Look no further than Joanne the Scammer to know that queer people have long been interested in the art of conning, even before our current cultural obsession with high-profile grifters. Today, with shows like The Dropout, WeCrashed, and Inventing Anna garnering critical acclaim, it’s clear that con artists have managed to enchant viewers — yet none of these stories have been exceptionally queer, although George Santos certainly seems destined for the documentary treatment.
Enter Confidence, a new novel by Rafael Frumkin that introduces us to a brilliant, gorgeous, and deeply narcissistic hustler named Orson, charting his journey from small scams to multi-billion-dollar pyramid schemes. Told from the perspective of Ezra Green, who becomes infatuated with Orson when they meet at a camp for troubled youth, the book reads like a blend between Succession and a queer love story. Together, Orson and Ezra begin finding small ways to take money from rich people and line their own pockets, but eventually that more innocent endeavor leads to the founding of the wellness brand NuLife, allowing them to become as wealthy as their former marks.
To mark the book’s release, Frumkin spoke with Them about the power of a story told through a sidekick, marrying a queer love story with a scammer narrative, and how a pandemic viewing of The Vow sparked the idea for this book.
Can you tell us a little bit about the kernel of the idea for the book? What inspired it?
Like a lot of people, I was really into the NXIVM documentary The Vow, during the pandemic. I was holed up watching it with my friend, who was staying with me, and then we went on a walk, which everyone was doing because we couldn’t do anything else. And I was kind of reflecting on the person of Keith Raniere, the guy at the center of NXIVM, who is this absolutely repugnant, horrific person. He created this sex cult. He manipulated so many people, and [was] a very shrewd businessman at the same time because he was able to manipulate so many people and extract so much money from them.
And I was thinking, “What would a millennial Raniere look like, without the really disgusting evil stuff?” I was like, “I want this P.T. Barnum, I want this huckster who’s my age and who came up in this crashed economy, who’s invested in scamming rich people out of their money.” And that’s how Orson and Ezra were born.
Between when you started writing Confidence and its publication, we’ve had The Dropout, Inventing Anna, and WeCrashed. The culture is at a place where we are now so enchanted with the idea of telling a story about scammers. What do you think enchanted you about telling the story of a scammer?
Ari Newman [of WeWork] is another absolutely repugnant person, and a bro who’s really hard to like. But I think that he and people like him are colonizing Silicon Valley. And Silicon Valley is terraforming American culture. We have this whole culture of wellness, this culture of expedience, this culture of optimization because of Silicon Valley and all these apps.
And so I was thinking marrying that with scam artistry is not a hard thing to do because there is so much scam artistry happening in that realm of things. Elizabeth Holmes is the perfect example of that.
But I think the heart of the scam story for me was the Robin Hood aspect. So Ari Newman and Elizabeth Holmes aren’t Robin Hoods, but Ezra and Orson are — at least at the beginning of the novel. They’re stealing from the 1% and giving to their families, or their friends, people who need the money. Eventually, of course, they become the 1%. They become the hoarders and so the tables get turned.
Orson made me think aboutf Keith Raniere because I also watched __The Vow, __but also about Wild, Wild Country. Keith and Osho are people who draw people in with what they say. And Orson has a little bit of that, too. But you also said you didn’t want to make him repugnant. And I know as writers, we also do want to really like our characters. How do you maintain that affection for Orson as you’re writing?
It’s easy to like Orson. He is this gorgeous Adonis who can sell anyone anything. But when you get deeper there, you can see his narcissism. And I think what fascinates me about Orson and what actually makes me like Orson, despite all of this nastiness that lurks inside him, is his care for Ezra. I think that Orson actually has a lot of love for Ezra. I don’t know if Orson wants to marry Ezra or anything like that, but Orson cares deeply for Ezra.
The problem for Orson is that he won’t allow himself to feel that love because he’s so used to con artistry. He’s so used to scamming. He’s so used to lying and conniving that he’s out of touch with his ability to love someone genuinely, and to be vulnerable and open up to them. That rub there really interested me: If we actually got down to the heart and soul of Anna Delvey — who, I mean, she’s pretty repugnant, too, but she’s more of an Orson-like figure insofar as she’s a shape-shifter — what if we really learned her story? Inventing Anna kind of gave us some insight into that. And it’s intriguing.
Just as the followers of NXIVM have a parasocial relationship with Keith, the followers of NuLife in the book have one with Orson. And then you have someone like Ezra who gets the magnetism, but then also loves him as a person, too, and has to know both sides of him and kind of love both of them. What was it like for you to write into that relationship and discover it as you were writing?
I think it was key to have Ezra be on both sides of this thing — to know both the more sensitive, vulnerable Orson, and also to know Orson as the cult leader, as the Wild, Wild Country, or even the Steve Jobs-type figure, to put it a little more benignly.
To have Ezra know both sides of Orson is key to humanizing him. It’s Ezra’s observations that hopefully give us some sympathy for Orson. I’ve been telling a lot of people that if the book was alternating point-of-view, and it was Orson’s point of view, you wouldn’t get anything useful. You would just get this narcissistic screed. But to get the other side, I think you do need Ezra’s POV.
By focusing on Ezra, this book does give us a lens into that style of leadership through the perspective of, let’s call him, a sidekick, right? I’m interested in this idea of what a sidekick affords you as a novelist. My favorite show of all time is Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which I believe is just as much Willow’s story as Buffy’s. What’s the benefit of using a sidekick to get into a story?
An example of this I really like that’s not quite sidekick-y but sort of parallel to that idea: Succession is supposed to be a show about Logan Roy choosing his successor. But it’s Kendall Roy’s show really. He’s the one who’s receiving all these slings and arrows of Logan’s fury. And he is the one whose sensitivity, even though he won’t admit it, is kind of carrying the plot.
These sidekicks get beat up on a bit, [they] get mistreated and abused. And I think that that mistreatment and that kind of... Let me put it this way, the sidekick is the canary in the coal mine. Obviously, Willow isn’t hyper abused or anything. Willow isn’t necessarily mistreated in the way that Kendall is or in the way that Ezra is, but Willow still serves as that canary in the coal mine, where you see her reactions to what Buffy’s doing — or you see, again, Kendall’s reactions to what Logan’s doing — and you understand better what’s actually going on.
If you were to get Succession all from Logan Roy’s point of view, it would be deranged. And it would just be endless volatility and distortions. And to see Kendall as this sponge who’s absorbing that derangement, I think, brings us closer to the truth than the person who’s at the center of the solar system.
Ezra is a great character, the brains of the operation as it were, but I also love that, while he’s so good at thinking through those things, he makes so many decisions that just fuck his own life up which I think makes him a really great character. How did Ezra unfold for you as the story went on?
I think that Ezra is kind of locked in this limerence, and it’s the instability of that obsession, or the instability that comes from that obsession, that results in a lot of these choices that he makes. Either he’s indulging in or fighting against his love for Orson. " He’s wanting so badly to be his love. And maybe not even necessarily to be him, but to be worthy of him. He wants to be strong. He wants to be this kind of ideal human being, the way he sees Orson.
Orson is the sun, and he’s forced to orbit Orson. And so his choices get increasingly bad until he winds up where he winds up. I mean, it’s not giving anything away, but the book opens up in prison, right? So we know he ends up in prison. And things get increasingly anarchic. They get increasingly chaotic just because of this limerence. Following that obsession led me to the places Ezra ends up going.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Confidence is available now from Simon & Schuster.
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