Nothing is more exposing than going on reality TV, though writing a book about it might be a good contender. For Stephen Fishbach, Escape! is another act of vulnerability. The former reality TV contestant has appeared on Survivor twice, first in 2009 and then was voted back onto the show in 2015. In addition, Fishbach has worked on the network side of television, gaining insight into how stories are shaped long before they reach the screen.
Those experiences fuel his debut novel, a sharp and entertaining exploration of identity, control, and storytelling. Escape! follows a former reality show winner who returns for another shot at the game alongside a disgraced producer seeking redemption of her own. As their stories collide, Fishbach uses the mechanics of reality TV to examine how people construct versions of themselves, how easily those versions can slip out of their control, and whether you can tell the story yourself.
In this interview with Pop Heist, Fishbach reflects on vulnerability, authorship, and the strange freedom that comes from finally controlling the narrative.
Grace Leeder: Stephen, you wrote a book! How are you feeling?
Stephen Fishbach: One of the wonderful things about this book has been seeing the community and Survivor fans embrace it and order it and be enthusiastic for it. It’s also scary. Maybe I shouldn’t be putting that in the interview. [Laughs] Every book, some people like it and some people don’t like it as much. And so, the thought that there are these people out there who have ordered literally multiple copies without even knowing if they like one copy is a little nerve wracking for me.
So much of this book feels drawn from your time on reality TV, and you say as much in the introduction. At the time, I assume that was the most public thing you’d ever done. Now it's all these years later and you’re sort of putting yourself out there again.
Yeah, I was always more of a private person. When I was cast, and I’m sure nobody believes this now, but I was excited about the idea of playing this amazing game but I did not want to be on television. That was not of interest, and ultimately, it went great. I mean, the TV aspect was very fun. At least for the first time. The second time was less fun. But yeah, definitely the most public thing I’d ever done.
And then yeah, it feels very vulnerable. Especially with something like this. When you go on Survivor, people are insulting the way you look or the way you act or picking up on the weird idiosyncrasies of who you are, but in some ways, that’s less intimate than the work you do. Like, “okay, I’m goofy and I run weird,” I don’t really care. What can I do about the way my nose looks? But with the work, this is something I’ve been working so hard on. And then asking people to spend money on it and hoping they like it — it is nerve wracking. I hope people do like it. I hope it resonates with our little community, because hopefully it deals with themes that are of interest to them.
I have read it and I think it’s very fun, but also very compelling. I’ve heard you talk about not having read anything like this book before you wrote it. Can you speak to that?
Yeah, so there’s the plot synopsis element, which is this has-been reality TV contestant goes back on a show and faces off against this reality TV producer who is coming off her own disgrace. They’re both sort of looking for redemption as they both kind of try to control the narrative of this show. So of course, it’s very much about storytelling. It’s about people trying to live up to their ideal versions of themselves. People create fictional versions of themselves that then they can never really live up to, which I hope is a contemporary theme that resonates beyond reality TV. It also wrestles with some of the gray moral areas in this culture that I haven’t really seen addressed yet.
You used the word "fun," and more than anything, I wanted it to be fun. Because I feel like everyone is stressed and overwhelmed and miserable at the moment and the world is falling apart. So when you’re reading, it should be enjoyable. It should be something that’s fun.
Was there a first moment where you envisioned this book?
I was writing a book about 20-somethings in New York media, which I feel like every 20-something in the New York media landscape needs to write. And at some point I recognized that I had access to this world that I really hadn’t seen before depicted in fiction in a way that I felt was true to the real texture of it. I kind of wanted to capture that, and also just explore the producer side of it. That was sort of my initial hook of interest. What are the producers experiencing out there? They are these amazing storytellers. They are scripting out three act plots out of the messy human experience in the jungle. What a fascinating enterprise. So I initially wrote a whole book from the producer’s perspective, and then it was only when I went back to it and got my MFA that I really realized that, perhaps quite stupidly, that what I could bring was the player’s perspective.
I think that’s the best part of the book, in my opinion, in that we get to see both sides of the camera and their perspective in the story. You’ve also been involved in the behind-the-scenes of television in that way.
I mean, I’ve never picked up a camera but I’ve been on the network side. I’ve never filmed a reality show, but I’ve seen the thinking and planning that goes into these. There’s one part in the book where you see the story Bible for the show and that really happens. They literally script out what is meant to happen on the show. I have written story Bibles. I have read the synopsis of what is supposed to happen in every episode of the show. I have scripted your lives in advance, type of thing. Of course, there’s some flexibility, but that’s the outline you pitch the network.
You were very clear in the introduction of the book to say that Escape! is not Survivor. You must have weighed that decision heavily, even whether to just have Escape! be the fictional version of the show that so many of us watched you on.
I’ve seen some people say that they read the book wanting it to be about Survivor. But it’s not about Survivor. On a moral level, I didn’t want to be selling out or sticking it to Jeff Probst. And from a broader level, I wanted it to be about reality TV. I didn’t want this to be a one-to-one. I wanted someone addressing this whole industry and the things that go on inside of it. There is a question about “Why read a book about reality TV when you could just watch one?” That’s always the question. “What am I bringing to it that you’re not just getting on TV?” I think that there’s an illusion to it all. The contestants are telling you what they’re thinking and giving their inside thoughts. I hope this book shows that perspective is not unvarnished. That perspective has the illusion of being authentic and true but is actually the product of overthinking from the contestants. The contestants striving to be something and then, also prompting from the producers.
The thing that resonates the most with me about the book is the way it’s exploring identity, especially through the lens of reality TV. This idea that you could go on a show that opens these questions of who you are perceived to be, who you want to be, and who you might be portrayed as.
