Unmasking Shadows with Chuck Palahniuk | Fight Clubs, Killer Families, and Deep Reflections

[00:00:06] It's always great having Chuck Palahniuk.

[00:00:09] We always go much deeper than I always expect to go and it's always great.

[00:00:15] I always think about it for many months or years afterwards and such a pleasure.

[00:00:21] He's the author of Fight Club, he's the author of a new book, Not Forever but For Now, a

[00:00:25] great new novel.

[00:00:27] And we talk about writing and life and the relationship between the two and then the

[00:00:32] specifics of it.

[00:00:33] We talk about everything.

[00:00:34] So here it is.

[00:00:39] This isn't your average business podcast and he's not your average host.

[00:00:44] This is the James Altucher Show.

[00:00:56] Well Chuck, where are you right now?

[00:00:57] Are you in Oregon?

[00:00:58] I am in Portland, Oregon.

[00:00:59] Are you doing a book tour for this book?

[00:01:02] Oh, I'm doing the mother of all book tours.

[00:01:04] Do book tours work?

[00:01:06] You know, they used to do...

[00:01:08] The purpose of book tours was that they got you local promotion and even if you

[00:01:13] only got like six people in the store, you got to do the daytime television show locally.

[00:01:19] You got to do all the radio shows.

[00:01:21] The newspaper would cover you.

[00:01:23] You got all the local market.

[00:01:24] You got dumped with free publicity.

[00:01:27] And nowadays there is no coverage for books so book tours are kind of useless except

[00:01:32] for mine because mine draw like a thousand people.

[00:01:35] That's good.

[00:01:37] I think you more than many authors, you have a very loyal audience.

[00:01:44] They stick with...

[00:01:45] They follow you.

[00:01:46] Well, you know, the shocking part is I first met them when they were in high school and

[00:01:52] then I met them when they were in college and then I met them.

[00:01:55] They brought their baby and now they're bringing their teenager which is really fucking

[00:02:01] depressing.

[00:02:02] And the teenagers, do they have a clue?

[00:02:05] No, the teenagers love the books.

[00:02:07] It's one thing that they share in common with their parents.

[00:02:10] Oh, that's good.

[00:02:11] They're not...

[00:02:12] Like this is what I'm wondering like just in general, books and not airport books like

[00:02:19] let's say, you know, thrillers that you could read on a flight from New York to

[00:02:23] California, books other than that, are they in trouble do you think because of

[00:02:28] TikTok and YouTube?

[00:02:30] I mean, people can scroll forever on TikTok and be just as happy.

[00:02:34] It seems.

[00:02:35] Yeah, but you know, books give a depth of experience and they give a kind of...

[00:02:39] They stick...

[00:02:40] Continue to give stories that Netflix is never going to touch and that studios are

[00:02:44] never going to touch.

[00:02:45] So I think that especially transgressive stories can only be delivered through books.

[00:02:52] And describe transgressive.

[00:02:53] Anything in which nice people who read The New Yorker do not want to hear about.

[00:02:59] So we're talking about not forever, but for now and I'll mention it more in the

[00:03:02] intro, but this book is definitely transgressive.

[00:03:05] It's not going to be in The New Yorker any sections from this book.

[00:03:09] And it's not going to be on NPR.

[00:03:11] You know, NPR is not a place for transgressive.

[00:03:14] So in this book in particular, it's about two little boys who kind of have an

[00:03:20] obsessive, incestuous relationship and they watch nature films, which is a

[00:03:27] thinly veiled metaphor for online pornography.

[00:03:31] Their entire life is nature films and they eat nothing but sweets, which is a metaphor

[00:03:37] for drugs.

[00:03:38] And somehow they have managed to squander about 30 years living in their nursery,

[00:03:43] which is a lovely reference to the woman in The Huntingham Hill House who ages 30

[00:03:52] or 40 years from a child to an old woman and eventually dies in Hill House.

[00:03:57] So like this is I don't want to say that it's completely different from other

[00:04:02] books you've written, but of course it is.

[00:04:04] But how did you come up with this?

[00:04:08] Like in the well setting and the idea of a family of professional killers,

[00:04:13] like what was kind of made you wake up one day and say, this is the book

[00:04:17] I have to write?

[00:04:19] Have you ever lived any place where it snowed and snowed and snowed and you

[00:04:23] were stuck in the house for three weeks?

[00:04:26] Yeah, kind of.

[00:04:27] Like, you know, I've lived most of my life in New York and the area around

[00:04:31] there, I lived in Ithaca, New York for a while and that was very snowy.

[00:04:35] I got a stack of cozy mysteries from Barnes & Noble.

[00:04:39] These mysteries where somebody has their throat cut at a bake sale in an

[00:04:44] English village and a dog solves a mystery or the vicar solves a mystery

[00:04:49] or the little Miss Marple.

[00:04:53] And so I read all of these thinking, what is the appeal?

[00:04:56] And I was kind of disgusted because they were all the same.

[00:05:00] But I was kind of charmed because there was a kind of autistic disconnect

[00:05:05] between the horror that was depicted.

[00:05:08] Somebody getting their throat cut or their head bashed in

[00:05:12] during church rumble sale and nobody reacting to it emotionally.

[00:05:18] Everyone reacting to it as if it was just a new board game,

[00:05:22] something that they all had to rush to solve the mystery.

[00:05:25] So this complete flattened emotional affect

[00:05:29] sort of made it very funny for me.

[00:05:32] So I thought I would sort of take that that lack of reaction to death

[00:05:35] and horror and write kind of the mother of all cozy mysteries.

[00:05:41] You know, I feel like that lack of emotion to murder and horror

[00:05:47] happens a lot in movies and TV.

[00:05:50] So every superhero movie, like the big bad villain comes in

[00:05:56] and kill, you know, there's buildings that are crashing

[00:06:02] and planes going down.

[00:06:03] A lot of people die and you never hear about all the funerals

[00:06:07] and the sadness and the pain that's been caused.

[00:06:10] And this happens in every single movie.

[00:06:12] And like kids are just waiting for like, you know,

[00:06:14] Spider-Man to like wrap up the guy in a web and Iron Man to say something witty.

[00:06:19] But like there's a lot of death and sadness

[00:06:21] that must be happening in the real world.

[00:06:24] And you're right, like it happens even in like these thrillers or mystery novels.

[00:06:28] Like everybody will be dying in some town and people will be focused on,

[00:06:33] well, what's the clue to solve this as opposed to going to funerals

[00:06:36] and being really upset that their best friends died?

[00:06:39] Well, and also so much of it is what I think of as Tableau horror,

[00:06:43] like a Da Vinci code.

[00:06:44] We don't actually see the people slaughtered.

[00:06:46] We come across these elaborate

[00:06:49] Tableaus in which the body has been arranged in this open dramatic way

[00:06:54] and the archbishop is sort of strung up by his entrails.

[00:06:57] So it's a suggestion of violence and pain

[00:07:00] without us actually having to witness it.

[00:07:03] Yeah. So it's almost like, you know,

[00:07:06] on the one hand, I think fiction in general

[00:07:09] provides a safe way to experience the horrors and pains of life.

[00:07:14] You could read about someone's marriage and divorce.

[00:07:17] You could read about someone's death.

[00:07:18] You could read about someone's search for meaning.

[00:07:21] And you don't have to actually experience it yourself.

[00:07:23] You could live it through somebody else.

[00:07:25] And then to take it one step further

[00:07:27] in these very graphic thriller stories,

[00:07:29] like let's say the Da Vinci code,

[00:07:31] it's almost like a safe way to experience that extreme violence.

[00:07:34] Like we have that craving for the extreme, the transgressive,

[00:07:37] but we don't want to admit it.

[00:07:39] So it gives us this safe path to have those emotions.

[00:07:42] Do you think in your book, you're kind of making fun of that?

[00:07:46] Or in this book, what are you doing related to that?

[00:07:50] In a way, I am making fun of it,

[00:07:52] just making fun of that form where, you know, horror happens

[00:07:56] and it happens offscreen.

[00:07:58] And then it's immediately turned into a kind of

[00:08:00] game that has to be solved.

[00:08:03] I'm also thinking of books like, do you remember The Alienist?

[00:08:08] Yeah, Callip Carr.

