in the book, but I think it would be “Orion” by Metallica as much as the song the book is named after—“Anyone’s Ghost” by The National. Maybe some kind of Girl Talk-esque mashup, though that sounds terrible, sonically. And also referencing that makes me feel very old.
So your main character’s name is Theron David Alden. His parents call him Davey but he starts going by Theron. Your name is August, which is Theron-esque. So I have to ask, because I’m an immature gossip, were you originally called something like Davey?
I have always been August outside of 2nd grade, when I tried to go by Gus. It didn’t stick. I really hated having a “unique,” or whatever, name growing up. I have endured an endless onslaught of uncreative jokes about having a sister named July, etc. I think I kind of wanted the inverse of Theron: to not have my name stick out.
There’s a lot of name stuff in the book that I don’t expect people to pay much attention to, but it was important for me to have characters who were laying claim to what they’re called. Jake is short for Jackson, Lou is short for Louvinia, Theron turns away from his nickname. Young people trying to find any agency at all.
But in short: no. Always an August.
Relatedly, I assumed while reading that Jake (the love interest) was based on a real person. But you told me you didn’t have a Jake. Where did he come from?
In some ways, Jake is a composite of a lot of real people—as is true of so many fictional characters, I think?—that I kind of fell in love with throughout my life. There’s a lyric by The National (I swear I’m not sponsored by them) that I adore and am haunted by that goes, “I’m secretly in love with everyone I grew up with.”
So Jake is a bunch of people of all genders who I wanted to be when I was younger, whose aspects, positive and negative, I wanted to emulate or enjoy.
I was especially focused on boys I knew, men I know, who have a kind of death drive to them. I’m so rarely in the moment that I’m obsessed with people who seem to always be here, willing to sacrifice their future, their bodies, for pleasure and presence.
If Anyone’s Ghost is adapted, who do you see playing Theron and Jake?
I really wish I could resurrect River Phoenix to play Jake. Both because he’d be perfect for it and because it would be rad to have one of the greatest actors ever still among us. As for Theron, I’m open to suggestions.
You got your MFA at NYU where you were taught by some hotshot writers. What’s the best writing advice you received there?
Joyce Carol Oates told me you can’t know what a book actually is until it’s finished, which helped me write all the way through and not worry if the book was working or not, to just explore, put as much blood as I could on the page and see what it ended up being.
Where’s your dream writing retreat?
Get me in a lighthouse up in Maine.
What are your most overused words or phrases?
Oh god, what a piercing question. I write about light and hands often. I’ll get caught on words—“obscure” can be a big one, same with oblong. All my obs. But I seem to shuffle through my attachments. By the next book it will probably be some new pet.
If you were a literary critic, what would you say about your own writing?
I’d say, “God this kid talks about lights and hands a lot.”
What’s a book that made you want to write?
I mainly read Fantasy and adventure books growing up and I remember thinking how cool it would be to write something like the His Dark Materials series. I still feel that way, frankly.
But I had two teachers in high school who showed me things like Slaughterhouse V and the work of John Steinbeck and Fitzgerald and I think that was really expansive. I still read a lot of literary fiction growing up, but something clicked reading those books where they made me feel less alone, and I wanted to try to write something that might make other people feel less alone.
If you could get a drink with any fictional character, who would it be?
Philip Marlowe. I’d like to really make a night of it, and he could always put them back. A night of chain-smoking and saying things like “dame” would be fun.
Are there any books that Anyone’s Ghost is “in conversation with” as they say?
I’m never wholly sure how to figure out what my work is in conversation with, but the books I thought about most when I was writing were A Visit From the Goon Squad, Ferrante’s Quartet, Giovanni’s Room and Endless Love by Scott Spencer.
What’s your relationship to self-promotion? You’re a Leo, right? A Leo named August! Maybe you’re born for it.
I am a Leo named August and I think my Leo-ness and August-ness have been helpful in that I can talk with people and am often at-ease-presenting—the interior reality is all anxiety, but people don’t know that, usually— though I’d probably prefer to be excused from the self-promotion part of the process and left to write and go on walks and see movies.
