Synopsis

At three years old, Michael Esposito’s parents take him to see Death Wish. While Charles Bronson cleans the streets of a collapsing New York, Michael internalizes a contradiction that will haunt him: the suburbs promise safety, but the city—violent, dazzling, dangerous—offers liberation.

You Don’t Know What It’s Like (77,000 words) is the first of a two-part literary coming-of-age novel set in the static of the late ’80s and early ’90s. Michael grows up an awkward theater kid on Long Island, marked by class anxiety and a hunger for escape. He ricochets between children’s repertory plays, punk clubs, VHS experiments, and infatuations that tip into obsession. Convinced that desire and delusion can be transmuted into art, he struggles to reconcile ambition with failure.

As friends surpass him, his arrogance curdles into betrayal, and a disastrous white-out humbles him, Michael begins to glimpse writing as a medium capable of catching what performance cannot. The novel closes with him boarding a train for Manhattan—leaving behind the girl he wounded, the mother he disappointed, and the suburb that defined him—believing the city will redeem him, even as the reader wonders whether it will consume him instead.

The companion novel, Walkman Blues (88,000 words), continues Michael’s story through drama school and into the half-promised bohemia of New York. His obsessions persist, his illusions degrade, and the gulf between the city he imagined and the city he inhabits widens. While each book can stand on its own, they may also be published together as a diptych, tracing the arc of one artist’s illusions from adolescence to disillusion.

You Don’t Know What It’s Like blends dry observation with emotional vulnerability to explore class, delusion, and the dangerous hope of youth. It will resonate with readers of Ben Lerner, Torrey Peters, and Ottessa Moshfegh, as well as anyone who came of age longing for art to explain a restless heart.