When Andrew Sean Greer ’92 took creative writing classes at Brown, people “were not afraid to hurt each other’s feelings,” he said. They were also allowed to smoke cigarettes in the classroom. “Isn’t that just like something from a bygone era?”
Greer knew he wanted to be a writer long before he arrived at Brown — since he was 10 years old. This June, he released his eighth book, “Villa Coco,” following his Pulitzer Prize-winning 2017 novel “Less” and its 2022 sequel “Less Is Lost.”
During his time at Brown, Greer was a member of the Jabberwocks a cappella group and wrote two shows for the theatre group Brownbrokers. Being in the Jabberwocks “was the first time I had been in anything that was slightly fraternal in that way,” Greer said, adding that he is still friends with some of his former groupmates.
After his graduation from Brown — at which he delivered a commencement address — Greer moved to the West Village in New York City, where his share of the rent for a shared apartment with friends was $500 per month.
He worked as a temporary secretary, but he still couldn’t afford to join his friends when they went out for drinks. “I just couldn’t hack it in New York,” Greer said. “I didn’t have whatever it took.” So, he applied to graduate school and ended up in the master’s of fine arts program at the University of Montana.
When he wasn’t writing, Greer was camping, backpacking or cross-country skiing.
“He was like a gay cowboy for a while,” said Angela Robinson ’92, Greer’s friend from Brown. The two became friends during a Brownbrokers production when they were undergraduates.
When he graduated from Montana in 1996, Greer moved to Seattle. It was “the right place at the right time,” he said; Kurt Cobain had just died, and Greer was living three blocks away from Courtney Love.
It was time for Greer to write. “I had the rest of my student loan left over, and I just thought ‘I’m gonna see,’” he said. “I knew that the hardest thing was to go from graduate school to becoming a writer.”
He wrote a “terrible” draft of a novel and several short stories. “The fire was under me because the money was running out,” he said. He got a job teaching at a community college but knew at that point that he could never go back to a nine-to-five job. “I remember I applied for one and came home and just broke down in tears because I thought, ‘It can’t be over,’” he said. “I want to be a writer. I don’t care what else happens.”
He collected his short stories into a book called “How It Was for Me,” which was published in 2000. When he got the call from his agent that it had sold, he felt “not joy, but just relief.”
“I thought … ‘I’m on my way. I can do this now. Whatever it takes. At least I’m not just free falling,’” Greer said.
He tried to sell another novel right after, which he described as a “mess.” Instead of trying to revise that manuscript, Greer chose to move on to something new. He had a realization that he “could just write a beautiful book.”
“Maybe it doesn’t need a plot,” he recalled thinking. “It just needs a structure and beauty.” In 2001, “The Path of Minor Planets” was published.
Since he had been drafting novels at the age of 16, Greer “knew that it was not about all-night bursts of novel writing,” he said. “It was about slow and steady, thoughtful, moving along, discovering things and then revising” — a process he still uses now.
In 2013, Greer published his fifth book, “The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells,” which “nobody paid even a little bit of attention to,” he said. He was depressed, and thought, “Screw it! I’ll just write whatever I feel like, and it doesn’t matter. No one will ever read it.’”
“It turns out that is a great way to write,” he said. “That’s the right state of mind.”
The product of this mindset, “Less,” a comic literary novel, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize nine months after its publication.
Greer said winning the Pulitzer was one of those rare times in life when something great happens and there are no “repercussions, and you just got to celebrate.”
“I’ve been proud to watch Andy stay the incredibly kind, generous and affirming person he’s always been, even with all his successes,” Greer’s friend from Brown, Joanna Schwartz ’94, wrote in an email to The Herald.
With “Villa Coco,” Greer wanted to “write the silliest book (he) could possibly write.”
Greer’s challenge to himself was to “write something that was just delightful.” The novel follows a young man who travels to Italy to catalog the archive of a whimsical and elusive baroness.
Schwartz “gobbled up ‘Villa Coco’ in two days,” she wrote. Greer, who lives between Italy and San Francisco, has been on a book tour for “Villa Coco” for the past several months.
Before the book came out, Greer was afraid that he “still hadn’t made a good enough argument, even after winning a Pulitzer Prize for a comic novel, that comedy should be seen as as worthy of serious contemplation as serious literature.”
The truth about comedy, Greer said, “is that it’s about serious things.”
“It wouldn’t be funny if it weren’t awfully close to something that terrifies or upsets you,” he added.
Rebecca Goodman is an arts & culture and university news editor covering career and alumni. She is a senior from Cambridge, MA, studying English. Outside of writing, you can find her at the Avon or in the basement of the Rock.
