At seventeen, Ezra Green doesn’t have a lot going on for him: he’s shorter than average, snaggle-toothed, internet-addicted, and halfway to being legally blind. He’s also on his way to Last Chance Camp, the final stop before juvie.
But Ezra’s summer at Last Chance turns life-changing when he meets Orson, brilliant and Adonis-like with a mind for hustling. Together, the two embark upon what promises to be a fruitful career of scam artistry. But things start to spin wildly out of control when they try to pull off their biggest scam yet — Nulife, a corporation that promises its consumers a lifetime of bliss.
We spoke with Rafael Frumkin, author of Confidence, about disability rep, satire, and the relationship between “falling in love and being scammed.” This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Dan Chaon, author of Sleepwalk, said your book, Confidence, explores a relationship that falls between the “grey area of falling in love and being scammed.” I’d love to hear more about this grey area. How does falling in love and being scammed play into each other?
I was totally delighted by Dan’s characterization of Confidence: it’s not just a love story or a scam story but a love-as-scam story. Given that we’re seeing a huge increase in discourse on both scamming and desire, from gaslighting to catfishing to thought insertion, I’m far from the only writer tackling this subject right now. For instance, Nathan Hill does a masterful job of broaching the “Is it love or coercion?” conversation in Wellness, which has some characters who seek to induce emotional intimacy in the name of science. And there’s Sarah Manguso’s brilliant autofictional Liars, in which she exposes what essentially amounts to the sexist grift of her marriage.
I think what I was most interested in tackling with Confidence is the power of persuasion and how one “gets gotten,” as it were. One mistake we make – or at least one mistake I made – is to watch documentaries about cult survivors and think, How unfortunate for them. Luckily for me, I’m immune to that kind of groupthink. Alas, no one is: that’s just the nature of human psychology. You can be the most savvy, canny skeptic in all the world, but I can guarantee that you still have weak points through which you can be manipulated. Do you feel self-conscious about your physical appearance? Do you wish you earned more money? Had a better relationship with your father?
We live in an economic system that engineers scarcity (both material and illustory) and then goads us into consuming in order to “fix” that scarcity. Fill the void with objects is a hard paradigm to escape, even for Ezra, who certainly fits the “savvy, canny skeptic” bill being a con artist himself, but who is no less immune to being conned. His weak points are love and loneliness, very common for American men.
I’ll use myself as another example: I published this novel about scammers in March 2023 and then got viciously grifted nine months later. It was one of the most terrifying experiences of my life, and I wrote about it in more detail here. This is just to say that we’re none of us “naturally immune” to this kind of thing: developing anything resembling immunity would take recognizing the many instances of coercion and manipulation we encounter every day, the fact that we are all at various times playing the roles of both mark and cooler for each other. The sociologist Erving Goffman wrote about this brilliantly in 1952, and it’s just as true today.
Your main character, Ezra, has glaucoma, making them halfway to legally blind. I find this really interesting since your book gets into themes of “not everything is as it seems.” Can you tell us more about this intersection of the themes of perception?
I had for a long time wanted to write a corporate drama that’s also part-Sophoclean tragedy, and even wrote a play in college about a young sociopathic executive who’s going blind during the downfall of an Enron-like corporation he helped imperil. (No, I didn’t know about Lucy Prebble’s Enron, and yes, my friends were really good sports and staged the play in our campus’s black box theater.)
So Ezra’s encroaching blindness started out as this objective correlative, this fatal flaw, but then I realized that it’s neither my junior year of college nor 400 BC in Athens and this is not the approach I’d like to take to a character’s disability. So instead of being just a heuristic for the reader, I wanted Ezra’s glaucoma to be a phenomenon, to feel fully inhabited by him and be frightening and annoying and curiosity-inducing in equal measure. I became less concerned that the reader learn something than that Ezra does, and not in the moralizing sense: I wanted him to learn things about himself through his blindness, or at least be prodded to so we can watch in horror as he chooses to turn away time and again. I think I ended up finding a happy medium where his blindness is less “tragic” than a fact about him like any other.
