Pictured Author Dolby and his book.
Gay novelist Tom Dolby will be reading from his debut novel, The Trouble Boy, on April 16 at Barnes & Noble on Webster, (773) 871-3610.
by Gregg Shapiro
Single, but dating, gay author Tom Dolby's debut novel Trouble Boy (Kensington Books, $23, 262 pp) is alternately funny, sexy and serious. Main character Toby is in his early 20s and trying to make a name and home for himself in Manhattan. At every turn, however, he is faced with trouble. Career woes, substance abuse, sexually transmitted diseases, family matters, and social situations provide Toby with enough of a story to fill at least one book. Dolby deftly handles his subject matter, keeping the pages turning and the trouble stirring.
Gregg Shapiro: Since the first two letters of your first name and the last two of your last name make up the name Toby, how much of Tom Dolby is in Toby?
Tom Dolby: It's funny that you should ask that. The thing with the name happened completely by accident. A friend pointed it out to me after reading an early draft of the book. I sort of thought that was a bit of serendipity. Toby is a real mix of different qualities that I have, and certainly a lot of fictional qualities. In some ways, he's more complicated than I am. In other ways, he's much simpler. I would definitely say that there's something of me in Toby, but I wouldn't say that Toby is me.
GS: Toby has an eclectic circle of friends, and I read on your Web site that many of your friends attended a launch party for the book on March 10 in New York. Would you say that your friends served as sources of inspiration for characters in the book?
TD: Absolutely. A lot of the characters in the book are sort of composites of friends of mine. It's a real mix. Fact and fiction get mixed up. It's a combination of people that I know, mixed with other people, mixed with stories that I've heard and they came to create these characters who became very real for me and took on a life of their own.
GS: How did the friends who might have recognized themselves feel about reading fictionalized versions of themselves?
TD: (Laughs) They absolutely love it. There are some characters that no one recognizes at all because they're really a mix of different people and have fictional qualities as well. There are a few characters who are pretty close to friends of mine, so I was concerned when I had them first read it, whether they would like it or not. To my delight, they absolutely loved it and sort of feel like they've been immortalized.
GS: The NYC club scene is another character in the book. As a writer, you had the opportunity to combine the experience of going out to clubs with doing research. Not many people can make that claim.
TD: I did nightlife reviews for a number of years. I started doing them for the Village Voice when I was an intern there and then I continued when I wrote a guidebook about the downtown New York scene. I had a Web site that grew out of that project. Work and play were definitely connected.
GS: The Trouble Boy has a story within a story—Toby's coming out. Was that story based on something you'd heard about or experienced yourself?
TD: It was inspired by the emotional truth of my own coming out process. It's not autobiographical. This is a way in which Toby and I really differ. He's deeply afraid of intimacy. I never really had that problem, personally. But I wanted to create some back story to explain why sex and crisis were sort of inextricably combined.
GS: In keeping with this discussion of intimacy, another central theme is Toby's quest to find a boyfriend and goes through a few including the Goth Boy and the Loft Boy, before meeting the Subway Boy.
TD: It's interesting how that develops. Some of those characters actually had real names and some had made-up names, because it was inspired from how I'd be with my friends, and we'd say, 'Oh, there's Goth Boy or Weird Hair Boy (laughs).' And I realized that they all needed to have those names because he doesn't see most of them as people. He sees them on the surface. And I don't think they see him as an individual either. It's only when he thinks he gets a little bit closer to certain characters that he finds out their real names. That's the perception that he has of other people.
GS: The Trouble Boy also deals with the character's brushes with HIV/AIDS.
TD: I didn't include it for any political reason, but if the book is able to educate people, then that's a wonderful byproduct of it. I included it because it's a part of young gay life that is absolutely there and ever-present. We may think it has gone away, but it hasn't gone away at all. The threat of HIV is there all the time. Anyone who thinks that it's gone or isn't a problem anymore is just an idiot. It was really important for me to include that because that was one of the many threats that are in the book, which includes HIV, drug addiction, alcoholism and the threat of losing yourself among people that you may not be able to trust.
GS: The Trouble Boy has been compared to Bright Lights, Big City and Less Than Zero, which were published 20 and 19 years ago, respectively. Do you think this is the renewal of a cycle in which the lives of young people in an urban setting will be popular in literature again? Do you feel you're at the forefront of this movement?
TD: I wouldn't exactly say that I'm at the forefront. I think those books came out as part of the '80s boom and they were reflective of a certain time period. I think that my book is also reflective of a certain time period, which is that pre-Sept. 11, post-dot-com era, right around 2000, 2001. It was a very specific time in New York's history. I guess I wrote it because I couldn't find anything out there that was like this. The incredible thing for me is getting e-mails from people (in which) they say that they feel like I was writing about them and their friends. That's incredibly rewarding to know that I was writing a very specific story that still somehow managed to be universal.
GS: In the book, Toby is working on a screenplay. Do you have any interest in writing screenplays, say, a movie adaptation of The Trouble Boy?
TD: I would like to do that. I think that would be a lot of fun and I think there is some really great cinematic stuff in the book. I certainly have dabbled in writing screenplays before, but writing fiction has always been my main passion.
GS: Who would you like to see play Toby?
TD: (Laughs) That's such a hard question. I think I would love to see a gay actor play Toby, but the way the industry is now, it's just so hard to do that. In terms of a mainstream actor, perhaps Elijah Wood.
GS: What can you tell me about your next book?
TD: My next book is set at a boarding school in New England. It is sort of about a love triangle between a middle-aged female English teacher and one of her male students, and also his best friend.