I don’t mind talking to people about my book, but I do find taking myself seriously to be embarrassing. I’d rather try to be goofy and vulnerable and a little bit catty—that’s my natural register. That’s the most fun.
What author’s (dead or alive) persona is aspirational?
I think outside of drinking himself to death, Fitzgerald had a pretty fantastic life. I’m not arguing the morality of his actions, but on paper it had the kind of glorious excess I find attractive.
Roger Ebert is one of my great influences and I admire that his persona was one of a fan. To truly love things for what they are, not as they could be. That’s a beautiful way to be.
And then there are people like Donna Tartt who get to wear sunglasses inside or Joyce Carol Oates who gets to be so ardently herself, indifferent to perception, seemingly, and that seems very satisfying. To be free of the desperate need to be liked—what a concept.
Favorite recent read?
The Memory Police for the creepiness, Worry for the humor.
What’s one word to describe what you’re working on now?
Melodrama.
August Thompson’s Debut Novel Dives Headlong Into the Pool of Queer Desire
Following the relationship between two men over 20 years, August Thompson’s evocative debut novel Anyone’s Ghost cuts to the heart what it means to want someone as much as you want to be them
July 08, 2024
TextNick Levine
No one could accuse August Thompson of opening his debut novel softly. “It took three car crashes to kill Jake,” he writes at the start of Anyone’s Ghost, signposting the tragedy that will befall a main character. By the end, you’ll be so taken by cool, inscrutable Jake and his relationship with younger, nervier Theron that his death feels like a gut punch even though you know it’s coming.
Anyone’s Ghost traces Jake and Theron’s relationship in three parts over 20 years. “The movie Moonlight was very impactful structurally on the book, as was Elena Ferrante’s Neopolitan Quartet [of novels],” says Thompson, speaking over Zoom from his New York apartment. In part one, Jake and Theron meet and become inseparable during a teenage summer in New Hampshire: Jake, 17, is two years older and has an easy charisma that the younger boy seems mesmerised by.
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Then in part two, they reconvene in New York six years later. Theron’s sense that their connection may be more than a friendship bubbles to the surface, even though Theron now has a girlfriend, Lou, who finally makes him feel more. Part three is where Theron says goodbye to Jake and grapples with what, exactly, they may have shared.
“There are signifiers from my own life in the book – real locations and real things that I lived through,” Thompson says. “But I didn’t have a Jake. I never really had a romantic experience in my adolescence, and certainly not a queer one. I took some stuff from my own teenage archive, and it was fun paying homage to that, but the plot details are almost entirely unrelated to my life.”
The result is a richly evocative novel that derives power from its own tolerance of ambiguity. Can we ever really know someone else – or indeed, our own selves? Here, Thompson discusses some of the novel’s key themes and its progressive approach towards queerness and masculinity.
Anyone's Ghost cover
Anyone’s GhostCourtesy of Picador
Nick Levine: You’ve said the novel explores “what it means to want someone as much as you want to be them”. What do you find fascinating about that kind of attraction?
August Thompson: There are people I’ve met in my life that are so charismatic, it’s like they radiate their own light. This is kind of an insane reference, but I think about Jude Law in The Talented Mr Ripley a lot. He’s fucking awful, but you can’t help but want to be around him. I’ve met a lot of those people, and I noticed there were overarching similarities where they kind of had this death drive. I never felt endangered by them, but it was clear they were sort of comfortable being in proximity to danger.
I think a lot of it was [my] admiring their bravery in being that present, and finding that attractive. You know, I’m a pretty neurotic person and pretty socially anxious, so seeing people who could move beyond that was just so enviable. And because I was closeted for a really long time, until I was like 25, it was easy to confuse the two. My brain would kind of hit a power surge switch where it would be like: “Oh, I must want to be that person. There’s no way that I could be attracted to them because that’s just not part of my personal vocabulary.”
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NL: What happened at 25 that made you feel more ready to explore your queerness?
AT: Before then I was in a long-term monogamous relationship with a woman, so I wasn’t doing much exploration in general. But then I started reading and watching a lot more queer media, and it really made me assess, like, “Why am I so attracted to these things?” And suddenly I was freshly single and there was this whole new world out there.