[00:08:09] I've had Callip Carr on the podcast actually.

[00:08:10] Yeah.

[00:08:11] You know, I just forgot about that until now.

[00:08:13] I had him on in like 2016.

[00:08:14] So it is male child sex workers who are slaughtered.

[00:08:20] And we never see them slaughtered.

[00:08:21] We always find them on top of the Brooklyn Bridge

[00:08:24] with their entrails and their organs arranged in some cryptic pattern.

[00:08:28] And so in a way, it's a huge cheat because we are seeing

[00:08:32] the suggestion of incredible violence done to children.

[00:08:37] But we are always seeing it after the fact.

[00:08:39] So even though it purports to be more gruesome

[00:08:44] or gruesome transgressive thing, it is not because

[00:08:46] we're only seeing the after effects.

[00:08:49] It's like a reaction shot.

[00:08:51] We don't see the violence.

[00:08:52] We see people's reaction to the violence.

[00:08:54] Now, you know, with Callip Carr, I wonder for him,

[00:08:57] if he's also finding a safe way to experience these emotions personally.

[00:09:03] So for instance, and I apologize to Callip Carr,

[00:09:07] if I'm not recommending remembering exactly everything we discussed

[00:09:12] seven years ago, but I think he had suffered abuse as a child.

[00:09:17] And so he didn't want to have children because he felt like

[00:09:20] that sort of, you know, he was a child.

[00:09:23] That sort of passes from generation to generation.

[00:09:26] And I wonder if he was himself finding kind of a safe way

[00:09:31] to deal with these emotions inside of himself.

[00:09:34] And so and then the question is for you, to what extent?

[00:09:38] In books ranging from Fight Club to this book,

[00:09:40] and to what extent are you playing out emotions that

[00:09:45] you feel you can't experience in real life?

[00:09:49] For me, it's really super easy.

[00:09:52] And that the two little boys feel enormously inadequate.

[00:09:56] And they feel enormously kind of rejected by their parents and by society

[00:10:00] because they are kind of they call themselves pre-mails,

[00:10:05] that they their father has disappeared very early in their childhood.

[00:10:10] And they they've had kind of no access to becoming adults.

[00:10:13] The metaphor that they have attached to is the

[00:10:17] the kind of fetal joy that comes out of the kangaroos vagina.

[00:10:22] And has to climb up the outside of the kangaroo's fur and ideally get into the pouch,

[00:10:27] the marsupial pouch where it can complete its development.

[00:10:32] But there's always the danger that the that the joy is going to fall off

[00:10:38] and just be fallen to the

[00:10:41] into the Australian outback and die in the dust

[00:10:44] and that the mother can't help it and that the father is not there

[00:10:47] and this poor little just mass of cells has to do this impossible task.

[00:10:54] And so these little boys find themselves isolated

[00:10:58] and forced to do this impossible task of trying to become adults.

[00:11:03] So they are, yeah, it's a it's a huge book about inadequacy.

[00:11:11] And at what times in your life have you felt inadequate?

[00:11:17] Oh, my God, you know, I think about the age of three or four

[00:11:21] when when your same sex attracted and your dad realizes, oh, my God,

[00:11:28] it's going to be a fag.

[00:11:30] And the dad distance distances himself

[00:11:34] from the infant fag because the dad has no idea how to deal with this thing.

[00:11:40] And so the dad is he's just got to get out of the picture.

[00:11:43] It's like, I can't deal with this.

[00:11:45] I have no idea what this thing is going to be.

[00:11:48] And so the dad disappears.

[00:11:50] And so that is kind of very much the case of Cecil and Otto

[00:11:55] is that they sort of have internalized the sense that they are despised

[00:12:02] and that they have no way of sort of completing their adulthood.

[00:12:06] And in what sense did you have a hard time completing your adulthood?

[00:12:11] I'm not trying to be all, you know, Sigmund Freud here, but,

[00:12:15] you know, clearly there's there's a connection that you brought up

[00:12:17] that that you're exploring here.

[00:12:20] You know, a lot of it is just floundering around.

[00:12:22] You have no idea what to do and you kind of distract yourself.

[00:12:26] You just trying to get from day to day

[00:12:29] without dealing with any of the issues until things kind of come to a head.

[00:12:34] Perhaps usually late in life and then you take all the wrong steps.

[00:12:39] Do you think of, oh, was it Sebastian, the character in suddenly last summer?

[00:12:44] At the very end of the play, when he's confronted by this enormous sort of

[00:12:49] mess that he's made of his life, he's finally going to try to resolve the situation.

[00:12:53] That leads to his destruction.

[00:12:55] Now, you had success fairly early on with Fight Club.

[00:12:59] And, you know, since then, have you feel like, oh, a better sense of belonging?

[00:13:06] Like maybe the father wasn't there, but now you have this community

[00:13:10] of writers and readers that love you and are kind of give you more of a feeling of,

[00:13:17] oh, I've made it.

[00:13:17] I've I've succeeded despite despite the missing father,

[00:13:22] despite the the disaffected mother or whatever it was.

[00:13:27] You know, that's the only reason why I could have written this book.

[00:13:29] Now, this is the kind of book that you only write from a place of

[00:13:33] eventual safety, whether it's nothing left to lose

[00:13:37] or whether it's a kind of a stable place where I have some resources.

[00:13:41] But I could never have written this book at the beginning.

[00:13:44] In a way, this book is a kind of a completion and a continuance of Fight Club

[00:13:49] because the two little boys, the older boys, very much like Tyler Durden

[00:13:54] and the younger boys very much like the witnessing character of the narrator in Fight Club.

[00:13:59] Right. It's very much parallel to that, except to more of an extreme

[00:14:03] like like people won't emulate these two characters.

[00:14:07] I don't think but Fight Club somehow people emulated it like Fight Clubs actually started

[00:14:14] because Fight Club presented a kind of activity that could be replicated

[00:14:19] the Fight Clubs themselves and they kind of replicated they presented an activity

[00:14:23] in Project Mayhem that people can replicate as a means of kind of being with each other

[00:14:29] and exploring these issues, whether they fought each other or whether they just

[00:14:34] did these huge outdoor public pranks.

[00:14:53] Have you ever thought about writing a kind of let's call it typical coming of age type

[00:14:58] novel that's really about where you came from and who you are

[00:15:02] and why you are who you are?

[00:15:04] I can't imagine wasting my time on writing such a novel.

[00:15:08] That would be I would read it.

[00:15:09] That would be great to see your style in your world.

[00:15:13] I think Tobias Wolff has already written that novel.

[00:15:17] Yeah, I mean a lot of people, I guess, have but everybody's got their own take on it.

[00:15:22] You know what this book reminds me of?

[00:15:23] Have you ever read this author, Anderson Prunty?

[00:15:29] He has he has a book called Fuckness and the auto

[00:15:34] character sort of reminds me of a character in this book who just

[00:15:40] really can't fit in at all and has this life of despair and what he calls Fuckness.

[00:15:47] And and stranger and stranger things happen in the novel.

[00:15:52] I think I think you would like it.

[00:15:53] It's like a strange kind of style.

[00:15:56] But when you say like this couldn't have been written before,

[00:16:00] do you think if you were unknown, would a publisher publish this book?

[00:16:05] Right now, at this point in history, probably not.

[00:16:08] But maybe 20 years ago, maybe 25 years ago.

[00:16:12] Yeah, I feel like 25 years ago, so like mid 90s,

[00:16:16] I feel like from the mid 80s to the mid 90s, there was this kind of

[00:16:22] acceptable indie book scene within the major publishers.

[00:16:26] So when you had things like the vintage books and American Psycho

[00:16:30] and and Jay McInerney stuff and I don't know, there were a lot of

[00:16:35] there were a lot of novelists who I feel random house and others were taking a chance on.

[00:16:40] And train, train spotting, Maribus, York Nightmares, all of Irving Welsh.

[00:16:44] Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

[00:16:47] How much of an influence was was Welsh?

[00:16:50] You know, he was a huge influence because I think for a lot of people,

[00:16:54] American Psycho was too too much, but train spotting was just enough.

[00:17:01] So it kind of hit that sort of happy medium that made transgressive, you know, bearable.

