James Frankie Thomas Found Himself in ‘Idlewild’
James Frankie Thomas’s debut novel Idlewild tells the story of Fay and Nell: queer, sardonic, delightfully weird best friends at a Quaker high school in 2002 Manhattan whose friendship falls apart when they meet two queer boys in a campus production of Othello. Told both in 2002 and in 2018 as Fay and Nell reflect on the friendship that shaped them, Idlewild is a compulsively readable, sincerely funny, nostalgic ode to adolescence. Throughout the novel, Thomas captures the obsession innate to being a teenager with skillful sincerity and paints a uniquely beautiful portrait of a young trans man.
I chatted with Thomas by phone to talk about fan fiction, Donna Tartt, the horniest book he’s ever read, and more.
Ariél Martinez: Tell me about the first kernel of the book.
I got my undergraduate degree at City College, the CUNY school, when I, and one week she said, “Your prompt is high school.” I had never written anything about high school and I thought, “How am I going to touch the subject of this happiness that I’ve never looked at or revisited within the space of a short poem?” I wrote this mysterious, odd little poem, and what’s interesting is , it’s weirdly a beat-for-beat rehearsal for . That assignment unlocked a new way of thinking about high school—not just about the experience of high school, but about that historical era.
