Joe Bond’s excellent debut novel Hope House tells the story of a residential treatment home for wayward teenagers in 1980s Kentucky. The boys who inhabit the home are depicted lovingly, yet unflinchingly; there’s no denying their capacity for good or for ill. From an ensemble cast, it’s our evasive narrator AWOL (so named for his frequent, abortive escapes from Hope House) whose voice makes this work so memorable. Alongside steadfast staff member Mr. Watts, AWOL’s persistent presence unites these sparkling short chapters, welding vignettes together to form a dazzling coming of age story.
Joe Bond grew up around group homes and residential treatment programs in eastern Kentucky. He’s been a child-care worker, a copy editor, a security guard at a psychiatric hospital and a research librarian at a law firm in Times Square. For several years he covered mixed martial arts fighting for ESPN and various magazines and newspapers throughout the U.S., Brazil and Japan. He lives in New Orleans.
I understand Hope House grew out of your story “Damico,” which won the 2018 Winter Short Story Award from the Masters Review. I’m curious about the process of expansion, especially the moment when you realized you were writing a novel.
I started with poems. My son was two years old, and I didn’t have much time to write, so I would stand around playgrounds and write some lines. I started writing about these different kids that I had grown up around in boys’ homes. One of those poems was never really finished as a poem, but I went back to it, and it had a moment of some strength, so I built a story around it. That was “Damico.” By the time it got published, I was already writing about the other kids; I had a group coming together. Part of the prize for the contest I won was getting reviewed by agents. When I ended up with an agent, I was like, okay, now I’m writing a book.
You know, I spent years failing and getting rejections, writing about all the wrong stuff. I don’t know why I didn’t think to write about a boys’ home, because it was a world I knew really, really well. Once I started, so much material came rushing back to me.
You explored these experiences initially through poetry and fiction, but you don’t mention a memoir or essays. Why did you decide to fictionalize?
I’ve just always thought that fiction would get me closer to the truth of that world. I didn’t want to be beholden to facts. I wanted to create my own scenes and moments. None of the characters in the book are thinly-veiled kids I knew with changed names. But I do hope the characters come off as real and authentic. For me, that comes from knowing the world, so my imagination could base them on the sort of kids I knew and the sort of staff I knew. If the home comes alive, I hope it’s because of how memory and imagination work together to make that happen.
That said, I like the idea of verisimilitude, in a Tim O’Brien way. The Things They Carried was such a guidepost for me writing this book, how he deals with a big cast of characters, how he tells stories and then tells them again. I like the idea of people reading the book and wondering if something really happened. There was a lot of stuff that happened that I couldn’t put in the book because I thought it wouldn’t be believable, even though it was true. Still, probably the most ‘real’ character would be Mr. Watts. He is like my dad, but not my dad. Which my dad and I argued about. He’s pretty sure Watts is him when he was really young, running a group home.
Watts definitely stands out as a heroic figure. At the same time, his ending is not an entirely happy one, and he certainly has his struggles along the way. Through his successes and failures, what does he come to represent for the boys of Hope House?
I think he’s different things to different kids. To new peers, he’s just another guy who doesn’t get it. He’s not to be trusted, he has no idea what they’ve been through or where they’re from. To the kids that have been in Hope House, he’s much more on their side. Kids like Karvel are very suspicious of him through most of the book, but Peanut, who’s not as sophisticated as Karvel, even says “maybe we’re his kids,” when someone asks if Watts has kids. Watts doesn’t see himself as their father necessarily, but there are kids, the really young ones, who try to see him that way, no matter how many times he reminds them not to. Watts is being honest when he tells them “I can’t save you,” but I also think he forgets himself sometimes. He’s hopeful, a little bit of a dreamer. And his dreaming is at the root of a lot of his mistakes with Karvel and with the community. At the same time, the boys need someone who believes in them. They pick up on his dreaming, his hope, and it means something to them.
There’s this turn towards the end of the book, when AWOL becomes really preoccupied with recording others’ experiences, writing them down, telling them in a meaningful way. It creates an interesting effect, where we stay with one narrator, but it feels like a polyphonic novel. How did you land on that perspective, and what do you feel it opened up for you?
His voice came to me early. When I took the first poem and turned it into a story, his voice was there. I wasn’t sure who he was, though; I didn’t have a name for him immediately. The home is its own world, and so I really needed someone inside that world to tell the story. AWOL as a narrator is very knowing because he lived in Hope House for so long. That gave me first-person intimacy, while also being able to tell all the other boys’ stories, and the staff’s stories too. He could tell the story of the home itself. But through most of the book, he’s much more reluctant to tell his own story. It’s almost like in group: It takes time to open up. By the end of the book, he trusts the audience enough that he can tell more about his own life. Having AWOL as a narrator let me tell a much bigger story, while also remaining close to what was happening.