[00:17:07] Yeah, it's interesting because American Psycho, I would say part of

[00:17:11] the appeal of reading that was and not only American Psycho,

[00:17:16] but also less than zero by Brett Easton Ellis.

[00:17:18] There's like no emotion in the main characters.

[00:17:21] So you don't get this feeling that, you know,

[00:17:25] like we do with a superhero movie that there's all this pain

[00:17:28] and nobody feels anything.

[00:17:30] It's like the main character himself doesn't really feel anything.

[00:17:34] And we, the reader are aware that's a problem.

[00:17:37] But in train spotting, it's interesting because the dialogue is so realistic

[00:17:42] and you really feel that not only these people do feel things,

[00:17:47] but it's like a different sort of feelings than then quote unquote regular people have.

[00:17:52] And the point of view jumps around so that you have

[00:17:57] it's kind of deluded between several characters

[00:17:59] and you're not always inside that Patrick Bateman's head.

[00:18:03] Yeah, it's interesting.

[00:18:05] I feel like the first three books by Brett Easton Ellis,

[00:18:08] I really enjoyed, which was less than zero rules of attraction, American Psycho.

[00:18:12] And then after that, I just sort of lost.

[00:18:14] I kind of lost the thread of his books.

[00:18:17] But what other influences from that period do you think you have?

[00:18:22] You know, very much the minimalists

[00:18:24] because a lot of the minimalists kind of do that trick,

[00:18:27] but they do it in a kinder, gentler way.

[00:18:29] People like Mark Rashard and Amy Hempel,

[00:18:32] where they will present

[00:18:34] the story without sort of dictating emotion,

[00:18:38] that the characters won't have an emotional reaction,

[00:18:40] even though they're being abused by their father

[00:18:43] or they're watching their best friend die.

[00:18:46] And their lack of expressing emotion within the story

[00:18:50] forces the reader to carry the entire building accumulation of emotion and pain.

[00:18:56] And so by the end of this story, like in the garden where

[00:19:00] Al Jol... in the cemetery where Al Jolson is buried,

[00:19:03] you find yourself weeping and you're not really sure why you're weeping so hard.

[00:19:08] And it's because you've been forced to carry all of the pain

[00:19:11] that the narrator hasn't expressed.

[00:19:14] Yeah, that's so interesting.

[00:19:15] I never thought of minimalism in that way,

[00:19:18] but it's not only minimalism of language, it's minimalism of emotion.

[00:19:22] And we've, of course, spoken about Dennis Johnson before

[00:19:25] and his collection of stories, Jesus' Son.

[00:19:28] But even in the very first story in that collection,

[00:19:31] car crash while hitchhiking, all these horrific horrible things happen.

[00:19:35] And the main character's reaction or

[00:19:39] and the main character is called fuckhead.

[00:19:42] I'm saying the word fuck a lot in this podcast.

[00:19:44] But the main character has almost no emotional reaction.

[00:19:48] He's even surprised that he dresses the reader directly in the last sentence,

[00:19:52] even surprised anybody expects emotion from him,

[00:19:55] says if he doesn't really know how to do it.

[00:19:57] Yeah, and that very much a kind of a combination

[00:19:59] suggestion of being on drugs, but also being a kind of callow young person.

[00:20:05] So it's a perfect combination to do that kind of story.

[00:20:10] Yeah. And it's interesting how that, you know,

[00:20:12] that's a collection of connected short stories.

[00:20:14] And by the end, the main character is more sober.

[00:20:18] He's like in a rehab Beverly home.

[00:20:20] Right. But and the stories are less disjointed.

[00:20:23] They have a more of a narrative, but he still has kind of this

[00:20:27] emotionless reaction to many things.

[00:20:30] Like he's he's a voyeur without necessarily pondering the ethics of it.

[00:20:35] He just wants to see something happen.

[00:20:36] But he's also learning in those scenes where he's the voyeur through

[00:20:40] the bathroom window.

[00:20:41] He's not just witnessing the naked woman in the shower.

[00:20:44] He's also witnessing the act of a forgiveness between the husband

[00:20:49] and wife as the wife, as the husband washes the white's feet.

[00:20:53] He is kind of learning what it is to be a human being.

[00:20:56] And that's where it becomes so redemptive in a gorgeous understated way.

[00:21:01] But I wouldn't say you're a minimalist in that way, though.

[00:21:03] I mean, in many ways, particularly in language, you're almost a maximalist.

[00:21:06] And and here the stories are just dripping with every angle and every

[00:21:14] possible scenario that these characters to get involved in.

[00:21:16] Like it's you're pushing the limit of the reader and the characters.

[00:21:20] And so so you're inspired by the minimalist, but how does it show up?

[00:21:25] Let's say in this book.

[00:21:26] Well, to me, minimalism isn't necessarily about language itself.

[00:21:31] For me, minimalism is like when you think about a play,

[00:21:35] a play has to keep its setting limited.

[00:21:39] It has to keep its time limited.

[00:21:41] People are only going to sit in their butts for two hours,

[00:21:44] which is why I haven't seen Oppenheimer yet.

[00:21:47] And it has to keep its characters limited.

[00:21:49] It has to keep its objects limited.

[00:21:51] So a play escalates very quickly because it has so few things to work with.

[00:21:57] And that's how I see minimalism.

[00:21:59] I see it as a skipper seafood commercial where you've got to show

[00:22:04] skippers seafood in as many different ways as possible in 30 seconds.

[00:22:09] So you're not going to throw in a picture of a horse.

[00:22:11] You're going to throw in just everything that says skippers in as

[00:22:15] many different forms as possible.

[00:22:17] So in minimalism, I see the themes, the characters, the settings,

[00:22:24] the objects as all being very limited like in a play so that those so that

[00:22:29] the story itself escalates very quickly.

[00:22:33] Right. And then I guess also there's an extent of mystery.

[00:22:37] Like you're going to always have,

[00:22:39] there's a lot of things that you know that you keep hidden from the reader.

[00:22:42] And the reader is maybe guessing but but but gradually

[00:22:47] figuring out this world that that you're putting them in.

[00:22:50] Right. And also introducing them in a kind of

[00:22:54] wrinkled chronology so we get a glimpse of something and then much,

[00:22:59] for example, the nanny that fell down the stairs and rung her neck.

[00:23:04] And then later we find out

[00:23:06] that how she fell down the stairs and rung her neck.

[00:23:10] And then we find out more or less why she fell down the stairs and someone

[00:23:15] rung her neck.

[00:23:16] So the story is hinted at but then over the course of the entire book,

[00:23:21] this very small subplot is fleshed out.

[00:23:24] And so I've never done this before,

[00:23:26] but it was a blast to do it this time and to force the reader to assemble all of

[00:23:31] those out of order details

[00:23:35] and to suffer the pain without me having to dictate it.

[00:23:38] It's interesting. You say you've never done it before.

[00:23:40] I feel like I feel like Fight Club was a little bit disjointed in that way.

[00:23:46] Fight Club feels like a walk in the park compared to this one.

[00:23:49] This one is really a Gordian knot.

[00:23:53] Yeah, because Fight Club still exists in what I'll call our world.

[00:23:57] Yeah.

[00:23:58] Whereas this one, it does exist in our world technically, but somehow it's not.

[00:24:05] These are characters we really wouldn't have a chance of encountering

[00:24:08] in the real world, in my world, for instance.

[00:24:11] Yeah.

[00:24:13] Boy, even the language, just the language of this one is so

[00:24:18] different for me.

[00:24:19] Just to sit down and just kind of put on this entire wardrobe if somebody else's

[00:24:24] language was a blast for me.

[00:24:26] I've never had so much fun adopting all of these Brit phrases

[00:24:31] and studying language to figure out what the phrase is actually meant.

[00:24:35] The purposes they served, I felt like I was writing Clockwork Orange.

[00:24:39] Yeah, it felt like you were at this one more than just about any other book

[00:24:44] I've read from you. This one felt like it was a party for you.

[00:24:48] Like every time you sat down, you were like, how can I make this as fun as possible?

[00:24:52] This chapter and also heartbreaking.

[00:24:54] This book had the most heartbreaking things I've ever put into a book.

