Photo courtesy of Josh Silver and François Arnaud.
“If we’re going to use other people’s experiences, what’s the intention behind it?” author Josh Silver asked his friend François Arnaud on a call last week. Just waking up from a nap, Silver was talking about Mallory, the protagonist of his new novel Fruit Fly, though the question has incidentally become relevant to his own life as well. In the book, Mallory, a literary has-been desperate for her next bestseller, borrows someone else’s trauma in pursuit of creative fulfillment, only to discover that getting what she wants doesn’t necessarily make her feel any better.
Ironically enough, Silver can now relate to Mallory more than ever. Until recently, he was working as a mental health nurse, writing in his car on lunch breaks, and staying up late to finish what would become his fifth book in five years. Now, Fruit Fly has been optioned by A24, and things are moving quicker than ever for the 36-year old. The book is one hell of a cheeky, dark, emotional rollercoaster, something you can swallow in a single afternoon. Below, Silver and Arnaud get on the phone and get deep on the experience of embodying someone else, the myth of the tortured artist, and the addictive quality of getting exactly what you want.
FRIDAY 2 PM SEPTEMBER 4, 2026 NEW YORK CITY
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FRANÇOIS ARNAUD: Good morning. A little birdy tells me that you just woke up from a nap. Is that true?
JOSH SILVER: Yeah. I sat down on my couch about an hour ago and then woke up 45 minutes later, which is very unusual for me. I’m not a napper at all.
ARNAUD: Your body’s calling for it. How’s sleep been lately?
SILVER: I’ve never been a good sleeper, but at the moment, it’s all gone a bit out the window. I’m traveling a lot and jet lag doesn’t help.
ARNAUD: The last few months have been full of speedy and intense developments for you.
SILVER: Speedy and intense are definitely the two words I would use.
ARNAUD: You still had your job as a mental health nurse up until eight weeks ago, right?
SILVER: Yeah. I was a mental health nurse, and things have changed quite rapidly and significantly since then.
ARNAUD: I’ve had a copy of your book, Fruit Fly, for many months now.
SILVER: Did you like the book?
ARNAUD: I loved the book. I’ve been a fan of your work, as you know, for many years. I’ve been the lucky recipient of early copies, which I’ve read with great pleasure. Your previous books were in the young adult literature space, which I’m not very familiar with, but I found myself incredibly compelled by the plot and the character development and the ease with which you write your prose. It’s effortless poetry, truly. In my opinion, you brought the best of that fast-paced thriller element from young adult to adult fiction incredibly successfully, and the world is paying attention at long last.
SILVER: Thank you.
ARNAUD: I could not be more excited for you.
SILVER: People ask me about my writing style and whether it’s intentional to write at that pace. I didn’t have any formal writing training. So in retrospect, I never set out to have a style. I never set out to try and cultivate a certain kind of writing. It just is the way my brain moves, reflected on the page. Or I should say the way the characters’ brains move, because I write from a first-person point of view.
ARNAUD: Was that a conscious choice from the beginning or is that how things come to you?
SILVER: No, it’s definitely a conscious choice. As you know, I used to be an actor. There was something about disappearing into—I don’t want to sound too wonky—but disappearing into a character that I really enjoyed. Then I became an actor, and I struggled with my relationship to the industry and all that. But I realized I can find my creative autonomy elsewhere, and I started writing. I really loved going into the point of view from other people’s brains and watching a scene from someone who isn’t me.
ARNAUD: Do you consider both acting and writing as a possibility to discover and talk about yourself?
SILVER: I definitely have used it as a way of escaping myself. I’ve written five books in five years, and people will say, “Wow, how’d you do that whilst nursing? You must be very disciplined.” But part of it, for me, is there’s an addictive quality to going into someone else’s head or removing myself from the reality I’m in. I’m still figuring out how it can be healthy in so many ways because I can excavate feelings and emotions that I go through. I have sometimes wondered if it’s a little bit like a drug and it helps me to escape.
ARNAUD: Well, all these things can exist at once. It doesn’t have to be one or the other.
