'People want to be good': Talking books, kids and hope with Will Leitch

Plus: Win a free copy of Will's book LLOYD McNEIL'S LAST RIDE!

May 23, 2025

Hey friends! I’ve got a TV show and (soon) a book out in the world, and I’d love for you to check ‘em out. Watch “Home Turn,” my show with NASCAR Studios, right here. And prepare for the arrival of IRON IN THE BLOOD, the story of the Alabama-Auburn rivalry, dropping Aug. 26. More details here, pre-order below.

Pre-order IRON IN THE BLOOD here

“My general attitude about the world is, I think people want to be good. People are not always good. They do not always act correctly. They don't always make good decisions. But I do think people are trying. And I like to write about people that are trying, and I don't have a cynical view of the world.”

Will Leitch is an Athens, Ga.-based sportswriter, a pundit, a movie critic and a novelist, creator of the late lamented website Deadspin and a sharp cultural commentator across a range of online and print publications for 20 years now. He’s always a reliable read for me to get a sense of both baseball and non-MCU movies. (You should subscribe to his newsletter if you’re not already.)

Now, he’s deep into writing novels, and the stories he creates are an extension of his worldview of optimistic realism — in other words, yes, there’s a whole lot of hot garbage in the world, but most of us are trying, in our own way, to fight against that fetid tide. His latest, LLOYD McNEIL’S LAST RIDE, published just this week, is a deep, thoughtful, heartbreaking and ultimately inspiring look at what a father will do to make sure his son stays on the right path, long after the father is gone.

Lloyd McNeil is a police officer in Atlanta, a job that’s not as tough as non-cops seem to think it is, but a hell of a challenge in ways that outsiders can’t even imagine. Just before the book begins, he’s received devastating news — he has a brain tumor, and only has months, maybe weeks, to live.

So when the book opens, we find Lloyd sitting on the hood of his cruiser, staring up at the brutalist majesty that is Spaghetti Junction — the massive intersection where Interstate 85 and 285 join together just north of Atlanta. And in that moment, an eyesore and a daily headache becomes something beautiful.

“One of the things that I was trying to hit on in a general sense of the book is the idea of what it would feel like when suddenly, out of nowhere, your entire world changes. You learn that not only are you going to die, you're going to die in a pretty short amount of time,” Will told me recently. “Something as banal and utilitarian as Spaghetti Junction can actually have like an incredible beauty if you kind of step back from it.”

Divorced and with few friends, Lloyd doesn’t have much in his life, but he does have a young son, Bishop, whom he loves with his whole heart. And so the book proceeds on two tracks: One, how Lloyd plans to provide for Bish once he’s gone, and two, how Lloyd plans to teach Bish a lifetime’s worth of lessons in just a few short months. Throughout the book, Lloyd offers up “gentle edicts” for Bishop in separate chapters — lessons on everything from how to shave to how to drive stick to how to prepare for the eventuality of your own demise.

“It's really about being a parent and trying to convey to your children to make the world better for them,” Will says. “It's the American dream, right? To have a better place for your kids than you have for yourself. And Lloyd realizes very quickly, Wow, I've wasted too much time. I only have so much time. I have to get this across.”

As for the larger story — well, to tell too much of that would spoil it, but put it this way: once Lloyd realizes that children of officers killed in the line of duty are provided for throughout the rest of their days, Lloyd starts to scheme up ways to make that happen. Turns out, killing yourself on the job — while not taking others with you, among other complications — is surprisingly hard to do.

Lloyd’s occupation means this book comes freighted with preconceptions and expectations that are, honestly, pretty far off the mark. “It's very strange because when you say you're writing a book about a cop, everyone's like, Oh, it's a cop book. Is it like a mystery? Is it like a crime thriller?” Will says. “No, it's just about a cop, who has, like, other shit going on in his life.”

For Will, Lloyd’s occupation doesn’t define him, doesn’t encompass him. “One thing of the things I heard from a lot of the police officers I talked to, and their families,” he says, “was, It would be kind of nice for people to know is that we are not, in fact, like, baseless masked thugs that have no families and no interior lives.”