Group therapy session where peers share their ‘past histories’ are such a central part of the program at Hope House. They rely on a very radical vulnerability. Why is it often so hard for young men to open up in these ways, yet so rewarding and necessary for them to do so?
I think it’s risky for them to open up because they’re genuinely damaged. What they have come from has taught them to be tough, and any trust issues they have are completely earned. They’ve been let down by their parents, let down by their communities, let down by their country. They’ve let themselves down. The home gives them a chance to be around people like themselves. They’re still damaged, but they know everyone in that circle is damaged too. Over time, if you have a good group, like the group in this book, they begin to trust each other. Little bits are revealed and all of a sudden, you’re not alone anymore. Which is what community is: Commonality. A kid who sold crack in Louisville finds something in common with a kid from the country who burned his mom’s trailer down. Or a kid who’d been shot in his feet finds something in common with a treatment officer who also wears special shoes. The home is its own ecosystem, and the boys inside become their own tribe.
That tribe grows up together over the course of a nine-month, five-phase program, whose outline gives the novel its structure. This program is a very literal take on ‘how to be a man,’ ending as it does when a peer turns eighteen. I found myself thinking about the contemporary manosphere’s hollow promises. Why do you think that young men seem to so desperately want and need this sort of guidance to grow up?
Back then, the kids I knew were all committed through the state. This wasn’t their parents sending them off to military school; this was a judge signing an order to commit them into the Department of Juvenile Justice. So, almost none of them wanted guidance when they walked into the home. Not from the people who were about to give it to them. Maybe some of them had homes, but most didn’t. They had been through some type of care already, and had already been failed. Still, I do think that if you spend enough time with a kid and genuinely care about him, like the people in this book do, then that kid can reveal to you how lost they really are.
You know, I think that teenage boys are the worst decision makers in the universe. Evidence suggests they have poor impulse control, they’re very reckless, they can’t weigh consequences. Girls, in general, develop some skills a little more quickly; boys don’t develop those executive functioning skills until their mid-twenties. They can screw up their lives well before their brains are fully developed. Now put that kid in a situation when he’s fifteen years-old, his dad’s in prison, his mom’s struggling to get by, he’s going to a poor school, and his environment is dangerous. It’d be a miracle if he doesn’t mess up. A lot of teenaged boys in those situations need help, and they’re gonna go look for it. I remember reading an interview with Ed Burns, who co-created The Wire with David Simon. Ed was a schoolteacher in Baltimore, and he said something to the effect of “all kids are going to get an education. The question is, where are they going to get it?” I feel like that is true today. The kids are going to learn stuff. What are they gonna learn? Who’s gonna teach them?
This has been a male-heavy conversation, but there are two important women who work in the house: Ms. Elwell and Ms. Matewan. Both struggle in different ways before becoming indispensable members of the institutional team. What role do you see these female characters play in a masculine environment?
Well, they care about the boys, and the boys know it. Ms. Elwell is the less affectionate one. She’s old enough to be a grandmother, but she’s not very grandmotherly. She’s the cook, and she’s a terrible cook, but she’s consistent. She’s consistently terrible. She’s there every morning. You can’t fire her; there’s no way to get rid of her. These kids come from enormously unstable lives, and here’s this stabilizing force. It means something.
Ms. Matewan is more affectionate, able to actually squeeze a kid’s hand or put an arm around them. But she brings that same consistency in my mind. The fact that she has a disability doesn’t matter to the kids. They don’t see her in those terms. They see in terms of, is this person steady? Is she reliable? Do I know what to expect from her? I vaguely remember a counselor at a home when I was really little; mostly I remember my dad telling stories about her. She was loosely the inspiration for Ms. Matewan. She would hug the kids occasionally. Those real moments of affection are so few and far between in a home. It was information gathering for her, too; she wrap her arm around a kid and it would be genuine, but it would also tell her which kids would let themselves be hugged. It was an easy way for her to find out what the kids weren’t saying. Ms. Matewan has that level of intelligence too, in this book. She was one of my favorite characters to write.
I don’t know if you’re too superstitious to discuss, but I do want to ask if you have a new project underway as Hope House makes its way into the world.
My process with this book took several years. I would write and send off pages to my agent, so all through revision, I had these intervals where I could work on other stuff. Right now, I’m working on a book about male friendship. It’s not a spin-off of Hope House, but if you took two outcasts who could have grown up in a home like this and let them be a train wreck together, that’s the book I’m trying to write now.
I look forward to reading it. Thank you for taking the time to sit for this conversation, Joe.
Thanks so much, Adam.
FICTION
Hope House
By Joe Bond
Hub City Press
Published May 26, 2026
Southern Review of Books 