Journey to the End of Autofiction

Emily Wells and Aaron Bornstein talk with John Tottenham about his debut novel, “Service.”

By Emily Wells, Aaron BornsteinAugust 21, 2025

• Fiction

• Memoir & Essay

SERVICE (2025) IS A NOVEL about the indignities of life in capitalism-of-late, the indulgent fears of age and insignificance, and self-inflicted suffering in pursuit of success. It is also, despite this subject matter, consistently hilarious and occasionally heartening. The protagonist, Sean, is a bookseller and aspiring novelist of a certain age who, bound by rent control to an apartment in a gentrifying neighborhood of late-2010s Los Angeles, finds himself beset from all sides: by debt collectors seeking their respective pounds of flesh; by friends and acquaintances whose own successes elicit consuming envy; and, most of all, by ignorant customers who demand an affective labor that Sean can rarely provide. He struggles with habits both encompassing (a series of unnamed, situationally useful pills taken with increasing frequency as the narrative goes on) and fragmentary (his writing practice). By the time we meet Sean, his aspirations for his novel-to-be as a work of historic art are already abandoned, and he has resigned himself to cobbling together a work of “Pose Friction”: a thinly veiled retelling of his life in context, a last-ditch effort to break free of totalizing obscurity.

The author of the novel, John Tottenham, is a bookseller of a certain age who, bound by rent control to an apartment in a gentrifying neighborhood of mid-2020s Los Angeles, has earned a measure of renown in the always-burgeoning literary communities of North-Central/Eastern-West Los Angeles: Service’s launch at the Poetic Research Bureau was a standing-room-only event. Such celebration is warranted. Service serves up breezy, at times lyrical, prose, syncopated by slacker-Dylanesque couplets (“I didn’t make an effort, but I tried to”); Beckettian stage notes as stand-alone paragraphs (“I don’t know how to create the impression of time passing”); and a litany of self-aware, self-deprecating punch lines. Amid this vivaciously droll haze, Tottenham, an accomplished poet who has published four major collections, seems, at times, almost as if he is struggling against himself in summoning quotidian connecting tissue when it is needed (“I [am] unable to create or recreate dialogue” is an occasional refrain). The resulting metric pace evokes the delivery he affects during poetry readings: a distant, staccato cadence that can lull the listener into a trance not unlike the one that the protagonist aims for with pharmaceutical aids.

We spent an afternoon with Tottenham touring some of the sites frequented by Sean, eventually winding our way to stiff cocktails and limp fries at the century-old neighborhood establishment Taix (itself struggling against the threat of obsolescence as developers plan to replace it with a condo tower—albeit with a sign designating the site “historically preserved”). Our journey began at the apartment in which Tottenham has lived for two decades, a paint-peeling split-level abutting the 101 and overlooking a wooly, weedy patch of lawn. The interior is structured by child-high stacks of books and records, which would seem pretentious if they weren’t so clearly born of earnest necessity. Upon our arrival, he sat us down and offered a pleasantry—before disappearing to catch the running of the Belmont Stakes. This was curious because he had invited us to arrive at exactly that time—the scheduled time of the running of the Belmont Stakes—and also because later he suggested that we begin the piece by describing him sitting in his apartment, listening to the running of the Belmont Stakes. We had to wonder: Was he directing the experience for us, playing a character he was writing as “himself”? Or did he simply expect everyone in Los Angeles to be late, late enough for him to catch a horse race?

Even in casual conversation, Tottenham cultivates an atmosphere of sarcastic detachment, frustrating attempts at discerning (or evincing) sincerity such that one can never be sure if they are the audience or the object of the bit. If most diaristic “autofiction”—with which the protagonist so desperately wishes to avoid association—is banal, superficial, self-absorbed, Service succeeds because the author is constructing the character, not merely observing him. This Escheresque quality can, in real life, make for a frustrating interview … though not one without its charms. And so the three of us proceeded along the hilly streets of Angelino Heights, pulling teeth and dodging well-intentioned (we hope) barbs.

¤

EMILY WELLS: Shall we talk?

JOHN TOTTENHAM: Sure, but I have nothing to say.

EW: So you keep saying.

JT: Sufficient proof will soon be furnished.

AARON BORNSTEIN: Three-hundred and fifty pages of “nothing to say.”

