The Bodacious Interview of American Novelist Chris Orcutt

A conversation with the “Lord of the ’80s” and author of

Bodaciously True & Totally Awesome

(Picture from the author’s website.)

Conducted in 2025 by Perrin Lovett

A full decade ago, New York novelist Chris Orcutt set out to do what some writers might have, probably would have considered impossible. In an attempt to forge a new epic genre and craft a legacy work for the ages, Orcutt laid aside ordinary life, hunkered down, and toiled until he at last printed out a book, literally twice the length of War and Peace, that may well change American literature and that will certainly alter the perception and memory of the penultimate decade of the twentieth century.

Orcutt describes his books as “meticulously crafted novels.” Having read several of them, and having taken a privileged look behind the scenes at their development, your reviewer can now say the author’s self-styled appellation is a humble understatement. And yet, even readers who have previously enjoyed titles like One Hundred Miles from Manhattan (2014) and A Real Piece of Work (of the Dakota Stevens mystery series, 2011) are in for an astounding surprise. 

Bodaciously True & Totally Awesome, a novel in excess of one million words, is scheduled for release over the next two years in nine episodes. The book, an examination of the life and times of a young man named Avery “Ace” Craig, is billed as “a time machine back to the 1980s.” It is that, one-hundred percent and more. In addition to a “you’re there” experience, it is also an exceptionally deep saga in keeping with many of the great volumes of literature of the past. It was my high honor to go back in time by reading Episode One: Bad Boy in advance of publication. My review of that initial segment will follow this interview, landing sometime between now and January 2026. And now, it is my honor to present a brief interview with author Chris Orcutt.

1.

Lovett: What first prompted you to consider embarking on this grand journey?

Orcutt: I can’t point to one thought or event and say, “That was it. That was the thing that kicked off Bodaciously.” And I think that any writer who says that a novel is born from one moment is profoundly self-deceived. Those moments of sudden enlightenment are rare.

I believe most novels come out of a process that Vladimir Nabokov described in a Playboy interview in which he said, “All I know is that at a very early stage of the novel’s development I get this urge to garner bits of straw and fluff, and eat pebbles. Nobody will ever discover how clearly a bird visualizes, or if it visualizes at all, the future nest and the eggs in it.”

What I’m saying is, the book came from a lot of these twigs, straw, and fluff, and it just grew and grew. Here are a few that I remember:

• • Deciding that the world didn’t need another detective novel, and that I wanted to write something wholly my own.
  • A sense that the stories and novels I’d written up to that point had merely been training me for something much bigger and more important.
  • Rereading Homer’s The Odyssey and reading War and Peace for the first time.
  • General feelings of bittersweet nostalgia about my teen years in the 1980s: the double-edged sword of freedom that my friends and I had, the mistakes we made, the stupid (possibly life-ending) things we did but fortunately survived, the time before the internet and how great it was, the lack of parenting that I and most of my friends had, a rediscovery of all of the great music from that period.
  • A recognition that, on the whole, most of the adolescent coming of age stories that had already been written were superficial or too short to fully probe the depths of the emotional turmoil we all go through at that age.
  • A curiosity about how friends of mine back then were doing in the present.
  • A desire to understand how my childhood, especially my teen years, affected my life—for the better and the worse.

When I first started writing the novel, quite a bit of it was autobiographical, and I realize now that that was because I was trying to process my past. By the second draft, however, almost all of the autobiographical stuff got cut, and the characters became their own people. I originally thought that Bodaciously True & Totally Awesome (which was first titled When All the World was New) would be one novel of average length, but just like John Steinbeck said of East of Eden when he was writing it, the book just kept having pups. One terrific scene whelped five more—some great, some meh.

