William Gibson, The Art of Fiction No.

211
Interviewed by David Wallace-Wells
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Vancouver, British Columbia, sits just on the far side of the American border, a
green-glass model city set in the dish of the North Shore Mountains, which encl
ose the city and support, most days, a thick canopy of fog. There are periods in
the year when itll rain for forty days, William Gibson tells me one mucky day th
ere this winter, and when visibility drops so low you cant see whats coming at you
from the nearest street corner. But large parts of Vancouver are traversed by t
rolley cars, and on clear nights you can gaze up at the wide expanse of Pacific
sky through the haphazard grid of their electric wires.
Gibson came to Vancouver in 1972, a twenty-four-year-old orphan whod spent the pa
st half-decade trawling the counterculture in Toronto on his wandering way from s
mall-town southern Virginia. He had never been to the Far East, which would yiel
d so much of the junk-heap casino texture of his early fiction. He hadnt been to
college and didnt yet intend to go. He hadnt yet heard of the Internet, or even it
s predecessors arpanet and Telenet. He thought he might become a film-cell anima
tor. He hadnt yet written any science fictionhe hadnt read any science fiction sinc
e adolescence, having discarded the stuff more or less completely at fourteen, j
ust, he says, as its publishers intended.
Today, Gibson is lanky and somewhat shy, avuncular and slow to speakmore what you
would expect from the lapsed science-fiction enthusiast he was in 1972 than the
genre-vanquishing hero he has become since the publication of his first novel,
the hallucinatory hacker thriller Neuromancer, in 1984. Gibson resists being cal
led a visionary, yet his nine novels constitute as subtle and clarifying a medit
ation on the transformation of culture by technology as has been written since t
he beginning of what we now know to call the information age. Neuromancer, famou
sly, gave us the term cyberspace and the vision of the Internet as a lawless, spe
llbinding realm. And, with its two sequels, Count Zero (1986) and Mona Lisa Over
drive (1988), it helped establish the cultural figure of the computer hacker as
cowboy hero. In his Bridge seriesVirtual Light (1993), Idoru (1996), and All Tomo
rrows Parties (1999), each of which unfolds in a Bay Bridge shantytown improvised
after a devastating Pacific earthquake transforms much of San Franciscohe planted
potted futures of celebrity journalism, reality television, and nanotechnology,
each prescient and persuasive and altogether weird.
Neuromancer and its two sequels were set in distant decades and contrived to daz
zle the reader with strangeness, but the Bridge novels are set in the near futur
eso near they read like alternate history, Gibson says, with evident pride. With
his next books, he began to write about the present-day, or more precisely, the
recent past: each of the three novels in the series is set in the year before it
was written. He started with September 11, 2001.
Pattern Recognition was the first of that series. It has been called an eerie vis
ion of our time by The New Yorker, one of the first authentic and vital novels of
the twenty-first century, by The Washington Post Book World, and, by The Economis
t, probably the best exploration yet of the function and power of product brandin
g and advertising in the age of globalization. The Pattern Recognition books are
also the first since Mona Lisa Overdrive in which Gibsons characters speak of cyb
erspace, and they speak of it elegiacally. I saw it go from the yellow legal pad
to the Oxford English Dictionary, he tells me. But cyberspace is everywhere now, h
aving everted and colonized the world. It starts to sound kind of ridiculous to
speak of cyberspace as being somewhere else.
You can tell the term still holds some magic for him, perhaps even more so now t
hat it is passing into obsolescence. The opposite is true for cyberpunk, a neolog
ism that haunts him to this day. On a short walk to lunch one afternoon, from th
e two-story mock-Tudor house where he lives with his wife, Deborah, he complaine
d about a recent visit from a British journalist, who came to Vancouver searchin
g for Mr. Cyberpunk and was disappointed to find him ensconced in a pleasantly qui
et suburban patch of central Vancouver. Mr. Cyberpunk seemed wounded by having h
is work pigeonholed, but equally so by the insult to his home, which is quite comf
ortable, and his neighborhood, which is, too. We like it quiet, he explained.
David Wallace-Wells

INTERVIEWER
Whats wrong with cyberpunk?
GIBSON
A snappy label and a manifesto would have been two of the very last things on my
own career want list. That label enabled mainstream science fiction to safely a
ssimilate our dissident influence, such as it was. Cyberpunk could then be embra
ced and given prizes and patted on the head, and genre science fiction could con
tinue unchanged.
INTERVIEWER
What was that dissident influence? What were you trying to do?
GIBSON
I didnt have a manifesto. I had some discontent. It seemed to me that midcentury
mainstream American science fiction had often been triumphalist and militaristic
, a sort of folk propaganda for American exceptionalism. I was tired of America-
as-the-future, the world as a white monoculture, the protagonist as a good guy f
rom the middle class or above. I wanted there to be more elbow room. I wanted to
make room for antiheroes.
I also wanted science fiction to be more naturalistic. There had been a poverty
of description in much of it. The technology depicted was so slick and clean tha
t it was practically invisible. What would any given SF favorite look like if we
could crank up the resolution? As it was then, much of it was like video games
before the invention of fractal dirt. I wanted to see dirt in the corners.
INTERVIEWER
How do you begin a novel?
GIBSON
I have to write an opening sentence. I think with one exception Ive never changed
an opening sentence after a book was completed.
INTERVIEWER
You wont have planned beyond that one sentence?
GIBSON
No. I dont begin a novel with a shopping listthe novel becomes my shopping list as
I write it. Its like that joke about the violin maker who was asked how he made
a violin and answered that he started with a piece of wood and removed everythin
g that wasnt a violin. Thats what I do when Im writing a novel, except somehow Im si
multaneously generating the wood as Im carving it.
E. M. Forsters idea has always stuck with methat a writer whos fully in control of
the characters hasnt even started to do the work. Ive never had any direct fiction
al input, that I know of, from dreams, but when Im working optimally Im in the equ
ivalent of an ongoing lucid dream. That gives me my story, but it also leaves me
devoid of much theoretical or philosophical rationale for why the story winds u
p as it does on the page. The sort of narratives I dont trust, as a reader, smell
of homework.
INTERVIEWER
Do you take notes?
GIBSON
I take the position that if I can forget it, it couldnt have been very good.
But in the course of a given book, I sometimes get to a point where the narrative
flow overwhelms the speed at which I can compose. So Ill sometimes stop and make
cryptic notes that are useless by the time I get back to them. Underlined three
times, with no contextHave they been too big a deal?
INTERVIEWER
What is your writing schedule like?
GIBSON
When Im writing a book I get up at seven. I check my e-mail and do Internet ablut
ions, as we do these days. I have a cup of coffee. Three days a week, I go to Pi
lates and am back by ten or eleven. Then I sit down and try to write. If absolut
ely nothing is happening, Ill give myself permission to mow the lawn. But, genera
lly, just sitting down and really trying is enough to get it started. I break fo
r lunch, come back, and do it some more. And then, usually, a nap. Naps are esse
ntial to my process. Not dreams, but that state adjacent to sleep, the mind on w
aking.
INTERVIEWER
And your schedule is steady the whole way through?
GIBSON
As I move through the book it becomes more demanding. At the beginning, I have a
five-day workweek, and each day is roughly ten to five, with a break for lunch
and a nap. At the very end, its a seven-day week, and it could be a twelve-hour d
ay.
Toward the end of a book, the state of composition feels like a complex, chemica
lly altered state that will go away if I dont continue to give it what it needs.
What it needs is simply to write all the time. Downtime other than simply sleepi
ng becomes problematic. Im always glad to see the back of that.
INTERVIEWER
Do you revise?
GIBSON
Every day, when I sit down with the manuscript, I start at page one and go throu
gh the whole thing, revising freely.
INTERVIEWER
You revise the whole manuscript every day?
