Across multiple novels and audio recordings of his writing backed by music, Adam Gnade has chronicled his life and simultaneously created a singular snapshot of American life in this century, chronicling a world of independent artists and the scenes that support them. His fiction is part of a larger piece titled We Live Nowhere and Know No One. Within that, he has recently completed a four-novel cycle called The Home and Away Quartet. He also runs Hello America Stereo Cassette, a label dedicated to cassettes of his work and other authors.
His non-fiction book, The DIY Guide to Fighting the Big Motherfuckin’ Sad, is a brief volume filled with practical advice for fighting off depression. It had a “moment” when it went viral on Tumblr. It is a practical guide to doing something good for yourself. I went to it days after the 2024 US Presidential election and found its advice grounding and realistically hopeful.
The first novel of The Home and Away Quartet, 2022’s After Tonight, Everything Will Be Different, is a food-focused travelogue through his life that has attracted significant interest from film and television producers. He took this attention in stride. “Ever since After Tonight, Everything Will Be Different went viral, there’s been a lot of interest in turning it into a TV show. I imagine it’ll happen at some point,” he says. The other novels that comprise the quartet include 2023’s The Internet Newspaper, 2024’s I Wish to Say Lovely Things, and the most recent and final installment, Your Friends Will Carry You Home.
Your Friends Will Carry You Home was written a few months after the events that inspired it. Set in 2023, it finds James Jackson Bozic, Adam Gnade’s stand-in, in England on a book tour. Along the way, he spends time with friends, loses a treasured hat, and performs readings. It is filled with his trademarks–hardships, friendships, and a deep appreciation for the little things in life that make up its finest moments. He weaves episodic elements with musings on contemporary life. Taken together, the four books focus on love in its many forms.
“While finishing the first book in the quartet, I suddenly realized that I had something even closer connected brewing. I wrote the four books in The Home and Away Quartet without breaks. I worked day and night; just really caught up in it, ecstatic, emotionally overcome,” he says.
“How it works is I come up with a title, and as soon as I have that title, I know immediately what will be in that book because the stories are already there; they’ve happened. The title sets a fence around them.”
From there, Adam Gnade works unrelentingly. “I write my first drafts quickly, then spend the rest of the year making them readable. I wrote Your Friends Will Carry You Home very fast…maybe in a week without sleeping much. Then, I rewrote it daily while at home in Kansas and traveling across the country this year. I finished it in California this summer.”
“The third book in the quartet, I Wish to Say Lovely Things, happened the same way. A lot of that was written in England last year and on the road when I was touring with [UK punks] Porridge Radio,” he says.
Collecting these everyday moments has some personal meaning for Gnade. “The books are at least in small part a celebration of the great things and a way to keep them alive. For the same reasons, we photograph moments in our lives and people we love. We’re saying, ‘You. You are important to me. You stay here. Don’t ever go away from me, or it’ll rip me apart,’” he said.
“Anything, no matter how boring, seemingly insignificant, or trivial, can be written well. It’s all in how you say it, how much you understand the subject or idea, and how deeply you can connect it with a substantial, relatable amount of feeling. At its best, good writing should either make you feel something, see something in your mind’s eye, or think about your own life with every single line. It’s an impossible standard, but that’s what you should aim for.”
“Sandra Cisneros comes to mind,” he continues. “James Baldwin does it beautifully. Ocean Voung, too. Those three authors… their words feel like they have a greater sense of dimensionality and spatial depth on the page—as if they’re charged with electricity and crackling with static,” he said.
Even when complicated and incomprehensible, Adam Gnades’ love for life comes through as the prevailing theme in most of his work. This love is found everywhere–in food, music, friends, and the creative process–and it is celebrated and cherished, all the more so when it is hard-won.
“Those bigger ideas are the things that keep me up at night, and I use writing to solve those problems or build some acceptance with them. A very important part of this whole process for me is that [writing] my books is how I come to terms with what’s torturing me and what I’m afraid of. It’s a way of dealing with fear, indecisiveness, frustration,” he says.