And that’s maybe what I’m wanting to say about perception as well, about what we miss when we think we’re seeing everything. Ezra prides himself in always being several steps ahead of his marks, playing six-dimensional chess with ease, and it’s precisely this arrogance that makes him so vulnerable to Orson’s charms. It’s lonely on top, and a total gift when you finally find someone who can join you there! Let’s just hope that someone isn’t also conning you.
There are many books that deconstruct the American Dream, and the ways in which it is done is constantly changing as our culture changes. Confidence tackles wellness culture and the ever-increasing desire we have for easy answers. With that in mind, could you tell us what attracted you to satirize these parts of American culture?
Speaking of Dan Chaon, I just recorded an interview with him in which we discussed Silicon Valley tech bros and startup culture as logical extensions of the “go West, young man” imperative. Except now manifest destiny looks a lot different from hopping in your covered wagon and staking your claim – often violently – to a plot of land that’s already occupied. Now it looks like extracting billions of dollars from venture capitalists and “moving fast and breaking things” and claiming products and technologies exist when they don’t. Elizabeth Holmes is guilty of doing this through her now-defunct corporation Theranos, and she and other millennial fraudsters were inspirations for both Orson and Ezra.
I love the tragicomedy – being someone writing about America in the twenty-first century, it’s a register I feel particularly comfortable in – and there’s nothing more tragicomic than “fake it ‘til you make it.” It’s an ethos that pervades wellness culture, from the people buying its products to the people inventing and profiting off them. When the fasting apps and microdosing kits and jade eggs and paradoxically expensive “life hacks” don’t fill that void – when you’ve lost the weight or finally hacked your weekly schedule or even made the fortune and you’re still not magically the person you wanted to be – what then? I think this is where Orson gets got, and what ultimately leads to him drinking his own Kool-Aid. When your scam actually works and yet you realize you’re still plagued by the same sense of desperation that made you want to scam in the first place, it’s just migrated elsewhere in your brain and taken on a different form? That’s when the tragedy sets in. It may sound trite to say that life is more than endless self-optimization, but I think we’ve been persuaded to lose sight of that.
What got you into writing? What are your favorite genres to write and why?
I wish I could say something high-minded like seeking to understand the world around me or responding to the absurdities of late capitalist life, but really I was just a kid who loved to fill up notebooks and floppy discs with the stories of my interests and obsessions: everything from “The Battle of Dogs and Cats” (my first-grade War and Peace in which it’s revealed that the opposing generals in the dog and cat armies are…brother and sister?!) to a lot of adolescent writing about characters who flee the suburbs for places like Antarctica or Dubai. I had a lot of feelings and ideas and I just wanted to get them out on paper, which I guess would qualify as “seeking to understand the world around me.”
Thus far I’ve been a psychological realism girlie (a genre I love and can’t foresee getting tired of), but I’m starting to branch out into speculative fiction because I love the unreal’s ability to clarify the obfuscations of the real. Last year, I wrote a long novella/short novel draft that I’d describe as fabulist, and I’m actually currently at work on something of a similar length that falls squarely within the realm of dystopian sci-fi!
What are your writing plans for the future?
That’s a good question, and one I’ll try not to answer at too much length! Basically, I’ve been really lucky to find myself in a super fertile period creatively, so I’m trying to take advantage of it as best I can. In addition to the shorter projects I mentioned above, there are two books in the offing: an autofictional novel that further explicates my recent grifting and a memoir/reportage hybrid about my gender transition.
Anything else you’d like to add?
If you liked this interview and want to keep up-to-date on my book news and other musings, I hope you’ll consider subscribing to The Cosmic Cheeto, which is my Substack newsletter and also my only real online presence nowadays. If you’re discovering my work through this interview, send me a message and I’ll get you the Knee Brace Reader’s Gift: all three of my books for the price of two!
