{"id":196076,"date":"2026-06-27T22:48:03","date_gmt":"2026-06-28T06:48:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=196076"},"modified":"2026-06-27T16:24:34","modified_gmt":"2026-06-28T00:24:34","slug":"steve-almond-affection-without-exemption","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=196076","title":{"rendered":"Steve Almond: Affection Without Exemption"},"content":{"rendered":"

Steve Almond<\/a> (b. 1966) is an American writer whose work crosses fiction, memoir, literary criticism, political commentary, and the craft of writing itself. He has published twelve books across more than three decades and built a reputation for confessional candor joined to comic timing and moral argument. His subjects run from romantic obsession and grief to football, candy, popular music, and the condition of American political life.<\/p>\n

Almond grew up in Palo Alto, California, and graduated from Gunn High School before attending Wesleyan University<\/a>. He did not move into the academy at once. Instead he spent roughly seven years as a newspaper reporter, first at the El Paso Herald-Post and then at the Miami New Times<\/a>. He has credited that apprenticeship with teaching him to observe American life beyond the affluent world of his childhood and his education. The reporter’s habits stayed with him: close listening, attention to the texture of ordinary lives, a documentary realism that marks both his fiction and his nonfiction and separates his work from straight autobiography.<\/p>\n

He drew wide literary notice with My Life in Heavy Metal (2002), a story collection about romantic obsession, emotional exposure, and modern manhood. Reviewers admired the energy of the prose, the dark comedy, and the refusal to soften flawed men into sympathetic ones. The collection set out themes he would return to for the rest of his career: the pull between longing and self-destruction, the search for real intimacy, the absurdity of contemporary courtship. The collections that followed, The Evil B.B. Chow (2005) and God Bless America (2011), confirmed his command of the short form. His stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize, and other anthologies.<\/p>\n

His commercial breakthrough came with Candyfreak: A Journey Through the Chocolate Underbelly of America (2004), a book that mixes memoir, cultural history, and business reporting. On the surface it traces the decline of regional candy makers under corporate consolidation. Underneath it reads as an elegy for vanishing local traditions and small-scale enterprise. Candyfreak reached the New York Times bestseller list and won the American Library Association’s Alex Award. It marked Almond as a writer who could turn a light subject into a serious meditation on the country.<\/p>\n

He has moved between genres with ease. His essay collections, among them (Not That You Asked): Rants, Exploits, and Obsessions (2007), Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life (2010), and Bad Stories: What the Hell Just Happened to Our Country (2018), fold memoir into cultural and political reflection. A recurring claim runs through them: that American life rewards emotional avoidance, consumption, and tribal feeling while it punishes honest vulnerability. He tends to enter political disagreement through character, empathy, and moral responsibility rather than ideology.<\/p>\n

His most contested nonfiction book is Against Football: One Fan’s Reluctant Manifesto (2014). A lifelong fan of the game, Almond argued that the mounting evidence of traumatic brain injury, together with the sport’s commercial use of its players, made continued fandom hard to defend. The book pressed readers to ask whether entertainment can justify lasting neurological harm, and it became a visible entry in the national argument over concussions and player safety. His readiness to indict a sport he loved reflects a pattern in his writing. Affection, he holds, should not buy a subject exemption from moral scrutiny.<\/p>\n

Almond has also written novels. The first, Which Brings Me to You (2006), co-written with Julianna Baggott, unfolds through confessional letters between two strangers who meet at a wedding, a structure that lets the book examine romantic idealism, self-deception, and the cost of honesty. Nearly two decades after publication it became a feature film, released in January 2024, with Lucy Hale and Nat Wolff. His later novel, All the Secrets of the World (2022), follows two girls whose lives turn after a school shooting and takes up adolescent friendship, violence, and trauma. It has been optioned for television.<\/p>\n