When the first draft’s word count passed that of Anna Karenina (about 350,000 words), I had a sense that I had found my vein of gold, that I might be on the way to creating something great. I started asking myself, “Why not turn this into an epic? Why not an epic-length novel about teens in the eighties? Why not an American War & Peace—a long, detailed and compelling story about a group of teens during the decade that this country was undeniably on top?” I began to see myself as an explorer, not of geographic icons like Mt. Everest or the South Pole, but of literature. I wanted to write something monumental like Tolstoy and to create something totally original: the teen epic.

You asked what first prompted me, and it wasn’t one thing; it was all of these small things that snowballed into one big thing. But here’s the deal: I allowed it to snowball. I didn’t shut it down by saying, “Chris, that’s ridiculous—you can’t write an epic-length novel about teenagers, for Pete’s sake. Nobody will want to read that crap.” Mind you, I heard those voices every day for ten years, but I worked through them. The voices would rear up every morning when I sat down to work, and I would tell them, “I don’t care. I’m writing it anyway.”

The final thing that prompted me was my age. I was 45 years old when I started this novel, and shortly before that I had read somewhere that most writers’ periods of peak productivity, when they produce their best work, was between the ages of 45 and 65. Then Carrie Fisher, an icon from my childhood, died suddenly at age 60, and I realized that 20+ more years is hardly guaranteed for anybody. I started thinking that the most time I could reasonably expect to get was an additional ten years, so I knew that I couldn’t waste any more time writing genre or formula novels. I had to use my peak productivity years to create my magnum opus. I was going for the summit of Everest, and if I got there, great; if I didn’t, at least I’d die knowing I gave it everything I have.

2.

Lovett: Many writers edit out some of the little background touches, scenes, and flourishes in their novels, even those that might otherwise add extra depth and life. How do you decide what stays and what goes?

Orcutt: The Tommy Gun sidebar in Episode 1 (or “Chicago Typewriter”; I love that moniker by the way) was pulled 100% from my own experience during my own D.C. high school class trip. It’s a vestigial moment from a very early draft of the book, and it comes off as a bit irrelevant to the main story now, but I’m one of those novelists who believes that if you’re only going to include relevancies in your writing and not allow for sidelines and anecdotes that veer from the main story, you shouldn’t be writing novels; you should be writing legal briefs.

A novel is NOT an argument, although it should have an internal logic that the writer is faithful to. Faulkner probably would have considered it a “darling” and said that I have to cut it, but screw him; if he was so set on the idea of killing your darlings, why did he have single sentences that stretched for pages? You’re telling me there weren’t a few darlings in there, Bill? Anyway, I kept it because I liked it and because I believe it’s those “irrelevancies”(which are sometimes “darlings”) that create the verisimilitude. After all, randomness is a major part of life, right?

In fact, I would go so far to say that fiction that lacks those irrelevancies, those frills and flourishes, is ultimately dead. There’s no life in it because it lacks that real-life quality of randomness. Elmore Leonard once wrote (I’m recalling this from memory, so I might be a bit off), “A story or novel isn’t everything that happens; it’s every important thing that happens.” I disagree. That thinking is fine for formulaic fiction, where the compact between the writer and reader is, “This thing is made-up and will only include things that are moving the story toward the climax, but we both know it’s make-believe, so we’re going to leave out anything that doesn’t contribute to that end”; but for fiction that is trying to give readers immersion in reality, you have to include those “irrelevancies.” Chekhov was a master of this.

I believe very strongly that it’s those random details that make a story memorable, and as I continue to polish Eps. 2-9, I find myself putting back in some of the “irrelevancies” that I cut 3-4 drafts ago.

Sorry to go on and on about this, but you touched on something that I’ve wrestled with for ten years: how many of these “darlings” do I keep, which ones do I keep, and am I being self-indulgent in keeping them? I’ll never forget that moment when that FBI agent fired that gun at the paper-man target as I and my classmates watched him through the fishbowl window. I wanted to capture that moment for all time.

3.

Lovett: The pop and rock music of the 1980s helped define the decade. I noticed you not only referenced numerous songs, but, if I’m not mistaken, you adroitly use song titles as punctuation or scene settings. Do I have that right?

