Q&A Part II: John Fram talks about The Bright Lands

Come for the Courage the Cowardly Dog mention. Stay for the movie-going experience that John called "profoundly moving," a discussion about the intersection of sports and class, and more.

This post was written at the same time as last week’s post (while playing this eerie cover of Smells Like Teen Spirit from the new Black Widow movie) because I was briefly on top of my shit and knew better than to save this for later.

In last week’s post, I shared Part I of a Q&A with author John Fram. Keep reading for Part II, but before you dive in, make sure you buy his book, check out his website, and follow him on Twitter and Instagram.

Reader beware: The following Q&A contains spoilers for The Bright Lands.

Q&A Part II: John Fram

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

CLAIRE: Another thing that I lost my mind over when I saw was that Courage the Cowardly Dog influenced you. I don't know if it was specifically this book or just the work you will create as a person, but I also grew up on that show and didn't remember just how terrifying it was until I was reading you describe it. What stuck out to you about that show?

JOHN: I feel like Cartoon Network in the late 90s and early 2000s was like the movie scene in 70s New York or something. It was so bizarre. It was so incredibly inventive. There were so many great shows. I don't know how they snuck Courage in. I had been thinking about it a lot, not really consciously when I was writing The Bright Lands, but I had always thought the Courage deserved to be like kind of a queer icon. He's just such a perfect mama's boy. He's going to try to do the right thing. It's hard not to root for him. Then on iTunes I bought the first season or something. And watching it, I was just like, “this is so incredible. How in God's name did they get this?” Not just like one episode, but three seasons of this show? 

Being kind of a weird kid, you will find the weird stuff. It's such a strange law of nature. I don't know if [Courage] consciously influenced The Bright Lands particularly. But then when Interview asked me to make this list of my influences, I had no idea what my influences were. Then one day, I just was like, “oh, Courage the Cowardly Dog was doing supernatural horror and open flatland way before you.” It was kind of eye opening. I think he's just been hanging out. I remember one or two episodes genuinely scared the pee out of me, were one of the first encounters with visceral horror in a work of art. That's so profound if you can get it at six or seven. It sounds crazy, but it is beautiful in a way to be introduced to that level of fear and catharsis. Because then after that, you're just kind of like, “Oh, well, now I'm bored with anything else.”

CLAIRE: That's kind of how I felt with “Are You Afraid Of the Dark.” I want to find out who was in the writers rooms and how this got pushed to primetime viewing time as children, because I was definitely influenced by that, too. 

Speaking of influences, I feel like I obviously can't talk about this book without talking about football. I put this in the email - have you seen Normal People that TV show? 

JOHN: I haven’t yet, no.

CLAIRE: Okay, you don't need to know anything about it for this one point. Basically, one of the characters [tells] the other character, who is playing British football and who’s kind of the celebrated star, that she wanted to watch him have sex with someone. And he thought that was really weird, but she was just talking about the erotic nature of sports and how violent it is. Football is so deeply American, and it's about being young and healthy, but also about being willing to sacrifice your body. It's all about potential for these kids, but there's an expiration date with their youth and graduation. I know you've also talked a little bit in some of these interviews about how football is erotic. Can you talk about why - I mean, Texas and football, it's hard to extricate one from the other - but why did you want to incorporate that into your story and how did you approach it?

JOHN: That's interesting. Circling back to Normal People, the girl is rich in that, right? And the guy is working class? 

CLAIRE: Yes.

JOHN: Okay. I think that that's actually an important element to consider anytime you discuss sports. I mean, you're talking about a tradition that goes back to the Romans or the Greeks of wealthy people paying young men to hurt each other. I think it was something that I only really had space to hint at in The Bright Lands, but honestly what upset me much more as a kid was when I realized how much of football was a grift for these schools. Like I heard - this is an urban legend, or not an urban legend, but it was something that I've heard about - like a kid was doing so well in middle school that one of these small podunk towns literally invented a job, gave his dad a city job so that the dad would move the kid to that county to play for their football team. You know, that level of influence. Even at 14, 15, 16, I would see the Texas football finals on ESPN, because they always play in the Dallas stadium. It's just bananas to see these kids from nowhere, who in all likelihood will never achieve this level of fame again, on TV. Often getting humiliated, because the thing that's also terrible about high school football is they're usually blowout games. It really bends one way or the other. It struck me as so gross, even as a teenager - and I didn't really have the way to verbalize it - but I was like, “why are we entertaining ourselves with this?” What about this as providing pleasure to justify - even leaving aside the CTE, the cranial damage, and the bodily harm - the psychological damage of just being in the spotlight and having to be this kind of icon even when you're still developing yourself as a person? The erotic side of it was was definitely an angle, especially as the book neared the end, and I realized what was happening, and I was like, “Oh, yes, okay, this is a really sexy game. And this whole book is about sex.” But on the other side, I'd been disturbed just for years with, “why do we expect somebody who has no idea who they are to be this perfect embodiment of what we want them to be?”