Among his recent books, Truth Is the Arrow, Mercy Is the Bow: A DIY Manual for the Construction of Stories (2024) carries his fullest statement on craft. He treats storytelling not as a set of techniques but as an ethical practice grounded in emotional honesty. He urges writers to give up perfectionism, to sit with uncertainty, and to extend empathy even to the characters they find hardest to love. The book gathers what he learned across decades of teaching and restates his conviction that literature exists to deepen human understanding rather than to entertain.<\/p>\n

Teaching has grown into a large part of his working life. He has taught creative writing at many institutions and conferences, including the Nieman Foundation for Journalism<\/a>, GrubStreet, the Tin House Writers Workshop, and Wesleyan. In 2022 he received a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts<\/a>. Students and peers describe his workshops as candid, weighted toward emotional authenticity over literary fashion or commercial calculation. He has carried that teaching into 2026.<\/p>\n

He has never kept to literary circles alone. In 2006 he resigned an adjunct professorship at Boston College<\/a> to protest the university’s choice of Condoleezza Rice<\/a> (b. 1954) as commencement speaker during the Iraq War. He writes from the progressive side of American politics, yet he has also criticized ideological conformity within progressive literary culture and argued that writers owe their loyalty to intellectual independence rather than to a coalition. That skepticism toward groupthink has made him a hard man to place, willing to challenge orthodoxies on the left and the right alike.<\/p>\n

He has become an advocate for independent publishing. Alongside the books from major houses, he has self-published. Letters from People Who Hate Me (2010) collects the hostile mail his Boston College resignation produced, and This Won’t Take Long (2014) gathers short reflections on writing and creativity. Both grow from his belief that authors can build a direct relationship with readers outside the traditional system, and from a broader quarrel with institutional gatekeepers.<\/p>\n

Beyond his books, Almond has contributed to The New York Times Magazine<\/a>, GQ<\/a>, The Wall Street Journal<\/a>, Poets & Writers, and The Boston Globe<\/a>. For several years he co-hosted the advice podcast Dear Sugars with Cheryl Strayed<\/a> (b. 1968), first under The New York Times<\/a> and later under WBUR<\/a>. The program built its identity on radical empathy, with the two hosts answering questions about love, grief, family, and identity through psychological depth rather than quick counsel. His years as a reporter shaped his approach there too, leading him to treat each caller’s dilemma the way an interviewer treats a source, as a life to be understood in full.<\/p>\n

Almond lives near Boston with his wife, the novelist Erin Almond, and their three children. He continues to write essays, teach, and speak at literary festivals, and he remains a public defender of emotional honesty in art and in civic life. His books range across fiction, memoir, criticism, politics, and craft, yet a single outlook holds them together. He believes that real storytelling demands emotional courage, that moral life starts with honest self-examination, and that literature remains a rare place where people can face hard truths without losing their humanity.<\/p>\n

