Discover the World of Brand Mavrick

As the fictional co-author of Cool on the Outside, Screaming on the Inside, Brand Mavrick has spent an unreasonable amount of time pretending not to be fictional.

He began life as a useful device: a voice with enough distance to say uncomfortable things without getting anyone fired. Over time, he accumulated a résumé, a worldview, a family, a history of questionable professional triumphs, and a persistent sense that he had missed the moment when work stopped being interesting and started being compulsory.

Brand’s family name is technically Maverick. He was misnamed before he had a chance to disappoint anyone. Someone misspelled it. The paperwork went through anyway. The error stuck. So did the quiet feeling that followed him for years—that he was always slightly out of register with the world, close enough to pass, never quite close enough to settle.

He grew up in Darien, Connecticut, in a house that signaled comfort and success from the curb and felt increasingly airless once you crossed the threshold. Everything in it was correct. The furniture behaved. The walls never argued. It was the kind of place designed to reassure the outside world and slowly compress the people inside it.

His father, Martin, favored restraint and practicality and carried a low-grade anger he never fully unpacked. His mother, Willow, was warmer, more speculative, inclined toward herbal remedies and gentle theories about balance. Between them, Brand learned early to watch people closely. To listen for what they meant rather than what they said. Language became a lever.

Most summers, Brand’s parents and younger brother, Luke, took to the road in an aging motorhome, roaming back roads in search of land they might buy and flip into flea markets. Brand stayed home—something about motion sickness and teasing Luke, his parents said. The days stretched. He learned how silence behaves when no one is supervising it. He spent long afternoons thinking about other places: fishing camps tucked into mountains, cabins near cold lakes, the vague but persistent idea of being elsewhere, somewhere less arranged. The notion lodged early and never quite let go.

After college, while sorting graduate-school catalogs (“Maybe anthropology,” he said. “Or folklore.”), he took a temporary job typing school-lunch menus for a local institutional food distributor. The work required speed, tolerance for chortling cooks bearing food samples and secrets, and a willingness to pretend that words like homestyle meant something.

He lasted about a week before he started meddling.

French fries became “salt- and oil-infused slices of obesity.”
Fish sticks were reintroduced as “rectangular commitments to lowered expectations.”
Pizza was described as “a circular apology.”

What began as private amusement became a short internal column dissecting how institutions use language to anesthetize disappointment. The column circulated. People laughed. Then they stopped laughing as the cooks threatened to quit. Then they forwarded it anyway.

Eventually it landed at the Panopticon Agency, where someone recognized the danger immediately and hired him.

Brand rose on talent and irritation, not charm. He was incisive in meetings, impatient with ceremony, and selectively loyal. Luke—earnest and perpetually a half-beat late—drifted into the agency later and survived through likability and benign confusion. Luke didn’t unsettle anyone. Brand did, often without meaning to. Over time, that difference mattered.

A public failure—messy, faintly humiliating, and not entirely accidental—gave the organization permission to move on. Mavrick exited with his résumé intact and his confidence rearranged. A month later, he was hired back as Creative Director. The Boss also assigned him to maintain the company website—a kind of penance for thinking, quite correctly, that he is usually the smartest person in the room.  Clients pay a fortune for his work, but in the office, he’s known for writing internal memos that escape their intended audience, blog posts that sound suspiciously like confession, and reflections on work, identity, and the quiet cost of being very good at the wrong thing.

He now lives in the family home in Darien with his wife Eve and their daughter.

Eve, a former department-store model, runs a successful clothing boutique on the Post Road—an enterprise built on taste, discipline, and a preternatural ability to know what people will want before they do. Under Luke’s enthusiastic, questionably structured tutelage, their eleven-year-old daughter is learning to DJ, developing a devotion to EDM and a comfort with volume that Mavrick is still adjusting to.

He remains preoccupied with systems that reward compliance while praising creativity, and with the lingering suspicion that some jobs—and some lives—are assigned early and rarely corrected.