CLAIRE: Yeah. It's so interesting to hear people from Texas talk about football, because my experience obviously comes from being in a neighboring state, but also in pop culture. I can't imagine what that's like. We don't necessarily have the equivalent where I'm from. That's interesting that you picked up on that as a teenager, too.

JOHN: I mean, I'm sure we'll get to Friday Night Lights eventually, but I remember seeing that movie in theaters. It really shook me, it really blew my mind, because everybody was going to see it, so I thought it was gonna be stupid. But there's that movie once a year that your grandparents are going to go see, and that was that one that year. So I went with all the men in my family, and it felt very masculine and strange. Then seeing this movie about a team failing, it just was so profoundly moving to me. It really was one of the formative works of art, because I was like, “Oh, you can do this? You can have the team lose?” That was really eye opening. It was also really interesting to see how deeply the film affected the men in this theater. It was a packed theater, and everybody had come from the boonies to come see this random matinee. I don't remember anybody crying, but I remember the entire theater being really deeply shaken. So I was like, “oh, there is a way to touch these viewers who maybe aren't what I originally envisioned when I think I'm going to write a novel.” It was always in the back of my head the way that Friday Night Lights, the film at least, really got to the root of something that a lot of these men I don't think had ever really experienced, which was failure. You know, most of them fail in their youth. So between all those things, it was like the metaphor that kept on giving. It was really strange.

CLAIRE: Was there a moment that stuck out to you in the film? Because I think I've seen it more than once, but the one moment that sticks out to me is where one family member takes off the ring and throws it out of the car. Were there any moments that stood out to you? Or was it just kind of the collective experience of that heartbreak?

JOHN: Well, so much of it is meta textual, because the experience I remember more was the theater responding to it, and not booing it and being angry at it. That was my other thought too, because I had seen shitty movies when people make fun of it, but to see a film that ends so - I don't wanna say anticlimactic, it's a really solid climax - but to see it end so downbeat and so honest and not be sort of raised by the audience was really interesting. I remember being shocked by Billy Bob Thorton’s face. That guy can do so much with masculine dignity under pressure. It was really moving.

CLAIRE: I'm assuming you've watched the TV show Friday Night Lights?

JOHN: I actually avoided it. I saw episodes of it on TV when I was a kid randomly at people's houses. I watched the pilot, and I was really interested in how it got started. 

I think part of it is the arrogance of youth, where you think when you're writing your first novel that you don't need to do a lot of research, and lo and behold of course I wound up doing tons of research. But I didn't want to be too overly influenced by the show. Then I also clocked that it's good, but it's very maudlin. They filmed big chunks of it in Waco, so it was also really interesting to see my hometown on screen in that way. It's always validating to see where you're from presented as art, right? That's a really shocking feeling. But once I realized where they were going with it, I was like, ‘Okay, I know what they're doing.’ I was way more influenced by the book and the film than I was by the TV show.

CLAIRE: Yeah, that makes sense. Oh and the book, too, yeah. God, I forgot there were many layers to Friday Night Lights. 

I love interviews where people get to share what they like, but I feel like we don't get that from authors as much - getting to talk about their favorite moments. So from the book - were there moments that scared you when you wrote them? Or still make you question yourself now? What were some of your favorite moments? What were you proud of? I want to give you space to talk about that, because I don't think authors get that enough.