Orcutt: It makes me so happy that you noticed what I was trying to do with the song titles. You said something like, “song titles as punctuation.” Dude, THAT’S EXACTLY WHAT I WAS DOING. Ever since I was a young, young writer, all of the books on fiction writing have said that you shouldn’t mention songs, TV shows, movies, etc. because you run the risk of alienating readers who don’t know or like those songs, TV shows or movies. This has been an unquestioned meme in fiction writing.

When I first started writing Bodaciously ten years ago, back when its original title was When All the World was New (borrowed from part of a sentence by Peggy Toney Horton: “Remember sixteen – when all the world was new and a lifetime stretched before you like fresh snow just waiting for your footprints?”), when I wanted to mention a song, etc. that old meme rang out in my head: “But Chris, you can’t do that! The rules say….” And that’s when I said to myself, “You know what, Chris … to hell with the rules. Those rules were created when friggin’ radio was a brand-new invention, maybe even as far back as the telegraph. This is the 21st century!” Google Glasses had recently come out and quickly disappeared, but I saw the future: reading-assistive devices that can augment a reader’s experience: look at a song title, TV show, etc. and get a window that plays the song, shows the show, displays the geographic location or obscure cultural detail.

4.

Lovett: You say, “You have to be willing to turn your back on your heroes and do things your way.” Why?

Orcutt: For me, that moment came about eight years ago, when the novel became longer than War and Peace. I have a considerable home library and was always able, when writing fiction, to pull down a novel by a “master” writer to see how s/he did something. But when I passed the 650K-word mark, I realized I had done something that Hemingway talks about in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech (this one I had to look up; bold is my emphasis):

“How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.”

I had gone out beyond where any of the masters could help me. I knew I was doing something that had never been done before, so I knew that none of their or the establishment’s rules applied. Now I—not a revered hero writer and certainly not anybody in the publishing “industry”—was the authority.

As I was writing, I had to battle my internal editor who was reminding me daily of these “rules.” Eventually I had to tell that guy, “You know what, dude? You’re FIRED. You’ve never done what I’m doing, so you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. Get lost, go home.””At the time, I was reading the Bible (1 Kings, if I remember correctly), and came upon the line when Adonijah has declared himself king (and David was still alive), and Solomon says, “Adonijah … go home.”(I LOVE THAT.) I like to imagine Solomon smirking at him and saying that with his voice dripping with contempt: “Adonijah … go home.” Shoo, fly, shoo. I think of that line often, and now when the internal editor or critic rears up inside me, I say under my breath, “Adonijah … go home.” 🙂

5.

Lovett: With your internal editor gone, what does your process of creative production and control look like?

Orcutt: It used to bother me that my work wasn’t published by a “major” or legacy publisher, but now I’m proud of the fact that I’ve done it all myself. With the exception of the covers (which I art-directed for my designers), I have done EVERY aspect of all of my books myself: writing, editing, layout, proofreading, etc. Now there’s a “rule” you’re not supposed to break—ever.

Back in 2012, I got a few offers from publishers for A Real Piece of Work, but the offers were paltry and gave them total control over my work. Screw them. I turned them all down. Now I realize that not only did I never need their acceptance or approval, but that I was never meant to get it. My entire life has been about being an outsider, a maverick, a guy who does things his way. Somewhere along the way, I had a moment of satori: None of the greats in any line of endeavor became great by following another great’s path; they all made their own path.

I remember inscribing a copy of A Real Piece of Work to a podcaster who wanted to write a mystery novel (and discovered years later that he had taken an idea I gave him and based his first novel on it; I didn’t mind; I’ve always said that ideas are a dime a dozen—it’s the execution, the actual creation of something from the idea, that’s hard). I wrote something like this on the flyleaf: “Write what you want to write, say what you have to say, and fuck all.”

6.

Lovett: How much of Avery Craig’s personality or experience is really an avatar for Chris Orcutt and is there an example from your life that illustrates the connection?

