When I wrote Loverboy, Still, I knew I didn't want to write a novel in the traditional sense. I wanted it to feel like Gregory Mitchell was sitting across from you at a corner table in a Brooklyn bar at 2 a.m., confessing something he'd never told anyone. I wanted you to feel like you'd stumbled on a letter he'd written to himself — or maybe to someone he loved — and you were reading it over his shoulder, breath held, hoping he wouldn't notice you there.
That intimacy — that collapsing of distance between narrator and reader — is what I think of as epistolary energy, even though Loverboy, Still isn't technically an epistolary novel. There are no "Dear Reader" addresses. No formal letter structure. But the tone is confessional. The rhythm is conversational. And Gregory's voice — urgent, self-aware, tender, sometimes defensive — sounds like someone speaking directly to you, not performing for an invisible audience.
The Letter as Masculinity's Off-Ramp
I've been thinking a lot about Mitchell S. Jackson's work, where the intimacy of his prose makes vulnerability feel necessary, not optional. I've also been drawn to Nicole Dennis-Benn's novels, where characters speak their truths with an urgency that feels like they're confessing to someone they trust completely. Both writers use intimacy — the direct address, the confessional tone — as a way to disarm the reader's defenses.
For Black men in literary fiction, vulnerability is often the hardest thing to write. We're so used to performing strength, even on the page. We're so used to the expectation that we'll be legible through trauma or rage or silence. But what if the most radical thing a Black man can do in a novel is say: I loved someone. I still do. I don't know how to let go.
That's what Gregory Mitchell does in Loverboy, Still. He tells you about a love affair that changed him, and he doesn't hide behind third-person omniscience or narrative distance. He's right there in the first person, stuttering through his own contradictions, circling back to memories he can't quite let rest. It reads like a letter because it is a letter — not to a specific person, but to the self he used to be, the man he's trying to become, and maybe to every reader who's ever stayed too long in something they knew was ending.
Why NYC Demands Intimacy
Setting the novel in Brooklyn — in Bed-Stuy, Crown Heights, the corners where Gregory and his circle come of age — also shaped the book's intimacy. New York is a city that forces proximity. You're always overhearing someone else's conversation on the train, always catching someone's eye across the bodega, always living so close to strangers that their lives bleed into yours.
Morgan Jerkins captures this brilliantly in her work, where the city becomes a character that demands honesty from everyone who lives in it. In Loverboy, Still, Gregory's narration does something similar — he's telling you the story because he needs to make sense of it, because the only way to understand what happened is to speak it aloud, to someone, even if that someone is just the reader holding the book.
I thought about Deesha Philyaw's The Secret Lives of Church Ladies too — the way her stories feel like someone leaning across the table to tell you the thing they're not supposed to say. That's the energy I wanted. Not confession as performance, but confession as survival.
The Loverboy Archetype: Charm as Self-Defense
Gregory Mitchell is what I call a "loverboy" — a man who knows how to make people feel seen, how to deploy charm like armor, how to love intensely and leave just as quickly. It's a survival mechanism, but it's also a trap. The novel examines what happens when the mask starts to crack, when the person you've been performing for — yourself, your lover, your boys — starts to see through it.
In the audiobook (narrated by Gregory Mitchell, the protagonist's voice I built for him), you hear that tension in real time. The pauses. The moments where he catches himself lying. The way his tone shifts when he talks about his father, or the woman he can't forget, or the version of himself he's trying to outrun. It's not my voice as the author — it's Gregory's voice, and I wanted it to sound like he was sitting in a room with you, trying to get it right.
Why the Letter Form Matters Now
We live in a time when intimacy is mediated through screens, where vulnerability is commodified as content. Writing a novel that feels like a letter — that demands the reader lean in, slow down, listen — felt like a small act of resistance. I wanted Loverboy, Still to be the kind of book you can't skim. The kind where you have to sit with Gregory's contradictions, his tenderness, his fuck-ups, and let them complicate your assumptions about Black masculinity, about love, about what it means to grow up.
Hanif Abdurraqib writes that the best essays feel like someone inviting you into their living room and trusting you not to break anything. I wanted this novel to feel the same way. I wanted you to feel like Gregory Mitchell trusted you with his story — not because you earned it, but because he needed to tell it, and you happened to be there.
Read It Like a Letter
If you're curious about the book, I'd encourage you to start with Chapter 1. You can listen to it for free at /audiobook and hear how Gregory's voice carries the story — how the intimacy I'm describing here isn't just on the page, but in the rhythm, the breath, the pauses. Or grab the full book at /#purchase and read it the way I wrote it: like a letter from someone who's trying to figure out what love costs, and whether he can afford to pay it.