GIBSON
I do, though that might consist of only a few small changes. Ive done that since
my earliest attempts at short stories. It would be really frustrating for me not
to be able to do that. I would feel as though I were flying blind.
The beginnings of my books are rewritten many times. The endings are only a draf
t or three, and then theyre done. But I can scan the manuscript very quickly, muc
h more quickly than I could ever read anyone elses prose.
INTERVIEWER
Does your assessment of the work change, day by day?
GIBSON
If it were absolutely steady I dont think it could be really good judgment. I thi
nk revision is hugely underrated. It is very seldom recognized as a place where
the higher creativity can live, or where it can manifest. I think it was Yeats w
ho said that literary revision was the only place in life where a man could trul
y improve himself.
INTERVIEWER
How much do you write in a typical day?
GIBSON
I dont know. I used to make printouts at every stage, just to be comforted by the
physical fact of the pile of manuscript. It was seldom more than five manuscrip
t pages. I was still doing that with Pattern Recognition, out of nervousness tha
t all the computers would die and take my book with them. I was printing it out
and sending it to first readers by fax, usually beginning with the first page. Im
still sending my output to readers every day. But Ive learned to just let it liv
e in the hard drive, and once Id quit printing out the daily output, I lost track
.
INTERVIEWER
For a while it was often reported, erroneously, that you typed all your books on
a typewriter.
GIBSON
I wrote Neuromancer on a manual portable typewriter and about half of Count Zero
on the same machine. Then it broke, in a way that was more or less irreparable.
Bruce Sterling called me shortly thereafter and said, This changes everything! I
said, What? He said, My Dad gave me his Apple II. You have to get one of these thin
gs! I said, Why? He said, Automationit automates the process of writing! Ive never go
back.
But I had only been using a typewriter because Id gotten one for free and I was p
oor. In 1981, most people were still writing on typewriters. There were five lar
ge businesses in Vancouver that did nothing but repair and sell typewriters. Soo
n there were computers, too, and it was a case of the past and the future mutual
ly coexisting. And then the past just goes away.
INTERVIEWER
For someone who so often writes about the future of technology, you seem to have
a real romance for artifacts of earlier eras.
GIBSON
Its harder to imagine the past that went away than it is to imagine the future. W
hat we were prior to our latest batch of technology is, in a way, unknowable. It
would be harder to accurately imagine what New York City was like the day befor
e the advent of broadcast television than to imagine what it will be like after
life-size broadcast holography comes online. But actually the New York without t
he television is more mysterious, because weve already been there and nobody paid
any attention. That world is gone.
My great-grandfather was born into a world where there was no recorded music. Its
very, very difficult to conceive of a world in which there is no possibility of
audio recording at all. Some people were extremely upset by the first Edison re
cordings. It nauseated them, terrified them. It sounded like the devil, they sai
d, this evil unnatural technology that offered the potential of hearing the dead
speak. We dont think about that when were driving somewhere and turn on the radio
. We take it for granted.
INTERVIEWER
Was television a big deal in your childhood?
GIBSON
I can remember my father bringing home our first setthis ornate wooden cabinet th
at was the size of a small refrigerator, with a round cathode-ray picture tube a
nd wooden speaker grilles over elaborate fabric. Like a piece of archaic furnitu
re, even then. Everybody would gather around at a particular time for a broadcas
ta baseball game or a variety show or something. And then it would go back to a m
andala that was called a test pattern, or nothingstatic.
We know that something happened then. We know that broadcast television did some
thingdid everythingto us, and that now we arent the same, though broadcast televisi
on, in that sense, is already almost over. I can remember seeing the emergence o
f broadcast television, but I cant tell what it did to us because I became that w
hich watched broadcast television.
The strongest impacts of an emergent technology are always unanticipated. You ca
nt know what people are going to do until they get their hands on it and start us
ing it on a daily basis, using it to make a buck and using it for criminal purpos
es and all the different things that people do. The people who invented pagers,
for instance, never imagined that they would change the shape of urban drug deal
ing all over the world. But pagers so completely changed drug dealing that they
ultimately resulted in pay phones being removed from cities as part of a strateg
y to prevent them from becoming illicit drug markets. Were increasingly aware tha
t our society is driven by these unpredictable uses we find for the products of
our imagination.
INTERVIEWER
What was it like growing up in Wytheville, Virginia?
GIBSON
Wytheville was a small town. I wasnt a very happy kid, but there were aspects of t
he town that delighted me. It was rather short on books, though. There was a rot
ating wire rack of paperbacks at the Greyhound station on Main Street, another o
ne at a soda fountain, and another one at a drugstore. That was all the book ret
ail anywhere in my hometown.
My parents were both from Wytheville. They eventually got together, though rathe
r late for each of them. My father had been married previously, and my mother wa
s probably regarded as a spinster. My mothers family had been in Wytheville forev
er and was quite well-off and established, in a very small-town sort of way. My
fathers father had moved down from Pennsylvania to start a lumber company. Once t
he railroads had gotten far enough back into the mountains, after the Civil War,
there were a lot of fortunes being made extracting resources.
My mother had had some college, which was unusual for a young woman in that part
of the world, but she hadnt married, which was basically all a woman of her clas
s was supposed to do. When she did eventually marry my father, he was the breadw
inner. He had had some college, too, had studied engineering, which enabled him
to wind up working postwar for a big construction company. My earliest memories
are of moving from project to project, every year or so, as this company built L
evittown-like suburbs in Tennessee and North Carolina.
INTERVIEWER
And as these projects were being built you would live in one of the houses?
GIBSON
We did, in these rather sadly aspirational ranch-style houses within brand-new,
often unoccupied suburbs. It was right at the beginning of broadcast television,
and the world on television was very much the world of that sort of house, and
of the suburb. It was a vision of modernity, and I felt part of that.
But my father was often awayhe traveled constantly on business trips. When I was
about six, he left on one business trip and died. Within a week, my mother and I
were back in Wytheville.
INTERVIEWER
How did he die?
GIBSON
Its odd the way families try to help people grieveit doesnt always work out. I was
told at the time that he had died of a heart attack. Then later, I began to thin
k, You know, he was youngthats pretty scary! Twenty years later somebody said to m
e, Actually, he choked on something in a restaurant. It was a Heimlich maneuver
death prior to the Heimlich maneuver.
It was a hugely traumatic loss, and not just because Id lost my father. In Wythev
ille, I felt I wasnt in that modern world anymore. I had been living in a vision
of the future, and then suddenly I was living in a vision of the past. There was
television, but the world outside the window could have been the 1940s or the 1
930s or even the 1900s, depending on which direction you looked. It was a very o
ld-fashioned place.
Towns like that in the South were virtually tribal in those days. Everything was
about who your kin were. I was this weird alienated little critter who wasnt eve
n that into his own kin. I was shy and withdrawn. I just wanted to stay in my ro
om and read books and watch television, or go to the movies.
INTERVIEWER
What drew you to that stuff?
GIBSON
It was a window into strangeness. Any kind of foreign material got my interest,
anything that wasnt from the United States I would walk around the block to see.
Most of what you could see on television or at the movies was very controlled, b
ut sometimes you could just turn on your television and see some fabulous random
thing, because the local channels had space they couldnt afford to fill with net
work material. They might show old films more or less at random, and they wouldnt
necessarily have been screened for content. So there were occasionally coincide
nces of this kind of odd, other universesome dark, British crime film from the 19
40s, say.
My mother got me an omnibus Sherlock Holmes for a tenth-birthday present and I l
oved it. I remember casting one particular brick building that I walked by every
day as a building in Sherlock Holmess London. That could be in London, that buil
ding, I thought. I developed this special relationship with the facade of this b
uilding, and when I was in front of it I could imagine that there was an infinit
e number of similar buildings in every direction and I was in Sherlock Holmess Lo
ndon.
