Under the Surface

Adam Straus speaks with Yannick Murphy about her new novel “Things That Are Funny on a Submarine but Not Really.”

By Adam StrausNovember 13, 2025

• Fiction

YANNICK MURPHY’S 12TH BOOK, Things That Are Funny on a Submarine but Not Really (2025), is a coming-of-age story that follows David Sterling—nicknamed “Dead Man” after he notionally dies while fighting a simulated fire—from the waning days of his enlistment as a submariner through his first year of college. But the narrative is not about moving from one world to the next so much as it’s about those worlds collapsing into one another, and about Dead Man coming alive under the pressure.

This process begins in the service. The United States’ continuous cold war with China defines Dead Man’s time in the navy. But in this space between war and peace, actual military action is viewed as an intrusion rather than the purpose of the sub’s existence. While being chased by a Chinese sub, Dead Man wishes the enemy away so his boat can “just proceed with drills without worrying we’ll be torpedoed by some country worried we’re too close to their islands they’ve built out of sand.” And when those drills are done, Dead Man’s submarine returns to its home port in Guam, the site of an ongoing multibillion-dollar military buildup. The island is both American and not; it’s an unincorporated territory whose Chamorro residents are US citizens by birth but are unable to vote in presidential elections. While there, Dead Man eats most of his meals at McDonald’s.

It’s in Guam that Dead Man first hears about a nascent pandemic. Soon he’s scrambling to find hand sanitizer and N95 masks. And when he arrives at college the following fall, classes are still online. This semi-quarantined state, set against the backdrop of a rapidly changing American society, serves to further muddy his post-service transition. In many ways, Dead Man never fully leaves the submarine. There are the months he spends with a deceased shipmate’s voice in his head, and then there’s the living shipmate who turns up, strung out and uninvited, to disrupt Dead Man’s college life. “We might as well be back on the boat,” he quips from the kitchen of his apartment in Iowa. It’s only when he learns to capture his ghosts in fiction that Dead Man is able to exorcise them and arrive, finally, above the surface.

Narrator and author are perhaps most closely aligned in their twin observational roles. Like much of Murphy’s previous work, Things That Are Funny on a Submarine but Not Really draws heavily on her family life. She spoke with me via Zoom from her home in Vermont. Our conversation has been edited for concision and clarity.

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ADAM STRAUS: On a process level, I’m curious about the relationship between this novel and the eponymous short story you published in Conjunctions back in February 2020. Were you already working on the novel at that point? Or did the novel grow from that story?

YANNICK MURPHY: When I start writing a novel or a story, I try to start with a big enough premise, a story of utmost importance, where the main character is going to speak the deepest truths within themselves. I want the reader to feel that the writing is saturated with this power of human energy. In the case of Things That Are Funny on a Submarine but Not Really, the story came first. And then, because I realized that I had a big enough “what,” a big enough premise that could carry me even further, I wrote the novel.

Of course, stories are different from novels, and to get to the novel, I had to imagine a succession of things that Dead Man would have to come up against down the line. What challenges would he face in the navy and after the navy? What would those challenges reveal about what makes him tick? I thought about what resistances would be present to enshroud him in a sense of drama. So, it turned out to be this novel, which is a coming-of-age story of a young sailor who’s faced with reentering the civilian world after serving as a radioman on a fast attack submarine. The way he tells his story involved a degree of risk on my part because of his realistic sailor rhetoric. But it was a risk I was willing to take. I knew I had to get mongrel. I had to labor for the rightness of the story, and mention the everyday stuff that’s unmentionable.

In a manner I recognized from my own time in the military, Dead Man is both vulgar and profane. Did you conduct research or interviews to develop fluency with that authentic language?

I only had to sit down at the Christmas dinner table. My three kids have been in or are currently in the navy. My eldest son was enlisted on a fast-attack submarine, and my middle daughter went to the Naval Academy; she’s now an officer on a ballistic missile submarine. My youngest daughter also graduated from the Naval Academy. So, a holiday meal at our house is filled with acronyms, slang, curse words, and jokes. I’m lucky enough to hear stories firsthand from them, and I’m also lucky enough to have kids who are great storytellers in their own right. Listening to my two submariners swap stories is like listening to people talking in a foreign language. Their father and I have to butt in constantly to ask them to explain. We don’t always get the answer; mostly we just get eye rolls.

I believe writing is about observing. Michael Ondaatje said it best: a novel is a mirror walking down the road. That’s my modus operandi. I put down everything that I see and hear others do. I’m not here to explain to the reader what the character’s actions mean. That’s for the reader to decide. That’s what makes the reader’s experience enjoyable, to be an active participant and use their own intellect to process images and interpret Dead Man’s actions or inactions in their own way. I believe a writer’s biggest mistake can be to make it all too easy for the reader.

It’s interesting that you built this novel on others’ stories. I’m thinking of when Dead Man gets in an argument with a college friend who makes some fairly broad generalizations about the navy and people who serve. “Not until you’ve been through it should you ever suppose you know anything about it,” he shouts at her. As you wrote, did you ever confront this sentiment, either within yourself or from others?

No, that was just something I gathered that a lot of people who were in the military and end up coming home could feel. I generalized that that could happen.