Steve Almond and the Alliance Theory of Political Belief<\/strong><\/p>\n

David Pinsof, David O. Sears (b. 1935), and Martie Haselton advance a claim that unsettles the standard picture of political conviction. In “Strange bedfellows: the Alliance Theory of political belief systems<\/a>,” forthcoming in Psychological Inquiry, they argue that belief systems do not grow from deep moral values such as equality or liberty. They grow from alliance structures. People choose allies by similarity, by transitivity, and by interdependence, and then they support those allies with a set of propagandistic biases that defend the coalition’s reputation and attack the rival’s. The moral vocabulary comes after the alliance, not before it. On their account partisans on both sides claim altruism, impartiality, honesty, and love for themselves while assigning selfishness and malice to their opponents, and this matching of virtue to ally is the thing the theory predicts. The final move is the one that does the most work. Motivated reasoning, they write, reads less as a cognitive defect than as an honest signal of loyalty. The person who reasons toward his coalition’s conclusion advertises that he can be counted on.
\nSteve Almond presents a hard case for this frame, and that is what makes him a good one. His public identity rests on a single claim about himself: he holds loyalty to intellectual independence rather than to a tribe. He criticizes the orthodoxies of the left from inside the left. He preaches emotional honesty and radical empathy. He resigns positions on principle. Run Alliance Theory across this self-portrait and the portrait becomes evidence for the theory rather than an exception to it.
\nStart with the independence itself. Almond writes from the progressive side of American letters and then attacks ideological conformity within progressive literary culture. He treats this as a stand outside the coalition. Alliance Theory reads it as a position inside one. The literary-progressive elite runs a status code that rewards the pose of standing above the tribe. The writer who scolds his own side for groupthink signals to that side a rare and prized quality, the willingness to tell hard truths, and he collects the distinction that comes with it. He criticizes the coalition to an audience drawn from the coalition, in venues the coalition reads, and the criticism raises his standing within it rather than costing him a place in it. Independence functions here as a similarity cue. It marks him as the kind of ally the literary class most admires, the one who will not flatter. The pose presupposes the membership it claims to transcend.
\nHis resignation from Boston College in 2006 carries the argument further. He left an adjunct post over the university’s invitation to Condoleezza Rice (b. 1954) as commencement speaker during the Iraq War. In a 2006 interview he gave the reason in the vocabulary of virtue: the school was cashing in on her fame, chasing donations, telling students that lying is acceptable as long as you gain power. Alliance Theory does not deny that he meant it. The theory predicts that he meant it. The resignation signals loyalty to the antiwar progressive coalition and rivalry toward the Bush administration, and the moral framing, lying for power, is the moralization that mobilizes support for the ally and opposition to the rival. The frame gains force from what Almond did next. He gathered the hostile mail the resignation produced and published it as Letters from People Who Hate Me (2010). That is competitive victimhood turned into literary capital. The grievance becomes the product. The book emphasizes the malice of his attackers and the cost he paid, which is the victim bias the paper describes, the embellishment of harm that mobilizes third parties to one’s side.