Orcutt: Exactly 13 percent. 🙂 No, seriously, although a few of the situations Avery finds himself in were inspired by personal experiences, those experiences were then fictionalized heavily—distilled or heightened for effect. Avery has a few of my character traits, but he also has some inspired by people I knew back then, and some that are entirely his own. But while the details changed, the core emotional reactions had to come from somewhere, and those came from what I call “memory mining.” One example of that was a very uncomfortable car ride and argument I had with my first girlfriend’s father; that scene, which appears in Episode III: Danger Zone, because of the deep memory mining I did, is basically verbatim to what really happened.

7.

Lovett: If you had to, then how did you change your thinking as an adult to convincingly write young adult characters?

Orcutt: I didn’t have to change my thinking at all; I just needed to remind myself of how it felt to be that age. I spent a lot of time reading letters from girlfriends during that period, and my journals, and I combed through yearbooks and leafed through period magazines. But the most valuable thing I did was deep memory work to recall not just the incidents from the mid-1980s, but the emotions. I call this “memory mining.” One of the things I discovered was, the key to remembering the details of incidents is to first recall the precise emotion you felt. It’s like the sounds, smells, sights and other details are all encoded in the emotion. Anyway, I started with the memory mining and wrote sketches about things that I experienced. Gradually, characters emerged from the primordial ooze that would eventually become the novel. 

8.

Lovett: In socio-sexual hierarchy terminology, Avery is identified in word-stumbling speech by a popular female character as an “alpha,” a status identity he accepts and has apparently earned. Can you briefly summarize his internal conflicts regarding his new position?

Orcutt: He’s a reluctant teenage heartthrob, and later on, a reluctant hero. He likes the attention he gets from girls, and they all thrill him in one way or another, but he doesn’t want to hurt any of them, and he also doesn’t want to be manipulative. He starts to become aware of his attractiveness to women, and so his major internal conflict is the teenage hormones driving him to copulate with all of them while his conscience is telling him that’s wrong. Remember, too, that his and Caitlyn’s idea that they’re “alphas” is based on what they understood that to mean at the time. They could just as well have said they were “leaders” or “trendsetters” or just “cool.”

9.

Lovett:  Complex, even convoluted teenage relationships are integral to the book. How did you create and manage those complexities without coming off as clinical?

Orcutt: I have no idea, but one thing I will say is that I’ve always been a keen observer of people—going all the way back to my first memories as a child. In high school, I often purposely put myself in the position of outsider or observer, and I paid attention to things like how girls talked to (and about) each other, the scheming that some of them engaged in, their plights with dumb guys, etc. Hopefully, some of all of that observation made its way into Bodaciously.

10.

Lovett: You’ve previously described—accurately, in my estimation—the 1980s as the last great American decade. Bodaciously exhibits, here and there, a certain level of period-appropriate American jingoism. In your opinion, was any of that spirit illusory?

Orcutt: I think it was a reaction to the meek, sweater-wearing, keep-the-heat-down-in-the-White-House President Carter years of the late 1970s. When Reagan was put in office in 1981, the mood of the whole country changed, and by 1984 or so, the United States had its swagger back. I tried to show some of this swagger through the teenagers like Avery, and one of the ways young people manifest that swagger is through jingoistic comments. For example, Avery has an ongoing feud with a West German exchange student, going so far as to insult her publicly in German.

11.

Lovett: What did you give up in order to concentrate on researching and writing Bodaciously?

Orcutt: I used to think that I gave up or sacrificed a lot to write this book, but now I realize that I didn’t give up anything—it’s not as though I had a choice; I was driven to write this thing. I suppose I could say that I “gave up” or sacrificed consistent income, consistent (and ample) sleep, vacations, cross-country ski trips, etc., but all of those things are a question of priorities. My number one priority was, and has always been, my writing—something that I love to do—and everything else has been second. Sure, I wish I could have taken a vacation every year (or even every other year) over the last decade, and I wish I had the time to ski for hours every day in the winter, but if you want to get the words written, you have to make the time. You have to make writing your top priority.

