If you don’t know Oliver Munday‘s name, you’ve most certainly seen his work. He designed Colson Whitehead’s cover for The Nickel Boys. Eli Bautman’s The Idiot cover. The Cover for Thick by Tressie McMillan Cottom. He’s also the former associate creative director at The Atlantic.
Now, he’s released his debut story collection, Head of Household, which explores the evolving role of fatherhood in contemporary life. Many a book about motherhood recently has become Debutiful favorites (The School for Good Mothers, The Nursery, Nightbitch), but this is the first book about fatherhood to catapult into the pantheon of must-read debuts. Munday’s grasp on character, emotion, and scene will extend to the reader. He’ll hold you tight as you navigate the lives of these fathers.
We chatted with Munday via email to learn about his journey to becoming a writer, why he wanted to write about fatherhood, and what it was like to have a book cover designed for him instead of by him.
When people hear your name, they may just think Graphic Designer, or Creative Director. What has Oliver Munday, the Fiction Writer’s, journey been like?
My journey to become a writer started well before I knew it, probably back to when I was trying to draw Macho Man at five or six years old. I’d always had an urge to create and make things, and for a long time graphic design satisfied that urge. I channeled my energy into trying to master the craft of design, and eventually narrowed the focus to working on book jackets. What I realized more recently, was that I was only channeling a portion of that energy. I almost felt betrayed by my blinkered focus on design, the way that I assumed it would always be enough. In the back of my mind, I’d felt that I would eventually try to make personal work—work that exists solely for me—but I kept deferring it in pursuit of professional advancement and simply getting better at what I was already doing. It was also true that I assumed that whatever I ended up making for myself would be visual.
After a decade of tireless reading—both for work and for my own pleasure—I decided to try my hand at writing. To finish one, single-spaced page felt miraculous to me. But it also induced a vulnerability I hadn’t known before. I was setting out to do something new, entirely from scratch, and I knew well from my design career that it would take years to learn how to do it well. In my early 30s, summoning that kind of commitment was both daunting and exciting. I feared failing on that urge that began in my childhood.
A new aspect of that uncertainty is that I’m now asking those people who have a sense of who I am and what I do to look at me in a new way with Head of Household. But the more exciting part—the part that ultimately wins out—is that I might potentially reach an audience that has no idea who I am.
How does your writing life and creative/design life intersect? Do the artforms coexist peacefully, or do they compete?
Both lives are deeply creative, but distinct. They don’t compete, they complement. Writing is the thing I do that’s mine. It exists only because I feel that it should. Design is the ultimate predicate: it originates with someone else. Design provides quick bursts of satisfaction—like seeing a book printed for the first time, or getting an emphatic response from an author—while writing has a much longer-term payoff.
Any design project begins with a brief, or prompt. Initially, I thought this was a marker of difference between the two creative practices, but getting deeper into the editorial process with my book proved me wrong. Yahdon Israel, my editor at Simon and Schuster, gave me what was effectively a project brief shortly after acquiring the book: How do we make a book—a collection of short fiction—that reflects the varied experience of contemporary fatherhood? Attempting to answer this was like solving a design problem in certain ways. How do the individual stories communicate a message while cohering to form a whole? It felt like arranging discrete visual elements on a page in search of some greater composition harmony.
Recently, a lot of my favorite books have been about parenthood through the lens of mothers, but I haven’t seen a lot of fatherhood books. So, why fathers?
Because fathers deserve to see themselves fathering in literature. So much is being made of the fact that men don’t read fiction, and I think this is partially to do with the fact that a huge demographic of men—ie fathers—lack for books that reflect our experiences. This was true for me, and is certainly true for many of the dads I know. With this book, I want to reach those men who might’ve turned their backs on reading, or feel it’s a waste of time.
When my agent, Molly Atlas, first told me to focus on fatherhood (that that’s the stuff I wrote about well) I flinched. I’d wager that some of the reasons that made me flinch—that parenting seems like boring, unserious material and not emblematic of Real Art—are to blame for the scarcity of domestic dads in fiction. To your point, we know that novels about parenting can be amazing—and we know this because of the exemplary books about motherhood. Writers like Olga Ravn, Rachel Yoder, Rachel Cusk, and Sheila Heti all push the boundaries of fiction in order to mine the domestic experience of parenting. In doing so, they depict a deeper, and often stranger, sense of the self and the ways in which our identities as parents often clash with our identities as individuals. These are the books that inspired me. Fatherhood, by contrast, typically happens off the page and is so rarely central to the story. And this is glaring because men have always been central.