Part of my method for writing fiction grew out of that fundamental small-town la
ck of novelty. It caused me to develop an inference mechanism for imagining dist
ant places. I would see, perhaps, a picture of a Sunbeam Alpine sports car and i
nfer a life in England. I always held on to that, and
it migrated into my early fiction, particularly where I would create an imaginary
artifact in the course of writing and infer the culture that had produced it.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think fiction should be predictive?
GIBSON
No, I dont. Or not particularly. The record of futurism in science fiction is act
ually quite shabby, it seems to me. Used bookstores are full of visionary texts
weve never heard of, usually for perfectly good reasons.
INTERVIEWER
Youve written that science fiction is never about the future, that it is always i
nstead a treatment of the present.
GIBSON
There are dedicated futurists who feel very seriously that they are extrapolatin
g a future history. My position is that you cant do that without having the prese
nt to stand on. Nobody can know the real future. And novels set in imaginary fut
ures are necessarily about the moment in which they are written. As soon as a wo
rk is complete, it will begin to acquire a patina of anachronism. I know that fr
om the moment I add the final period, the text is moving steadily forward into t
he real future.
There was an effort in the seventies to lose the usage science fiction and champ
ion speculative fiction. Of course, all fiction is speculative, and all history,
tooendlessly subject to revision. Particularly given all of the emerging technol
ogy today, in a hundred years the long span of human history will look fabulousl
y different from the version we have now. If things go on the way theyre going, a
nd technology keeps emerging, well eventually have a near-total sorting of humani
tys attic.
In my lifetime Ive been able to watch completely different narratives of history
emerge. The history now of what World War II was about and how it actually took
place is radically different from the history I was taught in elementary school.
If you read the Victorians writing about themselves, theyre describing something
that never existed. The Victorians didnt think of themselves as sexually repress
ed, and they didnt think of themselves as racist. They didnt think of themselves a
s colonialists. They thought of themselves as the crown of creation.
Of course, we might be Victorians, too.
INTERVIEWER
The Victorians invented science fiction.
GIBSON
I think the popular perception that were a lot like the Victorians is in large pa
rt correct. One way is that were all constantly in a state of ongoing technoshock,
without really being aware of itits just become where we live. The Victorians wer
e the first people to experience that, and I think it made them crazy in new way
s. Were still riding that wave of craziness. Weve gotten so used to emergent techn
ologies that we get anxious if we havent had one in a while.
But if you read the accounts of people who rode steam trains for the first time,
for instance, they went a little crazy. Theyd traveled fifteen miles an hour, an
d when they were writing the accounts afterward they struggled to describe that
unthinkable speed and what this linear velocity does to a perspective as youre lo
oking forward. There was even a Victorian medical complaint called railway spine.
Emergent technologies were irreversibly altering their landscape. Bleak House is
a quintessential Victorian text, but it is also probably the best steampunk land
scape that will ever be. Dickens really nailed it, especially in those proto-Bal
lardian passages in which everything in nature has been damaged by heavy industr
y. But there were relatively few voices like Dickens then. Most people thought t
he progress of industry was all very exciting. Only a few were saying, Hang on,
we think the birds are dying.
INTERVIEWER
Were you hunting around for books as a kid?
GIBSON
I knew what day of the month the truck would come and put new books on those wir
e racks around town, but sometimes I would just go anyway, on the off chance tha
t I had missed something during the last visit. In those days you could have bou
ght all of the paperback science fiction that was being published in the United
States, monthly, and it probably wouldnt have cost you five dollars. There was ju
st very little stuff coming out, and it was never enough for me.
A couple of times I found big moldering piles of old science fiction in junk sho
ps and bought it all for a dollar and carted it home. These magazines were proba
bly eight or ten years old, but to me they were ancientit felt like they were fro
m the nineteenth century. That there could be something in one of these magazine
s that was completely mind blowing was an amazing thing.
INTERVIEWER
What was so affecting about it?
GIBSON
It gave me an uncensored window into very foreign modes of thought. There was a
lot of inherent cultural relativism in the science fiction I discovered then. It
gave me the idea that you could question anything, that it was possible to ques
tion anything at all. You could question religion, you could question your own c
ultures most basic assumptions. That was just unheard ofwhere else could I have go
tten it? You know, to be thirteen years old and get your brain plugged directly
into Philip K. Dicks brain!
That wasnt the way science fiction advertised itself, of course. The self-adverti
sement was: Technology! The world of the future! Educational! Learn about scienc
e! It didnt tell you that it would jack your kid into this weird malcontent urban
literary universe and serve as the gateway drug to J.?G. Ballard.
And nobody knew. The people at the high school didnt know, your parents didnt know
. Nobody knew that I had discovered this window into all kinds of alien ways of
thinking that wouldnt have been at all acceptable to the people who ran that litt
le world I lived in.
INTERVIEWER
Who were the writers that were most important to you?
GIBSON
Alfred Bester was among the first dozen science-fiction writers I read when I wa
s twelve years old, and I remember being amazed, doing my own science-fiction-wr
iter reconnaissance work a decade or two later, that someone I had discovered th
at young still seemed to me to be so amazing.
Bester had been doing it in the fiftiesa Madison Avenue hepcat who had come into
science fiction with a bunch of Joyce under his belt. He built his space-opera f
uture out of what it felt like to be young and happening in New York, in the cre
ative end of the business world in 1955. The plotlines were pulp and gothic and
baroque, but what I loved most was the way it seemed to be built out of somethin
g real and complex and sophisticated. I hadnt found that in a lot of other scienc
e fiction.
INTERVIEWER
What other writing interested you then?
GIBSON
Fritz Leiber was another culturally sophisticated American science-fiction write
runusually sophisticated. Samuel Delany, too. I was a teenager, just thirteen or
fourteen, reading novels Delany had written as a teenagerthat was incredible to m
e.
I started reading so-called adult science fiction when I was eleven or twelve, a
nd by the time I was fourteen or fifteen I had already moved on, into other kind
s of fiction, but somewhere in that very short period I discovered British scien
ce fiction and what was at that time called British New Wave science fiction, le
d, it seemed to me, by J.?G. Ballard.
There was a kind of literary war underway between the British New Wave people an
d the very conservative American science-fiction writerswho probably wouldnt even
have thought of themselves as very conservativesaying, Thats no good, you cant do t
hat, you dont know how to tell a story, and besides youre a communist. I remember
being frightened by that rhetoric. It was the first time I ever saw an art movem
ent, I suppose.
When I decided to try to write myself, in my late twenties, I went out and bough
t a bunch of newer science fictionI hadnt been reading the stuff for a long while.
It was incredibly disappointing. That window to strangeness just didnt seem to b
e there anymore. It was like, when I was twelve there was country blues, and whe
n Im twenty-six theres plastic Nashville countryit was that kind of change. My inte
nt, when I began to write, was to be a one-man science-fiction roots movement. I
remember being horrified that critics who were taken quite seriously, at least w
ithin the genre, habitually referred to the category of all writing that was not
science fiction or fantasy as the mundane. It didnt make any sense to me. If there
was mundane literature, then certainly a lot of it was science fiction. You kno
w, if James Joyce is mundane but Edgar Rice Burroughs isntIm out of here.
INTERVIEWER
When did you encounter the Beats?
GIBSON
More or less the same time I found science fiction, because I found the Beats wh
en the idea of them had been made sufficiently mainstream that there were paperb
ack anthologies on the same wire rack at the bus station. I remember being total
ly baffled by one Beat paperback, an anthology of short bits and excerpts from n
ovels. I sort of understood what little bits of Kerouac were in this thingI could
read himbut then there was William S. Burroughs and excerpts from Naked Lunch I
thought, What the heck is that? I could tell that there was science fiction, som
ehow, in Naked Lunch. Burroughs had cut up a lot of pulp-noir detective fiction,
and he got part of his tonality from science fiction of the forties and the fif
ties. I could tell it was kind of like science fiction, but that I didnt understa
nd it.