\nThe 2005 attack on Mark Sarvas tests the frame against a harder fact. Almond went after Sarvas, a fellow Jew and a fellow figure in the literary world, on Salon, and he did it on Yom Kippur. A reader who takes Almond’s anti-tribal self-image at face value finds this puzzling, since here is the independent man waging coalitional war. Alliance Theory removes the puzzle. Rivalries occur within groups as readily as between them, because the cues that select allies, similarity and interdependence, also generate competition among the similar and the interdependent. Two literary Jews working the same small status field are rivals before they are anything else. The independent posture does not prevent coalitional combat. It relocates it, from the safe enemy outside to the dangerous rival nearby, and the timing on the Day of Atonement reads as a status display aimed at an audience that would register the transgression.
\nThen there is the home team. In the same interview Almond describes his pull toward other Jews in plain language. He says he never believed in God, that he identifies culturally, that he is drawn to the Jews when he walks into a room, that he usually recognizes them, that they share an attitudinal link. It is the home team. He names Philip Roth (1933-2018) and Saul Bellow (1915-2005) as carriers of a Judaic apprehension of life. This is the similarity cue stated without disguise. The man whose brand is independence avows a coalitional loyalty he did not choose and cannot argue himself out of. Alliance Theory treats the avowal as the ordinary condition, the visible form of the alliance instinct that the political self-image papers over. Almond is more candid here than his public philosophy permits, and the candor confirms the frame.
\nThe signature concepts, emotional honesty and radical empathy, do the coalitional work the theory assigns to virtue language. Both terms run through his memoir, his criticism, and the advice podcast Dear Sugars he co-hosted. Both resist definition. Empathy for whom, honesty about what, the terms do not say, and the vagueness is the point. A concept loose enough to mean many things serves as a loyalty signal precisely because it cannot be pinned to a policy that might cost an ally. To stand for emotional honesty is to claim altruism, sincerity, and love for oneself and one’s side, which is the self-attribution the paper documents on both wings of politics. The craft book Truth Is the Arrow, Mercy Is the Bow (2024) raises the vocabulary to doctrine, casting storytelling as an ethical practice grounded in honesty and mercy. Alliance Theory hears in this an account of how a writer builds the reputation that holds his readers and his peers, a reputation for the very qualities his coalition prizes.
\nAgainst Football (2014) is where the frame meets the most resistance, and an honest reading should say so. Almond attacked a sport he loved on grounds of brain injury and the exploitation of players. Football fandom does not map onto the progressive alliance the way the Rice protest does, and the argument cost him a pleasure he valued rather than buying him standing with an ally. The book looks like a value operating free of coalition. Alliance Theory can answer that the concussion argument carried its own emerging coalition, the players and the medical critics against the league, and that taking the players’ side fits the victim-and-perpetrator structure the paper lays out, the powerful institution harming the vulnerable laborer. The answer holds, though it strains, and the strain is worth marking. The frame accounts best for the cases where Almond’s conviction tracks an alliance and accounts least well for the cases where conviction cuts against his own comfort with no ally in view. A reader who wants truth over the frame’s tidiness should keep both columns open.
\nWhat Alliance Theory delivers on Almond is a single reversal applied across the career. The thing he offers as proof of independence, the criticism of his own side, the resignation, the empathy, the honesty, the refusal of tribal loyalty, is the behavior a skilled coalition member performs and a high-status coalition rewards. The theory does not require that he be a cynic. It requires the opposite. The honest signal works because he means it, and the man drawn to the home team is the same man who tells the literary class he answers to no team. Both are true at once, and Alliance Theory explains why a writer can hold them together without strain and call the result a conscience.<\/p>\n