Since he takes inspiration from his experiences to write, people in his life are curious about where they appear in his work. Gnade, however, keeps that to himself. “I rarely talk about how my work intersects with reality, and only with my partner Elizabeth and my editor Jessie Duke, who runs Bread & Roses Press. You’ve got to catch me on the right day or under a special moon to get me to talk about that side of things,” he shared.
Adam Gnade will allow fans to get him to talk sometimes. “Some people are better at asking questions than others. I met these two [women] at a show in San Diego a few weeks ago who wanted to talk about the books. One said, ‘I want to ask you a bunch of questions,’ and I was happy to answer those questions. The direct approach was nice. I respect that. But usually, I try my best to change the subject,” he says.
Hello America Stereo Cassette, Gnade’s audiobook record label, releases cassettes and is focused on poetry, short fiction, and memoirs. They produce compilations of writers with and without original music backing. The emphasis is on shorter pieces of literary realism, and that is reflected in the format choice.
“Writing, read aloud, needs a little noise to make it sound human and natural sometimes. I like how the poor quality of low-budget analog tape softens the recorded thing,” Gnade sys. Hello America encourages submissions from young writers and writers of color, queer, trans, and nonbinary authors to submit work for consideration.
Hello America has released work from several authors Adam Gnade has found in his travels. He frequently tours, reading with other authors and sometimes musicians accompanying him. “I’m like the bear in the children’s song that goes over the mountain to see what he could see. I like to be out in the world, wandering around. I’m on the road a lot, so I meet people at my shows or book fairs. Sometimes, we’re set up by a record label or publisher to tour together,” he said.
Those friendships and partnerships have been fruitful for Gnade, challenging him to continue to hone his craft. “I’m very inspired by the friends I tour and collaborate with. I want to write things they’d like.”
“Touring with Lora Mathis, Matty Terrones, Andrew Mears, and Joshua Jones these past two years has made me want to be a better artist. They have very high standards for their work. Everything has to be as good as I can make it, and I tear myself up in the process. My rule – and it’s an impossible standard – is to make each book better than the last. I don’t know if I’ve pulled that off, and maybe it’s too subjective to tell anyway, but I’m trying very hard,” he explains.
As you might expect, running a niche operation like Hello America is challenging. “Depending on how well my books are doing, I either have a lot of money or very little. Sometimes, I’m living rough, and when I’m not, it feels like everything will be easy from this point on. Of course, it never works out that way. The good times always end, then I’m back to counting pennies to buy dinner,” he says.
Regardless, don’t expect Adam Gnade to start a podcast to create a continual outlet for promoting the label or his work. “With a few good exceptions, I don’t like podcasts. I love the Cult and Culture podcast, created by Three One G’s Justin Pearson and Luke Henshaw. Nate Perkins’ Ultimate Gospel is great. But I don’t like listening to things for information.”
“Also, I’m not a big talker. I’m not particularly verbally articulate or eloquent in any improvisational sense, so the idea of having to talk and discuss things while what I’m saying is recorded… gives me an overwhelming sense of dread. I like doing book readings, but they’re scripted, which makes it feel safer.”
Continuing in the comfort zone of some removal, he says, “Now, the worlds of film and TV feel very remote from my world—like satellites ten thousand miles away. You see the light they emit, and you can watch them move across the night’s sky, but they’re so far off you don’t feel any true connection to them.”
Even though Your Friends Will Carry You Home has recently been released, Adam Gnade is already working on his next novel. “I outlined the book I’m working on in the downtime between proofreading sessions of Your Friends Will Carry You Home; then began to write it in California while on tour.”
“It was this beautiful, quiet, sad afternoon after many heavy things had happened earlier that day. I was sitting under a tree in a park by the bay when suddenly I heard the sound of the rollercoaster in the amusement park at the beach a few blocks away. There was this strange, sweet ache in that sound that rushed over me, and it all came to me, and I wrote out the first few chapters until it became too dark to see,” he said.
For this project, Adam Gnade has a different mindset. “The new book is about 2024. I’m writing it as the events happen. In contrast to the way most of my earlier books were written, now the idea of writing about the past feels like trying to bring life to a dead moon. Life and writing are happening simultaneously at the moment. The two have become the same thing, and it feels natural and comfortable. The artifice of it is gone. Now it’s just living.”