INTERVIEWER
Was Dick important to you?
GIBSON
I was never much of a Dick fan. He wrote an awful lot of novels, and I dont think
his output was very even. I loved The Man in the High Castle, which was the fir
st really beautifully realized alternate history I read, but by the time I was t
hinking about writing myself, hed started publishing novels that were ostensibly
autobiographical, and which, it seems to me, he probably didnt think were fiction
.
Pynchon worked much better for me than Dick for epic paranoia, and he hasnt yet
written a book in which he represents himself as being in direct contact with Go
d. I was never much of a Raymond Chandler fan, either.
INTERVIEWER
Why not?
GIBSON
When science fiction finally got literary naturalism, it got it via the noir det
ective novel, which is an often decadent offspring of nineteenth-century natural
ism. Noir is one of the places that the investigative, analytic, literary impuls
e went in America. The Goncourt brothers set out to investigate sex and money an
d power, and many years later, in America, you wind up with Chandler doing somet
hing very similar, though highly stylized and with a very different agenda. I al
ways had a feeling that Chandlers puritanism got in the way, and I was never quit
e as taken with the language as true Chandler fans seem to be. I distrusted Marl
ow as a narrator. He wasnt someone I wanted to meet, and I didnt find him sympathe
ticin large part because Chandler, whom I didnt trust either, evidently did find h
im sympathetic.
But I trusted Dashiell Hammett. It felt to me that Hammett was Chandlers ancestor
, even though they were really contemporaries. Chandler civilized it, but Hammet
t invented it. With Hammett I felt that the author was open to the world in a wa
y Chandler never seems to me to be.
But I dont think that writers are very reliable witnesses when it comes to influe
nces, because if one of your sources seems woefully unhip you are not going to c
ite it. When I was just starting out people would say, Well, who are your influe
nces? And I would say, William Burroughs, J. G. Ballard, Thomas Pynchon. Those a
re true, to some extent, but I would never have said Len Deighton, and I suspect
I actually learned more for my basic craft reading Deightons early spy novels th
an I did from Burroughs or Ballard or Pynchon.
I dont know if it was Deighton or John le Carr who, when someone asked them about
Ian Fleming, said, I love him, I have been living on his reverse market for year
s. I was really interested in that idea. Heres Fleming, with this classist, lateBr
itish Empire pulp fantasy about a guy who wears fancy clothes and beats the shit
out of bad guys who generally arent white, while driving expensive, fast cars, a
nd hes a spy, supposedly, and this is selling like hotcakes. Deighton and Le Carr
come along and completely reverse it, in their different ways, and get a really
powerful charge out of not offering James Bond. Youve got Harry Palmer and George
Smiley, neither of whom are James Bond, and people are willing to pay good mone
y for them not to be James Bond.
INTERVIEWER
Were you happy in Wytheville?
GIBSON
I was miserable, but I probably would have been anywhere. I spent a year or two
being increasingly weird and depressed. I was just starting to get countercultura
l signals. Its almost comical, in retrospect1966 in this small Southern town, and
Im like a Smiths fan or something, this mopey guy who likes to look at fashion ma
gazines but isnt gay. I was completely out of place, out of time. None of it was
particularly dramatic, but Im sure it was driving my mother crazy. Pretty soon I
had become so difficult and hard to get out of bed that I let myself be packed o
ff to a boys boarding school in Tucson.
INTERVIEWER
Were you close with your mother?
GIBSON
She was difficult. She was literateshe was actually a compulsive reader, and real
ly respected the idea of writingand she was very encouraging of any artistic impu
lses I might have had. Writers were her heroes, and that made her kind of a clos
eted freak in that town. She was one of maybe ten people who had a subscription
to the Sunday New York Times.
But she was also an incredibly anxious, fearful, neurotic person, and I would im
agine she was pretty much constantly depressed, except that depression didnt exis
t in those days, people were just down or difficult. But she was a chronically depre
ssed, anxiety-ridden single parent who wanted nothing more than to read novels,
chain-smoke Camels, and drink bad coffee all day long. There are worse things a
parent can do, but it was still hard.
INTERVIEWER
Were you in Arizona when she died?
GIBSON
I was still in school, but not for much longer. I was sufficiently upset, after
she died, that they wound up sending me home after a couple of months. But I did
nt get along with my relatives, so my mothers best friend and her husband finally
took me in. This was a woman whod been my mothers literary buddy all her life. She
was the only other person in town who cared about modern literature, as far as
I knew. It was lifesaving for me, because it gave me somewhere I could be where
the people I was with werent trying to figure out how to get me into the army.
INTERVIEWER
Had you already decided to avoid the draft?
GIBSON
Im not sure what would have happened if I had been drafted. I was not the most ti
ghtly wrapped package at that time, and I think it would have depended on the da
y I got the draft notice. I suspect I would have been equally capable of saying,
Fuck it, Im going to Vietnam.
I never did get drafted, but I went off to Canada on a kind of exploratory journ
ey to figure out what I might do if I ever was drafted. I got to Toronto early i
n 1967 and it was the first time I had been in a big city that was pedestrian fr
iendly, not to mention foreign, so I just stayed there. I figured if they drafte
d me I was already there. But I found that I couldnt hang out with the guys whod b
een drafted.
INTERVIEWER
Why not?
GIBSON
I didnt belong. I hadnt made their decision. And I found them too sad, too angry.
Some of their families had disowned them. They could feel, I guessed, that theyd
brought dishonor on their families by resisting the draft. Some of these were pe
ople who had no intention of ever leaving the United States. There were suicides
, there was a lot of drug abuse. Nobody knew that a few years down the road it w
ould all be over and that all would be forgiven. And that wasnt my situation. I w
as there because I liked it there.
It was 1967, and the world was in the middle of some sort of secular millenarian
convulsion. Young people thought everything would change in some Rapture-like w
ay. Nobody knew what it was going to be like, but everybody knew that pretty soon
everything would be different.
INTERVIEWER
Did you?
GIBSON
I do remember thinking that the world I was seeing around me probably was going
to be very different in relatively short order. But I didnt assume that it would
necessarily be better.
I had become interested at some point, before I got to Toronto, in popular delus
ions and the madness of crowds. Science-fiction writers had long accessed popula
r delusions as a source of materialintentional communities where people all belie
ve something nobody else in the world believes, groups of people under some sort
of great emotional stress who decide that something is about to happen, people
who commit suicide en masse, people who invest in Ponzi schemes. When the sixtie
s cranked up, I felt already familiar with what was happening. Moving to the woo
ds always creeped me out so I just stayed in cities and watched the whole thing
congeal.
INTERVIEWER
Congeal?
GIBSON
Like bacon fat in the bottom of the pan. It was ghastlythe nuked psychic ruins of
1967.
INTERVIEWER
And how were you passing the time?
GIBSON
I was one of those annoying people who know they are going to do something in th
e arts, but never do anything about it. But then, in 1967 and 1968, if you were
a part of the secular millenarian movement, even on the fringes, you basically d
idnt do anything, you just got up in the morning and walked around, and figured o
ut what you had to do to make that happen again the next daywhere you were going
to sleep and what could be done to pay the rent. Soon, the hippie rapture would
happen and it would all be okay. In the meantime you just hung out. While I susp
ected that wasnt really sustainable, I couldnt think of anything else to do.
I had been hugely fond of Toronto as I first found it in 1967, but by 1972 I had
lost that fondness. Montreal had always been the business capital of Canada, an
d when the Quebecois separatist movement got problematic enough for the country
to be placed under martial law, all of the big companies fled to Torontothe stock
market even moved thereand the mood of the place changed very quickly.
INTERVIEWER
You met your wife in Toronto, didnt you?
GIBSON
I took her coffee one morning. I was staying at my friends place, and he had spen
t the night with some woman and didnt want to get out of bed, so he called to me
and asked me to make them some coffee. I said sure, I made them some coffee, bro
ught it up on a tray, and there was my wife.
