Can you empathize with someone who committed an unspeakable act? Can you imagine yourself as a perpetrator? Can you see yourself in a monster? In his latest book, Humpty Dumpty , that’s exactly what Harold Rogers seeks to explore. Exhausted by the moral pedestal that exists in the current literary landscape, the Ohio-born, New York-based writer explores writing as a vehicle to drive down the path of “what might have been.” His sophomore novel follows a revered high school football quarterback on his way to taking his team to the state championship. However, after a horrific crime is committed, followed by its subsequent cover-up, his dreams may be over. It’s an examination and takedown of the American dream, a promise that tastes bitter on our tongues now. Before Humpty Dumpty hits bookshelves, Rogers spoke with his boxing partner and fellow author Eddie Huang about incels, hacker groups, and fighting demons inside and outside of the ring.
TUESDAY 10 AM OCTOBER 27, 2026 NEW YORK CITY
HAROLD ROGERS: Doing great, Eddie. How are you?
HUANG: I’m good. I mean, we boxed an hour ago, so it’s funny to be on Zoom.
ROGERS: I feel good. I’m ready to get it out in the world. I want to see what random people have to say.
HUANG: I remember maybe almost a year ago I said, “All right, we both got books coming out this year. What do you want out of this book launch and tour this time?” And you said to me, “I just want some attention, because last time I woke up and I expected a New York Times review of my book, and nothing happened.”
ROGERS: Yeah. My expectations were too high. I mean, it’s kind of gross to say I just want attention.
HUANG: No, you’re just a person. I think it’s funny.
ROGERS: You write something because you want to connect with people. When I’m working on something alone, I’m not writing because I want attention from it. But now that it’s done, people might as well pay attention to it, right? That’s better than nothing.
HUANG: Everybody wants some attention, bro. It’s fine. What was the vision you had the first time? What did you think was going to happen?
ROGERS: Oh my god, I thought I was going to take the world by storm. I thought I was going to win the National Book Award, and my book would be the book that everybody was talking about. That I would go on the train and everyone’s reading my book.
HUANG: Then you went on the train and it was still Dr. Zizmor ads. [Laughs]
ROGERS: Yeah, there was nobody reading the book. But it’s kind of a good thing because sometimes if you got a big hit with your first book, I feel like it cripples some people and it makes it so they can’t write anything else. The attitude I had was, “Now I got to make a better book.”
HUANG: Well, reading your book, the first thing that hits me is the amount of honesty. The first three chapters of your book, very much like The Canterbury Tales , the characters are like archetypes. I thought I was going to read a folk epic. But by the end of the first act, it becomes very clear that this is an extremely personal book. It deals with this shattering of the American dream and you did it by leaning into your own feelings of being an American.
ROGERS: I appreciate that, Eddie. That’s high praise. I love The Canterbury Tales comparison because it’s very much like that. It’s a dude telling the story about all these different people and exposing their vices and all the secrets that they have behind their supposed virtues. You also say the personal aspect of it, and I just think that writing is only worth something if you’re really digging into your truest, rawest feelings. I mean, I would call this book pretend-autofiction, but all of the feelings are real. I give the characters my last name. Darius is my middle name. Harry got my first name. So everyone’s a part of me in some way.
ROGERS: Yeah, so it’s very much gesturing toward reality all the time, but I think there’s a lot of invention in the book, but there’s some truth behind all that.
HUANG: As writers, we get a lot of pressure from editors and publishers, and then you read these op-eds about, “Is the literature renaissance over? Do men read? Is autofiction dead?” This book is fantastic because it’s not caught up in any current conversation besides sexual assault in America, obviously.
ROGERS: I mean, it’s just a fact of human life that’s been going on throughout all of history. So this ain’t no new shit, but it’s something that happened around me when I was in high school, and it makes you think about moral accountability in a different way when something happens that close to you, but you’re also an outsider to it. So the book is about that collective moral accountability.
HUANG: What happened in 2012 and how did you hear about it?
ROGERS: So in Steubenville, these two football players sexually assaulted this girl at a party, and they were live-tweeting shit that was going down, and people were posting pictures and shit. They went to a different high school, but I knew them through sports. Nothing happened until months later, around New Year’s, the hacker group Anonymous hacked the school’s website and doxed everyone involved. It became a big story. It was in The New York Times and CNN. Both of the guys ended up getting convicted, but one dude did two years in juvie and the other did one. So not much came out of it, honestly. But what I remember most about it is everyone talking about something that had happened without a good impression of it. You get the story just from these various accounts that people have half the information about, they’re speculating. And I think the book challenges that and makes it like, you can know the truth about something, even with all the various accounts and the unstable nature of truth.
HUANG: Yeah, and truth through unreliable narration is what you are playing with here.
ROGERS: Yeah. It’s like implicating yourself in the worst shit possible as a mental exercise to not separate yourself from them. To truly understand wrongdoing, you have to be able to put yourself in, like, “I could have been a perpetrator of some awful shit. I’m no saint standing over here and judging everyone from above.” The whole book is about implicating yourself in these darkest parts of humanity.
