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“Some people in that position, if something like this happens, will want to beat their chest and talk about how smart they were,” he said. “I just won this lottery through no hard work of my own, and I found it very disorienting. So I started, therapeutically, to write a chapter about what the hell had just happened.”

Frank Hamlin’s debut novel satirizes corporate culture. (Contributed photo)

Hamlin, who graduated from the College of Arts & Sciences in 1990 with a degree in music, did not expect to write a novel. In fact, one of his friends teased him that it was “the lamest old man thing” he could do. But the same friend encouraged Hamlin to send him the chapter. He ended up loving what he read, and connected Hamlin with a literary agent he knew.

“She said, ‘This makes no sense. … I think this is going to be a long row to hoe, but I’d love to take you on,’” Hamlin recalled.

The book, “Skinny Dipping at Low Tide,” came out in January. It is a semi-autobiographical work about a would-be musician stuck in the C-suite at the brick-and-mortar video game retailer PwnShop when the company’s stock value explodes. It’s a satirical take on corporate culture.

Hamlin said he did not know he had a book in him, despite his love of writing. In fact, when he enrolled at UVA, he planned to graduate from the School of Architecture. But during a required class for architecture students, co-taught by the department heads of art, music and drama, music professor Walter Ross encouraged him to take a music class.

He fell in love. His father, however, was less than thrilled. As a UVA alumnus himself, he was paying for his son’s tuition under the belief Hamlin would graduate from his alma mater with an architecture degree.

“He was a very serious businessperson, not very artistic, so he just read me the riot act,” Hamlin said.

Hamlin’s family is full of Wahoos. He met his wife, Sarah Armstrong Hamlin, at the University. His daughter and elder son graduated from UVA, and his youngest son is currently a third-year student. In the UVA Department of Music, Hamlin studied composition, and Ross even appears in “Skinny Dipping at Low Tide.” 

After graduating, he went to work for Arista Records in Nashville, which had signed country musicians like Alan Jackson, Brooks & Dunn and Brad Paisley. His job was to get record stores to buy country albums.

Hamlin's love for music goes back to at least his UVA days, where he switched his major from architecture to music. (Contributed photo)

“These cool record stores, like Tower Records or Peaches Records, they would mostly sell alternative records or pop records. So I wrote something I called the ‘Jackalope Journals’ that was pretty tongue-in-cheek that got quite a following in that world,” Hamlin said.

After Arista, he enrolled at Harvard Business School. He described himself as a less-than-enthusiastic student there, a phase he fictionalized in the novel as well.

By the time he left the music industry, peer-to-peer file sharing and streaming had completely upended the business of bricks-and-mortar record stores. While serving as the head of marketing for the specialty food division of the Texas grocery chain HEB, a headhunter pitched him an opportunity as the chief marketing officer at Guitar Center. It  seemed like a perfect fit – even if it required a commute from Texas to Los Angeles during the work week, so his family could remain in Texas. 

“It was a perfect opportunity, because it was a real business that was making money, and it was in a passion category, so all of the employees and most of the customers really cared about the mission,” he said.

After spending four years being jet-lagged, Hamlin went to work for the parent company behind Men’s Warehouse and Jos. A. Bank. Then he went to GameStop. The video game retailer was also facing disruption as digital downloads took over the market.

Hamlin was on a mission to make GameStop a place where gamers could come together in person to bond over their shared passion. Then the pandemic hit. After the Reddit-fueled “memestock” craze of early 2021 at GameStop, Hamlin retired and began writing his novel. 

Proceeds from the novel will benefit the Causeways Program at UVA, established by Hamlin and his wife, which fosters student leadership and encourages conflict resolution.

“My career is this tortured mess of weird decisions and things happening, but I’m a huge believer in a sort of serendipity,” Hamlin said.