After we had been together for a while, I began complaining about the weather in
Toronto. I told her, I cant do this winter, I forgot how bad this is. She said,
I know an easier waycome with me to Vancouver. Weve been here ever since.
INTERVIEWER
Thats when you went back to school.
GIBSON
Those days it was fantastically easy to get a degree at UBC. I discovered very q
uickly that they were in effect paying me for studying things I was already inte
rested in. I could cool it for four years, and I wouldnt have to worry about what
I was going to do for the rest of my life.
But my wife started to talk about having a child. She already had a job, a real
job at the university. Everyone I had known during that four-year period was als
o trying to get a job. It startled me. They hadnt really been talking about getti
ng jobs before. But some part of me I had never heard from before sat me down an
d said, Youve been bullshitting about this art thing since you were fifteen years
old, youve never done anything about any of it, youre about to be shoved into the
adult world, so if youre going to do anything about the art thing, youve got to d
o it right now, or shut up and get a job.
That was really the beginning of my career. My wife continued to have a job afte
r she had the baby, so I became the caregiver guy, the house husband guy, and si
multaneously I found that it actually provided ample time to write. When he was
asleep, I could write, I knew that was the only time I would have to write. Most
of the short fiction I wrote at the beginning was written when our son was asle
ep.
INTERVIEWER
You wrote your first story for a class, didnt you?
GIBSON
A woman named Susan Wood had come to UBC as an assistant professor. We were the
same age, and I met her while reconnoitering the local science-fiction culture.
In my final year she was teaching a science-fiction course. I had become really
lazy and thought, I wont have to read anything if I take her course. No matter wh
at she assigns, Ive read all the stuff. Ill just turn up and bullshit brilliantly,
and shell give me a mark just for doing that. But when I said, Well, you know, we
know one another. Do I really have to write you a paper for this class? She said
, No, but I think you should write a short story and give me that instead. I think
she probably saw through whatever cover I had erected over my secret plan to be
come a science-fiction writer.
I went ahead and did it, but it was incredibly painful. It was the hardest thing
I did in my senior year, writing this little short story. She said, Thats good. Y
ou should sell it now. And I said, No. And she said, Yeah, you should sell it. I went
and found the most obscure magazine that paid the least amount of money. It was
called Unearth. I submitted it to them, and they bought it and gave me twenty-s
even dollars. I felt an enormous sense of relief. At least nobody will ever see
it, I thought. That was Fragments of a Hologram Rose.
INTERVIEWER
How did you meet John Shirley?
GIBSON
Shirley was the only one of us who was seriously punk. Id gone to a science-ficti
on convention in Vancouver, and there I encountered this eccentrically dressed y
oung man my age who seemed to be wearing prison pajamas. He was an extremely out
going person, and he introduced himself to me: Im a singer in a punk band, but my
day job is writing science fiction. I said, You know, I write a little science fic
tion myself. And he said, Published anything? And I said, Oh, not really. This one s
tory in this utterly obscure magazine. He said, Well, send me some of your stuff,
Ill give you a critique.
As soon as he got home he sent me a draft of a short story he had written perhap
s an hour beforehand: This is my new genius short story. I read itit was about some
one who discovers there are things that live in bars, things that look like drun
ks and prostitutes but are actually something elseand I saw, as I thought at the
time, its flaws. I sat down to write him a critique, but it would have been so m
uch work to critique it that instead I took his story and rewrote it. It was rea
lly quick and painless. I sent it back to him, saying, I hope this wont piss you o
ff, but it was actually much easier for me to rewrite this than to do a critique
. The next thing I get back is a noteI sold it! He had sold it to this hardcover hor
ror anthology. I was like, Oh, shit. Now my name is on this weird story.
People kept doing that to me, and its really good that they did. Id give various f
riends stuff to read, and theyd say, What are you going to do with this? And Id say,
Nothing, its not nearly there yet. Then theyd Xerox it and submit it on my behalf,
to places I would have been terrified to submit to. It seemed unseemly to me to
force this unfinished stuff on the world at large.
INTERVIEWER
Do you still consider that work unfinished?
GIBSON
I had a very limited tool kit when I began writing. I didnt know how to handle tra
nsitions, so I used abrupt breaks, the literary equivalent of jump cuts. I didnt
have any sense of how to pace anything. But I had read and admired Ballard and B
urroughs, and I thought of them as very powerful effect pedals. You get to a cer
tain place in the story and you just step on the Ballard.
INTERVIEWER
What was the effect?
GIBSON
A more genuine kind of future shock. I wanted the reader to feel constantly somew
hat disoriented and in a foreign place, because I assumed that to be the highest
pleasure in reading stories set in imaginary futures. But Id also read novels wh
ere the future-weirdness quotient overwhelmed me and simply became boring, so I t
ried to make sure my early fiction worked as relatively solid genre pieces. Whic
h I still believe is harder to do. When I started Neuromancer, for instance, I w
anted to have an absolutely familiar, utterly well-worn armature of pulp plot ru
nning throughout the whole thing. Its the caper plot that carries the reader thro
ugh.
INTERVIEWER
What do you think of Neuromancer today?
GIBSON
When I look at Neuromancer I see a Soap Box Derby car. I felt, writing it, like
I had two-by-fours and an old bicycle wheel and Im supposed to build something th
at will catch a Ferrari. This is not going to fly, I thought. But I tried to do
it anyway, and I produced this garage artifact, which, amazingly, is still runni
ng to this day.
Even so, I got to the end of it, and I didnt care what it meant, I didnt even know
if it made any sense as a narrative. I didnt have this huge feeling of, Wow, I j
ust wrote a novel! I didnt think it might win an award. I just thought, Phew! Now
I can figure out how to write an actual novel.
INTERVIEWER
How did you come up with the title?
GIBSON
Coming up with a word like neuromancer is something that would earn you a really
fine vacation if you worked in an ad agency. It was a kind of booby-trapped por
tmanteau that contained considerable potential for cognitive dissonance, that pl
easurable buzz of feeling slightly unsettled.
I believed that this could be induced at a number of levels in a textat the micro
level with neologisms and portmanteaus, or using a familiar word in completely u
nfamiliar ways. There are a number of well-known techniques for doing thisall of
the classic surrealist techniques, for instance, especially the game called exqu
isite corpse, where you pass a folded piece of paper around the room and write a
line of poetry or a single word and fold it again and then the next person blin
dly adds to it. Sometimes it produces total gibberish, but it can be spookily ap
t. A lot of what I had to learn to do was play a game of exquisite-corpse solita
ire.
INTERVIEWER
Where did cyberspace come from?
GIBSON
I was painfully aware that I lacked an arena for my science fiction. The spacesh
ip had been where science fiction had happened for a very long time, even in the
writing of much hipper practitioners like Samuel Delany. The spaceship didnt wor
k for me, viscerally. I know from some interviews of Ballards that it didnt work f
or him either. His solution was to treat Earth as the alien planet and perhaps t
o treat ones fellow humans as though they were aliens. But that didnt work for me.
I knew I wouldnt be able to function in a purely Ballardian universe. So I neede
d something to replace outer space and the spaceship.
I was walking around Vancouver, aware of that need, and I remember walking past
a video arcade, which was a new sort of business at that time, and seeing kids p
laying those old-fashioned console-style plywood video games. The games had a ve
ry primitive graphic representation of space and perspective. Some of them didnt
even have perspective but were yearning toward perspective and dimensionality. E
ven in this very primitive form, the kids who were playing them were so physical
ly involved, it seemed to me that what they wanted was to be inside the games, w
ithin the notional space of the machine. The real world had disappeared for themi
t had completely lost its importance. They were in that notional space, and the
machine in front of them was the brave new world.
The only computers Id ever seen in those days were things the size of the side of
a barn. And then one day, I walked by a bus stop and there was an Apple poster.