JOHN: It's kind of a daunting question, because you don't want to be wrong. I think that the parts that writers are often most proud of are ideally the places that are invisible to the reader. Because there are a lot of stretches of that book where it went from being a 600 to a 400 page book, and that was just a lot of fine tuning and compressing. There's a bunch of passages, especially in the middle, that I like to read now that are sort of invisible. They get the job done, they keep the voice going, they keep the rhythm going, and you're just absorbing it, you're not even noticing that I probably wrote that five page stretch 20 times. In a way, I'm most proud of the invisible stuff. 

There's a scene early on where Joel goes mudding with another character in a truck, and it turns into this very erotic moment. Very hopeful, and also very sad. I was really pleased with that one because I’d had that image in my head since I was probably 18 and I'd never known how to use it. That was a very pleasant full circle moment. I think when you're a young artist, you're struggling so hard to just get enough material, enough life, and enough wherewithal to do something with it. It was very full circle almost to realize, “Oh, I can finally use this piece that I've been carrying around for years.”

I'm really proud of how well the ending bounces off itself. Just on a technical level, it's pleasant to look at that and to know I have it in my back pocket now as I write other stuff. Whenever I hit like a technical bump, I'm like, “if you wrote that when you were 25, you can handle what you're working on now.”

CLAIRE: I know most people can't share, and also I totally understand if you don't want to share at this point this book you're working on, but is there anything else you're excited to explore in the future? I know you might not want to even sit in this genre. I'm just curious what you envision for your body of work now that you've got this first book out?

JOHN: I'm by no means the first person to do it, but I never thought that I would write this sort of supernatural thriller. I realized that I really enjoy writing suspense, whether that's supernatural or not. I think for me, I'm just really excited over the next couple of books to lean further on one side of that line or the other. And just sort of see, “what's the scariest thing I can write?” And then, “what's the most classical thriller thing I can write?” Balancing those two is a lot of fun. Beyond that, I'm not quite ready to talk any more. It's so much easier to talk about a book once an editor's bought it. But right now, I'm in this process of finishing the new book where every day you sit down to read it, and you're like, “oh God, I don't know what this is.” It's very strange, because even writing The Bright Lands I did not realize it was a horror novel until I literally had the hardback in my hand, and you see the Library of Congress cataloging data, and you're like, “oh, okay, I guess that is that.” I had always thought of it as a mystery novel.

CLAIRE: Wow. That's really funny. Mostly because when I describe [The Bright Lands] to people I'm like, “just remember it is a horror novel,” because I don't want people to -  actually, I do want people to go into it not knowing what happens. But that's funny you didn't think of it as one.

JOHN: The one thing that is nice about the horror, and I didn't even realize I was doing it, is it does let you take the guardrails down a little bit. And that's very fun as a writer to just be like, “okay, nothing is off the table.” You don't know who's gonna die, you don't know how bad it's going to be. That's really fun. And that's kind of me as the author gaming you as the reader. 

It is funny to have sat down with a future project and have a much clearer concept of both genre and how it's going to be marketed in your head. It does change the way you work. It's a funny thing.

CLAIRE: I know from reading that you've done a lot of interviews at this point in your debut year. Is there anything you haven't gotten a chance to talk about with the book that you want to talk about?

JOHN: I saw that question in the email, and I kept trying to come up with a clever response to it. It's tricky, because there are some things that are sort of spoilery that are always fun when people talk about in book clubs or something.

CLAIRE: I can drop a spoiler warning in there if you want to go spoilery.

JOHN: I'm always interested in how readers do and don't predict. Especially who's gonna die. I'm surprised that more people haven't asked me why I decided to kill off the characters that I do. Because by the end of the book, we've racked up a really substantial body count. That was a very deliberate choice, but it surprises me that so many readers seem to roll with it. Versus for me, the thing in the book that really gets my blood pressure up is when you realize somebody has died. I guess I'm more surprised that people haven't had as much of a chance to talk about who got killed and why. At the same time, I don't really have a great answer, because I wrote the book two years ago. People will interview me, and I'll be like, “Oh god, did I write that? That's a really nice paragraph, who wrote that? Oh, I wrote that.” I'm just incredibly blessed that for a debut novel, launched in a pandemic, I have gotten to do so many interviews and gotten to talk so much about it. I feel like I've sort of exhausted it and that's such a great feeling. I'm very lucky to have that problem.

Deep Pockets: There’s More Down Here

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