“It’s as if the town crouched and time stepped over it,” the actress Jenny Slate told Ben Shattuck the first time she visited his hometown of South Dartmouth, in Massachusetts, in 2019. Six years later, the couple, who married in 2021, live there with their four-year-old daughter, Ida, in an old dance hall that Shattuck’s great-grandfather converted into a family home nearly a century ago. A small neighborhood on the state’s southern coast, South Dartmouth is one of the last enclaves of old New England. The Shattucks have lived there for generations, keeping alive the traditions of contra dancing and hay baling even as Target and Trader Joe’s sprang up around them.
“There’s a real cozy sense of home here,” says Shattuck, whose short story “The History of Sound,” a W.W. I–era portrayal of a love affair between two men, won a Pushcart Prize in 2019. A film adaptation of that story written by Shattuck and starring Paul Mescal (Normal People, Gladiator II) and Josh O’Connor (The Crown, Challengers)—which earned a nomination for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year—arrives in theaters this Friday.
Shattuck says that South Dartmouth remains a sanctuary from all this commotion. “There’s a sense that Hollywood and the publishing world, whatever exists out there, is like a satellite orbiting our place.”
Though only 40 miles from Providence, Rhode Island, and 60 from Boston, South Dartmouth has always felt, to Shattuck, like its own world, frozen in a bygone era. “I grew up fishing and hunting and digging for quahogs and clams,” says the 41-year-old, whose father was a landscape painter and mother a bird-watcher.
At 15, Shattuck left home to attend Deerfield Academy, an exclusive boarding school in western Massachusetts. He went on to Cornell University, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in fine arts in 2008. He then moved to New York City, where he worked a variety of disparate jobs—first at a bird-conservation project in Prospect Park, then at an advertising firm on the Upper East Side, and, finally, as a painter, studying under Norway’s Odd Nerdrum. Shattuck later moved to California, where he worked as a field assistant at the Hastings Natural History Reservation, in Carmel Valley, and then at McSweeney’s, Dave Eggers’s San Francisco–based publishing house.
In the evenings, Shattuck says, “I had nothing to do … except read and write short stories.” He used the short stories to apply to grad schools, and in 2012 he was accepted into the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop. While there, he felt the pull of his hometown and its history more strongly than ever. “I’d always try to write stuff in contemporary, snappy, Sally Rooney–esque prose,” he says, “and then by page two, someone would be picking up a lantern and walking to a horse.”
A part of Shattuck always remained in South Dartmouth, and in 2019, more than 20 years after he first left, he moved back into his childhood home and—with his brother—bought the town’s historic general store, Davoll’s, which was established in 1793.
In some ways, Shattuck believes his childhood in South Dartmouth made it easier for him to step back into history in his writing. Many of the experiences he had growing up could have taken place a century ago, “like the urgency to get in hay before it rains,” he says, “or how you have to wait quietly on a really cold day to shoot a duck.”
After years of struggling to get published—during which time he taught at Iowa, spent a semester teaching in New Zealand, and co-founded the Cuttyhunk Island Writers’ Residency, off the coast of Cape Cod—“The History of Sound” was published in The Common, Amherst College’s literary magazine, in 2018. The story follows two young men, Lionel (played by Mescal in the film) and David (played by O’Connor), who meet in 1917 while attending the Boston Music Conservatory and who, after being separated by war, relationships, and geography, continue to be drawn to each other by the memory of their brief but intense time together.
“Here’s a story in which you’d expect shame and violence to play a big role, and it just doesn’t,” Shattuck says. “It’s about how the fear that the person you loved when you were 20 or 21 is really the deepest, best love that you’ve ever felt. And because of circumstances, you decided that you wanted to not stay with that person … but you don’t know it’s the wrong decision until you’re seventysomething and you receive some distant memory of the past, and it hits you in the gut and punctures your whole identity.”
The story caught the attention of the production company End Cue, which bought the rights in 2019 and agreed to let Shattuck write the screenplay. Wanting to establish himself as a book writer first, Shattuck released his first collection of nonfiction essays, Six Walks: In the Footsteps of Henry David Thoreau, in 2022. “It was really the film that catalyzed the collection,” he says. When the film began shooting in New Jersey in 2024, Shattuck visited six times, which he recalls as being “a disorienting but astronomically exciting experience.... Here are the characters I invented, that are saying the words that I invented, and [in] the place [I] thought about.”
Back in South Dartmouth, Shattuck is currently working on more screenplays as well as his first novel from the second floor of Davoll’s—which has the best Wi-Fi in town. “We live like sort of bohemians in the day,” he says of life there with Slate and Ida. And yet, despite his deep roots in South Dartmouth, the family is preparing to move to New York City—at least for a little while. “Personally,” Shattuck says, “the idea of not driving and having to put a toddler in a car seat is so thrilling.”
The History of Sound will be released in theaters on September 12
Jeanne Malle is a Junior Editor at Air Mail