Three-hundred twenty-eight, to be precise. Do you want to stroll or what?

[We exit.]

AB: How long have you been in this place?

JT: More than 20 years. There’s a description at the beginning of the book where the protagonist takes a walk. And there’s a drunk passed out on the outside of the house and his neighbor suggests calling the police. That’s right—would be right—here.

AB: Do you get many people passing out right here?

JT: No, but I wouldn’t mind if they did. Doesn’t bother me, I mean.

AB: The protagonist does seem more kindly disposed toward the drunkards and unhoused people than toward the customers at his store.

JT: Well, it’s partly out of self-interest—a sort of “there but for the grace of God go I” kind of deal.

EW: Why do you live in L.A.?

JT: I weaned myself on American culture from an early age. Specifically Southern California—well, it became that way. As a teenager, I was into all the obvious stuff: Bukowski, Tom Waits and what-have-you. So I got a feel for the old Downtown and the seamier, ragged edge of life here.

AB: But you constantly complain about the characters and characteristics of the place.

EW: Would you say that you thrive in opposition to your surroundings?

JT: I don’t feel I’m in opposition. I fit in here, strangely. I can hardly imagine living somewhere else at this point. Don’t you feel that way?

[He takes a stack of notes from his shirt pocket, shuffles through, and reads from one.]

“Somebody had tipped the American continent like a pinball machine and all the goofballs had come rolling to LA in the southwest corner.” I didn’t write that—it’s Kerouac—but it’s true. Los Angeles is a place for people who don’t fit in anywhere else, and Echo Park used to be a place for people who didn’t fit anywhere else, but that’s all changed. Everywhere is the same now, right?

AB: Is that what bothers you about gentrification—the homogenization?

JT: I think it’s nice when everything remains suspended in a sort of state of perpetual decay. I like that, but it’s not to everybody’s taste. Change doesn’t necessarily imply progress. Things have to change, and there’s a lot of things that seem like progress but they’re the exact opposite … I can’t think of any right now, though.

AB: I’ve only been here five years, and have seen the neighborhood lose so many places.

EW: The Right won the food culture war, and formerly vegetarian restaurants like Sage [Regenerative Kitchen] and Elf [Café] had to close after pivoting to meat, which was a self-own. No one will be able to afford Sunset anymore, except for the chains.

JT: And Stories Books [& Café].

AB: Our Parthenon. Where are we walking?

JT: This is my secret route down to Sunset. The guy I dedicated the book to, the late Mark Ehrman, lived in that apartment up there for a while. Another good friend, Jimmy Komma, lives in this house right opposite it, there. He’s making a film about me—about the book—right now.

AB: The actual you, or the fictionalized you?

JT: Well, it’s some combination.

[Police cars speed by; helicopters circle in the distance.]

Are you paying attention to all this? It’s madness.

AB: They’re sending in the National Guard.

JT: What! When?

EW: They get in tomorrow.

JT: You know, I had my first driving lesson on the day the [1992] L.A. riots started.

EW: Really?

JT: Yeah. It was bizarre. I mean, the rioting had started the night before, but it wasn’t expected to continue. Things seemed relatively normal the next morning.

AB: Which part of town were you in?

JT: I was on Western Avenue, which was not the best place to be during the riots, living above a Korean furniture store. Anyway, we were in this driving lesson, my instructor was this young guy, and he had his radio tuned so that he could figure out where the rioting was going on. He had me drive to a mini mall on Vermont and 2nd or somewhere, and there was this huge mob descending on an electronics supply store. And he just jumped out of the car and joined them. Left me sitting in the front seat, this lone white face in a seething mob. And I didn’t know how to drive.

AB: Did you pick up a brick and go?

JT: No, I just sat there. He came back and we went back to my place, and I went up on the roof, and the whole neighborhood was this sort of circle of fire. Didn’t know if the place would still be there the next morning. That was my first driving lesson.

[We arrive at Taix.]

EW: You’re the only person I know who doesn’t think the drinks are strong here. It’s like they lace the martini with grain alcohol.

JT: I mean, I’m not a heavy drinker. I’m just a consistent drinker.

EW: Drugs are an important part of the book; let’s talk about the protagonist’s opioid use. We noted that the novel feels like an inverse of the traditional addiction narrative—Sean is using the pills to be productive as a writer. It’s almost more like Adderall to him, where society doesn’t consider you “addicted” because it’s helping you be productive.

