Will Phillips is a storyteller. The irony, perhaps, is the idea that becomes apparent as the broader story of Adjustments unfolds, along with its many smaller stories, that Will’s whole way of being in the world is a long practice of not telling a story. The toll that such a practice can take on a […]

We debated promoting Adjustments as a queer story when it published. In the end, we decided that this story is very many things at once (cue Whitman’s multitudes) and didn’t want to pigeon-hole it as a “certain kind of book.” I’ll always wonder if that was the right decision. Another reason I hesitated: I wasn’t […]

Music is one of those unexpected (for me) themes in Adjustments. There’s some Rolling Stones, some Dylan. Even some Patsy Cline. And there’s also Ivan Rebroff, the Russian opera singer. Rebroff shows up early on in the story in the old man’s house while Will is trying to figure out how to leave. That really […]

Will Phillips is a deeply introspective man, given to a lot of internal dialogue and mildly dark moods. He manages it well enough, while the people around him seem to give him space to indulge this need. Until, that is, Joe Murphy comes along and finds ways to poke and prod into Will’s adaptive loneliness. […]

I don’t know that I realized it while I was writing, but Adjustments turns out to be, in many ways, about four lonely people finding, and not entirely on purpose, human connection. Part of the way they find that connection is by trying to help one another not be so lonely, again maybe not entirely […]

The Wild Swans, an Andersen fairy tale, figures prominently in Adjustments. The idea of being a man who has a swan’s wing where an arm should be follows the main character around, and the people in his life would like to know what it means. Maybe a reader would, too. I have to wonder if […]

Plausible deniability is a concept that shows up now and again in Adjustments. It might be true that the main character lives his whole life in a carefully orchestrated plausible deniability scheme. The Keats volume Will carts around is a great little metaphor for that dynamic: the cover is bound upside down, so a guy […]

When I was writing Adjustments, I had no idea where the Barbie head Will found in a parking lot was going to go. Turns out she went pretty much everywhere, but without ever really telling us where she’d been. And that’s okay. She helped untangle some other things I might not have seen coming. And […]