[00:25:00] Chapter 43 where they go out and they're going to pick up some low class

[00:25:04] street guy, some guy with absolutely no future, but who just happens to be

[00:25:08] like 19 years old, they're going to pick him up.

[00:25:11] They're going to abuse him.

[00:25:13] They're going to dump him.

[00:25:15] And that scene where they're preying on this kid's loneliness,

[00:25:20] it was just heartbreaking for me.

[00:25:22] And is that because like what did you picture when you were writing that?

[00:25:26] Were you the 19 year old?

[00:25:28] Like what was what was the heartbreaking part for you?

[00:25:31] I was both the characters in that it really put me in touch with

[00:25:36] when your same sex attracted and you are that age and you're not out

[00:25:40] and you're living in a place where you don't have the freedom to be anything.

[00:25:44] And you will do absolutely anything for any predator,

[00:25:49] if it means getting not being lonely for a moment.

[00:25:53] And you will do anything that kind of deadens

[00:25:55] the fantastic loneliness and isolation that you feel.

[00:25:59] And you will tell yourself that it's that it's love or that it's emotional

[00:26:03] connection when in fact it's not.

[00:26:05] It's just a kind of respite from pain and loneliness.

[00:26:09] And so that is so present in that scene.

[00:26:12] And in a way, I kind of saw that very much in the Dahmer series that Netflix brought out.

[00:26:18] They really kind of brought to the fore

[00:26:19] the enormous pain of loneliness and what it will drive people to do.

[00:26:24] Where did you grow up again?

[00:26:25] I don't know.

[00:26:26] I grew up in a little town called Burbank,

[00:26:28] Washington, which was about 300 people on the Snake River in eastern Washington state.

[00:26:33] And do you think when when you started

[00:26:37] writing, it was almost like you're sending this message in a bottle out to the world

[00:26:43] to try to find others who can connect with your writing, i.e. connect with you?

[00:26:50] Do you feel that was an instinct that got you started writing?

[00:26:54] You know, it's never been a kind of attempt to connect.

[00:26:56] It's been an attempt to kind of analyze my feelings and to choose the ones that

[00:27:01] still seem valid, like in Fight Club.

[00:27:03] You know, I really had to make fun of the fact that I thought that furniture would

[00:27:08] make me an adult, that I thought having a good condominium or having a good car

[00:27:13] would make me an adult.

[00:27:15] So I really had to kind of look at all the fallacies of my life.

[00:27:20] It's never been about connecting.

[00:27:21] It's been about kind of dissecting my life and making fun of the broken parts,

[00:27:28] the fake parts.

[00:27:30] It's funny, I wonder if if a lot of people go through that, like

[00:27:34] for me, I thought when I could afford my own VCR,

[00:27:37] if people don't know what a VCR is, it's a video cassette recorder.

[00:27:41] I won't explain.

[00:27:42] But when I could afford my own VCR,

[00:27:44] that's when I felt like I made it to adulthood.

[00:27:47] And and and I think that if you're really honest about expressing

[00:27:53] those fallacies and making fun of yourself, then you do inadvertently

[00:27:58] connect because you provide other people with the opportunity to do that,

[00:28:01] to express whether it's a feeling that they they never feel like they grew up

[00:28:05] or that they maybe spend a lot too much time watching nature films on Pornhub.

[00:28:11] You know, you provide that opportunity for other people to say, oh my gosh,

[00:28:15] me too and to not feel bad about it, but to laugh about it.

[00:28:20] If you were to rank like someone's prospects in writing,

[00:28:23] it seems like not necessarily an ability with language,

[00:28:27] although that's extremely important, but an ability, that ability you just mentioned

[00:28:31] to be able to to find where your pain was, where you went wrong and to be able

[00:28:37] to almost laugh about it without arrogance.

[00:28:40] I feel that's a strong part of every good writer.

[00:28:43] Well, I think it's

[00:28:45] a little more difficult when I don't have children.

[00:28:48] So I'm not going to see I'm not going to see their developmental stages.

[00:28:52] And so I'm not going to be sort of automatically reminded of decisions

[00:28:57] I made at those stages.

[00:28:58] So for me, it's a little bit more haphazard and

[00:29:04] things like watching Mutual of Omaha's Animal Kingdom and revisiting the

[00:29:11] enormous terror that I felt as a child when I wasn't sure whether the baby

[00:29:16] fawn was going to be destroyed by the tribe of baboons.

[00:29:21] Getting in touch with those and then putting them on the page and seeing that

[00:29:25] those scenes also trigger other people who are also as children terrified of

[00:29:32] seeing that baby animal destroyed.

[00:29:35] That is what I do because I don't have kids I can watch.

[00:29:39] Do you ever regret not having kids?

[00:29:42] Oh, geez, no, I'm I would have been.

[00:29:47] This is a generalization that might not be the case.

[00:29:51] But I am such an obsessive writer that I think I would have made a lousy parent.

[00:29:57] I mean, I'm a really good dog parent.

[00:30:00] My dog has a great life.

[00:30:01] My long series of dogs have all had great lives.

[00:30:05] But dogs are not kids.

[00:30:07] And I would I would have been one of those writer parents whose kids suffer.

[00:30:15] Yeah, I when I was younger, I never wanted to have kids.

[00:30:19] But of course, you know, one thing happens after another and I have

[00:30:24] two biological kids, three step kids.

[00:30:27] And so now I now have a whole coven of kids.

[00:30:30] Do you recognize when they go through a developmental stage and they

[00:30:36] they sort of are up to worded or stopped by something?

[00:30:39] Do you recognize the moment that you were in that stage?

[00:30:43] Oh, absolutely.

[00:30:44] And it's so painful because you can't give them really any advice.

[00:30:49] Because if you remember when you were at those stages,

[00:30:51] you're so filled with those young emotions that words are just meaningless.

[00:30:57] Like they cannot combat all the hormones and emotions that are happening inside

[00:31:02] your brain and body.

[00:31:03] And when they were born, I was really sad.

[00:31:07] Not because I didn't want to have kids, but because

[00:31:10] I knew eventually they would go through some of the things that I've been through.

[00:31:15] And it's just I was horrible imagining these little babies

[00:31:18] would one day experience those things.

[00:31:21] What about in seeing them go through those stages?

[00:31:24] Has it allowed you to kind of recalibrate your life from decisions

[00:31:29] that you made at those stages?

[00:31:31] I don't know. I don't think so.

[00:31:33] Because I think I would have made mistakes no matter what.

[00:31:37] And I think I would have regretted them no matter what,

[00:31:39] even though I see that they're common things through them.

[00:31:43] But like imagine the things you went through, like do you have any regrets in life?

[00:31:47] Do you wish any part of your life were different?

[00:31:50] You know, I really wish that I had made the time as a child to sit down and

[00:31:56] spend more time just talking with my older relatives.

[00:32:00] Even back then our lives were so full of distraction and we would sit with

[00:32:04] the television and the television would hold everyone's attention.

[00:32:09] That I never really engaged with my older relatives in a task.

[00:32:13] I could have sat down and help them do something.

[00:32:16] And that would have given us the opportunity

[00:32:19] for me to learn what their lives have been.

[00:32:21] So in a way, I have no idea who they were or where they came from.

[00:32:28] It's funny how now that won't be

[00:32:30] the case as much for our great, great, great grandkids because of social media.

[00:32:36] They'll see all the dumb, stupid things we were doing all the time.

[00:32:39] It's all documented.

[00:32:41] Like I wish I could see my great, great, great grandfather's TikTok videos,

[00:32:45] but they don't it didn't exist.

[00:32:48] I really hope that's the case.

[00:33:05] This is a weird question.

[00:33:07] But do you ever wish that you hadn't been born same sex attracted?

[00:33:14] No, never.

[00:33:16] It just seems like something that

[00:33:20] was just so much a part of me from such a young age that I cannot imagine my life.

[00:33:25] You know, for a long time, I tried to be

[00:33:30] attracted to women and I dated and I had sexual responses and I tried to pursue

[00:33:35] that, but ultimately it was just so tortuous.

[00:33:40] It was unpleasant for me.

[00:33:42] It was unpleasant for the women.

[00:33:44] And so it just would have been a disaster for everyone.

[00:33:48] At what age did you sort of like own it that this is who I am?