JT: It’s funny, actually, because an article about the book in The Washington Post assumed that the pills were uppers—that was a major error. But only the color of the pill is mentioned. Then there’s a different-colored pill for sex, and another one for sleeping. All different colors.

AB: I like how you invert the standard diagnostic criteria for addiction: the protagonist reassures himself that as long as he’s doing it at the prescribed time, for work, it’s not a problem. When the pace picks up, he makes excuses that the work will follow. Then he starts doing it recreationally. And this is when his attitude changes a lot—he becomes more aggressive toward his surroundings.

JT: There’s only one occasion when he takes it recreationally, at the bookstore, and it calms him down for a couple of hours. Then he gets nauseated and irritable … from what I’ve been told, it can have that effect. It stops working, and it’s no longer a useful creative tool. The protagonist spends a lot of time railing against the “drug memoir epidemic,” and the people who write those books. But, at the same time, the novel turns into something of a drug memoir of its own.

EW: Which the protagonist wanted to avoid. Sean considers himself part of a canon of “loner literature.”

JT: The literature of impoverished solitude. Beckett licked the plate pretty clean when it comes to the literature of nullity and negation. The protagonist is just pleased to find a few scraps to call his own.

AB: Who else falls in that tradition?

JT: I read Beckett at a very impressionable age. I took a bus trip from L.A. to New York and I brought the Beckett Trilogy with me. By the end of the trip, I’d read the whole thing, and it completely flipped my lid. Knut Hamsun’s Hunger. Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground might be considered the bedrock, right? I guess Thomas Bernhard would fit into that genre.

AB: You omit Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night.

JT: I don’t know if that qualifies. There are too many characters in it. Too much happens.

AB: You’re not exactly lacking for characters. But, like in Journey, the protagonist is the only one whose perspective is granted legitimacy, in part because of his social class—neither rich nor poor.

JT: True. The characters whose lives contrast most with that of the protagonist have carefree attitudes that are entirely the result of not having to worry constantly about money.

EW: Your protagonist has much to say about the labor of creative production—“The self-conscious novel is a lower form of literature, but it’s all I’m capable of … this is all I’m capable of: Pose Friction.”

JT: I mean, maybe one’s just too self-involved or lacking imagination …

EW: You’ve railed against the superficiality of Los Angeles literary culture in your Substack.

JT: Why shouldn’t literary events be frivolous and fun, as events are with music and art? It’s not necessarily a bad thing. As you say, it used to be that people went to art openings as a pretext for socializing. Now, the same sort of crowd can be found at poetry readings. The only difference is that, instead of pretending to take an interest in the work on the walls while sipping wine and chatting, one now has to sit through poetry readings before one gets to enjoy hanging out, and these events are often marathons featuring seven or eight readers, and a lot of these writers seem to spend more time giving readings than they spend writing—or, for that matter, reading. They’re like athletes that don’t train, who just show up on match day unfit and unprepared.

When the readings are over, and the pressure of pretending to pay attention to one’s friend’s work has subsided, a collective sigh of relief engulfs the room. One has survived another reading. One can breathe freely again, talk and drink. That’s when the fun starts.

EW: Yes, they’re a kind of mutual hostage situation.

JT: Social media is a huge part of it too, because people post their stuff on Instaflam or wherever, and they get instant validation when their friends “like” it. If I didn’t do the writing I do, nobody else would. So I feel this sense of duty—and it’s good to have a sense of purpose, even if it is inflated or misguided. I don’t really know what else I’d do with my time.

AB: Maybe bet the horses.

JT: Yes, that. I had been hoping to resist it entirely. I haven’t been paying much attention to horseplay recently. I wasted a lot of time out there. If you compressed all the time I’ve spent out there into one solid slab of time, it would amount to at least two-and-a-half years of my life. It has consumed far too much of my spirit, among other things—it was all I did for a while. I still check the results every day, but rarely bet. At this point, my desire to quit is greater than my desire to win.

I realize that I’ll never get it entirely out of my system. When the urge becomes irresistible, I allow myself to lose a little and get it over with. I have the horse-racing gene. It runs in the family. I love this line of Walter Benjamin’s—“Gambling converts time into a narcotic.” It’s so true.