In the middle of the night, writer Jon Ronson received a text message from his son, Joel, alerting him to the fact that he was in a “completely fucked” situation. Earlier that day, Joel and his friends had piled into a car and driven three-and-a-half hours outside of New York to Connecticut. His friend, a promoter named Nellie, had matched with an older man on Tinder who told her to bring people along to a castle party he was hosting at his residence there. Upon arrival, there was no party, only a collection of confused 20-somethings milling about. Then, the man of the house, Chris Mark, descended the stairs and informed them, “I’ve invited you here for a different reason. I’d like you all to take part in my reality show, 101 Princesses. Are you ready to get into your princess costumes? Come downstairs.”
What follows in the appropriately titled new nonfiction tome from Ronson, The Castle, is part investigation of this mysterious Mark figure, part interviews with other baffling men, part reckoning with the crisis of masculinity felt by those left to spin in the tailwinds of our fallen institutions. As Ronson senior ekes closer to the dark center of Mark’s world over 322 pages, the two become tangibly obsessed with each other—sending frantic texts, poring over those text logs, treating each other alternately with suspicion and compassion. Purpose, the author argues, is what’s missing from men like Mark’s lives, a gaping hole men across America have filled with wild and at times dangerous ambitions. Ronson’s own conception of a man’s necessary usefulness has made him a workaholic, a condition he seems less and less interested in curing as his investigation into Mark unfolds. (What he uncovers in it is so patently unpredictable that saying any more would do a disservice to potential readers.)
With all the wit and ease of storytelling employed across Ronson’s backlog of bestsellers—including The Psychopath Test, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, and The Men Who Stare at Goats—The Castle is a very different look at just what is coming to be known as our inscrutable problem with men’s place in a changing world. Ronson chronicles their confusion, regrets, and how some, like Mark, have tried to remake the world they miss. Ahead of the book’s release this week, we sat down with the writer to hear more about how he put all the pieces together.
I imagine that it’s a very strange experience, your son coming home saying, “Dad, I drove three hours to go to a castle party with a strange middle-aged man that my friend met on Tinder.”
So ill advised, but it does speak to this thing about how it’s kind of hard to catch a break [as a young person], and maybe some people are putting themselves in reckless positions because they’re just trying to get work. A little bit of me thought in a melancholy way about that.
Did Joel find this encounter hilarious or terrifying?
He was very nervous at the moment. He told this Australian paper something that he hadn’t told me, which is that he asked the [event’s] videographer, “Are we safe?” The videographer kind of said yes, but he looked like he wasn’t sure himself. So they were very relieved to leave. They weren’t enjoying it. But, like me, afterwards, they just found it so intriguing. He went from fear in the moment to fascination after the fact.
I get the sense that over your career you’ve built up a tolerance for talking to, let’s say, wild personalities. You also say in the book, though, you had not met anyone like Chris Mark. What set him apart?
He was very eccentric. At one point when I met him in Fort Lauderdale, he said that he was meeting with African kings, and he was giving them infrastructure ideas and in return, they were giving him endangered animals. Usually you think, I see a concerning character trait here, which I recognize from other people’s concerning character traits, but he was like nobody else in the world, and so it was very hard to get a handle on him.
I’ve driven to scary or unknown situations a number of times in the past. I had to remember: When you do these worrying things is when you get the most interesting stories. And here we are three years later talking about it.
You can feel your glee at some points at some of the craziness—you have a Deep Throat and maybe a murder is afoot. You get the sense that you’re enjoying a little bit of the devolution.
Yes, the people in the book all have this sort of weird dysfunctional relationship with purpose. For me it manifests as just being work-obsessed when I’m on a story. Do I feel happy? It’s like I’m chasing the dragon of fulfillment, because storytelling gives me purpose.
Did coming to the end of this project feel like reaching catharsis with your need to work, or you’ve accepted that that’s just how it is?
I’m trying to change that. What I was thinking is that, every time I’ve got an afternoon where I don’t need to work, I’m not gonna work. I’m just gonna relax. I have done that a few times this month and I haven’t felt guilty. There’s not many times when I’m working too hard that I’m upset. A lot of the time it’s when I don’t work that I feel empty. What am I going to do with my day? I find it very difficult. I keep downloading novels on Audible and none of them are engaging me. That’s why I then go back.
It sounds like you have it worked out. I liked the part in the book where you’re like, I’m gonna be out of state for my anniversary… Well, whatever.
I didn’t put this in the book, but I spent my 40th birthday with a church minister in Beckley, West Virginia who helped non-terminally ill people take their lives.
One of the central ideas in the book is that maybe what men need is structure, or institutional structure. Does that feel like a fair takeaway?
It doesn’t even necessarily need to be institutional structure, but definitely structure of some sort—and purpose. It’s sort of wishful thinking to think that we might be heading back towards an age of institutions. It has to be finding structure and purpose in another way and spotting when it’s false promises. The world of content creation is going to be a false promise for a lot of people. YouTube and TikTok aren’t the wide open country where a man can “manifest his destiny,” to use a horrific phrase.
There’s other things too, which I think matter to most men, but matter to me less. For instance, there’s that chapter about how men feel tossed around in a sea of conflicting ideologies about what being a man means. Men are told to be vulnerable, but then often when they try, people recoil in disgust, because deep down you don’t want men to be vulnerable.
You talk in the book about Louis Theroux and how you started out your careers together and then diverged. Now, it feels like you’ve almost come back together. He just did a documentary about the manosphere. Did you guys talk about these projects at all?
Louis told me he was doing the manosphere a couple of months before it was announced, but I wasn’t worried because I was thinking, Well, I don’t really go to the manosphere in my book.