If Mearsheimer Is Right: Steve Almond and the Social Animal<\/a><\/p>\n

John J. Mearsheimer (b. 1947) builds The Great Delusion<\/em><\/a> (2018) on a claim about human nature before he says a word about foreign policy. We are social beings from start to finish, he writes, and individualism runs a distant second. Liberalism makes the opposite wager. It treats people as atomistic actors who carry an inalienable set of rights, and it grounds its universalism in that picture, since everyone on the planet holds the same rights and a liberal order feels called to honor them everywhere. Mearsheimer answers that the picture inverts the order of operations. People are born into groups that shape their identities long before they can assert any individual will. They form strong attachments and make sacrifices for fellow members. They are tribal at the core, because the surest path to survival runs through the society that protects and feeds the long human childhood.
\nThe childhood is the heart of his case. A person spends his early years nurtured and socialized while his critical faculties are still forming, so the value infusion arrives before the capacity to weigh it. By the time reason comes online, the family and the society have already loaded the moral code. Mearsheimer ranks the three sources of our preferences and puts reason last, behind innate sentiment and socialization. People have limited choice in building a moral code, he writes, because so much of their sense of right and wrong comes from inborn attitude and from the milieu that raised them. The autonomous chooser of liberal theory is the fiction. The socialized member is the man.
\nSet Steve Almond against this and the strain shows at once, because Almond is a liberal individualist of the purest literary type. His public identity rests on the autonomous conscience. He answers to no tribe. He holds loyalty to intellectual independence above loyalty to any side. He preaches radical empathy, a concern that crosses every line and reaches every person, and emotional honesty, the courage of the single self facing its own truth. Each of these is a liberal claim in Mearsheimer’s sense. Each assumes that a man can stand apart from his group, examine his inheritance by the light of reason, and choose his commitments fresh. If Mearsheimer is right, Almond has the order backward.
\nBegin with the independence. Almond came up in Palo Alto, the son of two psychiatrists, took a degree at Wesleyan, worked years as a newspaper reporter, and earned an MFA at Greensboro, where he found what he calls the artificial welfare state for people who are word-drunk. Mearsheimer reads that sequence as a value infusion, not a series of free choices. The milieu that prizes vulnerability, candor, and the writer’s solitary integrity is a particular American class with its own code, and Almond absorbed the code during the long apprenticeship in which his critical faculties were still forming. What he experiences as independent conscience is the socialization of the liberal literary professional, broadcast back to its own audience as a feat of reason. The man who answers to no tribe answers to the one that taught him to say so.
\nIn a 2006 interview<\/a> Almond described his pull toward other Jews without apology. He never believed in God. He identifies through culture and history. He is drawn to the Jews when he enters a room, recognizes them, feels an attitudinal link. It is the home team. He names Philip Roth and Saul Bellow as carriers of a shared apprehension of life. Mearsheimer needs no further evidence. Here is the social nature reasserting itself under the individualist self-description, the attachment that arrived through inheritance rather than argument and that survives even the loss of the belief that once justified it. Almond cannot reason his way out of the pull and does not try. He reports it as a fact about himself. The reporting is the theory’s confirmation. The tribal core holds when the creed has lapsed.
\nThe collaboration with Julianna Baggott (b. 1969) on Which Brings Me to You (2006) shows the social animal in another register. Almond describes the writing as combat, two fragile narcissists sharing a byline, each sent back into the ring by a spouse in the corner to beat on the other. The liberal account would cast two autonomous artists negotiating a contract of equals. Almond’s account is closer to a fight between rivals bound by interdependence, the emotional veracity of the book purchased through the conflict rather than through the cool exercise of craft. The sentiments came first and ran hot. The reasoning followed.
\nThe Boston College resignation in 2006. Almond left over the university’s invitation to Condoleezza Rice during the Iraq War, and he gave the reason in the language of universal principle, that the school told its students lying is acceptable when it brings power. That is liberal moral universalism, the appeal to a standard binding on everyone everywhere, the kind of claim Mearsheimer says motivates liberal states to overreach abroad. Mearsheimer’s deeper argument cuts the other way, though. He would expect the universalist gesture to ride on a prior tribal commitment, the antiwar progressive allegiance of Almond’s class, and to dress the allegiance in the costume of principle. The resignation fits that reading. What it does not give Mearsheimer is the foreign-policy payoff his book is built to explain. Almond is a memoirist, not a state. His universalism stays moral and aesthetic and never commands an army. The social anthropology travels well to a single writer. The geopolitics it was built to support does not, and a reader who wants truth over a clean fit should say so plainly.
\nRadical empathy. Almond’s doctrine extends concern past every boundary, to the stranger, the rival, the difficult character on the page. The craft book Truth Is the Arrow, Mercy Is the Bow (2024) raises this to a rule of art, mercy for even the figure the writer finds hardest to love. Mearsheimer treats boundless universal concern as the liberal dream that human nature defeats. Sympathy runs along the lines of the group first and thins as it moves outward, because the long childhood trained it to. Almond’s own evidence supports the deflation. The man who preaches empathy without limit attacked Mark Sarvas<\/a>, a fellow Jew and a fellow writer, on Yom Kippur, and avows that his warmth bends toward the home team when he walks into a room. The universal doctrine sits on the surface where reason operates. The graded, tribal sympathy operates underneath where socialization and sentiment do their work. When the two meet, the lower layer wins, which is the whole of Mearsheimer’s claim about which of the three sources governs.
\nIf Mearsheimer is right, then, Almond is the social animal who has been trained by a particular tribe to prize the appearance of standing free, and who supplies, in his own candid moments, the evidence that the training took. His independence is the value infusion of the liberal literary class. His empathy is the universalist creed that human attachment keeps cutting down to size. His drawn-to-the-home-team avowal is the core the creed cannot reach. The figure survives the frame, but not as he describes himself. He survives as a case of the thing Mearsheimer says we all are, a member first and a free chooser a distant third, with reason arriving late to ratify what the group already settled.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Steve Almond (b. 1966) is an American writer whose work crosses fiction, memoir, literary criticism, political commentary, and the craft of writing itself. He has published twelve books across more than three decades and built a reputation for confessional candor … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-196076","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literature"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t