The poster was a photograph of a businessmans jacketed, neatly cuffed arm holdin
g a life-size representation of a real-life computer that was not much bigger th
an a laptop is today. Everyone is going to have one of these, I thought, and eve
ryone is going to want to live inside them. And somehow I knew that the notional
space behind all of the computer screens would be one single universe.
INTERVIEWER
And you knew at that point you had your arena?
GIBSON
I sensed that it would more than meet my requirements, and I knew that there wer
e all sorts of things I could do there that I hadnt even been able to imagine yet
. But what was more important at that point, in terms of my practical needs, was
to name it something cool, because it was never going to work unless it had a r
eally good name. So the first thing I did was sit down with a yellow pad and a S
harpie and start scribblinginfospace, dataspace. I think I got cyberspace on the
third try, and I thought, Oh, thats a really weird word. I liked the way it felt
in the mouthI thought it sounded like it meant something while still being essent
ially hollow.
What I had was a sticky neologism and a very vague chain of associations between
the bus-stop Apple IIc advertisement, the posture of the kids playing arcade ga
mes, and something Id heard about from these hobbyist characters from Seattle cal
led the Internet. It was more tedious and more technical than anything Id ever he
ard anybody talk about. It made ham radio sound really exciting. But I understood
that, sometimes, you could send messages through it, like a telegraph. I also k
new that it had begun as a project to explore how we might communicate during a
really shit-hot nuclear war.
I took my neologism and that vague chain of associations to a piece of prose fic
tion just to see what they could do. But I didnt have a concept of what it was to
begin with. I still think the neologism and the vague general idea were the imp
ortant things. I made up a whole bunch of things that happened in cyberspace, or
what you could call cyberspace, and so I filled in my empty neologism. But beca
use the world came along with its real cyberspace, very little of that stuff las
ted. What lasted was the neologism.
INTERVIEWER
Where did you get the prefix cyber?
GIBSON
It came from the word cybernetics, which was coined around the year I was born b
y a scientist named Norbert Wiener. It was the science of feedback and control s
ystems. I was familiar with the word through science fiction more than anything
else.
Science fiction had long offered treatments of the notional space inside the com
puter. Harlan Ellison had written a story called I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scre
am, which was set in what we would call a virtual world within a computer. You co
uld even go back to Ray Bradburys story The Veldt, which was one of his mordantly c
autionary fables about broadcast television. So I didnt think it was terribly ori
ginal, my concept of cyberspace. My anxiety, rather, was that if I had thought o
f it, twenty or thirty other science-fiction writers had thought of it at exactl
y the same time and were probably busy writing stories about it, too.
Theres an idea in the science-fiction community called steam-engine time, which i
s what people call it when suddenly twenty or thirty different writers produce s
tories about the same idea. Its called steam-engine time because nobody knows why
the steam engine happened when it did. Ptolemy demonstrated the mechanics of the
steam engine, and there was nothing technically stopping the Romans from buildi
ng big steam engines. They had little toy steam engines, and they had enough met
alworking skill to build big steam tractors. It just never occurred to them to d
o it. When I came up with my cyberspace idea, I thought, I bet its steam-engine t
ime for this one, because I cant be the only person noticing these various things
. And I wasnt. I was just the first person who put it together in that particular
way, and I had a logo for it, I had my neologism.
INTERVIEWER
Were you hoping to make cyberspace feel unfamiliar when you were first writing a
bout it?
GIBSON
It wasnt merely unfamiliar. It was something no one had experienced yet. I wanted
the readers experience to be psychedelic, hyperintense. But I also knew that a m
ore rigorous and colder and truer extrapolation would be to simply present it as
something the character scarcely even notices. If I make a phone call to London
right now, theres absolutely no excitement in thattheres nothing special about it.
But in a nineteenth-century science-fiction story, for someone in Vancouver to
phone someone in London would have been the biggest thing in the story. People i
n the far-flung reaches of the British Empire will all phone London one day!
Giving in to this conflict, I inserted an odd little edutainment show running on
television in the background at one point in NeuromancerCyberspace, a consensual
realm. Partly it was for the slower reader who hadnt yet figured it out, but also
it was to get me off the hook with my conscience, because I knew I was going to
hit the pulp buttons really big-time and do my best to blow people out of the wa
ter with this psychedelic cyberspace effect.
Of course, for the characters themselves, cyberspace is nothing specialthey use i
t for everything. But you dont hear them say, Well, Ive got to go into cyberspace
to speak to my mother, or Ive got to go to cyberspace to get the blueberry-pie re
cipe. Thats what it really is todaythere are vicious thieves and artificial intell
igence sharks and everything else out there, swimming in it, but were still talki
ng to our mothers and exchanging blueberry-pie recipes and looking at porn and t
weeting all the stuff were doing. Today I could write a version of Neuromancer wh
ere youd see the quotidian naturalistic side, but it wouldnt be science fiction. W
ith the fairly limited tool kit I had in 1981, I wouldnt have been able to do tha
t, and, of course, I didnt know what it would be like.
INTERVIEWER
What was needed that you were missing?
GIBSON
I didnt have the emotional range. I could only create characters who have really,
really super highs and super lowsno middle. Its taken me eight books to get to a p
oint where the characters can have recognizably complex or ambiguous relationshi
ps with other characters. In Neuromancer, the whole range of social possibility
when they meet is, Shall we have sex, or shall I kill you? Or you know, Lets go r
ob a Chinese corporationcool!
I knew that cyberspace was exciting, but none of the people I knew who were actu
ally involved in the nascent digital industry were exciting. I wondered what it
would be like if they were exciting, stylish, and sexy. I found the answer not s
o much in punk rock as in Bruce Springsteen, in particular Darkness on the Edge
of Town, which was the album Springsteen wrote as a response to punka very noir,
very American, very literary album. And I thought, What if the protagonist of Da
rkness on the Edge of Town was a computer hacker? What if hes still got Springste
ens characters emotionality and utterly beat-down hopelessness, this very American
hopelessness? And what if the mechanic, whos out there with him, lost in this em
pty nightmare of America, is actually, like, a robot or a brain in a bottle that
nevertheless has the same manifest emotionality? I had the feeling, then, that
I was actually crossing some wires of the main circuit board of popular culture
and that nobody had ever crossed them this way before.
INTERVIEWER
How did the Sprawl, a megalopolis stretching from Atlanta to Boston, originate?
GIBSON
I had come to Vancouver in 1972, and I wasnt really trying to write science ficti
on until 1982. There was a decade gap where Id been here and scarcely anywhere el
seto Seattle for the odd weekend, and that was it. I was painfully aware of not h
aving enough firsthand experience of the contemporary world to extrapolate from.
So the Sprawl is there to free me from the obligation to authentic detail.
It had always felt to me as though Washington, D.C., to Boston was one span of s
tuff. You never really leave Springsteenland, youre just in this unbroken highway
and strip-mall landscape. I knew that would resonate with some readers, and I j
ust tacked on Atlanta out of sci-fi bravura, to see how far we could push this t
hing. Sometimes in science fiction you can do that. The reader really likes it i
f you add Atlanta, because theyre going, Shit, could you do that? Could that be p
ossible? If youre visiting the future, you really want to have a few of the shit,
could they do that? moments.
INTERVIEWER
Do readers often ask you to explain things about your books you yourself dont und
erstand?
GIBSON
The most common complaint I received about Neuromancer, from computer people, was
that there will never be enough bandwidth for any of this to be possible. I did
nt want to argue with them because I scarcely knew what bandwidth was, but I assu
med it was just a measure of something, and so I thought, How can they know? Its
like saying therell never be enough engines, therell never be enough hours for thi
s to happen. And they were wrong.
INTERVIEWER
Why did you set the novel in the aftermath of a war?
