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There is a particular quality to the nostalgia for the nineteen-nineties, a decade that now feels less like a distinct era than the last long, analog afternoon before the digital dawn. It was a time of landline telephones and their tangled cords, of messages left on answering machines, of painstakingly curated mixtapes on cassette, their sequences laden with unspoken meaning.
It was, as the federal trial judge and debut novelist Thomas Cullen describes it, “a good year,” a time when formative experiences felt both monumental and intensely private, unmediated by the public performance of social media. This specific, pre-wired moment is the atmospheric setting for Cullen’s novel, “Charlie Man,” a coming-of-age story that suggests the most compelling narratives are often found by looking in the rearview mirror.
At first glance, Thomas Cullen seems an unlikely candidate to pen a novel categorized as “young adult.” A former U.S. Attorney, now a federal judge in Virginia, his day-to-day existence is steeped in the sober, high-stakes world of legal opinions and courtroom decorum—a world of unflappable prose and binding precedent.
Yet, he tells me the transition from the bench to the world of fiction was less a departure than a return. “My first love is writing,” he admits. Before his judicial appointment, Cullen was a frequent author of op-eds on public policy and law, a practice he had to abandon upon taking the bench. “I can no longer opine on current events and politics,” he said. “I needed an outlet.”
The result is “Charlie Man,” a novel that opens in the humid Richmond air of late August, 1994. The protagonist, Charlie Stewart, is entering his senior year at the fictional St. Mark’s Episcopal School, an elite, all-boys institution that hums with the twin engines of tradition and pressure.
Charlie is, in his creator’s words, “a relatively undistinguished mediocre student,” a middling athlete still reeling from the death of his father. He is anxious and quietly depressed, but pins his hopes for the year on the familiar pillars of adolescence: rekindling a romance with his ex-girlfriend, Katie Hendricks; surviving football and track; and, above all, securing admission to a prestigious state university.
Judge Cullen is candid about the adage that first novels are often thinly veiled autobiography. “Some of what Charlie experienced is vaguely familiar to the author,” he concedes. Having attended a private co-ed school in Richmond himself, he drew from a well of personal memory to construct the world of St. Mark’s and its particular ecosystem of class, loyalty, and fraught masculinity. The characters, he notes, are not “dead ringers” but “composites of folks that I encountered during those years.”
Richmond itself, specifically the collection of neighborhoods known as the “near West End,” becomes a crucial, shaping force. Cullen speaks of it with a novelist’s ambition, citing Pat Conroy as an inspiration for creating a sense of place so vivid “you can hear it, you can see it, you can smell the brackish water.” He wanted to conjure a setting that would feel intimately familiar to those who grew up there, and entirely imaginable to those who have not.
The novel delves into the unique pressures of that time and place—the “cutthroat competitiveness of academics,” the athletic “arms race,” and the looming anxiety that lurks just behind the bravado. It’s a landscape Cullen remembers well, acknowledging a certain “familiarity of that experience for the author.” Yet, he astutely observes that for all the stress of a nineties adolescence, the intensity has only magnified for young people today.
Perhaps the most compelling connection is the one between Cullen the judge and Cullen the novelist. Non-lawyers, he suggests, might not appreciate “how much writing we do as part of our day-to-day existence.” While most of it is “incredibly dry and boring,” he was mentored by those who stressed the importance of accessible prose. “As a lawyer and now as a judge, when we write legal opinions… I want this to read like a newspaper article,” he explains.
The goal is to take a complex set of facts and “craft a narrative that hooks the reader,” using short, declarative sentences and avoiding legalese. This discipline, of finding the story within the statutes, of making the arcane accessible, provided an unlikely but effective apprenticeship for fiction.
While his publisher has labeled “Charlie Man” as YA, Cullen, along with early readers like the novelist and former judge Martin Clark, sees a broader audience. It’s a book for those who remember what it was like to navigate teenage heartbreak and ambition in the age of CDs and handwritten letters. It has a little bit of an American Graffiti for the nineties feel. It’s a story about a boy’s resilience, but it’s also a cultural time capsule.
Judge Cullen, who avoids social media for reasons of judicial propriety, seems quietly pleased, and a little amused, by the reaction from his inner circle. “I think folks are a little bit shocked that the Straight Laced Judge has written a YA novel with some of these themes and these characters,” he says. The shock gives way to enjoyment. In the end, the novel is an act of reclamation.
It’s the story of Charlie Stewart’s precarious journey toward adulthood, but it is also the story of a man in a position of immense public trust finding a private outlet for his first love. By stepping back into the fraught, hopeful world of 1994, Thomas Cullen has crafted a narrative that does what all good stories do: it finds the universal in the specific, reminding us that even in the most pressure-filled times, there is a deep human need to connect, to persevere, and to believe that, despite the odds, we’re all going to make it.
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