This summer, R. Eric Thomas brought his “Asking Eric” column to the Washington Post, taking the place of freshly retired Amy Dickinson and her 21-year-old mainstay, “Ask Amy.” Now, seven days a week, Thomas weighs in on readers’ life dilemmas: relationship estrangements, difficult in-laws, inheritance conflicts, and struggles with kids, parents, spouses, pets, friends, coworkers, neighbors, and strangers. What qualifies Thomas to tell people how to fix their issues? Nothing in particular—he’s just an empathetic guy with some useful insights into human behavior. He’s an accomplished author, having written two memoirs, a biography of Congresswoman Maxine Waters, a YA novel, and a number of plays. He’s also worked as a writer on the TV shows Better Things and Dickinson. Three months into his tenure, we caught up with Thomas—who grew up in Baltimore and currently lives in Philadelphia—to talk about writing the column and what he’s noticed so far. One thing he’s seen again and again? Misunderstandings based on a lack of communication. “Sometimes,” he says, “I feel like I have to find new ways to say, ‘Talk to each other.’ ” There are several advice columnists at the Post, including the super-popular Carolyn Hax and Miss Manners. Why should people send queries to you? Oh, gosh, now I feel like I’m in a cage match, like American Gladiators. Or I’m on The Voice, hoping that Kelly Clarkson turns her chair around and asks me [for advice]. Thomas sharing his wisdom at an event in Baltimore. Photograph by WZhou Photo. The Voice but with advice! That’s a tough assignment. I wouldn’t go head to head with Carolyn on that one. Sometimes people write to everybody. Carolyn and I and a columnist at the New York Times all got and answered a question about wedding attire for a beach wedding. Some people wrote in and were like, “Why are you plagiarizing Carolyn Hax?” So sometimes people just take the scattershot approach. But whether it’s me or Carolyn or [fellow Post advice columnists] Elaine Welteroth or Sahaj [Kaur Kohli] or Miss Manners—there’s so many great people to write to. I’m going to respond to you with empathy and with kindness. I believe every other columnist is going to do the same thing, but that’s what you’re going to get from me. How to deal with political differences has become a common advice-column question. For people in DC, it can be difficult to navigate, especially as we go into election season and then the holidays. What advice do you have? I grew up in Baltimore and thought of DC as this place where everyone is having high-falutin cocktail parties, where everyone’s talking about how they know the ambassador to France. That’s probably part of it, but that’s not the whole of DC. In fact, most of DC is people who care about what they care about, and their choices in life are motivated by that. It often feels like we have to challenge other people and debate them and prove that they’re wrong. I don’t think we’re telling each other stories about our lives; we’re not talking about what we care about. We’re talking about talking points, which are fine for the floor of Congress, but at a dinner party, what are we leaving with? Are we leaving with a deeper sense of who each other is? Or are we just leaving feeling like we just got finished doing the Joy Reid show—which is a great show, but unless she’s at the dinner party, maybe talk about something else. Advice columns have historically been the domain of white women, but in recent years that has changed a lot. Why is it important for the people giving advice to more broadly reflect those seeking advice? It’s interesting how blunt people are sometimes. They’re like, “I didn’t like you when you first showed up because I thought, a man giving advice?” Some people are very specific. They’re like, “You’re a bald Black gay man—what do you know about my life?” But to their credit, when they write, they say, “But you won me over, and I appreciate that.” One of the growing [things] for all of us is to understand that a diversity of experiences and backgrounds does not mean that we are inherently unrelatable to each other. I don’t know that I am going to be any more attuned to a letter from a gay bald Black man than I am from a white 52-year-old straight woman. But my experiences as a human are going to give me a lot of options. Your books Here For It and Congratulations, The Best Is Over! explore the idea of being “other.” How do those feelings and experiences inform your advice? Both of my memoirs have taken a comedic look at feeling like an outsider in my own life—the first one through the lens of identity and the second one feeling like a stranger in my hometown. When you feel like you don’t belong, you do a lot of work to try and figure out what would make you belong, what would make other people want to welcome you in. You do a lot of thinking about other perspectives. That gives useful insight into the way other people think and operate, and also to the idea that something can feel directed at you but other people are not necessarily thinking about you. Feeling like I’m an outsider in so many ways in life helps me feel more empathetic to other people’s struggles and problems. It’s interesting how blunt people are: ‘I didn’t like you when you first showed up because I thought, a man giving advice?’ How do you separate your own experiences from your answers? One of the things about being a writer is I have a deep curiosity about other people. The more people I meet, the more experiences I’m exposed to, and all of that becomes great empathetic fodder. Having a very small understanding of how humans behave and respond to things doesn’t do me any good, either as a fiction writer, a playwright, [or] particularly as an advice columnist. I have to be curious. One thing I have to do as both a TV writer and as a writer of fiction, or even in my own memoirs, is think about character motivation. What does the character want? How did they try to get it? What got in their way, and how did they resolve that? That’s the basis of rising dramatic action. That’s why we tune into Grey’s Anatomy: We want to see how Meredith Grey gets into and out of various entanglements. With the column, even though these are real people—and particularly because these are real people—I’m always trying to think: This is the main character in this story. What did they want? What is in their way, internally and externally? How do we create a list of options for them to get out of it? I wrote for a television show called Dickinson, about Emily Dickinson, and it took liberties with the truth of her life at various points, but we were always sort of rooted in the truth of her work. We would sit there and say, like, “Emily is going to have a dream visit with Walt Whitman—what happens?” And then we’d spin out eight, ten, 12 different options for Emily. That’s the same thing that can happen in life, too. There are definitely some times where it’s very clear what a person ought to do, but I think it’s also clear that life is full of many different paths and many different options. I want to make sure I’m thinking through the options for those people, because they have to live it—they have to be the main character. This article appears in the November 2024 issue of Washingtonian.The post R. Eric Thomas Wants to Solve All Your Problems first appeared on Washingtonian.