GIBSON
In 1981, it was pretty much every intelligent persons assumption that on any give
n day the world could end horribly and pretty well permanently. There was this v
ast, all-consuming, taken-for-granted, even boring end-of-the-world anxiety that
had been around since I was a little kid. So one of the things I wanted to do w
ith Neuromancer was to write a novel in which the world didnt end in a nuclear wa
r. In Neuromancer, the war starts, they lose a few cities, then it stops when mu
ltinational corporations essentially take the United States apart so that can ne
ver happen again. Theres deliberately no textual evidence that the United States
exists as a political entity in Neuromancer. On the evidence of the text America
seems to be a sort of federation of city-states connected to a military-industr
ial complex that may not have any government controlling it. That was my wanting
to get away from the future-is-America thing. The irony, of course, is how the
world actually went. If somebody had been able to sit me down in 1981 and say, Yo
u know how you wrote that the United States is gone and the Soviet Union is loom
ing in the background like a huge piece of immobile slag? Well, you got it kind
of backward.
That war was really a conscious act of imaginative optimism. I didnt quite believ
e we could be so lucky. But I didnt want to write one of those science-fiction no
vels where the United States and the Soviet Union nuke themselves to death. I wa
nted to write a novel where multinational capital took over, straightened that s
hit out, but the world was still problematic.
INTERVIEWER
The world of the Sprawl is often called dystopian.
GIBSON
Well, maybe if youre some middle-class person from the Midwest. But if youre livin
g in most places in Africa, youd jump on a plane to the Sprawl in two seconds. Ma
ny people in Rio have worse lives than the inhabitants of the Sprawl.
Ive always been taken aback by the assumption that my vision is fundamentally dys
topian. I suspect that the people who say Im dystopian must be living completely
sheltered and fortunate lives. The world is filled with much nastier places than
my inventions, places that the denizens of the Sprawl would find it punishment
to be relocated to, and a lot of those places seem to be steadily getting worse.
INTERVIEWER
Theres a famous story about your being unable to sit through Blade Runner while w
riting Neuromancer.
GIBSON
I was afraid to watch Blade Runner in the theater because I was afraid the movie
would be better than what I myself had been able to imagine. In a way, I was ri
ght to be afraid, because even the first few minutes were better. Later, I notic
ed that it was a total box-office flop, in first theatrical release. That worrie
d me, too. I thought, Uh-oh. He got it right and nobody cares! Over a few years,
though, I started to see that in some weird way it was the most influential film
of my lifetime, up to that point. It affected the way people dressed, it affect
ed the way people decorated nightclubs. Architects started building office build
ings that you could tell they had seen in Blade Runner. It had had an astonishin
gly broad aesthetic impact on the world.
I met Ridley Scott years later, maybe a decade or more after Blade Runner was re
leased. I told him what Neuromancer was made of, and he had basically the same l
ist of ingredients for Blade Runner. One of the most powerful ingredients was Fr
ench adult comic books and their particular brand of Orientaliathe sort of thing
that Heavy Metal magazine began translating in the United States.
But the simplest and most radical thing that Ridley Scott did in Blade Runner wa
s to put urban archaeology in every frame. It hadnt been obvious to mainstream Am
erican science fiction that cities are like compost heapsjust layers and layers o
f stuff. In cities, the past and the present and the future can all be totally a
djacent. In Europe, thats just lifeits not science fiction, its not fantasy. But in
American science fiction, the city in the future was always brand-new, every squ
are inch of it.
INTERVIEWER
Cities seem very important to you.
GIBSON
Cities look to me to be our most characteristic technology. We didnt really get i
nteresting as a species until we became able to do citiesthats when it all got rea
lly diverse, because you cant do cities without a substrate of other technologies
. Theres a mathematics to ita city cant get over a certain size unless you can grow
, gather, and store a certain amount of food in the vicinity. Then you cant get a
ny bigger unless you understand how to do sewage. If you dont have efficient sewa
ge technology the city gets to a certain size and everybody gets cholera.
INTERVIEWER
It seems like most if not all of your protagonists are loners, orphans, and noma
ds, detached from families and social networks.
GIBSON
We write what we know, and we write what we think we can write. I think so many
of my characters have been as you just described because it would be too much of
a stretch for me to model characters who have more rounded emotional lives.
Before we moved to Vancouver, my wife and I went to Europe. And I realized that I
didnt travel very well. I was too tense for it. I was delighted that I was there
, and I had a sense of storing up the sort of experiences I imagined artists had
to store up in order to be artists. But it was all a bit extreme for meFrancos Spa
in is still the only place Ive ever had a gun pointed at my head. I always felt t
hat everybody else had parents somewhere who would come and get their ass out of
trouble. But nobody was going to come get me out of trouble. Nobody was going t
o take care of me. The hedonic risk taking that so many of my peers were into jus
t made me anxious. A lot of people got into serious trouble taking those risks.
I never wanted to get into serious trouble.
INTERVIEWER
The protagonist of Count Zero, Bobby Newmark, has a comparatively mundane lifehe
lives with his mother.
GIBSON
One of the very first so-called adult science-fiction novels I ever read was Sta
rship Troopers by Robert Heinlein. Id gone away on a trip with my mother and I had
nothing to read, and the only thing for sale was this rather adult-looking pape
rback. I was barely up to the reading skill required for Starship Troopers, but
I can remember figuring out the first couple of pages, and it blew the top off m
y head. Later, when I managed to read it all the way through, I got the feeling
that I was more like the juvenile delinquents who got beat up by the Starship Tr
oopers than I was like the Starship Troopers themselves. And I remember wonderin
g, Where did the juvenile delinquents go after they got beaten up by the Starshi
p Troopers? What happened to them? Where did they live? Bobby is sort of the ans
wer. They lived with their mothers and they were computer hackers!
INTERVIEWER
In Mona Lisa Overdrive, your third novel, Bobby ends up in a peculiar contraptio
n called the Aleph.
GIBSON
I think I was starting to realize that the only image I had for total artificial
intelligence or total artificial reality was Borgess Aleph, a point in space tha
t contains all other points. In his story The Aleph, which may be his greatest, Bo
rges managed to envision this Aleph without computers or anything like them. He
skips the issue of what it is and how it works. It just sits there under the sta
irs in the basement of some old house in Buenos Aires, and nobody says why, but
you have to go down the stairs, lie on your back, look at this thing, and if you
get your head at the right angle, then you can see everything there is, or ever
was, anywhere, at any time.
I think I was probably twelve years old when I read that, and I never got over t
he wonder of that story, and how Borges in this very limited number of words cou
ld make you feel that hes seen every last thing in the universe, just by sonorous
ly listing a number of very peculiar and mismatched items and events. If Bobby w
as going to go somewhere, that was probably going to be it.
INTERVIEWER
What interested you about Joseph Cornell?
GIBSON
Beginning with Count Zero I had the impulse to use the text to honor works of ar
t that I particularly loved or admired. With Mona Lisa Overdrive, its heavily Jos
eph Cornell, especially his extraordinary talent to turn literal garbage into th
ese achingly superb, over-the-top, poetic, cryptic statements.
Gradually, Cornell became a model of creativity for me. Ive always had a degree o
f impostor syndrome about being or calling myself an artist, but Im pretty sure t
hat theres some way in which Im an outsider, and what Im doing has to be outsider a
rt. I felt that Ive worked with found objects at times in a similar way because I
valued bits of the real world differently than I valued the bits I created myse
lf.
When I was going to start writing All Tomorrows Parties, John Clute suggested to
me that all of my books had become Cornell boxes. The Bridge in Virtual Light, h
e said, was my biggest Cornell box. It really spooked me. I think thats why I wou
nd up burning the Bridge.
INTERVIEWER
Tell me about the Bridge.
GIBSON
The Bridge is a fable about counterculture, the kind of counterculture that may
no longer be possible. There are no backwaters where things can breedour connecti
vity is so high and so global that there are no more Seattles and no more Haight
-Ashburys. Weve arrived at a level of commodification that may have negated the c
oncept of counterculture. I wanted to create a scenario in which I could depict s
omething like that happening in the recognizably near future.