I knew I wanted to explore these feelings in my art, and I didn’t want to take people by surprise. It seemed unfair to have my parents find out I was bi when they read a book about it, like, six years down the line. So I don’t know, it just seemed like the right time. You know, a lot of the book is about how hard these things can be to realise. I’m very envious of people who had these very clarifying moments when they were younger, but I just didn’t. For me, it was kind of about piecing things together, which took a long ass time.
NL: What did you want to say about queerness in this novel? Was the aim really to provide an authentic representation of bisexuality?
AT: That was definitely one of my aims. I did want to write a book that I wish I could have read when I was 17. This sounds lofty, but I think this book could have helped me – or at least a book like this. But I also wanted to explore the kind of questions leading to more questions in terms of my own queerness. I think for a lot of people who don’t identify as gay or straight, there’s this strangeness of, like, some days I wake up and feel more attracted to men, and some days I wake up and feel more attracted to women.
And there’s no cohesion or reason to that. The kind of answerless-ness of that fascinates me. Sometimes I feel like the more I think about it, the less I understand. And you know, maybe the answers will never come. But I wanted to explore how OK it is to really not get it and for that to be kind of an eternal existential question and experience.
“And honestly, it felt like lazy work to say: ‘[Masculinity] is the worst thing in the world.’ ... Why are some parts of masculinity toxic, as people say, and why are some parts beautiful and freeing? That feels way more interesting to me” – August Thompson
NL: The word ‘queer’ is obviously controversial because for some LGBTQ+ people it remains incredibly triggering. But I do think it can be helpful for others because it allows for ambiguity. You don’t have to specify ‘how gay’ you are.
AT: Yeah. I wish so badly it was a term I knew or that was used when I was growing up. Back then, bisexuality was not really a common thing [in the media]. I mean, there’s that famous Sex and the City episode where Carrie questions whether bisexuality even exists and calls it “a layover on the way to Gaytown”.
NL: I feel like someone calls out the awfulness of that episode every week on TikTok. Which is something, at least.
AT: 100 per cent. Sex and the City has many brilliant moments but that is certainly not one of them. You know, I think some people have an issue with the term “bisexuality” because they feel it’s exclusive of things. I don’t view it that way. I don’t think that it means there are only two genders because obviously that’s insane. But it’s a term that’s existed for a long time, and I’m proud to sort of be part of its tradition. But at the same time, I’m also glad there are other terms reflecting the fact gender and sexuality is a spectrum with all these middle grounds.
NL: I was also wondering what you wanted to say about maleness with this novel. To me, Anyone’s Ghost is part of the new vanguard of work moving the conversation on from ‘toxic masculinity’, which has become such a reductive term.
AT: 100 per cent. I mean, in the last ten years, there’s been this idea of treating maleness as evil and femininity as an aspirational thing, which I don’t inherently disagree with. And as a queer, tender person, I did feel really restricted by masculinity. I just didn’t know how to fit in and stuff like that. But there are also parts of it that I unabashedly love. Many of the best relationships in my life are with my straight male friends that I’ve known forever; those moments of fraternity are really special to me.
I think it’s very easy to cast a wide net and be like: “Masculinity is the foundation of everything bad.” Because it certainly has caused a lot of evil in the world. But I think on the micro level, on the intimate level, there’s something really moving about male relationships and I guess I wanted to give that its due. And honestly, it felt like lazy work to say: “This is the worst thing in the world.” I wanted to push myself artistically to examine what the granular differences are. Why are some parts of masculinity toxic, as people say, and why are some parts beautiful and freeing? That feels way more interesting to me.
Anyone’s Ghost by August Thompson is published by Picador, and is out on July 11.
Anyone's Ghost.
By August Thompson.
July 2024. 320p. Penguin, $28 (9780593656563); e-book
(9780593656570).
