I wrote Loverboy, Still because I kept meeting a particular kind of man — in Brooklyn, in LA, in my own mirror — and nobody was writing him.
Not the player. Not the emotionally unavailable guy. Not the commitment-phobe or the heartbreaker or any of the archetypes we've been handed as shorthand for Black masculinity in love.
I mean the loverboy.
The man who feels everything. Who loves too hard, too quietly, too completely. Who mistakes intensity for intimacy and silence for strength. Who was taught to be a provider before he was taught to be a person. Who carries grief he was never given permission to name.
That man exists everywhere. But he doesn't exist much in contemporary literary fiction — not as a protagonist, not with interiority, not without being framed as either predatory or pitiable.
I wanted to change that.
What the Loverboy Actually Is
The loverboy isn't a romantic. He's a responder.
He didn't wake up one day and decide to love people harder than they love him. He learned early — often from a mother who loved through provision rather than presence, often from a neighborhood that policed softness, often from losses that arrived too fast to process — that love requires vigilance. That if you want to keep something, you have to earn it. Every day. Without rest.
Gregory Mitchell, the protagonist of Loverboy, Still, is that man at every age. As a kid climbing trees in Brooklyn with his first love. As a teenager watching someone he cared about slip away because he didn't know how to name what he felt. As a young father realizing the patterns he inherited are now being passed down unless he interrupts something.
I built Gregory's voice carefully. The audiobook is performed in his voice — the protagonist speaking his own story, Brooklyn cadence intact — because I needed readers to hear how he thinks. The way he justifies. The way he minimizes his own pain. The way he narrates his life like someone who's still trying to convince himself he did the right thing.
That interiority matters. Because the loverboy doesn't announce his wounds. He absorbs them. And absorption, over time, becomes a skill that costs him everything.
Brooklyn as the Fourth Character
I'm from Brooklyn — born and raised, wrote this book from LA but Brooklyn shaped every sentence. The block in Loverboy, Still isn't just setting. It's memory. It's the place where love first got complicated because everyone was watching and everyone had an opinion and privacy didn't exist the way it does when you grow up with space.
Gregory's first heartbreak doesn't happen in isolation. It happens on a block where rumors travel faster than truth. Where a kiss in a tree becomes public property. Where breaking up isn't just about two people — it's about everyone who saw you together and now has to watch you apart.
That pressure shapes him. It teaches him early that love has an audience. That your choices reflect on your family, your reputation, your standing. That wanting someone isn't enough if the block decides it's the wrong someone.
I wanted to capture that specific ecosystem — not as nostalgia, but as the architecture that builds a certain kind of man. Brooklyn in the '90s and early 2000s gave us a generation of boys who learned to move carefully. To read rooms before entering them. To protect themselves by becoming unreadable.
Gregory is that generation. And the novel is what happens when that training collides with the human need to be seen.
Intimacy Without Apology
One of the hardest decisions I made writing this book was how to handle intimacy.
Not sex — there are no sex scenes in Loverboy, Still. I'm not interested in that. I'm interested in the moment before. The wanting. The specific ache of being close to someone and not knowing if you're allowed to reach for them. The emotional nakedness that feels more vulnerable than any physical act.
Gregory is emotionally intimate in ways that make him uncomfortable. He notices things he shouldn't notice. Remembers conversations other people forget. Cares about outcomes in situations where detachment would serve him better.
That's the loverboy's curse and his gift — he can't turn it off. Even when turning it off would protect him.
I didn't write this as tragedy. I wrote it as recognition. Because there are men reading this right now who have spent their entire lives being told they're too much or not enough — too emotional or too distant, too invested or too detached — and nobody ever just said: You're not broken. You're just built different.
This book says that.
The Lesson Gregory Learns (Without Spoiling It)
By the end of Chapter 1, you already know something went wrong. You know Gregory's first love — Simone, the girl from the block, the tree, the kiss — didn't last. You know he's looking back on it as an adult, trying to make sense of where it fractured.
What you don't know yet is how many times that same fracture repeats. How many women teach him the same lesson in different languages. How grief, violence, betrayal, and silence all become teachers he didn't ask for but can't ignore.
And you don't know yet what he does with all of it.
That's the rest of the book.
I won't spoil it here. But I will say this: Gregory doesn't harden. That would be easier. That would fit the arc we expect from men who get hurt enough times. But hardening isn't the only option. And I wanted to write a man who proved that.
Why This Matters Now
We're in a moment where Black masculinity is being interrogated in ways it hasn't been before. That's good. Necessary. Long overdue.
But interrogation without interiority becomes reduction. And I'm tired of seeing Black men in literature only show up as case studies. As symptoms. As the violence they've survived or the harm they've caused, with no room for the quiet moments in between.
Loverboy, Still is an attempt to hold complexity. To say: this man loved hard and it cost him, and he's still here, still trying, still willing to be soft in a world that punishes softness.
That's not weakness. That's refusal.
If you want to hear Gregory's voice — the way he thinks, the way he remembers Brooklyn, the way he tries to make sense of his own heart — the first three chapters of the audiobook are free at /audiobook.
Or if you're ready to see where this goes, the full book is at /#purchase.
Either way, I hope you meet him. I hope you recognize him.
Because he's not fiction. He's just finally on the page.