HUANG: It’s also a double-edged sword. The truth is that if you actually put yourself in somebody’s shoes, you may start to understand why they did what they did, even though what they did was horrible.
ROGERS: It’s this really hard thing where if you had the exact life facts of someone who turned out to be a murderer, you would’ve probably done the same thing. But if we don’t judge those actions as wrong, then we can’t have a society. So it’s really hard to draw this line between judgment and compassion. A lot of “dude books” in the past 10 years have been dudes who are looking at other people being wrong and they’re good.
HUANG: Well, the literary world props up these writers, like that guy, Tony Tulathimutte. What’s the name of the book he wrote?
HUANG: Tony Tulathimutte wrote that book, and I remember the main short story in it is him creating this fictional short story about an incel. The whole story just beats the person down. And then we heard Tony Tulathimutte talk that one time in Bushwick, and you can tell he’s not this incel guy.
HUANG: He created this pastiche from watching MSNBC News or—
HUANG: Yeah. It’s funny to watch the literary world just clap it up for writers like that who are just like, “Down with these people.” It’s much scarier and more vulnerable for you to put yourself into these characters that you have no relationship with. I know you, you would never do anything like Darius does in this book, but you’re choosing to put a version of yourself through this and understand it based on what you know of these people you grew up with.
ROGERS: Sure. And I’ve been a dude who’s been in bad mental states where I’m not feeling very positively about women or I’m terrorizing my girlfriends at the time. I know and understand these dark male feelings. If you can’t look at that clearly, how are you going to move on and be a productive male member of society? With Harry especially, that’s his arc in the book.
HUANG: After hanging out maybe two or three times after we met, I could just tell, “Oh, this guy has seen some shit.” Also, you’re from Ohio, I’m from Florida. It’s kind of the two worst places to be from. [Laughs]
HUANG: I remember having a hunch that something happened to you in your childhood or with your family because you’re a fantastic dude, but there’s a sadness you carry, right?
ROGERS: Sure. I think for most people, there’s a darkness and sadness they carry.
HUANG: There are some people that are just oblivious, Harold. We started hanging out and I asked you about where you’re from and your family, and I remember you blurted out one time, “Oh yeah, my dad invented online gambling.” I’m like, “There you go. The feds raided your house as a kid.” [Laughs] People who don’t know, they’ll take my initial impression as a funny, nice, generous guy.
HUANG: Yeah, but those are things that I learned to be. I imagine Humpty was therapeutic for you because you were able to exorcise these demons and put a fictional version of yourself down the road you did not travel.
ROGERS: 100%. That’s what it is. I feel like writing the books is essential to my development as a person, and I’m working out whatever issues or anger I had, especially toward my past. Some people let themselves be completely destroyed by that anger and bitterness toward their past, and that was what I was trying to work through with these two books. I want to understand what happened and be able to move on and deal with whatever new issues because you never run out of issues.
HUANG: Yeah. It’s important when you’ve been dealt a shitty hand in your childhood to have compassion for yourself. Otherwise, you’re just going to be like, “Life is unfair. Why do other people have it better than me?” Having compassion, and being like, “I’ll figure this out. Nobody owes me shit,” that’s the beginning of the healing.
HUANG: Harold, what was your process like writing?
ROGERS: I mean, when I figured out that there was going to be a narrator, what I wanted to do was have no section of the book be longer than 1,500 words. So, I wanted it to move pretty fast, and especially because the voices are changing all the time too. But once I figured that out, I was cranking out drafts in 20 days. I probably wrote most of the real portion of the book in four different 20-day bursts at different times, but it was never more than three weeks where I’m working nine hours a day to write the whole thing.
HUANG: I like that. I usually write in five or six-day bursts and finish the book, but my books are significantly shorter than yours.
ROGERS: This was 20,000 more words than my first book, so it was the longest thing I’ve done so far.
HUANG: I think it is very difficult to maintain tone if you’re writing the book over a long period of time.
ROGERS: Yeah, you got to live in the book. Reading my book and having me as a boxing coach, do you see anything similar?
HUANG: Oh yeah, I do. There’s something similar between you as a boxing coach and a writer, and as a friend, which is why we get along. There are people in life who are micromanagers, and they’re very didactic. Then there are people who are irresponsible and check out and have no idea what’s going on. Then there’s the Phil Jackson type where you are watching, but you’re extremely selective about when you pop in with an opinion or any sort of push, and that’s who you are.
HUANG: As a coach, you give people a lot of space. You trust your boxer’s intelligence, and you do the same thing with your reader. Now, let me ask you this: As a boxer and a writer, do you think there are similarities for me?
ROGERS: That’s a good question. I mean, you got that southpaw, you’re already coming in unconventionally with it, and you have this straightforward energy, right? It’s almost like, as a writer, you’re very frank, but there’s something else as part of the honesty that throws you off a little bit too.
HUANG: Yeah, there’s an eccentricity to me that I don’t even understand. [Laughs]
ROGERS: I think that’s right. It’s just natural.
HUANG: But there’s an unspoken conversation we have training.
HUANG: I’m fat, I’m slower than I ever have been, but I still can box. [Laughs]
ROGERS: No, you can box well. I think people don’t realize how good you can box.
Source: Fashion
