No One Wants to Be the Supporting Character in Their Own Life

Adam Straus interviews Lucas Schaefer about his debut novel “The Slip.”

By Adam StrausAugust 22, 2025

• Fiction

A 16-YEAR-OLD BOY named Nathaniel Rothstein seeking psoriasis pills to darken his skin shortly before disappearing forever is among the least surprising moments in Lucas Schaefer’s masterful debut novel The Slip. Centered on a boxing gym and driven by Nathaniel’s disappearance, the story is as free-flowing as a street brawl spanning all of Austin, Texas, while remaining as crisply choreographed as a Hollywood fight scene.

There are nearly a dozen point-of-view characters, including a middle-aged Haitian immigrant, a Latina police officer, a genderqueer teenager, a Mexican American semiprofessional boxer, and an elderly Italian woman. As much as the subplots branching out from Nathaniel’s disappearance are stories of connection (via the boxing gym), they’re also stories of error. Characters are constantly crossing lines of identity, whether it’s Nathaniel masquerading as a Black man, X performing as a Russian woman on a phone-sex hotline, or an evil clown standing in for his intellectually disabled twin. They often mislead others, but they’re just as likely to fool themselves. Then again, if you desire a mask badly enough, what can that desire reveal? If you wear a mask long enough, at what point does it become you?

In exploring these questions, the novel shines an uncompromising light on our country’s current divided state. Though the events of the plot span from 1998 to 2014, there’s no mistaking the widening rifts that will come to define Trump’s America. The boxing gym is a rare space where people come together physically, despite their differences. Whether they can come together in a deeper sense remains to be seen, especially considering the resentments such proximity can breed.

Schaefer witnessed these conflicts up close. He moved to Austin in 2006 and promptly began working out at the gym that inspired this project. After 20 years that included receiving an MFA from UT Austin’s New Writers Project, Schaefer still lives in the city with his husband (the writer Greg Marshall) and their infant son. We spoke via Zoom; our hour-long conversation has been edited for concision and clarity.

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ADAM STRAUS: The Slip is such an ambitious novel. Did it accrete layers, subplots, characters, and thematic resonance as you went along? Or were you going for it all from the first draft?

LUCAS SCHAEFER: I knew from the first draft the themes I wanted to explore, and I knew it was going to be a big swing, because they’re big themes. The thing I didn’t know was how to write a novel. I’m a big fan of A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan and Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout, and when I first started this project, I thought I was writing a linked story collection. That didn’t work for a number of reasons. One is that I’m not a concise writer, I’m not a tidy writer. My version of a short story was coming out at about 12,000 words. Also, there was no through line. The characters were all grappling with identity without one plot driving the narrative. The big revelation for me was realizing that this was a novel, and it needed to be rewritten.

Starting again allowed me to write The Slip. It was also a good case study in how you really don’t waste any words. An amazing thing about writing short stories is that they’re so character-driven. I got to know these characters intimately before I wrote the first sentence of the novel. That allowed some of those layers to build, as you say, because many of these characters appeared in earlier drafts, or earlier stories, and they became more weathered over the course of creation. They developed different textures—they had histories.

You’ve lived in Austin for years now, but you originally came to the city as a transplant. What inspired you to write about the place?

When I came to Austin, I was 24 and I had writerly ambitions, but I was not doing much writing. I was already in Texas, which seemed an unlikely place for me to end up. So I thought I might as well do another uncharacteristic thing and go to R. Lord’s Boxing Gym on North Lamar Boulevard as a way to meet people. And I loved it from the second I walked in. Part of what appealed to me was that everyone in Austin seemed to be there—every age, every race, every profession. I was around people who were born and bred in the area, and people like me, who were newcomers. I was around immigrants from Mexico and the Caribbean. Men, women, all religions, all body types, all personality types: everyone.

I worked out there for about five years. When I went to grad school and started to write seriously, I knew the boxing gym was the place where I wanted to start. As a writer, I’m most intrigued by what happens when the lines that divide us—race, class, gender, geography, religion, age, whatever—begin to fade away. There aren’t that many places in Austin or in Texas or in America where that can happen. A gym is one of them, and this boxing gym was a good example.

You mention the boxing gym as a special space where lines of identity are blurred, but as an author, you’re still writing across those lines. Why did you choose to explore lived experiences so different from your own?

This is the defining question of our moment, right? How do we all live together? Is it possible to live together? Can we find ourselves in each other? I want to grapple with the core questions facing the country, and if you’re going to write about identity, you’re going to be writing outside your experience. You can’t be everyone at the boxing gym. How do you do that in a way that is credible and entertaining, in a way that feels true to these characters, that doesn’t feel contrived, that doesn’t feel offensive? Or needlessly offensive, I should say. Many of the characters do things in this book that some will find offensive.