[00:33:53] Probably 12 or 13.

[00:33:55] But even after that, though, you still try to

[00:33:59] have relations with women and so on.

[00:34:02] Oh, at least through the age of 18 or 19.

[00:34:06] Yeah.

[00:34:07] And so when I say own it, when did you finally say, look,

[00:34:11] I'm not going to I'm not going to do that anymore.

[00:34:15] This is who I am.

[00:34:16] Forget it.

[00:34:17] When I realized that I was just screwing up everybody's lives, you know,

[00:34:21] I screwing up the lives of these beautiful young women I was with.

[00:34:25] I was screwing up my life.

[00:34:26] I was misleading everybody.

[00:34:29] Yeah.

[00:34:30] Though it was just I was causing nothing but suffering for people.

[00:34:36] That's an interesting way to put it.

[00:34:37] See, that's why I think a novel about your,

[00:34:41] you know, kind of somewhere between novel and narrative nonfiction about your

[00:34:45] experience would be would be so fascinating.

[00:34:48] I would read that novel.

[00:34:51] I know I am so much a an advocate for metaphor.

[00:34:57] You read Valley of the Dolls, right?

[00:35:00] Yeah. And yeah, I love Valley of the Dolls actually.

[00:35:02] I adore Valley of the Dolls.

[00:35:04] And when it came out,

[00:35:07] people really crucified Jackie Suzanne and they said,

[00:35:10] what you write about that Tony Polar going into the institution and being

[00:35:16] having this progressive brain disease and becoming a vegetable of catatonic.

[00:35:21] And what you write about breast cancer, that's all exploitive.

[00:35:25] It's crude and exploitive.

[00:35:27] And Jackie Suzanne, you're a monster.

[00:35:31] But the truth is that Jackie Suzanne had a severely

[00:35:35] developmentally damaged child that she visited on a weekly basis in

[00:35:42] in a care home and that she struggled with breast cancer most of her adult life.

[00:35:46] And it eventually killed her.

[00:35:49] And so

[00:35:50] in the movie, when we see in the day room of the asylum where we see

[00:35:56] Patty Duke's character

[00:35:58] sort of stagger across the day room and embrace Tony Polar's character,

[00:36:04] what we're seeing is Jackie Suzanne embracing her severely damaged child at Willowbrook.

[00:36:13] And yeah, it looks like schlock, but it is so based on her life.

[00:36:21] It is still really powerful.

[00:36:23] It's what she was trying to express about her own life.

[00:36:27] And she just maybe wasn't the greatest writer to do so.

[00:36:31] But.

[00:36:33] I still think that that kind of personal pain is better expressed in fiction,

[00:36:39] where other people can attach to it in a non-threatening way.

[00:36:43] They can pretend that it's just a made up story.

[00:36:47] And it's not just exclusively the experience of Jackie Suzanne or Chuck Polanik.

[00:36:53] I guess it's what we were referring to earlier, like what is the safe way to

[00:36:58] experience some of these painful emotions and not because you're trying to

[00:37:04] make it as soft as possible, but because you want people to experience those

[00:37:10] emotions and not leave the writing because it's too hard for them.

[00:37:15] Right. You want to charm them

[00:37:18] because first and foremost, these are people who are spending their spare

[00:37:22] money and their spare time to consume this thing.

[00:37:26] And if they know that they're going to be spending their money in their time

[00:37:29] consuming a painful story, you know why?

[00:37:33] Nobody wants to spend their their downtime reading about pain.

[00:37:37] But if you can give them Rosemary's baby

[00:37:40] and not say you're going to be reading a story about the letimide,

[00:37:44] about deformed children, because mothers are being given these these

[00:37:49] cakes and these drinks and nobody's explaining anything until the baby is

[00:37:54] born with these claw like hands and feet.

[00:37:56] No, nobody's going to sit down and say, oh, yeah,

[00:38:00] I want to spend my all my off time reading about deformed babies and

[00:38:03] and chemicals approved by German drug manufacturers.

[00:38:07] No, no, it's got to be it's got to be Rosemary's baby.

[00:38:11] Is that what Rosemary's baby was really about?

[00:38:14] I would I love Rosemary's baby for the religious aspect.

[00:38:18] I would bet everything because

[00:38:22] all throughout it, it is the letimide.

[00:38:26] And it is about how the booties are being

[00:38:30] crocheted in such a way that they they look like they're being made for claws.

[00:38:34] And the claws very much.

[00:38:37] Sort of the trademark of a child suffering from phyllidomide sickness.

[00:38:42] So I really think that that's what I or 11 got away with and that he could

[00:38:47] never overtly state because nobody was going to say, oh, great,

[00:38:51] a phyllidomide novel.

[00:38:53] Nobody was going to read that.

[00:38:54] Nobody's going to publish that.

[00:38:56] But that's the horror that we were reacting to that we were not aware of.

[00:39:02] Wow. I have never thought of it that way.

[00:39:05] I've and I've read and reread and also seen the movie a bunch of times.

[00:39:08] I never thought of it that way.

[00:39:09] But you're probably right.

[00:39:11] And it was around that that time also like the late sixties when he when he

[00:39:14] wrote that.

[00:39:15] And another thing is

[00:39:17] people had such a strong anger reaction to Shirley Jackson's lottery

[00:39:24] when it came out in the New Yorker and subscriptions canceled and people railing

[00:39:28] saying this woman is the devil.

[00:39:30] How dare she publish this this this horrible story that seems so

[00:39:36] Norman Rockwell on the front end, but ends up with such fantastic violence

[00:39:41] of this woman being stoned to death by her own children.

[00:39:46] And how dare the New Yorker publish this thing.

[00:39:49] But when you consider the time it came out in, I would bet

[00:39:55] I would bet and for a short period of time, I was in possession of Shirley

[00:39:59] Jackson's ashes.

[00:40:01] Her cremains were sent to me by her daughter.

[00:40:04] But I would bet that that story

[00:40:07] was Shirley Jackson's incredibly smart way of saying, hey,

[00:40:12] let's look at the draft lottery

[00:40:16] during the Korean War.

[00:40:18] And if you just happen to get the right number and your number gets called,

[00:40:22] you are going to be destroyed in a fantastically brutal, painful way.

[00:40:28] And nobody's going to give a shit.

[00:40:29] And that's what we have to do to keep our society up and running.

[00:40:33] And nobody is going to sort of in the moment stop and protest this.

[00:40:39] They're going to let you just have your number called and tough luck.

[00:40:44] Sucks to be you.

[00:40:45] You're going to go step on a mortar and die and be blown to bits.

[00:40:50] And people do not want to think about that.

[00:40:53] They do not want to in their comfortable lives here at home.

[00:40:57] They do not want to think that these nice kids are just going to go and be

[00:41:03] slaughtered because of a stupid number that got pulled out of a stupid thing

[00:41:09] on television, I believe.

[00:41:12] Wow, you're you're totally right.

[00:41:14] You're blowing my mind here.

[00:41:15] I never thought about the lottery that way.

[00:41:17] But but if you think about it, it's a topic that was on everyone's mind.

[00:41:21] And because she used the power of metaphor, she's able to take it to

[00:41:25] such an extreme and yet touch this emotion we're all feeling right

[00:41:30] probably right then when she wrote it in during that time and make it extreme again.

[00:41:37] And so much of the rage that people felt was a fantastic shame.

[00:41:43] They did not want to be confronted with the fact that their comfortable lives

[00:41:47] are dependent upon a bunch of sweet innocent people being destroyed in this

[00:41:53] arbitrary way, and they didn't want they didn't want that thrown in their

[00:41:57] faces and they never would have understood that.

[00:42:00] But by putting it in a metaphor, in a fiction story,

[00:42:04] Shirley Jackson was brilliant because she she triggered them

[00:42:08] and they didn't know why they were so triggered.

[00:42:10] It's interesting because I've asked this question to a lot of people and

[00:42:14] and use the word triggered a lot of people get triggered by this.

[00:42:17] Do you think there was ever a war?

[00:42:20] Let's even just look at American history.

[00:42:22] Do you think there was ever a war that was really justified?

[00:42:27] It's a sensitive topic for a lot of reasons.

[00:42:30] You know, I don't know enough about war.