SILVER: As an actor, I definitely felt like it was a way of being in front of people without them having to see who I was, which I enjoyed. Because I had little self-esteem and didn’t know myself very well, I still wanted external validation, and this was a way I could do that. But with writing, I get to spend more time figuring out the sort of confused emotions underneath it all. Often, I’m inspired to write something that I’ve been going through or figuring out. I’ll put that in the characters as I’m writing.
ARNAUD: Does the validation that you’re experiencing now as a writer hit harder than the validation that you would get as an actor? Knowing that through the writing process you’re creating something, you’re a master commander on board.
SILVER: I wish I could sit here and say, “I’ve worked through my shit and external validation, and I don’t reach for it anymore,” but that isn’t true. There is so much about people enjoying my work that activates me. It’s really exciting. I’m certainly grateful that people are enjoying it. The way it’s happened has been very unexpected, and that’s part of the reason the dopamine flooding into my brain over the past two months has been—
ARNAUD: That’s something that I wanted to touch on. You’re talking about the potential fear of swapping one addiction for another, and maybe dopamine being at the center of that. It’s always good to get sober if you have a drinking problem or a drug problem, but then I see so many people replacing that with an addiction to exercise, or sex, or attention, or validation. I mean, we live in a world where dopamine is present all around. You have to be incredibly disciplined and make really hard choices for yourself to step away from that and decide to get validation elsewhere.
SILVER: For sure. I think there’s a very small gap now between desire and relief, and it’s just at our fingertips. My phone is a crazy thing to me. It’s so wild that we carry these things around with us, a little pocket of I can just search for something to try and make me feel better. It’s absolutely my experience of replacing one thing for another. When I got sober from drugs and alcohol, it was like all the consequences started to fall away. But then, the problem isn’t the drugs and the alcohol, it’s what I’m avoiding. It’s a bit like Whac-A-Mole, trying to push one thing down and it comes up somewhere else.
ARNAUD: I have a feeling that you and I share a desire to definitely keep a foot in normalcy and be in relationship with reality and the real world. I’m so happy for your success, but part of me loves the idea of you having this normal job, a practical job as a nurse helping people in a very real way. I’m wondering if there’s a part of you that mourns that a little bit, or if you’re thinking that maybe you’ll go back to it? And is it possible to find inspiration if you’re caught in a whirlwind?
SILVER: You’re asking questions that I’m currently asking myself, so I don’t have fully-formed answers. But when I became a nurse, my version of what happiness looked like changed massively and I felt content in a way that I hadn’t before. I had shattered the expectations I’d had around what success looked like. Nursing suited my personality in a way where I would finish the day and feel exhausted in a way that felt great. I enjoyed being around people, and it’s a very healthy way to feel validated if it’s through being amongst the real world and helping other people. I’m not going to lie, it’s a very tough job and it’s very difficult at times, but it always inspired my writing.
ARNAUD: You were writing in your car on your lunch break.
SILVER: I was writing in my car on lunch breaks, and staying up late, and moving at a very high-adrenalized pace. It was working, but I could feel the burnout and the wheels starting to come off a little bit. Not that long ago, I called my brother from my car in tears saying, “I don’t know if this is sustainable at all. I don’t know if I can keep trying to do both, and I need to have a think about whether I quit nursing or if I pack in the writing and just focus on progressing as a nurse.”
But you say a sense of mourning, and that’s a really interesting word because I do have an instinctive pull to that work. I really enjoyed being a nurse, and I really enjoyed meeting all these people, and having conversations with new people every day, and learning about their internal worlds, and I found it fascinating. Personality development is something that really interests me. But then, there’s also a lot of relief in knowing, “Well, I’ve got space to write my next book now in a way that’s a bit more healthy.”
ARNAUD: Yes, and you can always return to it later on if you want to.
SILVER: I can. And I’m really pleased that I got the degree when I did, because as a creative, you never know what the future’s going to hold.
ARNAUD: Oh, don’t I know it?
SILVER: Don’t you know it.
ARNAUD: I wondered so many times what other venture I should pursue to have something to fall back on for all sorts of reasons.
SILVER: I wanted to do something that felt completely separate to the acting or creative industries. But what ironically then happened was I found my creative spark by doing it, because inserting myself into reality was my gateway to finding my voice in my books.
