Lucas Mann on Personal Hangups

Welcome to I’m a Writer But, where writers discuss their work, their lives, their other work, the stuff that takes up any free time they have, all the stuff they’re not able to get to, and the ways in which any of us get anything done. Plus: book recommendations, bad jokes, okay jokes, despair, joy, and anything else going on that week. Hosted by Lindsay Hunter.    

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Today, Lucas Mann discusses his essay collection, Attachments, as well as Brad Pitt, being a dad but not a dumb dad, intentions vs. writing, fooling himself into writing, the usefulness of delusion, writing as excavation, Dr. Becky, his bookstore in Providence, Riffraff, and more!

From the episode:

Lucas Mann: Everybody’s personal hangups are exactly conflated with the way that they want to parent, which is then juxtaposed with the way that they actually parent. And it’s always fraught. I think a lot of what the book is about is these ways in which–at least for me–it feels like you’re supposed to, as a parent, separate your own childhood and your own baggage from your kid and protect your kid from it. And that is a good goal. But it’s also like, so much of parenting has made me care so much more for someone else other than myself, but also has made me feel and relive a lot more of my old shit than I ever did previously. And I think that double vision every time you see your kid exposed to something that triggers something in you–those are moments as parents and those are also deeply autobiographical moments and they can’t be separated.

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Lucas Mann is the author of the new collection, Attachments: Essays on Fatherhood and Other Performances, as well as Captive Audience: On Love and Reality Television, Lord Fear: A Memoir, and Class A: Baseball in the Middle of Everywhere. He teaches creative writing at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, and lives in Providence, RI with his family, where they own Riffraff Bookstore and Bar.