12.

Lovett: What do you think Generation X most missed or lacked during the 1980s?

Orcutt: Parenting and guidance. Overall, we were scandalously under-parented or outright unparented. Our parents’ generation (which was known back then as the ME generation) was so wrapped up in themselves that they gave us very little attention. A common phrase by our parents was, “Go play in traffic.” Another one was, “Look it up.” So, we lacked parenting, but I think that made our generation more self-reliant. We basically parented each other, made mistakes and learned from them, and helped each other out.

13.

Lovett: After they read the book, what will younger generations of Americans appreciate about teenage life in the ’80s? What will they make of all the (very clever!) footnotes?

Orcutt: Younger readers who have read advance copies remarked about how much they appreciated the footnotes and the music references, because having these things explained made the story richer. Most of them said they didn’t realize how much great music came out of the period. A couple readers have been put off by the footnotes, saying that they felt intrusive. But I didn’t put them in there for readers of my generation or the younger generations; I put them in there to give readers of the future, like in 2086 and 2186 (if we’re not extinct), a sense of the 1980s zeitgeist.

14.

Lovett: A few people have already read the book in advance. Have you been surprised by any of their reactions?

Orcutt: I’ve been really surprised by the reaction of older readers to the book. My parents read it, for example, and they commented that even though the story takes place in 1980s American suburbia, they both were taken back to their own high school days: my mother as a dancer at the High School of Performing Arts in Manhattan, and my father as a kid on an island off the coast of Maine. I guess what’s surprised me is this: I wrote Bodaciously to be a time machine back to the 1980s, but it turns out that what I’ve created is a time machine back to when anyone, whatever age, was a teen in high school.

15.

Lovett: You weaved period references into various scenes, both as descriptors and as effortless background—like in the description of Dina Tempestilli and the reference to Princess Leia’s “snow outfit” in The Empire Strikes Back. How did you balance that process?

Orcutt: You’re referring to moments in the novel in which I weave together a character description and a period reference. I don’t know how I do this. The fact is, I don’t do it; the Muse does. Besides, I try not to analyze things like this because it’s like Hemingway said of Fitzgerald—that he started to analyze the dust on his butterfly’s wings, the dust that had enabled him to fly effortlessly—and that once he started to analyze those magical moments in his writing and became conscious of them, he then tried to reproduce them elsewhere. I honestly don’t know. All I try to do is present the story honestly and clearly from the character’s POV, and in this case, it made sense that Avery would visualize his fantasy girl, Dina, in the outfit of another fantasy girl, Princess Leia.

16.

Lovett: What’s something you completely forgot about the ’80s that you rediscovered while writing the book?

Orcutt: One item I was reminded about while researching the ’80s for the novel was the story of the MOBRO 4000, a garbage barge from New York City. For nearly all of 1987, the barge traveled down the US Atlantic Coast, the Caribbean, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Coast of Central America (all the way to Belize) trying to get rid of its garbage. Eventually, the barge had to return to New York to be incinerated on Long Island.

Another interesting item was discovering that the USSR had checkpoint zones with varying levels of security measures to prevent its citizens from escaping. Any citizen who was 15–30 km from the USSR border would be subjected to KGB surveillance and document checks; and the closer you got to the border, the more elaborate and deadly the security measures became. I’m talking about sand traps, sound and vibration sensors, cameras, lookout posts, minefields, underground bunkers, machine gun pillboxes, guard dogs (constantly on patrol), and fences curved inwards—to prevent citizens from escaping, not to prevent foreigners from sneaking into the USSR.

A final bit of trivia I learned about the period while writing Bodaciously was this: in a March 1986 New York Times article, fashion designer Tommy Hilfiger made a now-famous declaration about himself:  “I think I am the next great American designer. The next Ralph Lauren or Calvin Klein.” Saying that took serious cojones. The guy didn’t wait around for someone to crown him or pass him the torch; he knew he was good and that the rest of the world just needed to catch up.