ARNAUD: I’m thinking about Mallory, the character in your book, and how she uses someone else’s trauma to achieve inspiration and success. As an actor, as a writer going down that route, do you think that’s a noble pursuit or are we being leeches?
SILVER: When I was at drama school, there was a narrative that if you were struggling while you were creating your art, it had more value. There was emotional recall in classes that we would do, and you would try to come up with something that you’d been through so that people would think you had this depth or this quality that made you a little fucked up, that made you interesting. And I think that’s a very unhelpful and dangerous narrative. I had so much fun writing Fruit Fly, and part of me felt like, “Oh, do I tell people that I wrote it quickly and had a great time doing it? Or do I need to say it was really difficult for me to excavate these different kinds of feelings?”
ARNAUD: The image of a tortured artist.
SILVER: Yeah, exactly. And actually, the truth for me is that I feel my writing flow and I feel the success of that when I’m having a lot of fun.
ARNAUD: Is talking about the book and being asked those questions about how authentic those portrayals are, does that take the fun away a little bit from the process?
SILVER: I’m still navigating that. I understand that I’ve written a book about whose right it is to tell what story and that my lead character is stealing someone else’s pain and trying to make money out of it.
ARNAUD: But she’s not doing it for the money. She’s doing it for a feeling of creative fulfillment, even if it’s borrowed.
SILVER: You’re completely right. But her own form of escapism is fantasy, and there’s an allure and a draw into his pain that she finds takes her out of her own. I don’t think she’s doing it for the money either. In the final chapters when she has what she wants and she’s not really okay, that’s where I feel Mallory understands, “Oh no, I’ve pursued this and it’s not resolved anything within me and I’m going to keep carrying that with me.” And on that note, for me personally as well, I don’t mind talking about my experience. I’m fine with doing it to a certain extent, but I don’t know if I have to say I’ve been through X, Y, and Z for people to take what I’m saying in the book seriously. The question that I’m asking is, if we are going to use other people’s experiences, what’s our intention behind it?
ARNAUD: What is it that you want to shine a light on?
SILVER: I’m trying to ask in today’s day and age if the queer experience holds value and if it has currency. The publishing world is very loud about wanting to champion authentic voices, but what does authentic mean and how are you defining it, and in what way are you then presenting authenticity?
ARNAUD: There’s something inherently problematic about authenticity being represented or sold. It becomes a performance of authenticity, and therefore isn’t authentic. Over the past few weeks, seeing the book blow up and being so thrilled for you, I kept thinking back about the scene where Mallory is giving that press conference at the end. I was like, “Oh my god, has this been Josh’s life for the past few weeks? Did he inadvertently find himself in Mallory’s shoes?”
SILVER: Yeah. Also, what’s interesting for me is that she is going through at that point, “Oh no, it’s not resolving the stuff.” I preempted this would happen for Mallory and that she wouldn’t feel like it would resolve itself. I still feel crazy. So I guess I should have known, but it is very odd that it’s slightly reflected back at me.
ARNAUD: Mirroring.
SILVER: And I know we shouldn’t look ourselves up online, and I think I’m also finding my boundaries with this stuff very quickly. But someone said, basically, this is all a big ploy for me to make money.
ARNAUD: “He’s doing the thing that he’s criticizing others for.”
SILVER: Yeah, that perhaps I’m a clever mastermind orchestrating my own success.
ARNAUD: That’s where surrounding yourself with solid people, solid relationships, people who’ve known you for a long time and finding stability within yourself really is valuable. You know who you are, you know the reasons why you did that.
SILVER: I agree.
ARNAUD: And why you’re writing, and it ultimately doesn’t really matter.
SILVER: You have to keep bringing yourself back to that though, and I’m grateful that I am at a place where I can do that. I think if this had been seven, eight years ago, I would really struggle with the ability to do that. But I’ve got, as you say, really good people in my life. I do have a much better sense of myself than I used to and my intentions. Thank you so much for chatting with me.
ARNAUD: I was just going to say it’s really exciting to talk to you. And congrats on the A24 adaptation there. I can’t wait for whatever happens.