I was very clear on why I was writing this wide swath of characters. I wasn’t trying to be needlessly contrarian; I wasn’t doing it to say “I can write whoever I want to write. Hahahaha!” I earnestly wanted to grapple with these questions, and some of the tensions and opportunities that I saw arose at the gym. I wanted to go there. The question was, how do you find your way into these characters? The book took 12 years to write. A lot of it was spent figuring out who each of these people is.

There’s so much mistaken identity across categories that are supposed to be impermeable: neurodivergence, race, nationality, gender, and age. And there’s this amazing Shakespearean mess where characters, most notably Nathaniel and X, are fooling others while being fooled themselves. How does self-perception influence the way these characters perceive others?

I feel one way inside, but I present a different way outside—for all of us, that’s a question, to some extent. It’s perhaps most apparent in the character of X. X has always thought that his inside self—who is gender-fluid, who is maybe a woman, who is figuring it out—was somehow the artificial self. He has this transformative moment when he realizes, Maybe it’s this outside self that is not who I am.

As a teenager in his time and place, X feels this mismatch, but he doesn’t have the words to describe it.

That was one of the challenges of writing X, but it made me much more attuned to his interiority. He doesn’t know any trans people. Any conversations that are going on around being nonbinary, if they’re happening in 1998, they’re not happening anywhere close to X. That forced me to think deeply and feel deeply about what it would be like to go through this. X thinks he’s the only one.

In the book, the way he figures it out is by starting to experiment on this phone-sex hotline. I was really interested in moments when characters transcend who they present themselves to be and come closer to who they think they are, or who they really are, or who they want to be. There are two activities that recur in this book, because I think they’re the two activities that most allow people to become someone closer to themselves: working out and having sex. All of these characters are either hitting a heavy bag or fucking. I think there’s a similarity between boxing and sex, in that suddenly you’re a stronger version of yourself, or a more passionate version of yourself, or you just say things you wouldn’t say otherwise. Linking the body with those emotional journeys was a big revelation for me in terms of how to figure out these characters.

Especially for our central character, Nathaniel. He’s passively led through phone sex, he’s being trained by David at the gym and in life. But his choices are what ultimately drives the plot. How did you build a novel on the back of a character who would very much not want that sort of attention?

That was the biggest challenge of writing this. How do you center a book around a blah dud of a kid? I had originally conceived of Nathaniel as being from suburban Houston, because I knew he needed to come to Austin from somewhere else, and I knew he needed to come from the suburbs, because so much of this book is about race, is about how white suburban kids perceive Black people with whom they have little experience.

What I didn’t realize was that I needed to know way more specifics about Nathaniel’s upbringing. About his friend circle, about his daily school life. So the trick with Nathaniel was moving him from Houston to Newton, Massachusetts, where I’m from. I really wanted him to express sentiments that felt true to 1998, to these white kid things I’d seen and experienced. I needed to get it right, because you don’t want to have him doing offensive things and have it also be inaccurate. If we’re going to go there, I want to do it correctly, because the purpose of him doing offensive things is for us to explore through fiction how he got there, what that leads to, and so on.

Casting him in a milieu I was familiar with changed the ball game, because suddenly I knew exactly whom he ate lunch with. I could picture the METCO kids a table over, bussed in from Boston to Newton, and Nathaniel with his pack of white nerds looking on, having these judgments and ideas about what was going on at that other table. I could see him walking down the halls. I knew what his extracurricular life was like. I had some sense of whom he’d want to date. That level of specificity is required for any character, but especially for a character who doesn’t know who they are. Everything around them needs to be vivid.

One of the things that makes the secondary cast so vivid is that they refuse to be secondary. They keep asserting themselves against the larger characters in the text. There’s vengeance, stalking, snitching, and straight-up refusing to do something a main character tells them to do. What role does that recalcitrance play in the novel’s larger social commentary?

One of my early thoughts writing this book was that it was The Karate Kid gone wrong. In that movie, there’s cross-racial mentorship, and the role of the teacher is solely to help the student. This might be throwing The Karate Kid under the bus a little bit; I haven’t seen it recently. Anyway, I started to think about what would happen if the mentor started to feel like, Wait a second, I have this whole life and my own aspirations. My own dreams exist, far outside of the student.

A couple of things that are relevant: I was teaching seventh and eighth grade at an all-girls private school when I started this book. My days were spent helping these girls get through school. Teaching is an amazing profession, but if you don’t want to be a teacher, or that’s not what you aspire to do, and it’s what you’re doing day in and day out, some resentment does build up. I was exploring that resentment.

