Habash was drawn to both elements of the sport, and he wanted to see if he could create a controlled narrative to match the dedication of a wrestler facing the end of his career. Wrestling demands an uncommon level of physical and mental control from its participants, and opportunities to compete beyond college-barring the Olympics-are basically nil. Stephen Florida follows the senior-year season of its titular character, a wrestler at the fictional Oregsburg College in North Dakota.
“I go into writing as a way of finding things out, because I don’t always know where it’s going.” “If I’m writing about somebody who has a lot of the same things with me in my life, I will just get tired of writing about it,” he tells Paste by phone.
But Habash says there’s no other way he could have made it through the years-long process of writing the book. It’s an unusual decision for a first-time novelist-all the more so considering that the resulting book, an immersive trip through the mind of a monomaniacal “Division IV” college wrestler, is written in the confident manner of authors who mask their all-too-familiar secrets. When Gabe Habash set out to write his debut novel, Stephen Florida, he knew one thing for certain: he wanted to write about what he didn’t know.
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