Some people change your life by opening doors. Others change it by convincing you that you can never walk through those doors without them. Julie Buntin’s Famous Men is an incisive and unsettling literary novel about ambition, mentorship, class, and the complicated ways young women are often forced to navigate systems built by powerful men. Following Will Miles from a struggling Michigan teenager to an aspiring writer entangled with a celebrated author, Buntin crafts a story that is as much about artistic aspiration as it is about the dangers of mistaking access for opportunity.
Will lives in Greening, Michigan, where a damaging rumor has left her isolated and desperate for a future beyond her small town. When she discovers the work of Nathaniel Fellow, a famous writer who also grew up in Greening, she becomes convinced that he may be the father she has never known. That possibility sends her to New York City, where she manages to gain entry into Nathaniel’s world and eventually becomes his assistant. What follows is a complicated relationship built on admiration, dependence, power imbalance, and mutual need.
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