PS: My understanding is that you started writing Greyboy at 19. In effect, you've grown up writing this book, being 25 now. Did the process of writing this book help you find catharsis or parse new meaning over events of your past?
CB: Yeah, there's no question. I think that that happens in a couple ways. One, you're right: there's parts of the book that really are like real-time reflection on that journey, and where I am in that trajectory, and where I hope to go. There's a section of the dating chapter that's like this, the Trump chapter is like this, the first chapter, "My Kind of People," is like this, where I wrote in the eye of the storm. So, in a very immediate way. And a few chapters helped me parse through emotions. And I tried to in those instances leave it pretty untouched, 'cause I wanted those emotions to be kind of laid bare for the reader.
But also if you zoom out and you look at the narrative arc of the book, there are things that I wrestled with for years, and then took me the full four years of writing to sort of come to terms with. My relationship with my father I don't wrestle with as much on the page, but certainly wrestled with in the writing process, and I think I ended in a different place than where I started. Similarly, I mentioned the chapter on depression, and those were emotions I hadn't really unpacked since they happened several years prior, and that took essentially the full four years to come to some landing place on.