[00:42:33] I just do not know enough about war to answer that.

[00:42:38] I feel like that's a cop out a little bit.

[00:42:39] No, I'm sorry.

[00:42:40] I just want to be I think I'd be flailing and I'd be making up a lot

[00:42:44] of stuff to try to come up with an example.

[00:42:48] Yeah. Yeah.

[00:42:50] I just do not know enough.

[00:42:53] But but every war has this element of

[00:42:56] somehow other people are making a decision to send off our children

[00:43:02] to get destroyed, like you say.

[00:43:04] And in that kind in that context, nothing seems nothing seems worth it.

[00:43:08] And and they're doing so and they're immediately forgetting the fact that they did so.

[00:43:14] Recently, I've been reading a ton of mid century science fiction

[00:43:18] because my next thing I want I want to do science fiction.

[00:43:21] I want to do one big science fiction book.

[00:43:25] And so much what I'm reading from the forties and the fifties are these stories

[00:43:30] that are very thinly veiled war stories from from guys who came back from World

[00:43:35] World War Two and they're writing about guys coming back from these expeditions

[00:43:40] to the moon, where they've seen all of their peers destroyed,

[00:43:44] killed in these brutal ways.

[00:43:46] And they're having to deliver the details to the

[00:43:51] the parents of these men who have died or the or the stories are about

[00:43:59] these robots that have to go through their lives with no emotion whatsoever,

[00:44:03] despite these kind of horrible things that are happening to them.

[00:44:07] So all of this mid century science fiction seems to be war stories that nobody

[00:44:13] wanted to read and nobody wanted to buy and nobody wanted to publish.

[00:44:17] So they had to be tarted up as science fiction stories about missions to Mars

[00:44:22] and robots.

[00:44:23] And so I think that the war stories are all over out there.

[00:44:28] The stories about pain, stories like the lottery,

[00:44:31] but they have to be dressed up in order to be sold.

[00:44:34] What about something like the things they carried by Tim O'Brien?

[00:44:37] Which, you know, specifically it is a giant metaphor, but it's an easy metaphor.

[00:44:42] Like, obviously they carried weapons in Vietnam, but they also carried, you know,

[00:44:47] emotions about the girl back home and fears and loneliness and so on.

[00:44:52] So what about something like that where it is directly in a war?

[00:44:56] And it is a very sad book.

[00:44:57] You know, and it's funny you mentioned that because I was just teaching with

[00:45:01] a friend four days ago and we were teaching that story.

[00:45:04] And my friend really loves that story.

[00:45:07] But I have never been a fan of that story because the story seems to

[00:45:12] constantly vacillate about depicting really horrific things and then saying that

[00:45:17] didn't happen. And so there seems to be kind of no

[00:45:22] true core to the story.

[00:45:24] And that's always frustrated me.

[00:45:26] That's interesting.

[00:45:27] Maybe no true core because

[00:45:30] everybody is different, everybody in this troop is different and they're

[00:45:35] carrying different things.

[00:45:37] But the threat is, you know, Vietnam.

[00:45:39] There's this like foundation of Vietnam.

[00:45:41] And but it's really about the fact that

[00:45:44] we're their kids and they're bringing a lot of

[00:45:47] sad things with them as well as these weapons that they're using to kill people.

[00:45:52] And when the character is depicted stepping on the landmine

[00:45:56] and dying on this beautiful sunburst of sunshine.

[00:46:00] And when the other character is depicted taking the water buffalo baby

[00:46:04] and then shooting away different parts of it, trying to kill it as slowly

[00:46:08] as possible. And then the reader is kind of subjected to these

[00:46:12] these moments that are so beautifully unpacked.

[00:46:16] But then all of that is instantly negated when the narrator says that didn't

[00:46:22] happen, that's not true.

[00:46:25] It just it leaves me really frustrated,

[00:46:28] not knowing what is true and what is made up.

[00:46:32] And so that's why I can never find the kind of core in that story.

[00:46:36] But wouldn't people say that about a lot of your novels?

[00:46:38] And again, I'll just take because most people know it.

[00:46:41] Fight Club is an example.

[00:46:43] Well, we don't know what's true and what's not in when we're reading the book

[00:46:47] initially, you know, things that happen in my novels.

[00:46:52] You what happens happens, but you don't understand the full context of what they are.

[00:46:58] We don't understand that.

[00:47:00] Yeah, until later.

[00:47:01] It doesn't negate what actually happened, what happened happened.

[00:47:05] But it sort of changes the circumstances.

[00:47:09] It provides a fuller understanding of the circumstances, which is what I think we

[00:47:13] get throughout life as a child.

[00:47:15] We experience something and we think, OK, that's what happened.

[00:47:19] But then much later in life, we find out all the surrounding

[00:47:24] circumstances for why it happened and what really fully involved.

[00:47:28] It's so it's so it's so interesting because I guess and since you're

[00:47:32] reading mid-century science fiction, you look at an author like Kurt Vonnegut,

[00:47:36] who was sort of born out of mid-century science fiction.

[00:47:39] And then you lead to the Slaughterhouse Five, which is his war story,

[00:47:43] but completely in this weird science fiction context.

[00:47:48] You know, time travel happens, space travel happens, but it's all basically

[00:47:51] about his experience in Dresden.

[00:47:53] Well, and I think that's the other thing is that

[00:47:57] the war experience from World War Two,

[00:48:00] it could be depicted either in science fiction

[00:48:04] with this kind of space cowboy thing, or it could be depicted in kind of ludicrous

[00:48:09] over the top catch twenty two Slaughterhouse Five absurd comedy.

[00:48:15] Yeah, really for most for the two or three decades following World War Two,

[00:48:21] it could only be one or the other, or it could be in a small way depicted

[00:48:26] in Ketcher and the Rye, because that came out of Salinger's

[00:48:31] fantastically brutal experience, or it could be depicted in the absurd comedy

[00:48:37] of Dennis Patrick Dennis, and he was one of the top selling writers

[00:48:41] in the mid century, beginning with Auntie Mame.

[00:48:44] He wrote maybe a dozen books that were huge sellers, but they were all these

[00:48:49] very comedic books that were him processing his World War Two trauma

[00:48:55] in this comic way like Joseph Heller.

[00:48:58] Yeah, it's it's interesting.

[00:49:01] I you shed a whole new light for me on how metaphors

[00:49:06] been used in this past century's worth of novels and stories.

[00:49:10] So what science fiction novels are you reading right now?

[00:49:13] I'm reading Dune, I'm reading Ursula Gwynne, Left Hand of Darkness,

[00:49:17] and I'm reading mostly short stories because I want to cover a lot of

[00:49:20] territory.

[00:49:22] I've reread Martian Chronicles a thousand times, but I'm reading rereading a lot

[00:49:27] of short stories that I loved as a child in the 60s.

[00:49:31] I always liked Asimov's and Ray Bradbury short stories.

[00:49:35] And Bradbury is so much about

[00:49:38] that lost innocence, that sort of lost American Midwest innocence.

[00:49:44] And so is Earl Hamner.

[00:49:46] I love Earl Hamner science fiction.

[00:49:48] You know, if you know the Waltons.

[00:49:52] Yeah, the Waltons was created by Earl Hamner and he is basically it's his sort

[00:49:58] of bio, his John Boyd Walton, this kid in West Virginia, who is sitting in

[00:50:05] his upstairs bedroom during the Depression wanting to be a writer.

[00:50:10] And then I love the fact that Earl Hamner, John Boyd Walton, goes on

[00:50:16] to write the most fucked up episodes of The Twilight Zone.

[00:50:19] So this sweet kid is writing the darkest, most twisted stuff that was ever on

[00:50:26] Outer Limits, The Twilight Zone, all of those anthology television series.

[00:50:32] Do you remember which any particular episode of The Twilight Zone that he

[00:50:35] might have written?

[00:50:36] I'd have to look it up.

[00:50:37] I'm sorry.

[00:50:38] But it was shocked how many that he had done.

[00:50:43] Yeah, that's funny.

[00:50:44] I had no idea.

[00:50:47] Givereed Don Carpenter, Hard Rain Falling.

[00:50:51] No, but tell me about it.