After his parents' divorce, Theron David Alden moved to L.A. with his mom. Now 15, unsure of who he is and trying to outgrow the childhood nickname Davey, he spends the summer back in rural New Hampshire with his father. Theron's dad gets him a job at a local hardware store, where he meets Jake, a 16-year-old from Texas who is everything Theron wants to be. The boys are fast friends, spending their days stealing petty cash, driving around, and drinking in the parking lot outside Walmart. Theron recognizes his feelings for Jake expanding beyond the platonic, though Jake is engaged to his fiancee, Jess, who's back in Texas. When the summer comes to an abrupt end, each boy leaves New Hampshire behind. Reuniting nearly a decade later in New York to see one of their favorite bands, both men have settled into themselves yet struggle with similar demons. With beautifully crafted prose and lived-in dialogue, Thompson's debut novel captures the joy and agony of first love alongside the struggle to understand and become oneself.--Laura Chanoux
YA: Teens will connect with Thompson's incisive coming-of-age story. LC.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 American Library Association
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Chanoux, Laura. "Anyone's Ghost." Booklist, vol. 120, no. 21, July 2024, p. 22. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A804615771/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=6267cd1e. Accessed 4 Dec. 2024.
Thompson, August ANYONE'S GHOST Penguin Press (Fiction None) $28.00 7, 9 ISBN: 9780593656563
A young man has an emotional and sexual awakening through a fellow troubled teen.
Thompson's debut is narrated by Theron, who at 15 is forced to shuttle between the East and West coasts after his parents' divorce. Spending a summer with his tough-as-nails dad in New Hampshire, he brings along a bag of pot brownies to cope; when dad finds it, Theron is made to work at a hardware store. But his ostensible boss is 17-year-old Jake, a fellow stoner and aspiring musician who recognizes that the store is a tax write-off and runs things lazily when he's not robbing the till. So ensues "a kind of permanent hang," with the two bonding over heavy metal, weed, and hard-to-articulate sexual feelings. Thompson writes beautifully and with a sense of tension about having nothing to do--no simple trick. And he's graceful when considering young male insecurity and self-loathing. ("He was beautiful. I was a brace-faced gremlin with boy tits and stalagmites of cystic acne ridging my cheeks.") Over time, this dirtbag Call Me by Your Name turns more perilous and gloomy. Jake is prone to vehicular calamities, and though Theron gets older, attending college and pursuing a relationship with a woman, he's not much wiser. A reconnection with Jake becomes a boozy, druggy push-and-pull as he sorts out his feelings, and poor choices and insecure selfishness abound. ("I wanted to control both of them. I wanted them both to give me their focus.") Yet Theron remains a sympathetic character, and Thompson recognizes that though sexual identity doesn't always arrive like a thunderbolt, or settle into simple definitions, the process can be all-consuming. The arc of the story's plot is largely tragic, but the mood is bighearted, revealing the power of the first flush of romantic and erotic connection.
A brash and well-turned coming-of-age tale.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Thompson, August: ANYONE'S GHOST." Kirkus Reviews, 1 June 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A795673870/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=16dd4335. Accessed 4 Dec. 2024.
Anyone's Ghost
August Thompson. Penguin Press, $28 (320p) ISBN 978-0-593-65656-3
Thompson debuts with the moody and moving chronicle of a complicated friendship between two young men. In the first sentence, the reader learns from Theron, the 30-something narrator, that his friend Jake recently died in a car accident. Theron then rewinds to 2004, when he's 15 and he moves from Los Angeles to New Hampshire with his father after his parents split. He gets a job at a hardware store, where Jake, who's two years older, is the manager. Their meeting is a "sea change" for Theron, who feels a "spike of desire" for Jake as they smoke weed and bond over their love of Metallica. From there, Theron's obsession with Jake propels the nonlinear narrative as it touches down at different points in their friendship--there's heartache when Jake bails on plans to visit him in Los Angeles in 2009, and excitement when they finally reunite in New York City a few years later, where Theron has recently graduated from NYU and is in an on-and-off relationship with his girlfriend. Thompson skillfully captures Theron's vulnerability, especially when the two men finally act on their mutual attraction and later when Theron deals with the impact of Jake's death. Readers will be eager to see what Thompson does next. Agent: Duvall Osteen, UTA. (July)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 PWxyz, LLC
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"Anyone's Ghost." Publishers Weekly, vol. 271, no. 19, 13 May 2024, pp. 72+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A799108737/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a18cec3e. Accessed 4 Dec. 2024.