There's quite a bit of grim humor in
'Final Boy' by Sam Lipsyte, published in The New Yorker on October 19, 2025. This is a classic story of 'struggling writers vs authenticity vs rent vs life'.
The narrator Rick is a writer of fan fiction about the eighties sitcom 'Charles in Charge'. This is a real sitcom that ran for five seasons from 1984 to 1990, created by Michael Jacobs, Barbara Weisberg and Craig Kellem.
Rick lives with his roommate Bennett in the latter's deceased aunt's one-bedroom apartment. Bennett is in a coma from a near-drowning in the bathtub from the use of dissociative anesthetics. Rick doesn't know if Bennett actually inherited the apartment or they were all simply squatting there. It turns out that they are squatting. His aunt's daughter Tabitha turned up to ask for it back because she wants to sell it. So Rick got kicked out.
Sure, I read fan fiction of many things. There's so much crap floating around out there, but there are some good stories that have been spun. All writers start from somewhere right? And writing fan fiction doesn't mean you can't have original thought even if you used the original script's characters. Anyway. This is what Rick wants to do, and of course he has his opinions about the other writers in the same sphere, and spinning off the sitcom.
The show also ignited some long-dormant ambitions. What I saw now in the “Charles in Charge” universe was a vast and sumptuous staging ground for my literary imagination. I’d stumbled upon a new frame, or filter, for my song. Everything I’d ever wanted to say about what it was like, for this human, to think and dream and feel could now be passed through the sieve of Charles.
I was not alone. The “Charles in Charge” community is tiny but vibrant. There are other skalds, or griots, or troubadours devoted to the goings on in the Pembroke (and, later, Powell) home, and when the reruns hit the streamers our world grew. But I consider myself a pioneer among the scribes, and while the others dash off mere extrapolative scenarios, often treacly, or pornographic, or both, I like to think I have smuggled some poetry and serious thought into the proceedings, especially in installments like “The Groundless Ground,” where I cooked up for Charles a few scheduling dilemmas with which to explore Heideggerian notions of temporality.
I’d found my audience, was even making a little extra scratch from paid subscribers—enough, along with my P.O.S. checks, to pitch in for the maintenance on the apartment. But now all I’d achieved teetered on Tabitha.
There's a lot of tension in this story, and a lot of real world angst. Rick and Bennett's real-life stories run parallel to Rick's fiction and what he talks to his clients about in his job with an AI therapy company. Then he kinda got 'emotional' with a client, and the AI therapy company called time on his employment. That was about the same thing as Rick getting kicked out of the apartment, and Bennett likely dying and never waking up from his coma.
In an interview with the same journal, the author is asked on his definition of authenticity within the story.
Rick also operates as a kind of human interface for an A.I. therapy company, a “beef puppet for a large language model,” reading advice from a screen to clients he sees remotely. Both his writing and his therapy work involve a certain slant on what authenticity means in various contexts. How were you thinking about this balance?
For Rick, there is a strict line between his writing and his therapy work. With his fiction, he may be using the preëxisting universe of an old sitcom for his frame—perhaps like using an old legend about a prince in the Danish court—but, in the end, these are Rick’s stories and Rick’s songs, and he’s aiming to achieve human connection with his writing. He eschews using A.I. to write his fiction. And he rejects the idea that we are “just lesser versions of ChatGPT,” or that, even if we are, we are each trained with a unique swirl of experiences and interactions with art. That’s what can be authentic, our proprietary blends, as it were. The remote therapy job disgusts Rick precisely because it erases the human. He’s basically a tool of the A.I. and of a cynical corporation, much to the detriment of his clients, which is why he must make his hero’s journey and take up the lance against the large-language-model dragons.
It isn't all gloomy though. When you're really down and can't get worse, you can only climb up right? Rick is in a pickle. In this despair and having to live in a shelter and such, Rick still has his passion and his words, and he could write still. He would have to keep up with his passion. He could still have paid subscribers and earn enough to get by. The stories become a story.
The story ended with,
Also, I wondered, what happened to Charles’s buddy, Buddy? Could a rare cancer of the blood, per my latest installment, put him in a coma? I pictured sweet, bumbling Buddy Lembeck hooked up to that vile accordion, straining to lift himself out of his intubated grave, giving everything to address his best and only friend one last time, to gargle a mucus-slick song of love before falling into dreamless murk. Such a moment might serve as this closing installment’s final beat, but it all seemed too sentimental, implausible, obscene. My subscribers would never buy it. But I knew it could happen. It had, in fact, happened. How could I render this truth, make others see? This was my challenge, my task. It wouldn’t be easy. It would take the bravest iteration of Rick. I would summon all my craft, everything I’d learned as a master weaver of fanfictional tapestries, my warp and weft, my tricks, my tics, my private prompts, and toss the whole tangled heap away. I would dump out the vats, start afresh. I would become a model trained on nothing but pure feeling, never knowing what comes next. Crouched there on the stone steps of the newish cathedral, I flipped my laptop open, got cracking.
