Sean Thor Conroe – The Protégé

Sean Thor Conroe lost his fiercest advocate right before he published his first novel. Now he’s facing the hype without him.

- By Molly Osberg

SEAN THOR CONROE is outlining what he calls the “four pillars” of fuckboy-hood—the different ways you can be a self-aggrandizing, duplicitous, and otherwise distasteful man. First, there’s what he calls the classic spineless, “bitch-ass dude,” whom other men look down on because they’re not living up to the “masculine standard of toughness and integrity.” There’s the “untrustworthy male in the romantic context.” There’s the “hypebeast fuckboy” decked out in Balenciaga. And finally, there’s the guy who uses sex with more powerful men for protection. I ask Conroe—the author of Fuccboi, a novel about a fuckboy who shares his name and some of his biography—whether he identifies as a fuckboy. He looks incredulous. “No, hell no,” he says.

It’s Black Friday, and we’re sitting over plates of potatoes and smoked salmon in one of those outdoor-dining boxes with plastic windows in Brighton Beach, so close to the ocean our conversation keeps getting interrupted by gulls. The 30-year-old eventually concedes that if you had done a 23andMe test on him at the time he was writing the book, he would have been something like one16th fuckboy. It’s that part of him—the old him—that the book is about. “Ah, I shouldn’t be saying this,” he says, and that’s probably correct, but what else can you expect from a first-time novelist doing an initial round of press barely six months after a modest deal with an independent publisher turned into a six-figure contract with Little, Brown? Conroe, wearing a Patagonia vest and a Carhartt hat in muted tones, waves his hand over my recorder, as if to swat away what he just said.