The plot points keep stacking up
Gabe Habash and Julie Buntin wed and birthed first novels. Take it from there.
Julie Buntin and Gabe Habash have a lot in common. They’re both young Midwesterners living in New York, first-time novelists, and are married — to each other.
Buntin’s “Marlena,” published in April by Henry Holt, is an understated but fiery novel about a teenager named Cat in Michigan who befriends a troubled girl with a drug-dealing boyfriend. Habash’s brash and explosive “Stephen Florida,” released in June by Coffee House Press, follows an obsessed college wrestler desperate to win a national championship.
The authors spoke with The Times via telephone from their home in New York; the conversation has been edited. Since your books are being released so close to each other, is there any competition ?
Julie Buntin: I don’t feel that from Gabe at all. I’m way worse . Gabe is very supportive and 100% has a healthier, less frantically anxious perspective on this whole process. I tend to be more competitive in general. I’ve tried to keep that in check, and having a partner that’s very chill about it is helpful. It can be hard not to play the comparison game, though.
Gabe Habash: I don’t really feel competitive in general, but with Julie, our books are so different. I’m published by a small press, she’s published by a bigger press. We’ve written very different books, so our situations are different despite the fact that they’re both fiction and they’re coming out around the same time. We both hit enough of the benchmarks and goals that we wanted through the process. I think that we both are very happy with our own experiences and for each other’s experiences, so I don’t think there’s that much competitiveness.
Buntin: This is corny-sounding, but I think “Stephen Florida” is one of the best books I’ve ever read. So anything you read that you love, you just want it to do well, other people to feel the same way you do. I love Gabe’s book, so even if, say, Scott Rudin buys the film rights, my excitement about the book getting the recognition it deserves mostly rises above any competitive feeling.
Habash: Just to piggyback on that, back when we were writing the first drafts and showing each other our work before it’s ready to be shown widely, I think for both of us, the other’s opinion is very important. I would not be happy if Julie didn’t like my book. That would make me miserable. There’s a reason why I’m showing her my book before anybody else, because I really want to get her input. So in that sense, both of the books are very important to both of us.
How long have you two been together?
Habash: We’ve been married since September 2015, and we’ve been together since 2011, right?
Buntin: Yeah, we met in grad school at NYU, 2011 or thereabouts. We were both fiction students. Gabe was a year ahead of me in the program, but we did have a class together. Did you write “Marlena” and “Stephen Florida” at the same time? Buntin: Kind of. Habash: Your book was in a different form for a while. I started my first draft in July of 2013. Do you know when yours was?
Buntin: It was earlier than that. I had been working on a version of this book that changed a lot, since 2011, basically. But Gabe was working on something else and then started this. He’s faster than me. There were definitely times when he was working on “Stephen Florida” and I was working in the other room, and you can hear the other person typing, and you’re like, “Oh, they’re actually writing.” Nothing makes me feel more insecure. And you’re just checking Twitter.
Buntin: Yeah! When you’re sitting in silence and you can hear the thoughts coming from the other room. I definitely had a lot of times like that. I’m way more of a procrastinator. Did the same thing happen to you, Gabe?
Habash: We work differently. Julie will put off writing, but then she’ll write for 18 hours and I’ll periodically put snacks in front of her while she’s sitting at her computer because she’ll be immobile for an entire day. It’s one step removed from having a bedpan there. But I would come home from work and write for an hour or two, and then I just had no more mental energy. I write on a more frequent basis for shorter periods of time, whereas Julie worked for larger swaths of single sittings. It sounds like you complement each other pretty well.
Buntin: Gabe would be like, “When will you be done? 7 p.m.?” and I’d be like, “Sure.” But that would really mean, like, 11. I would find myself a little bit jealous of the more moderate approach. Every writer is different in how they go about it, but his way seems saner to me somehow. Did you ever reach out to each other for advice?
Habash: In general, we both are each other’s first readers. When I wrote the first 50 pages and showed them to Julie, and I was like, “Is this good or bad?” and she was like, “It’s good.” I wrote the entire rest of the draft without showing her anything after that, because it’s important to me when it’s in the first draft, that it’s something only I have access to. Once I finished I showed it to Julie, and then from there, it started to get worked on. It’s not only the novel, anything I write, I show to Julie before anybody else, and I almost don’t send anything out unless Julie looks at it.
Buntin: I can’t imagine what it would be like to be married to someone who doesn’t do the same thing as you, though many people are like, “Oh, my God, that sounds terrible,” especially now with our books coming out at the same time. I really trust Gabe’s take. I feel the same way — I show him stuff before other people and definitely when the book was getting ready to go out. Have you thought about collaborating on a writing project ? Buntin: No. Habash: No, no.
Buntin: I don’t know why, but not only have I never thought about that, that sounds like — why does that sound so terrible?
Habash: I don’t want to collaborate with anybody.
Buntin: We both have pretty distinct ideas about what kind of fiction we want to write, and our sensibilities are very different. I think it would be really hard.
Habash: Speaking for my book in particular, Julie edited that very heavily. The book’s dedicated to her for a reason, I’ll put it that way. That’s fairly close to collaboration, I would say.
Julie, I saw that Gabe has a T-shirt with your book cover on it.
Buntin: Oh, my God, that’s the most embarrassing thing on Earth. That came from Colin Drohan, the program coordinator at Catapult who’s been working with me there for a year. It was a thankyou gift for writing his grad school letter of recommendation. And I think he was trolling me a little bit. [Laughs] Then Gabe got wind of it. Now he and Colin troll me with pictures of that T-shirt.
Habash: We had dinner with some of Julie’s friends. I was wearing that shirt and Julie made me change it right before we left. I was going to wear it out, and she wouldn’t let me do it! A “Stephen Florida” book cover T-shirt would look pretty cool. Buntin: I don’t know why I haven’t done that in retaliation. Habash: We can print it on a singlet.