17.

Lovett: Without giving away too much, what’s your favorite part of Episode One: Bad Boy?

Orcutt: That’s a tough one. It’s like asking me what my favorite quality is of my child. I guess it’s two scenes: the pool fight during the D.C. trip and Caitlyn Cray’s entrance at the end to Joan Jett’s “I Love Rock and Roll.” Those two scenes have the perfect balance of action, description, emotion, and good writing that I strive for in everything I write. But my favorite line of dialogue is something Avery says. I won’t give you or other readers context because I want everyone to be surprised and laugh when they read it. Avery says, “Stringbean here never brushes his teeth, sir!”

18.

Lovett: Avery is presented very well as a young man all at once sure of himself, plagued by doubts, and with little recourse but to his own solutions. Yet, at the very end of the “parapet” scene, he silently performs a small act that I found exceedingly refreshing. Is there a spiritual temperament or moral philosophy at work in the saga? 

Orcutt: I suppose there is, but I didn’t deliberately put it in. Avery, like a lot of teens that age, is groping for meaning spiritually, kind of trying on different spiritual or philosophical hats. He prays from time to time, but readers will notice that they’re basically “foxhole prayers”—him turning to God or his Higher Power when he’s in trouble or needs an answer. Again, remember: teens of my generation were largely unparented, so some of us turned to a Higher Power from time to time for guidance.

19.

Lovett: What’s the most important thing you learned from writing Bodaciously?

Orcutt: Well, one realization involves a line of narration from a documentary, Beyond the Edge, when Sir Edmund Hillary and Tensing Norgay summited Mount Everest for the first time: “There are just certain human beings able to put one foot in front of the other—relentlessly, psychologically able to do it—whereas other people would fail.” Over the past decade, I’ve learned first and foremost that I am one of those “certain human beings”—a realization that fills me with pride.

The second one came when I lined up all of Bodaciously’s book covers on my library bookshelves, and I realized that I had done something that none of my idols had. Although I might never write a perfect 47-thousand-word diamond like The Great Gatsby, or a novel with a genius sentence on every page like Lolita, or an oeuvre that completely redefines the style of American literature like Hemingway’s, or the two greatest novels in the history of all literature (Anna Karenina and War and Peace) like Count Tolstoy, I did produce, single-handedly, an ennead (9) of novels in a decade—something none of them did.

And the last and possibly most important thing I’ve learned about myself is that I’m now an authority. (Note that I said “authority” and not “master”; I agree with Hemingway, who said of writers and writing, “We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.”) When I was a young writer, I hadn’t produced enough work yet or produced anything great to give myself that bedrock of self-confidence. However, writing and publishing the 1.25 million words and nine books of Bodaciously—creating a new genre—has given me the confidence to say something as bold as Tommy Hilfiger’s 1986 declaration, and here it is: I believe that I am the next great self-taught American novelist in the tradition of Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway.

There are sure to be a lot of writers, editors, publishers, critics, literary agents and others from the traditional publishing establishment that disagree with this statement because they erroneously believe that only they possess the legitimacy to confer honorifics on writers, but I don’t accept that. I’ve read widely since I was three years old, I know what’s good and what isn’t, and I have enough of a grasp of the history of American literature to know that I’ve done something monumental and original.

Now, like Mr. Hilfiger, I just have to wait for the naysayers to catch up.

20.

Lovett: What’s next, Chris?

Orcutt: More of the same. Polish the next episode of Bodaciously, typeset it, proof it, publish it, promote it, and repeat until January of 2028—when I plan on taking a three-month vacation in the Caribbean. Pray for me.

 

Your interviewer gives great thanks to and for the author. Bodaciously True & Totally Awesome, Episode One: Bad Boy debuts in January 2026. 

(Episode One: Bad Boy. Pre-order NOW.)