More to the point, Will wanted to show that we’re not all just our resume and our demographics. “I think if you think all cops are bastards, for the record, I think that you're wrong, and I need to be able to convince you that this is a human being that is worthy of your time,” he says. “If you think all cops are faultless, and always on the right side, I also think that you are wrong about that, and I need you to be able to read and see where this person's coming from, too.”

That nuance of vision is something that runs through all of Will’s work. “When I'm actually out in the real world, I meet people that I disagree with, people that stand for things or advocate for things that I may even personally find quite abhorrent,” he says. “I don't find that nihilism and brutality and zero-sum game that we see that's kind of taken over a large part of American culture right now. I don't see that in my daily life. I only see it when I'm online.”

And here’s where we get deep, and philosophical. As a guy who spends a significant part of his daily life online, Will sees up close what social media breeds in ourselves and each other.

“In a lot of ways, I find cynicism and fatalism kind of empty and even sort of easy. I think the default mode, when you see bad things happening in the world, is to go, Well, yep, told you life sucks. Told you, people are terrible. And I find it, obviously it's defeatist, but I also, I find a certain smugness to it,” he says.

“At a certain level, yes, I am fully aware that life is very difficult. And there's a lot of bad things that happen in the world. Bad things have happened to me. Bad things have happened to you. Bad things have happened to everyone in the world. There's a certain protective coating of cynicism that I think in a social media age has become pervasive and almost kind of contagious, the idea that it's cool to think things are bad.”

“For me, the real courage is like, is being willing to be like, You know what? I might get hurt,” he says. “I might look like a fool for thinking that things are gonna be all right. But you know what? I'm gonna do that anyway.”

Pick up a copy of LLOYD McNEIL’S LAST RIDE at the Flashlight & A Biscuit bookshop, or wherever you buy your books. It’s great.

Win a free copy of LLOYD McNEIL’S LAST RIDE!

Would you like a free copy of Will’s book? Would you like that very copy pictured above at the PGA Championship last week? Sure you would! I’ll do a random drawing, and you can enter the drawing multiple ways:

“Like” this post up there at the top: 1 entry
“Share” this post using the link or via social media: 1 entry
Comment below with one bit of advice you’d give the next generation: 2 entries

And that’s it! Good luck! More giveaways coming soon!

Song of the Week: “Windfall,” Son Volt

As is our way, we give our guest the opportunity to pick the song of the week, and here’s Will’s selection for the right music to use on a road trip:

“I'm a Midwesterner, and I will always think in Midwestern terms, so to me, Son Volt is my ultimate ‘get on the open road’ music. There's something about Trace in particular, or even Straightaways. Those albums are the albums that I put on that represent to me an abandoned old country road where you're driving and you don't see any other cars for 10 miles. ‘Windfall’ would probably be the song.

“The first thing I do every time I go home, back to rural Illinois, is, I put on Son Volt, every single time. If you’re doing an open-road thing, you’re either trying to think of home, or trying to think of getting away from home. That’s what Son Volt represents to me.”

“Windfall” and all our selections are always available at the official Flashlight & A Biscuit playlist on Spotify, still tariff-free:

Stunt Food of the Week: The St. Louis Slinger Dog

We’ll send off Will, a St. Louis Cardinals fan who once wrote a book tangentially about the Birds, with a Stunt Food selection from his own home stadium. Presenting The Slinger Dog, an all-beef hot dog covered with — hold on — hash browns, taco meat and two sunny-side-up fried eggs. Total weight: about a third of a pound. Mother of God.

Here’s what it looks like in the wild:

Woof. Well. With that in mind, we must ask …

The first book tour announcement!

We’ll be hammering you with much more of this in the future, but I’m happy to announce our first book tour date for IRON IN THE BLOOD: Aug. 26, pub day, at the esteemed Alabama Booksmith bookstore in Birmingham. Full details here! Come hang if you’re anywhere near the area!

That’ll do it for this week, friends. Have a great holiday weekend, and we’ll catch you right back here next week …

—Jay
Land Cat, Georgia