The Common Thread in R. Eric Thomas’s Genre-Spanning Process

Previously in my author conversation series: Jasmine Guillory, Alejandro Varela, Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Megha Majumdar, Ada Limón, Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, Crystal Hana Kim and R. O. Kwon, Lydia Kiesling, and Bryan Washington.

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There is nothing R. Eric Thomas could write that I wouldn’t read the hell out of, though I truly have no idea how he writes it all. His debut memoir, Here for It: Or, How to Save Your Soul in America, came out in 2020 and was a national best seller; earlier this year, he published a young-adult novel, Kings of B’more. He’s co-authored a biography of Rep. Maxine Waters and written several plays. He writes for the shows Dickinson and Better Things. He composes and sends two newsletters each week—plus, he basically wrote this newsletter for me by answering my questions for an hour. “All I need is a little bit of encouragement. When somebody says, ‘Hey, we would like to read more of you,’ that’s all I really need,” Thomas said when we spoke last month. “Which is not to say that encouragement makes it easy—every day, I get up and say to my husband, ‘I’ve lost it. I’m not funny anymore. Everything I write is terrible.’ But now I have all these deadlines, so I’m like, ‘I guess we’re going to work!’”

Thomas and I talked about his new memoir, which will come out next summer; the pressure and strange isolation of having a Very Online career; how he got into playwriting and writing for television; and the questions and themes he explores in his work. I was particularly interested