That’s the central theme of the book. I mean, certainly for Kent and Miriam, the characters in the book. Kent is someone who has been a reality show winner who has sort of this idealized self that in real life, he just can’t live up to. And so there is this question of “who am I?” “I want to be this person, but how do I achieve that?” His whole goal is trying to achieve this manufactured construct.
And then with Miriam, you see her being molded into a construct. Kent has this passage about how he’s seen so many times, that people open themselves up to an experience and then become molded into cartoons and caricatures. I certainly found that that happened to me. I emerged more nerd than I went in. I’ve always been nerdy but I definitely felt myself turning more into a cartoon just from having been on the show. And you’re playing it up. They’re asking you questions. I’ve always being asked to give a Shakespeare reference. “Does this remind you of Macbeth at all?” So you just sort of become that persona a bit.
It’s so interesting because in many ways, going on reality TV both creates extremely authentic and inauthentic versions of oneself.
That’s exactly it. It’s kind of funny, right? There is this absurdity to the disconnect, where you’re surviving in the wilderness and lying to people’s faces, but there’s a TV show and it’s a camera and will be on cable. There’s something very bathos, that disconnect.
Well they say it brings out the truest version of yourself.
It’s also the version of you that you’re being told you are. I hope that’s clear with Miriam. She’s really forced into this cookie cutter version that’s not herself at all, and then how she responds to that. We’re all sort of messy humans but I also think there’s an inherent nature for all of us. We are kind of shaping ourselves. We’re always saying like “this is who I am” or “I am this type of person.” And so I think being on reality TV just magnifies that.
I am sure one of the fun things was getting to design a reality TV show, though I imagine you had to balance the idea of it being believable as a show while fitting the themes of your book. How was the process of designing the reality show concept?
It was super hard! For a lot of reasons. One thing that’s hard is not wanting there to be too much stuff happening. I didn’t want it to feel like there was this thing and then this thing and this thing. I didn’t want the characters to be responding to things that are happening so much as driving the action themselves. So that was challenging, especially when you already have a producer manipulating them. Ultimately, this book is about characters making decisions and exploring actions. But if they’re constantly being forced this way, that doesn’t feel as authentic or interesting for the character. So initially, it was a really bare bones reality show, but then it also felt like there wasn’t enough structure for them to react against. And so I kept having to add in little things. It’s sort of like baking.
Like first of all, if the prize money is there out of the gate, why don’t they just leave immediately? So I added that the money comes in drips and drabs. But then, what if someone doesn’t wait until the end? And so on. So I was creating structure. But then the structure also just comes in wanting these set pieces, which I really enjoyed writing. And hopefully, they are fun to read. So adding in a challenge, well now there has to be more than one. And it sort of spiraled from there.
It does feel like a show that many of us would watch.
And initially it was just Endure, but that ended up not feeling as thematically rich as the idea of Escape! I went to a movie with a friend and had an epiphany moment. The movie was about these people trying to escape an island and I thought, “oh, this is what this is about.” But it also plays into the theme of trying to get away from yourself and escaping into something new. I feel like that’s the reason people go on reality shows and then that’s the reason people go off reality shows. There’s just a constant flight from yourself about how you reckon with who you really are.
That feels like the real crux of the book. Do you think this book helped you figure out who you are?
I’ll say, that writing or talking about the book has made me more real. Whenever I write, I rely on other people to tell me what the themes are. And then I go back and think about those. Then I can work those themes into the book a little. I feel like if it’s too top down when you are writing about those themes, it can become a little too force fed. But it became very clear early in this process that that’s what this is about. And so of course, I was thinking about who I am. “What’s my identity?” And wanting to not just be the reality TV guy, but also a person of substance.
Even just recently, in being interviewed about the book, I have recognized how much of myself has become the reality contestant. I’m eager to please and I want to play along. You know, going where the cameras want me to go. And that’s been a challenge for me to say, “No, what do I want this book to be about?” That was always really hard, especially writing. I asked for a lot of advice from other reality contestants and a lot of them had ideas about what it should be. In some cases, I changed too much. I was creating a book according to somebody else's vision of what it should be. Maybe it was a great idea, but it wasn’t authentic to me. So I had to rediscover my voice. And honestly, yes, I guess that’s what it’s about. Finding myself through this whole process.
You talk about finding yourself in both Kent and Miriam. How difficult was it for you, when creating any character in the book, for them to feel authentic to people we’ve seen on a reality show, while also feeling like their own person?
I wanted it to be more archetypal rather than someone you saw on Survivor. In some ways, that’s a gift that this media casts in archetypes. You can create this pure expression of the archetype, and then maybe complicate that later. But when you first meet them, they’re sort of a two dimensional character. And there are a lot of characters in the book, between the cast and the crew, so I needed that. Hopefully the reader is not overwhelmed. So of course I was thinking of reality TV contestants that I’ve seen, though not always from Survivor. But I was really trying to distill their essence. As the plot acted on them and they acted on other characters, you can kind of broaden them to create more depth. And you know, some of them not be as deep. Not every character in a book is five dimensional.
I think this book will surely resonate with the reality TV world, but I’m sure you are hoping it might even reach beyond that universe. How did you go about balancing that?
I wanted it to be satire meets jungle thriller, which is already a hedgehog of genres that sort of stood on its own. Reality TV is the setting and I wanted it to appeal to people who are interested in that world, but ultimately, the theme is fundamental. I have a vision of myself but I am not in control of my own story. How do I take control of it? And I feel like that is a theme that will resonate for everybody right now. Some people might be turned off by reality tv, if they think it’s a frivolous medium, but I wanted to write something that showed the depth of the medium. I wanted to show the real human experience of both the contestants and the producers, hopefully to add some complexity to people’s perception of the genre.
Escape! is available in bookstores now. You can follow Stephen Fishbach on Instagram and Bluesky.
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