Paula Bomer: On the Art of the Character Study, Writing Into Uncomfortable Truths, Embracing the Untraditional, and Her Latest Novel ‘The Stalker’
I feel very cool when publicists email me with interview requests for their writers. I never thought I was hip enough to be considered worthy to sit down with an author and drill them about their craft. But working with Write or Die the past few years, I’ve found my niche, my little corner of the world where I get to rack these writers’ brains and feel truly good about it. And I feel even more cool when the interview request is on behalf of Paula Bomer and her newest novel, The Stalker (Soho Press, 2025).
The Stalker follows Robert “Doughty” Doughten Savile, a delulu (as the kids say) young man who hails from a formerly wealthy family in Darien, Connecticut. Set in early 1990s New York City, the novel traces his descent as he schemes his way from a YMCA bed to a luxurious Soho loft, navigating toxic relationships while fabricating an extravagant career in real estate. In reality, Doughty spends his days glued to VHS tapes, smoking crack in Tompkins Square Park, and occasionally resorting to sex work in the restrooms of Grand Central Station. Darkly comic and deeply unsettling, the novel paints a portrait of a sociopath trapped in the chaos of his own failures.
The Stalker has received much deserved praise for its incisive character study and bold narrative. Author Sam Lipsyte describes it as “an eyeball-scorching wonder, another brilliant addition to the Bomer canon.” And I can attest—my eyeballs were scorched, but in the best way.
Stoked to chat with Bomer on all things bold and radical.
Brittany Ackerman: Going to start out here with something creepy, ha!—something I found online. I’ve been stalking you on the Internet and saw this super poignant quote from Inside Madeleine: “This was before I knew that we all live on this planet, driving in the cars of our own little minds, our own self-contained worlds. Yes, this was before I knew that, when I thought that I mattered, when I thought that people saw me, deep into me, saw all my love and excitement at being alive, saw the very glistening, running-overness of my aliveness. But we only matter when we do something awful. Then, someone sees us and only then.”
This feels akin to the impulse of Robert Doughten Savile in The Stalker, this desire to surface a character who is only noticed for their wrongdoing. I’ve read a lot of stories (and even received workshop notes along the same lines) that feature “bad” characters, but they have to acknowledge they are “bad,” or the writer has to somehow infiltrate the story in order to showcase that they don’t align with their own fictional characters.
Your stories tend to reject conventional “likable” characters. Do you think literature is too concerned with likability?
Paula Bomer: I think many readers are concerned with wanting to relate to characters and they will find their novels, their favorite writers. But that’s not everyone’s jam. I am not that writer, or that reader, for the most part. Many readers want a warm fuzzy feeling reading a book. There are books that balance the complicated natures of human existence, and even then, your average reader might not find the characters likeable. Strangely, I had a reader show such empathy for Doughty, and I appreciated his take so much, but many readers will not, and I’m not sure I have any sympathy for him, either. But I’m interested in him—that’s for sure—and also interested in how he achieves empathy from the women around him. I tried to highlight this aspect, the empathy aspect of the sociopath, but that might need to be further developed another time. One of the great abilities of a bad person is to generate empathy from others. It’s a means of seduction, to work their vulnerability, the “poor me” scam. It’s often used for long-term scams. Doughty has a lot of reasons why one would “feel” for him. He has bad teeth, his father dies. But if someone uses these “vulnerabilities” to get something, are they vulnerabilities? Or are they just straight up cons?
BA: Your work often focuses on deeply flawed characters—mothers, daughters, and now, a delusional young man.
I love this scene here: “He took a long, wonderful shower. The bar soap was just Ivory, but the shampoo and conditioner were of a decent quality, not department store stuff like at Sophia’s but not generic, either. The water was deliciously hot and the water pressure was stellar. He masturbated slowly, taking his time. His dick was amazing, his chest was muscular…Then he thought of his cocaine. Then, strangely, his brain landed on the old man’s veiny head from Grand Central, which made him soft…”
It’s so refreshing to see a writer leaning into the weird and the strange and not shying away from uncomfortable truths. What compels you to write about these kinds of figures?
PB: Nothing is funnier than masturbation. I’m definitely going for a laugh there. I like writing about sex and our relationships to our bodies. Our bodies are strange things, they are what makes us animals. And then there is the brain, that part of our body. We’re still trying to figure out all of this. What strikes me about this scene is that he’s judging all of someone else’s toiletries which he is using for free out of the courtesy of a woman, but in his mind, they just exist for him. What an asshole. It reminds me of the time I cooked for a man and he said, “I need more people in my life who will cook for me.” Instead of, God forbid, “I would love to cook for you sometime.” This is Doughty. I had so much inspiration for him, it was overwhelming.
BA: Many of your past works have centered on the female experience. Was writing a male protagonist a departure for you?
PB: One of my first short stories ever published was “The Mother of His Children” in Open City Magazine. It was from the male POV. Another was “She Was Everything To Him” in Fiction, also from the male POV. I often write from the male POV, but this is my first full length novel from the male perspective that has been published. It wasn’t a departure, but because it was not a short story, which was what I primarily wrote for years, it was the longest time I’ve spent inside the head of a man. So that was something.
