It’s early on a Wednesday morning, and Jeff Hobbs, bestselling author and stay-at-home dad, is sitting in the family room of his “old beater” house in Los Angeles, dressed in a gray Oregon Track T-shirt, talking about the art of juggling child-rearing and a writing career.
“I don’t know if Mr. Mom is an offensive term,” Hobbs says via Skype. “I guess it’s archaic, but I kind of am with my kids pretty much all the time.” Most days, he gets up at 4:30 a.m. to write at the family dining table, when, he says, it’s dark and cold and nobody is emailing.
That table is where Hobbs, 40, wrote Show Them You’re Good: A Portrait of Boys in the City of Angels the Year Before College. Out in August from Scribner, it covers about a year in the life of a group of senior boys at two Los Angeles schools as they navigate their social and academic lives and work toward a common goal: getting into college.
“I wanted to write about kids living through their senior year, as they apply to college and deal with that process and its outcomes, and all the nonsense in between,” Hobbs says. As for why he focused on boys: “I felt like the emotional lives of boys are minimized in what’s still a machismo culture.” He takes a beat and adds, “I also thought an adult male probing the emotional lives of teenage girls might not go over well with their parents.”
Hobbs is the author of two previous books: the 2007 novel The Tourists, about a man who seduces both halves of a couple (“I don’t recommend it,” he says of his debut), and the 2014 nonfiction book The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League. The latter explores race, class, economic disparity, and maleness—subjects that Hobbs revisits in Show Them You’re Good.
At the heart of Show Them You’re Good are four students, two from Beverly Hills High School and two from Ánimo Pat Brown Charter High School (which is in a neighborhood called Florence-Firestone, north of Compton). From Beverly Hills High, there’s Owen, the well-off son of Christopher Lloyd, co-creator of the TV show Modern Family, and Jon, a Chinese Jewish kid whose immigrant mother moved the family to a small apartment in Beverly Hills so that Jon could have access to a good school. From Ánimo Pat Brown, there’s Carlos, a son of undocumented workers who’s trying to secure Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals protection, and Tío, an aspiring engineer whose father is an alcoholic. “They’re all super cool,” Hobbs says of the boys, whom he followed from August 2016 to June 2017 and still stays in contact with.
Born and raised in Pennsylvania, Hobbs says his own high school experience was “pretty unremarkable”—he got good grades, he ran track—and that going back to high school to do research was in no way a return to the glory days. “I just felt old,” he says with a smirk.
Developing a rapport with his young subjects took some time. “I’m an awkward guy, so the first couple of meetings were stilted,” says Hobbs, who has a tendency to pause often when he talks, giving his speech a unique halting rhythm. Pretty soon, though, he was immersed in the teens’ daily dramas.
“I spent a lot of time in their homes, I went to family dinners, and to dances and proms,” Hobbs recalls. “I was running around Los Angeles a lot, and it’s weird to tell your kids that you won’t be home for Friday night dinner because you’re going to a Halloween dance at a high school in South L.A., but, you know, my kids know what I do.”
Hobbs’s kids, now ages six and 10, sometimes joined him on his expeditions. They played while he conducted interviews. “It happened frequently that year,” he says. “It worked out. I think it was nice for the boys to get a glimpse into my life, too.”
Show Them You’re Good shows its quartet of high schoolers striving to get good grades, filling out blizzards of college application and financial aid forms, and dealing with family issues, including a sick parent (Owen) and an unstable living situation (Tío). Readers get to root for them as they forge their futures.
“This is a book that crosses over cultures, class, and race, and that’s at the heart of what Jeff Hobbs is looking to bring to the world,” says Hobbs’s agent, David Black at the David Black Literary Agency.
Colin Harrison, Hobbs’s editor and the v-p and editor-in-chief of Scribner, adds, “Line by line, Jeff is just a lovely writer. He’s careful and slow in the making of prose, and it shows. The guy couldn’t write a bad sentence.”
Nonfiction writing didn’t always interest Hobbs. “I stumbled into it when my friend Rob Peace died,” he says. Peace was Hobbs’s roommate at Yale, and after the two graduated in 2002, Peace returned to his hometown in New Jersey and began selling drugs, which led to his 2011 murder by a drug dealer. Hobbs struggled to make sense of the tragedy and, at the suggestion of his wife, began writing a book about Peace. The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace became a bestseller. There are currently 250,000 copies in circulation, across print and e-book formats, according to Scribner, and the book is being adapted into a movie. Hobbs’s wife, Rebecca Hobbs, is a film and TV producer and is producing the film with Training Day director Antoine Fuqua.
“I always felt like this story needed to be told to help people walk in someone else’s shoes,” Rebecca says. “It explores this idea that in order to make it in America you have to leave behind what you came from, and how unacceptable that could be.”
Hobbs remains keenly interested in examining people’s lives and understanding their motives. His next book is about kids in juvenile halls and detention centers. “I’m not good at much, but I’m pretty good at asking questions,” he says. “And I’m really good at listening.”
As a bright morning light filters in through his living room window, Hobbs hears his kids rousing in the next room. It’s time to make breakfast and maybe chat with his daughter about the pet rats she wants to buy. (“I’m skeptical,” he says.) Then it’s a full day of dad duty. And the next morning, before the sun comes up, it’s back to writing.
“Talking to someone that no one has heard of, that isn’t famous, and somehow helping their story become part of a reader’s story—that’s pretty neat,” Hobbs says.
Bonus Link:
— Jeff Hobbs in His Own Words
This piece was produced in partnership with Publishers Weekly.
