Geoffrey Mak is a Brooklyn-based writer whose debut memoir Mean Boys is a mesmerizing look into his life in the fashion and art world while exploring sexuality, art, and politics. He has written for New Yorker, the Guardian, Artforum, the Nation, Art in America, Interview, Spike, and Guernica, among other publications.
We caught up with Mak via email to get a behind-the-scenes look into his life, his writing, and his memoir.
Coming from the world of fashion, how did writing become part of your life? Was this form of art something you were always interested in?
I worked both in fashion editorial and advertising, but most of my experience comes from the advertising side. I saw myself as part of a lineage. Salman Rushdie and Don DeLillo wrote for Ogilvy. Joan Didion wrote captions for Vogue. Artists—Cindy Sherman, Robert Longo, Warhol—have long acknowledged advertising’s integral role in the collective cultural repository, and I had a front-row seat in how the dream fabric of a nation, a generation, got made. Because I saw the making of myth, I deconstructed them in my writing. Much of Mean Boys builds up a self-mythology, but by the end of the book, I pretty much gut it for every false bone in its body, there was no other way to move on. What remains is, I hope, the possibility for real intimacy.
The one question I always need to know when someone writes about their life is: why this story and why now?
About halfway through writing the book, only half convinced I even had a book, I stumbled upon a discovery: status. This was a thing I observed in the art world, which I orbited during the years I wrote this book. I saw status as having a life coextensive with class and identity, but ultimately distinct from it. You can have no money and a lot of status, just as much as you can have a lot of money and be unable to buy status. Identity privilege works the same way. The case study was incels: straight white men, with all the privilege that entails, yet finding themselves bankrupt of status. I chose incels as a case study because the stakes involved—mass murder—reached the pitch of a national, moral emergency. I write that status is a political problem without clear political solutions. But I hope that by bringing it into focus, we might first acknowledge that the life of status is real, and then second, think about how, in our own lives, what it might look like to take responsibility for it.
Something your book briefly touches on is how technology has changed fashion. I grapple a lot with tech and how much of the world is at our fingertips. I often ask myself, is all this technology actually any good? What is your relationship with technology. How do you view it influencing art from fashion to writing to other media?
Not only is technology changing everything about art and fashion and writing, it’s changing politics. The structure of social engagement has unleashed new behavior patterns that have irrevocably influenced global culture and politics: cancel culture, and reactionary edgelords, one of whom was elected president. The circulation of culture on social media has introduced a new temporality—everything is faster, more ephemeral—amping consumerist production, increasing waste. The outsized voice of urban superiority in mass/social media correlates with a population-flock to the cities, draining rural locales and has triggered an imbalance in the Electoral College, and American democracy. The ultra-adaptation of every algorithm on every personalized feed, from social media to search engines, has accelerated the felt condition of one’s hyper-individuality, fragmenting consensus, diminishing social bonds. As an acceleration of neoliberal capitalism, technological atomization correlates with all-time high rates in suicides, loneliness, and drug overdoses in America. Advancements in technology has enabled a universal corporate and state surveillance apparatus on a global scale. Meanwhile, technology and artificial intelligence has reached a complexity so extreme as to be perceived as spiritual, conditioning what James Bridle has coined a New Dark Age. I want to be clear: The acceleration of technology in every facet of contemporary life is an emergency. The trendy term “interdependence”—this idea that we must learn how to live with technology, because it’s too big to fail—leaves much to be desired. But change starts at the level of a micro-decision. For one night a week, pick up a book instead of TikTok. Iterate from there. If you can’t save the world, at least save yourself. Separate your recycling. Count your blessings. Love your enemies.
How does being an editor for Spike influence your approach to writing and creating? What has the role taught you?
Spike is a very strange magazine where we have a very freewheeling approach to writing. More than any other art magazine, I think, we encourage our writers’ literary sensibilities, their flair for formal invention, their reliance on the situated knowledge of the first person, their personality. We have a long tradition of party reporting. Our highest viewed piece last year was a longform profile of a modeling agency told in the form of an autofictional screenplay. I love editing online features for Spike, as my writers are often inspiring me and pushing me to take more risks in my own work. There’s no other magazine like us, and I’m not just saying that because I work here.
I spend a lot of time talking to writers about editing their fiction but I rarely ask nonfiction writers about it. What was the editing process like for this? How does it feel cutting something so personal and meaningful to make the book better?
I took a very unconventional and time-consuming editorial approach (very much influenced by psychoanalysis) with this book, and as a result, we pushed the release date back four times. In retrospect, I know we made the right choice all four times. I was demanding of my editor, Ben Hyman, but he rose to the challenge. What do I mean by this? In one of our earliest conversations, he told me that his role as an editor was to help my writing succeed in what I intended to do. Then I told him that I wasn’t interested in revealing my intentions. I chose to keep that a secret. I was more interested in his interpretations, even misinterpretations, of what I was doing, which is often where the most potent work happens. Ben has a brilliant and promiscuous mind, and I wanted to welcome it into my writing process as much as I could. So instead of executing commands from a pre-determined script, he really had to listen to a text, be sensitive, take his time, identifying heat spots and suggest I explore them, develop new areas, take detours, write new prose. It was a new way of working for both of us. This was time consuming. We often made the wrong move and were not embarrassed to admit it. I wrote thousands and thousands of words that we ended up scrapping because even if it was where I, as the writer, wanted to go, it wasn’t where the piece wanted to go. Two or three of these essays were basically rewritten from the ground up. In addition to being an editor, Ben was my psychoanalyst, my film director, my collaborator. I’m really proud of the work we’ve done together. It was so much fun. Most of the time, I could not stop laughing.
What do you want to explore with your writing in the future?
I’m writing a novel set in Berlin 🙂