BA: The protagonist, Doughty, is compared to characters from stories written by Patricia Highsmith and Bret Easton Ellis (I don’t care what anyone says, I loved The Shards). These are also writers who are such masters of character study, where readers are allowed inside access to the mechanisms of the mind.
Press for the book compares him to “An Untalented Mr. Ripley, a Dumb American Psycho.” But I think you’ve really made this guy your own here. You dig in where others might shy away.
What initially drew you to Doughty? How did his voice develop on the page?
PB: I love those comparisons because I admire those novels so much, and they were in my pile of books that sat on my desk while writing this novel, a pile that also included The Dwarf by Pär Lagerkvist, The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing, The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead, as well as Therese Raquin by Zola. I never re-opened those novels, but they all spoke to me from the pile on my desk. Zola has the main male figure in Therese Raquin deliciously imagining his future, which looks sort of like his present, where he gets to be completely lazy and do whatever he wants. It’s brilliant. He wants to do nothing. HAHA. And almost all of my writer friends are obsessed with the “Genesis” chapter of American Psycho. Just pure ego, self-loving and delusion! The love of hearing his own thoughts! The unbreakable self-belief! And regarding The Man Who Loved Children—never has a tyrant been more well developed. All this said, once I found the particular voice, Doughty’s voice, it was such a relief. I’d been trying to write this story for so long. And then—when it came—it felt so great. The best feeling.
BA: I also did a deep dive on your career and found that you submitted The Stalker without an agent!
Many of our readers will be curious about this process, as we are all fed the traditional agent-to-publisher route of becoming an author. Do you have any advice for writers who are knee-deep in querying (raises hand quietly) or any tips to go at it on your own?
I personally find it very inspiring when an author embraces the untraditional path and forges their own way into the world of letters. Anything you’d like to share is much appreciated and valued here.
PB: I actually love this question, and it’s not nearly as personal as discussing process. My first book, the story collection Baby and Other Stories, was published by Jackie Corley, then a very young woman running an indie press called Word Riot. I was forty-two and had been writing my entire life, and had received more rejections from more agents than I can count. I’ve had an agent or two at various stages but haven’t found the right one yet. It’s on the list of things to figure out, which is a long list for me. I do remember a moment in my life when I was getting stories published in small online journals, because I had understandably given up on more mainstream outlets. And that was a great time.
Here is my thing, and it’s not going to resonate with many people—I write for the love of writing, which turned into a need very early on in my life. Do I want readers? Of course I do! Do I want money? Yes! Do the vast majority of writers make any money writing? No. And academia isn’t for everyone and now it’s almost for no one, as no one is hiring. I admire tremendously many of the people who are more “established” and have taken more traditional routes. But I love the small press world, and you don’t need an agent for that. I love outsider art. I think I’m where I belong, in every sense of that word. I left Indiana very young, I love NYC and all the strange cultural and artistic happenings, all my “people,” people who didn’t belong where they came from, came here. I have a great community.
BA: I read that your work has been compared to some of the greats such as Mary Gaitskill and Lorrie Moore. I think this is because your writing is acclaimed and admired for its unflinching honesty. Have you ever felt the need to hold back (i.e. by industry standards), or is pushing boundaries essential to your work? Did you face any particular challenges when writing The Stalker? Also please share the moments of awe and pure joy with us too!
PB: I never would hold back. Because to compromise for something you do for love or need doesn’t make sense. I have written for money, and I would do that again in a heartbeat. That’s a different thing and it’s always worth a shot, but it’s not a talent I have spent time developing. I spent most of my adult life raising my two sons and making a home. And I wrote. I had little to no social life, and often my house was a mess. But it was how I wanted my life to be, no doubt. I’ve had my face in a book since I learned to read.
The challenge in writing The Stalker was the years of trying to figure out how to write what I needed to write, which was a story of what men do to women. I discovered over years of failed attempts that I could not write this story from a woman’s perspective, could not write from a victim’s point of view. Our country is run by a bunch of mentally deranged misogynists who are conmen, acting as if they are doing their best for their people, the people whose lives they are destroying. And these men don’t only run our government, but might be running a law firm, a production company (nod to Weinstein! Or Justin Baldoni’s people!) or even that deli on the corner that has a bad vibe (not my deli, I love my deli). The pure joy, an extreme high really, came when the voice came to me. Once I had that voice, the writing flowed. Constructing the narrative was never not hard and it’s always work. But it’s so satisfying. Like baking a tart. Like doing a headstand.
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Paula Bomer is the author of The Stalker, a Vogue best book of the year, as well as the novels Tante Eva and Nine Months and the story collections Inside Madeleine and Baby and Other Stories, as well as the essay collection Mystery and Mortality. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and magazines, including New York Magazine, Los Angeles Review of Books, BOMB, Fiction, and The Mississippi Review.