[00:50:53] It's it's about a kid who his parents were just

[00:51:00] losers and and died young and had him in a night of passion.

[00:51:05] And he ends up growing up in foster homes and he becomes a violent kid in

[00:51:09] Portland, Oregon.

[00:51:10] And and he's just trying to figure out like why is he so violent?

[00:51:17] Why was he why is he such a loser in his own words?

[00:51:20] And he hangs out in bars, pool halls.

[00:51:24] He's tries to rob people, but he knows it's all meaningless.

[00:51:27] And he's trying he's desperately trying to find meaning in his life.

[00:51:29] And it's very realist.

[00:51:31] It's hard to find the metaphor.

[00:51:33] But what intrigued me was Don Carpenter had a bunch of friends that he would

[00:51:38] hang out with, Richard Brodigan, other writers who I had read separately.

[00:51:45] But they all they had one thing in common.

[00:51:47] They all hung out with each other.

[00:51:48] They wrote this real hardcore stuff and they all committed suicide.

[00:51:53] So so I was just curious if you had any like here's people who were writing

[00:51:57] really realist stuff like I didn't even realize I would write a bunch of novels.

[00:52:00] I didn't realize all these people knew each other and that not only that

[00:52:03] they all killed themselves at different times in their lives.

[00:52:06] Why do you think that happened?

[00:52:08] That's a big question.

[00:52:10] Maybe it's another benefit of writing through a metaphor, kind of writing

[00:52:15] instead of writing my story, writing the lottery, writing it as a kind of a

[00:52:21] non-threatening metaphoric way into the story that makes it entertaining,

[00:52:25] makes sets it at a distance a little bit and makes it a little over over the top.

[00:52:31] So there's wiggle room and you can still express and deal with your issue

[00:52:36] and exhaust it, but you're not dealing with it so directly.

[00:52:41] And maybe that's also that kind of Foucault concept that when you deal

[00:52:46] with something directly, you're giving it more power.

[00:52:48] If you go in direct opposition to your story and you try to figure it out

[00:52:54] by figuring it out,

[00:52:58] then you're actually giving it more power and it maybe ultimately destroys you.

[00:53:03] But if you come in it from an angle as a comedy by writing

[00:53:09] Slaughterhouse Five and you deal with it in this kind of indirect way,

[00:53:16] you can avoid giving it more power and you can actually resolve it for yourself

[00:53:21] and actually make room, make access for other people to have the same

[00:53:25] experience at the same time.

[00:53:28] So you're not

[00:53:30] you're not reinforcing it in your head.

[00:53:32] You are you're dealing with it without making it stronger.

[00:53:37] Yeah, it's interesting because you think the lottery,

[00:53:40] I mean, that's introduced into middle school like kids.

[00:53:44] Kids read that because it's quote unquote safe.

[00:53:47] If it was just about the Korean War,

[00:53:49] nobody would they wouldn't assign it to sixth graders.

[00:53:52] And, you know, and all those young mothers in the 60s watching Rosemary's

[00:53:57] baby and just being so troubled by it.

[00:54:00] If they'd known that it was probably about the Littemide and the fact that that was

[00:54:05] the giant thing that could not be dealt with in the culture,

[00:54:08] they would not have gone to it.

[00:54:10] They would have been destroyed by it.

[00:54:12] Do you think I or 11 who wrote Rosemary's

[00:54:15] baby or Shirley Jackson, do you think they were 100% aware of the metaphor

[00:54:20] that they were using?

[00:54:21] Or do you think it's sort of like

[00:54:23] they were driven by the anxiety of those situations while they were writing those stories?

[00:54:30] Just from my own experience, I think that they were attracted.

[00:54:33] I knew I or 11 wanted to write a story about

[00:54:38] a pregnancy that wasn't what it seemed.

[00:54:41] And he was really compelled by the midwich cuckoos,

[00:54:45] which is the the story that inspired Village of the Damned, where a bunch

[00:54:50] of women in an English village suddenly became pregnant the same night

[00:54:54] and more or less gave birth to exactly the same child.

[00:54:58] And it's revealed that these children were all the offspring of some alien force.

[00:55:04] But the midwich cuckoos had already been written.

[00:55:07] So Ira wanted to find his own metaphor, his own way to write that story.

[00:55:15] And I think at the beginning,

[00:55:16] he wasn't fully aware that he was writing about the Littemind.

[00:55:21] But as he got into it, he was writing about these mysterious cakes

[00:55:27] and these mysterious drinks that were being given to this woman.

[00:55:31] And he was writing about her neighbors

[00:55:34] crocheting booties that were basically for claws.

[00:55:40] That he finally realized what he was writing about.

[00:55:44] But he also knew he could never get caught.

[00:55:46] If he got caught, he would be like Gilbert Godfrey when he made that crack

[00:55:51] about missing his connection at the Empire State Building.

[00:55:55] Yeah.

[00:55:55] And everyone said too soon, too soon that

[00:56:00] he would have got crucified.

[00:56:02] And so at that moment, he was probably terrified of getting caught

[00:56:07] so he could never ever let anybody realize it.

[00:56:11] And in fact, if people had come to him and said,

[00:56:15] is it really about the Littemind?

[00:56:18] He would have said, don't be crazy.

[00:56:20] Don't be crazy. Of course not.

[00:56:22] It's interesting because it reminds me of, let's say,

[00:56:26] this is a basic example, 1984, which

[00:56:31] particularly during COVID times, that book and also the recent elections,

[00:56:35] that book was quoted by 100 percent of people.

[00:56:39] But everybody thought it applied to the other people.

[00:56:45] So like if Orwell had said exactly who this is,

[00:56:50] he's writing 1984 about our what society or whatever, then it would be a trap.

[00:56:54] Then maybe only half of people would like it or nobody would like it.

[00:56:57] But because he makes it a sort of science fiction type book,

[00:57:01] everybody could relate to it and accuse the other side of being Orwellian.

[00:57:05] And I love that.

[00:57:06] I like I love the fact that both sides use Fight Club to beat on the other side.

[00:57:13] Yeah, it's kind of to some extent,

[00:57:16] it's a big Rorschach test and everybody sees their own thing.

[00:57:19] And what that's another thing about if I were to write my story,

[00:57:24] it wouldn't be that kind of a Rorschach test.

[00:57:26] It would be either people agree with it or they don't agree with it.

[00:57:29] There would be no kind of ambiguity.

[00:57:33] Yeah, that's really interesting.

[00:57:35] I never really thought of again, it sounds

[00:57:37] simplistic, but I never really thought of metaphor in this way.

[00:57:43] So what do you think?

[00:57:44] Is that your next project is to do science fiction?

[00:57:47] Oh hell yeah.

[00:57:48] You know, I love science fiction.

[00:57:50] I don't see why I shouldn't take a shot at it.

[00:57:52] I want to do it my way.

[00:57:54] And yeah, I'm so excited about this.

[00:57:58] And you know, I could totally say you're doing great science fiction because

[00:58:02] again, I'll bring up fight club.

[00:58:04] I know you must be sick of answering questions about fight club.

[00:58:06] But that's like a little bit of a scape as fiction.

[00:58:10] We want to be Tyler Durden and science fiction has elements of escapism.

[00:58:15] I want to be a prince of a galactic empire or a Jedi knight or whatever.

[00:58:21] I mean, part of science fiction, I think is half metaphor, but half escapism.

[00:58:27] And there's another aspect of writing it that I really thoroughly enjoy.

[00:58:32] And that's apostolic fiction where the narrator so admires Tyler Durden.

[00:58:38] And it is so much is so fun, such ongoing ecstasy to write about someone you love,

[00:58:45] someone you admire, even though what they're doing is very questionable and even

[00:58:51] despicable and not forever but for now.

[00:58:54] It is Cecil writing about how much he adores his older brother.

[00:58:58] And despite what his older brother is doing,

[00:59:01] he is just so in love with his older brother the way that we tend to be really

[00:59:07] in love with older brothers and in the way that America is kind of in love

[00:59:13] with Great Britain, that's why it's kind of set in England.

[00:59:17] And it's written with all these these this Brit language because

[00:59:22] America just hero worships England despite all of its sort of flaws.

[00:59:30] Yeah, that's interesting.