But I will say, when talking to my kids, as great as they are about telling us stories, there are stories I know they will never tell their father and me, because we simply won’t understand the implications. Or because the stories are too scary, and involve a degree of danger no mother or father wants to hear about. Or the stories cover things that happen on the boat that are not for civilians’ ears. So, the pressure of never being able to fully disclose what goes on in their lives, it must take its toll after a while. When Dead Man tells this college friend that they should never suppose they know anything about being in the military, I think you’re witnessing that turmoil, his knowledge that what he did for the past five years can never be fully validated or understood by the civilian world.

It’s a weight that he has to carry, but maybe because it’s a weight he shares with his shipmates, the burden is easier to bear. In the military, jokes are abundant because humor is the lifesaver, the great leveler. It’s the lullaby that can temper their moods, redirect their focus away from their fears, and enable them to get along with one another day after day.

The one moment that coping mechanism cracks is when they’re being trailed by a Chinese sub. At the same time, Dead Man’s primary antagonist is a corpsman who wants him to spy on a member of their crew who may or may not be a Chinese spy. To what extent, then, is the response to a perceived Chinese threat Dead Man’s actual enemy, as opposed to the Chinese themselves?

Well, when you’re hundreds of feet down in the ocean, you don’t want anyone poking holes in your hull. However, there’s not much Dead Man can do about the Chinese enemy. He can only follow orders, stay calm, and hope the entire crew works together to stay safe. So the corpsman who wants Dead Man to spy on the spy is a threat as well, one he can choose to do something about or choose to ignore. This dilemma and these dangers provided me with an undercurrent of conflict at the center of this story. It provided me with drama and elements that, when woven together through later chapters, contribute to Dead Man’s spiritual, moral, and intellectual development.

Much of Dead Man’s intellectual development occurs in the last third of the novel, when he leaves the navy for college in Iowa. What does higher education represent for him?

Dead Man recognizes in himself that going to college would be an achievement and something that could help him become a writer. The irony comes about when he realizes that teachers want their students to write about what they know. But when he writes about what he knows and the world he comes from, it turns out not to be what people want to hear. Setting up that irony helped me propel the character forward to talk naturally and bravely about what he experienced.

Another layer of irony comes about because he enters college at such a specific moment during the COVID-19 pandemic, when restrictions were just beginning to lift. Students are on campus, but classes are still on Zoom. I’m interested in how that complicated his experience, that these moments of connection came amid something so isolating.

There are two worlds in this novel, two systems of values that rub against each other. The magic for me is trying to show characters dealing with these turbulences. In this case, those worlds are the constraints of social distancing versus Dead Man’s cramped former life on a submarine. His insular life in college, where he doesn’t talk to many people, is very different from his life as a sailor, when at any time he could reel off whatever was on his mind to the person next to him. In college, though, he’s not only restricted about how and when he can talk to people, but he’s also limited in what topics are acceptable for him to talk about. It makes his transition doubly difficult.

I see that mirrored in the Iowa landscape, especially the winter scenes. It’s so open but so constricting at the same time. You can see for miles, but where are you going to go? What are you going to do?

Exactly, yeah.

Sticking with campus life, one thing that college and the military have in common is the unbelievable amount of substance abuse that occurs. Two characters in particular, Tintin and Grenadier, really struggle with drugs and alcohol. I’m curious whether you consider this an addiction novel on some level.

It’s not so much a story about addiction as it is an observation of Dead Man’s generation. I think everyone in their twenties knows someone or has heard of someone who’s addicted to something, whether it be drugs or alcohol. In the book, drug dependencies affect characters’ lives, but there’s no real effort by anyone to stop it. Dead Man, because he’s not a drug user himself, ends up being more grounded than the others, maybe somewhat more reliable. He’s almost an antihero in this regard, because he has other human qualities that are not admirable. Like we talked about, he has trouble curbing his offensive rhetoric. But in the end, he has the ability to do the right thing, however flawed his process was in getting there.

Absolutely. To wrap up, I thought we might look ahead. You’ve written children’s literature, story collections, and novels. Do you have a sense of what your next project might be?

A while back, I wrote a fictionalized account of my husband’s life as a horse doctor here in Vermont; the book’s title is The Call. Structurally, it was written as entries he would have made into his call log when visiting farms and treating horses. The structure was liberating and allowed for some really playful language, as well as profound observations. I longed to revisit the structure and the family dynamics in the book. So I went back and wrote what might be called a corollary book from the wife’s point of view, because I realized she has a story to tell from her own heart. Now, the veterinary logs are centered on the wife’s involvement in the discovery and aftermath of when a man she knows is found murdered in town. The book is called The Summer We Were Lost in Space.

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Yannick Murphy is the author of the novels This Is the Water (2014), The Call (2011), Signed, Mata Hari (2007), Here They Come (2006), and The Sea of Trees (1998). Her story collections include By the Time You Read This (2021), Stories in Another Language (1987), and In a Bear’s Eye (2008). She is the recipient of various awards, including a Pushcart Prize, a Laurence L. & Thomas Winship/PEN New England Award, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a National Endowment for the Arts award, and a Chesterfield Screenwriting award.

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Featured image: Photo of Yannick Murphy by Paige Hiller.