God, I remember when I was writing The Psychopath Test back in 2009, and Louis came round to a party at my house and I said to him, “Louis, please don’t do psychopaths.”
“Just let me have this!”
“Give me this one!” I was in London when the premiere [of Into the Manosphere] was happening. I sat right behind him in the cinema, and loved it. It was so nice to not feel in competition with him anymore. I could just sit back and enjoy it.
I didn’t want to go to the manosphere because it seemed like the easy thing to do. I wanted it to be about ordinary men, which actually made me all the more impressed by Louis’s documentary. He took a topic that I don’t think I could have done well, and it was really funny and he was in great form.
The manosphere is kind of like a car crash, where you can’t look away. I don’t know how much it says about the average man.
I’ve read a number of times people calling this book the “manosphere book,” and I’ve sort of resigned myself to it, but it really isn’t. It’s much more surprising and strange and, not to mention, like a thriller with twists and turns.
A lot of the men in this book wouldn’t identify with the manosphere at all, would think they’re just some freak sideshow. Actually, some of them share weird characteristics. Later on in the book, I talk about men who are becoming disinhibited from society’s structures—that it’s like they’ve ripped off their faces. I guess that’s kind of a manosphere trait, but theirs is manifesting in different ways.
How did you bring these men together in your head? You’ve got someone you got a text from, a former landscaping influencer, and then, of course, the Armie Hammer interview. If you had given me 1,000 guesses of who would show up in this book, it probably would not have been Armie.
I was the first person to ever interview Armie Hammer after the scandal. When Air Mail ran [their exclusive interview with him], it was everywhere. I did feel a bit jealous. I was prevaricating because I didn’t know what to do with the story.
I wanted to write about it because I had all that funny stuff about being in New Orleans with him. The reason why I didn’t do the big story at the beginning, which I could have done, was I just thought, This needs a lot of thinking about. For instance, he would sweep these women off their feet and take them to Ohai and give them like the best two weeks of their lives, and then drop them back in LA and completely forget about them. He would freely admit that. That’s a lot to think about; that’s complicated.
He has said, “Looking back I can see that there are power dynamics that were off, but you don’t know what you don’t know.” I thought, Well, you really should have known. All of these thoughts were rattling around in my head, and then Armie phoned me and said, “I’ve given my story to someone else, it’s going to be in Air Mail tomorrow.”
I have to ask: Does Chris Mark know what’s in the book? What do you expect his reaction to be?
I don’t think he knows everything that’s in there. He knows the book’s coming out and he’s gonna know everything very soon. Clearly, he’s worried about the book coming out, but I think he also knows that he’s under investigation from all of these law enforcement agencies.
Obviously, as a human being, it’s not my favorite feeling in the world. But, what I always think to myself is that I couldn’t stop. Once I knew that he was doing things that were hurting people, there’s a conversation to be had about what’s going on inside his own head, but I had to carry on because I don’t want to be one of those people who stood back and did nothing.
I couldn’t stop imagining the flurries of text messages and phone calls that would be coming your way from him when this book came out.
There haven’t been any phone calls, I’m glad to say, but I tend not to pick up the phone anyway. Any correspondence I’m getting, I’m passing to the publishers. I’m trying to manage my stress levels and enjoy the publication week. I haven’t spoken to him personally for a while now, probably months and months. I’ve tried not to think about it. I know I did the right thing. I couldn’t have done it any other way, and I just have to go with it.
Part of what I really enjoyed about this book was getting the sense that we’re going along with you as you’re becoming more and more obsessed with this story and this man. You’re reading hundreds of pages of text messages and going to his hometown. What was the experience like of putting this together? I don’t know exactly how long you were working on it.
It was close to 3 years. It was completely all consuming. I talk a lot about my own psychological state in The Castle. The obsession of filling days with purpose was a very big part of it for me. I did think it was interesting that for the castle owner, like so many other people in the book, purpose is so important to them. He said to me at one point, the reason why he started inviting young people to his castle to do 101 Princesses was because his daughters had grown up and left home. He had an empty nest and he had no purpose in his life.
How much of that was true—I don’t know. But if you take that at face value, isn’t it interesting that our lives have collided because we both have this sort of dysfunctional relationship with purpose? Everybody else in the book is the same, and by no means is it just a male thing. I just think that’s very interesting, particularly as we’re living in a world where A.I. companies are trying to convince us that we don’t need to work.
And that we don’t enjoy work, which many people do to a certain extent.
Oh God, yeah. Even when I hate it, I love it. Personally speaking. At one point—I should have put this in the book actually, now that I’m thinking about it—one of the A.I. gurus said that people don’t enjoy making music. Unbelievable bullshit.
Is there a moment that stands out of putting this together where you’re like, I can’t believe that that just happened?
There’s lots of those moments and that’s why I love the book so much. When [Chris] starts sending me those ominous messages as I’m driving Joel. When I discovered the “bad baby” story, that’s another one. I suppose the other one is when I had that big revelation in part two when I discovered that I’m not the only person investigating [Chris]—there’s several agencies investigating him. I’m sort of making fun of myself when I compare myself to John Berendt writing Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, but it felt a little bit like that. For a story to crash into your life in this way and then to evolve in the way that it does is very rare.
The one that I would have guessed was when you’re talking to your Deep Throat source and he gives you such a good, classic movie line. Like, “You wouldn’t be wrong to look into this.”
[Laughs] Oh my God, and I have a billion questions. He had no idea of my capacity. He wanted it to be perfectly cinematic, like, “Yes, that would be an interesting thing to look into…” Thinking he could just disappear into the parking lot like in All the President’s Men. But no, I’m chasing after him!
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