[00:59:31] And also there's I don't want to say nostalgia, but you brought up nostalgia

[00:59:36] earlier in reference to science fiction and Ray Bradbury.

[00:59:39] There's a certain nostalgia to a family business.

[00:59:43] Like that's like almost old fashioned now.

[00:59:46] You know, people don't have family

[00:59:48] businesses because that means you make tires or or, you know,

[00:59:54] you know, some snack or whatever they were or cereal.

[00:59:58] Like family businesses are there's but they're still a nostalgia to them.

[01:00:02] And and there's kind of a family legacy that happens in this in this book.

[01:00:06] And when you think about it on a kind of national level,

[01:00:09] Empire is a family business.

[01:00:12] Is the next generation going to sign on to run the empire that we have worked

[01:00:17] so hard to build? And if they don't, then all of our wealth is going to be

[01:00:21] destroyed. So Otto and Cecil are being signed on to run

[01:00:27] this giant killing machine as a kind of metaphor for is the next generation going

[01:00:33] to sign on to run the giant empire that we have worked so damn hard to make our

[01:00:38] lives great.

[01:00:40] Yeah, it's and it's funny how a lot of that is encoded in language.

[01:00:45] Like if you tell somebody,

[01:00:48] you're let's say next election, you tell a friend of yours, I'm not going to vote.

[01:00:53] One thing that is commonly said is people died for your right to vote.

[01:00:57] How could you not vote?

[01:00:58] People died for your right to vote.

[01:00:59] And in reality, nobody really died for Chuck's right to vote.

[01:01:04] Nobody was thinking Chuck Palinick could vote now when they were dying.

[01:01:10] But it's these words that have been encoded with all this meaning that is

[01:01:16] foisted upon us so that we continue these these empires and or or this

[01:01:21] family business or whatever nostalgia is trying to be forced on us.

[01:01:27] You know, language plays an important role.

[01:01:30] And you know, and voting would maybe be the least part of engaging with empire.

[01:01:36] And depending on who you voted for, you would be engaging with empire or maybe

[01:01:41] engaging with empire on a lesser level, maybe helping to resolve empire and

[01:01:47] saying, maybe we don't need to live in this giant house in the English countryside.

[01:01:52] If it means going out and killing Judy Garland.

[01:01:57] Yeah. So well, look, Chuck, I hope everyone reads your book not forever,

[01:02:04] but for now. And what is the title mean?

[01:02:08] Or should we figure it out?

[01:02:10] You know, it's just a it's a title about in transience.

[01:02:14] Is that the word?

[01:02:15] It's a title about things that are here in the moment, but will not be around forever.

[01:02:22] So it's a really a title about loss, because everything in the book is more or

[01:02:27] less lost except for the main character that everything falls by the wayside.

[01:02:32] Everything is resolved.

[01:02:33] Everything is left behind, including empire.

[01:02:37] It is this character who moves from being

[01:02:41] kind of a follower who is just a cipher.

[01:02:46] It's the classic witness novel where big chief in Cougar's Nest,

[01:02:52] you know, he can't resolve the machine.

[01:02:54] He can't resolve the death of Randall Patrick McMurphy or Billy Bibbit,

[01:03:00] but he can escape and he can go out into the world and be his own

[01:03:05] have agency and be his own small fix in the world.

[01:03:09] And so by the end of the novel,

[01:03:11] the narrator Cecil does escape the world and get out and have his own life

[01:03:18] in the way that Ann Wells kind of goes back to Lawrenceville in Valley of the Dolls.

[01:03:24] So again, it is the witnessing character.

[01:03:27] It is Nick Caraway going back to the Midwest heartbroken.

[01:03:30] But you know, at least he's not still involved with all of those nasty people.

[01:03:36] So yeah, it's about leaving everything behind.

[01:03:40] Someone should write what happens to Nick Caraway after like for the rest of his life.

[01:03:45] You know, or in all of these witness novels,

[01:03:48] someone should just take over like the little little boy in The

[01:03:52] Road Warrior, Mad Max movie, what happened?

[01:03:56] He grows up. What happened to him?

[01:03:58] You know, that's a good point because

[01:04:01] would it be that interesting because so many people,

[01:04:03] they make their whole lives about what happened to them at that early age like

[01:04:07] Jack London or Charles Darwin, you know, they had their adventure

[01:04:12] and that adventure kind of shaped who they were and they wrote about it for the

[01:04:15] rest of their lives.

[01:04:18] I get worried about that.

[01:04:20] I feel like I'm in a constant fight to not let that happen.

[01:04:24] And I feel that is a good way to keep one young as well,

[01:04:28] to always have the next quest that you're going for instead of always thinking

[01:04:33] about how to reinterpret something from the past.

[01:04:36] And I think part of it is now I'm teaching and now I'm working with a lot

[01:04:40] of much younger writers and

[01:04:44] is kind of reshaping how I work, but it's also really fulfilling to kind

[01:04:51] of walk them through getting their stories out.

[01:04:56] Maybe it's not the same thing as my experience, but there's a joy in it.

[01:05:02] Well, Chuck, thanks once again.

[01:05:04] I always enjoy our conversation so much about your books, about writing,

[01:05:08] about life in general.

[01:05:09] I really appreciate you coming on the podcast and and always enjoy your books.

[01:05:14] I hope everyone reads this one and I'm sure you're going to have a lot

[01:05:18] of work in the next few weeks doing the book tour and the podcast tour and

[01:05:22] that whole thing. So so good luck with this.

[01:05:24] And and hopefully we'll we'll you'll come on again when the science fiction

[01:05:29] book comes out. I'm missing you in person.

[01:05:31] Do you do anything in person?

[01:05:33] Not as much anymore.

[01:05:35] I've become more even reclusive like I barely ever leave.

[01:05:39] But every now and then I travel a little bit.

[01:05:42] So if I'm it's conceivable, I could be in the Portland, Oregon area at some

[01:05:47] point. So I love to do a podcast if I'm ever there or if you're ever in

[01:05:50] Atlanta, you know, in the actual Second World War,

[01:05:54] there was a La Bomba in Italy where the culture and everything exploded.

[01:05:59] It was this giant cultural explosion.

[01:06:02] And after Franco died in Spain, I believe they also called it La Bomba.

[01:06:06] And so much in Spain and Madrid,

[01:06:09] particularly is very 80s comic book stores and record stores and 80 neon colors

[01:06:16] because they're still so enjoying the freedom that they that they got after

[01:06:20] Franco died. And I'm really hoping that American culture has that same explosion

[01:06:25] after covid.

[01:06:26] Yeah, I wonder if we became we built a habit of not leaving

[01:06:33] during this and have it so hard to break now.

[01:06:35] Well, in the same way that that's by the end of the book,

[01:06:39] Cecil gets out and does his small part in the world to be in the world

[01:06:44] instead of being in that house with nature films.

[01:06:48] I really want to get my ass out there and do my part to try to explode things

[01:06:54] in the wake of covid.

[01:06:56] Yeah, maybe that's how I should how I should view it is kind of

[01:07:01] getting out there more.

[01:07:03] I feel like I've moved more inward, but

[01:07:07] it's it's not covid at first.

[01:07:10] I was fine with it.

[01:07:11] But then as it dragged on and as all the people's opinions sort of melded

[01:07:16] with the culture of it, I kind of became more I'm just staying in my house.

[01:07:21] I haven't left my house in about six or seven days right now.

[01:07:24] So it's become a habit.

[01:07:27] Oh, James, come on. Come on.

[01:07:30] I'm not going to I'm not going to get you.

[01:07:32] I'm not going to get you.

[01:07:32] I'm just saying it's going to be a lot more fun if you get out.

[01:07:36] I agree with you.

[01:07:37] So that so between now and the next time we speak, I will I will get out more.

[01:07:42] I'm going to try to break this habit.

[01:07:43] Yes, please get out of the giant nursery.

[01:07:46] Get out of the nursery.

[01:07:49] Yeah.

[01:07:51] Yeah, that's that's good.

[01:07:52] That's that's the metaphor.

[01:07:53] Happy to meet you.

[01:07:54] Well, thanks very much.

[01:07:55] Thank you as usual.

[01:07:56] I appreciate it.

[01:07:57] Thank you.

[01:08:00] Excellent.