This tension became the catalyst for my book. Yahdon pushed me to reckon with the very reason a book like Head of Household hadn’t existed. He underscored the importance of working on a book that in many ways has no precedent, which is where the real work began. As a father, he felt many of the same frustrations that I did, and experienced a similar ambivalence and complicity about his own masculinity. In the end, he helped me make a book worthy of the both of us. To answer your question, Why fathers?, more concisely: because we need it.
Can you walk readers through the timeline of this collection, specifically? What was the earliest? The most recent?
The first story I wrote was “Vandal.” I was working at the Atlantic magazine at the time and I shared a draft with an incredible editor and colleague named Ann Hulbert. She gave me a very helpful edit and then I shared it with the editor in chief. Later that same year, it was published in The Atlantic with the title “Getting Up”. Not only was this the first story I wrote for the book, it was the first short story I had written ever. I learned to write by trying and failing to write novels. I did this because I felt that novels allowed me to be messier and figure things out as I went, as they tend to be longer and more digressive in form. And in these unpublished manuscripts I wrote about characters younger than myself—from teenagers to young adults. I ended up writing “Vandal” because of my daughter, Lilly. The impetus for the story happened in real life, with me and Lilly on the floor playing together. It began with a burst of excitement and inspiration: I was both remembering something from my own childhood that was reflected in Lilly’s budding consciousness. Many months later I fleshed all of this out on the page. She is the most inspiring person in my life, and it’s no surprise that she’s the reason my writing finally began to click.
From there, I worked with my agent Molly on building a collection that treated fatherhood like I did in “Vandal,” but approached it from different angles. When Yahdon expressed interest in the project, it came with a serious caveat: the collection needed to expand and deepen. To deliver on that, I ended up working so closely with Yahdon that he probably knows me better than my therapist at this point. We talked often about our experiences as fathers and partners. We both are no longer with the mothers of our daughters, and both navigating new relationships with women while raising kids. These conversations helped us decide what made the page, what needed to be there. I wrote four new stories in the process and we cut four or five from the original manuscript. The last story I wrote was “Pizza Party.” We wanted to include a piece that dealt with a father who’d been largely absent. We wanted to show how this man masked his guilt, and how his denial showed itself despite his attempts to suppress it. Showing an absent dad helped define the dads who were present in the stories. It made the collection more cohesive.
I would be remiss if I didn’t ask you about book cover design. You’ve designed some of the most memorable covers in recent memory—The Idiot, The Nickel Boys, Thick. What’s your design philosophy? What makes a great book cover?
I’m not sure I have what amounts to a design philosophy, but I tend, more and more, to value the pairing of clarity and surprise. A great book cover directly provokes a potential reader. It excites the mind for the first time and prepares a reader for the book that lies ahead. There are so many ways to do this—with a wink, or a sleight, or simply by being brash. You’re making an introduction to the reader, trying to grab their attention with a gesture. Great covers are both surprising and inevitable. They become a lasting part of the experience of the book itself. And much like the books, they exist in a market and in relation to the other books. You always have to be aware of this. Covers stand out most when they are singular. Looking back, I think The Idiot, by Elif Batuman, succeeds fairly well in the ways I outlined.
Can you talk about your own book’s cover design process? What was it like being on the author’s side for Head of Household’s cover?
It was a trip for me. An honor too. Yahdon thought it best not to treat me with special status because I design covers, so really just like any other author. And this came as a relief, because I really didn’t know how to start. I would begin to think about imagery as I was editing the book, and I could never get anywhere. I think, deep down, I’ve had such trouble thinking of myself as a writer that Yahdon’s choice felt like an important step towards me accepting that.
And despite wanting to exorcize a career’s worth of my designer-grievances by being a Primadonna author, I humbled myself. The process was thrilling. I got to work with a good friend, Chris Brand, who happens to be one of the best cover designers at work (he did Barrack Obama’s memoir cover). He designed so many options and they all floored me. Looking over his designs revealed new things about the book and made me reconsider it altogether. It’s like being presented with proof of what parts of the book resonated most, and it was fun to discuss this with him. In the end, the cover (a design from his first PDF of ideas) was just so good: tender and beautiful and multivalent. It captures an essential quality about the book: vulnerability. The reader is looking under the table. It could be the view from a newly crawling child, or an unflattering angle caught by a partner after breakfast. There’s a near nakedness to it, an anxiety present in the way the feet lay. It may be the man has missed a rent payment, or is sitting with the reality that he cheated on his partner, or maybe he is about to go out to dinner with his own father whom he hasn’t seen in twenty years. This is the moment before something crucial changes in a life. Each man in this book has been that man.