1. What is 8-Track Boy about?

8-Track Boy is a coming-of-age novel set at a Southern boarding school in 1979. On the surface, it follows a group of students navigating friendship, power, and identity over the course of a single year.

But at its core, it’s about how those experiences are remembered—and how meaning is shaped after the fact. The story isn’t just about what happened. It’s about how the narrator comes to understand what happened, often long after the moment has passed.

2. The novel is described as semi-autobiographical. How much of it is drawn from your own life?

The emotional truth is real. The structure, characters, and events are shaped into fiction.

What mattered to me wasn’t documenting specific moments exactly as they happened—it was capturing how those moments felt, and how they linger. Memory isn’t precise. It compresses, distorts, protects. The book leans into that.

3. Memory seems central to the book. Why focus on that?

Because memory is where meaning actually lives.

At the time, most of what happens in the book isn’t fully understood by the narrator. It’s confusing, intense, sometimes overwhelming. The clarity comes later—or doesn’t come at all.

I was interested in that gap: the distance between experience and understanding. That’s where identity gets shaped.

4. Power dynamics play a major role in the story—between students, authority figures, and peers. What drew you to that theme?

Boarding schools are controlled environments. Hierarchies are clear, but not always spoken. Power shows up in subtle ways—in relationships, in silence, in who gets believed and who doesn’t.

I wasn’t interested in labeling characters as “good” or “bad.” I wanted to explore how power operates when people don’t fully understand it themselves—and how it can be normalized in ways that are hard to see from the inside.

5. The character of “Death” appears throughout the novel. What does that voice represent?

Death isn’t a literal figure in the traditional sense. It’s more of a presence—an awareness.

It reflects the idea that something is always ending, even when you don’t realize it. Moments, relationships, versions of yourself. Death is the voice that sees that clearly, even when the narrator doesn’t.

6. The relationship between Ryan and Tuck is one of the emotional centers of the book. How would you describe it?

It’s a relationship that exists just outside of definition.

There’s trust, closeness, tension—things that aren’t fully named or resolved. And that’s intentional. Some relationships don’t come with clarity in the moment. They’re understood later, if at all.

What mattered to me was the feeling of it, not categorizing it.

7. Music plays a strong role in the novel. Why was that important?

Music anchors memory.

Certain songs carry entire moments with them—where you were, who you were with, how things felt. The late ’70s had a very specific sound, and I wanted that to function almost like a secondary timeline running alongside the story.

It’s one of the few things in the book that feels fixed, even when everything else is shifting.

8. The novel deals with difficult and ambiguous experiences. Was it important to avoid clear answers?

Yes.

In real life, people don’t always get closure. They don’t always fully understand what happened to them, especially when they’re young. I didn’t want to impose clarity where it wouldn’t naturally exist.

The ambiguity is part of the truth of the experience.

9. How does the narrator change over the course of the book?

He doesn’t change in a clean, visible way.

What shifts is his awareness. At the beginning, he’s moving through experiences without fully understanding them. By the end, there’s a recognition—quiet, incomplete, but real—that he didn’t have control in the way he thought he did.

It’s less about transformation and more about realization.

10. What do you hope readers take away from 8-Track Boy?

Not a lesson.

More of a recognition.

That feeling of looking back on a period of your life and realizing you didn’t understand it at the time—but it shaped you anyway. Most people have some version of that.

If the book does anything, I hope it makes readers think about their own moments like that—what they meant then, and what they mean now.

11. Why set the story in 1979?

It’s a transitional moment.

Culturally, socially—it sits between eras. There’s a looseness to it, but also a lack of language for certain things. That tension made sense for the story.

It also allowed the characters to exist without the frameworks we rely on now to define behavior or identity. That absence is important.

12. This is your debut novel. Why this story, and why now?

Because it stayed.

Some experiences fade. This one didn’t. Not in a loud way—just consistently, over time.

Eventually, it felt less like a choice and more like something I needed to work through. Writing it was a way of understanding it differently than I had before.