The other thing is, as a gay person growing up in the 1980s and ’90s, where were gay people in the media? They were comic relief. The gay best friend. They were not the leading character, and I was someone who always was going to be the leading character in my life. You start to chafe against those boundaries. I think that chafing is what let me into so many of these characters’ brains. All of them have been told, by society or by their family or by an institution they work for or by their own minds, that they are the supporting character. The moments of tension in this book come when they say I’m going to be the protagonist. Today, I’m the star of my own life. And I’m going to be seen. The ways they make themselves seen sometimes work out, sometimes don’t. It sometimes feels poignant, maybe inspiring, and other times feels … icky. But whatever the case may be, I don’t think anyone wants to be the supporting character in their own life.

This is so much a part of our discourse now, because we’re in a period in the US where there’s all this talk about who’s a “real American.” We’ve been in this period many times before. My first job was knocking on doors to get rid of George W. Bush, and this was all the rage then. “Real Americans support W.” It’s such a corrosive line of thinking, and it’s incredibly damaging to both the people who espouse it and the people who are maligned. It rots everyone’s brains.

I find myself thinking of Miriam, because she dehumanizes herself in a bid to be the “real thing” she wants to be, a “real cop.” I’m curious about the role police play in this narrative, and if you did any research to make that role specific to the Austin Police Department.

When I first started this book, I had a feeling it would be fun to have a police officer character at the gym. As a result, I enrolled in 2015 in Austin’s Citizen Police Academy, which is fictionalized in the book. It’s a 14-week course run by the Austin Police Department that’s essentially PR. You go for four hours each week. Someone from the Homicide Unit comes and gives a presentation, and someone from Burglary comes, and someone comes from the Nuisance Abatement Unit. You also do a ride-along. I did two. I didn’t know how this would fit into the book; I took notes on all of it and set them aside. Then, as I’m working, George Floyd is murdered. Suddenly I’ve got this book that’s very focused on race, that is focused on the disappearance of a white teenager, and the police are not present. It didn’t make sense for a mystery.

Part of the struggle with Miriam was that I am not especially sympathetic to the police. But I also knew that, in a book in which every character is given a full arc and a full history, I could not have the one character who was not granted that be the police officer, just because of my feelings. Then it was a question of, Who is Miriam Lopez, and how do you get into her mind? I went back to my feelings on those ride-alongs. The officers I met had so much bravado. Never betrayed any fear, never signaled that they weren’t having a grand old time. When you do a ride-along, it’s with backup. There’s not a high chance of credible danger for the participants, for obvious reasons. Even so, I thought it was scary. I wasn’t scared, like, I’m going to be injured right now, but it was anxiety-provoking, not a good feeling. These officers, of course, showed none of that.

So I started thinking: surely there are cops who knock on the door and think, I don’t really want to be doing this. How did I end up in this situation? That’s how Miriam was born. I basically was like, What if I had to be a cop? Unlike me, she really wants to be a cop, which is what leads her astray.

Speaking of law enforcement, in the book, people breeze across the Southern border who, legally speaking, should not be able to enter the country, while people with every right to stay in the United States can’t. Though you wrote this over a long period of time, the mundane and vicious incompetence specific to immigration enforcement could not be more topical today.

I’m glad you brought that up. Because this comes to light later in the book, I’ve had less chance to talk about it. The book both pokes fun at and explores the irrationality of borders, or the randomness of borders, perhaps. Alexis’s immigration story, where he is smuggled across the border from Mexico to Texas dressed in whiteface as a party clown, was an early creation. The book is funny, but I wanted to keep it grounded in reality. I don’t consider it a satire. I wanted to think about what would really happen to these characters in these seemingly outlandish circumstances.

We’re having all of these situations of citizens being deported, of people being wrongfully deported, and it’s shocking. It has happened before, though not to this horrible extent. It calls attention to the ridiculousness of what happens when we allow racism to rot our brains. Many of the characters in The Slip can’t see beyond their own racial preconceptions, and that’s true not just of the white characters, though the white characters are big offenders in that regard. We see a lot of that now, people just not using their brains. The Supreme Court saying the Trump administration can deport people to countries they’re not from—I don’t want to know what sort of person you have to be in order to quote-unquote intellectualize yourself into that. But I think The Slip does explore how we got to this situation.

God, it’s awful. Let’s end on a brighter note. Do you have a sense of what your next project will be?

I have a vague sense. But 12 years ago, I said, “I’m writing a book about a boxing gym,” and then for 12 years, I heard “How’s the boxing novel going? How’s the boxing novel going?” So now, when I have a draft, maybe we’ll speak of it.

I will say I like a big story. I like fiction with a capital F. I like going for a big swing. I hope to continue going for it, on a different canvas.

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Featured image: Photo of Lucas Schaefer by Greg Marshall.