I woke up one morning in San Francisco and looked out the window and had this gr
eat archetypal San Francisco experiencethere was nothing but fog. Nothing but fog
except this perfectly clear diorama window up in the air, brilliantly lit by th
e sun, containing the very top of the nearest support tower of the Bay Bridge. I
couldnt see anything else in the city, just this little glowing world. I thought,
Wow, if you had a bunch of plywood, two-by-fours, you could build yourself a li
ttle house on top of that thing and live there.
The Bridge novels were set just a few years into the future, which is now a few
years in the past, and so they read almost like alternate-history novelsthe presen
t in flamboyant cyberpunk drag. And the Bridge itself, a shantytown culture impr
ovised in the wake of a devastating Bay Area earthquake, is a piece of emergent
technology.
INTERVIEWER
Many readers have argued that the Bridge books offer a theory of technology.
GIBSON
More like a rubbinglike rubbing brass in a cathedral or a tombstone in a graveyar
d. Im not a didactic storyteller. I dont formulate theories about how the world wo
rks and then create stories to illustrate my theories. What I have in the end is
an artifact and not a theory.
But I take it for granted that social change is driven primarily by emergent tec
hnologies, and probably always has been. No one legislates technologies into emer
genceit actually seems to be quite a random thing. Thats a vision of technology th
ats diametrically opposed to the one I received from science fiction and the popu
lar culture of science when I was twelve years old.
In the postwar era, aside from anxiety over nuclear war, we assumed that we were
steering technology. Today, were more likely to feel that technology is driving
us, driving change, and that its out of control. Technology was previously seen a
s linear and progressiveevolutionary in that way our culture has always preferred
to misunderstand Darwin.
INTERVIEWER
You dont see technology evolving that way?
GIBSON
What I mainly see is the distribution of it. The poorer you are, the poorer your
culture is, the less cutting-edge technology youre liable to encounter, aside fr
om the Internet, the stuff you can access on your cell phone.
In that way, I think were past the computer age. You can be living in a third-wor
ld village with no sewage, but if youve got the right apps then you can actually
have some kind of participation in a world that otherwise looks like a distant S
tar Trek future where people have plenty of everything. And from the point of vi
ew of the guy in the village, information is getting beamed in from a world wher
e people dont have to earn a living. They certainly dont have to do the stuff he h
as to do everyday to make sure hes got enough food to be alive in three days.
On that side of things, Americans might be forgiven for thinking the pace of cha
nge has slowed, in part because the United States government hasnt been able to d
o heroic nonmilitary infrastructure for quite a while. Before and after World Wa
r II there was a huge amount of infrastructure building in the United States tha
t gave us the spiritual shape of the American century. Rural electrification, th
e highway system, the freeways of Los Angelesthose were some of the biggest thing
s anybody had ever built in the world at the time, but the United States really
has fallen far behind with that.
INTERVIEWER
Is computer technology not heroic?
GIBSON
I do think its a really big deal, although the infrastructure is not physical. Th
eres hardware supporting the stuff, but the digital infrastructure is a bunch of
zeros and onessomething that amounts to a kind of language.
It looks to me as though that prosthetic-memory project is going to be what we a
re about, as a species, because our prosthetic memory now actually stands a pret
ty good chance of surviving humanity. We could conceivably go extinct and our cr
eations would live on. One day, in the sort of science-fiction novel Im unlikely
ever to write, intelligent aliens might encounter something descended from our c
reations. That something would introduce itself by saying, Hey, we wish our huma
n ancestors could have been around to meet you guys because they were totally fa
scinated by this moment, but at least weve got this PowerPoint wed like to show yo
u about them. They dont look anything like us, but that is where we came from, an
d they were actually made out of meat, as weird as that seems.
INTERVIEWER
When did you decide to write about the contemporary world?
GIBSON
For years, Id found myself telling interviewers and readers that I believed it wa
s possible to write a novel set in the present that would have an effect very si
milar to the effect of novels I had set in imaginary futures. I think I said it
so many times, and probably with such a pissy tone of exasperation, that I final
ly decided I had to call myself on it.
A friend knew a woman who was having old-fashioned electroshock therapy for depr
ession. Hed pick her up at the clinic after the session and drive her not home bu
t to a fish market. Hed lead her to the ice tables where the days catch was spread
out, and hed just stand there with her, and shed look at the ice tables for a rea
lly long time with a blank, searching expression. Finally, shed turn to him and s
ay, Wow, theyre fish, arent they! After electroshock, she had this experience of unut
terable, indescribable wonderment at seeing these things completely removed from
all context of memory, and gradually her brain would come back together and say
, Damn, theyre fish. Thats kind of what I do.
INTERVIEWER
What is pattern recognition?
GIBSON
It is the thing we do that other species on the planet are largely incapable of
doing. Its how we infer everything. If youre in the woods and a rock comes flying
from somewhere in your direction, you assume that someone has thrown a rock at y
ou. Other animals dont seem capable of that. The fear leverage in the game of ter
rorism depends on faulty pattern recognition. After all, terrorist acts are rare
and tend to kill fewer people than, say, automobile accidents or drugs and alco
hol.
INTERVIEWER
Had you already begun to write Pattern Recognition before 9/11?
GIBSON
I had but as soon as that happened just about everything else in the manuscript
dried up and blew away.
INTERVIEWER
Why did the September 11 attacks have such an effect on you?
GIBSON
Because I had had this career as a novelist, Manhattan was the place in the Unit
ed States that I visited most regularly. I wound up having more friends in New Y
ork than I have anywhere else in the United States. It has that quality of being
huge and small at the same timeand noble. So without even realizing it, I had co
me to know it, I had come to know lower Manhattan better than any place other th
an Vancouver. When 9/11 happened it affected me with a directness I would never
have imagined possible.
In a strange sort of way that particular relationship with New York ended with 9/
11 because the post9/11 New York doesnt feel to me to be the same place.
INTERVIEWER
Are you glad you wrote a book that had so much 9/11 in it?
GIBSON
Im really glad. I felt this immense gratitude when I finished, and I was sitting
there looking at the last page, thinking, Im glad I got a shot at this thing now,
because for sure there are dozens of writers all around the world right this mi
nute, thinking, I have to write about 9/11. And I thought, Im already done, I wont
have to revisit this material, and its largely out of my system.
INTERVIEWER
Alongside that public narrative runs a very private one, with Cayce chasing thro
ugh the maze of the Internet after the source of some mesmerizing film material
she calls the footage.
GIBSON
Having assumed that there were no longer physical backwaters in which new bohemi
as could spawn and be nurtured, I was intrigued by the idea and the very evident
possibility that in the post-geographic Internet simply having a topic of suffi
cient obscurity and sufficient obsessive interest to a number of geographically
diverse people could replicate the birth of a bohemia.
When I started writing about the footage, I dont think I had ever seen a novel in
which anybody had had a real emotional life unfolding on a listserv, but I knew
that millions of people around the world were living parts of their emotional li
ves in those placesand moreover that the Internet was basically built by those pe
ople! They were meeting one another and having affairs and getting married and d
oing everything in odd special-interest communities on the Internet. Part of my
interest in the footage was simply trying to rise to the challenge of naturalism
.
INTERVIEWER
Youve called science fiction your native literary culture. Do you still feel that
way, having written three books that are set in the present?
GIBSON
Yes, but native in the sense of place of birth. Science fiction was the first li
terary culture I acquired, but since then Ive acquired a number of other literary
cultures, and the bunch of them have long since supplanted science fiction.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think of your last three books as being science fiction?
GIBSON
No, I think of them as attempts to disprove the distinction or attempts to disso
lve the boundary. They are set in a world that meets virtually every criteria of
being science fiction, but it happens to be our world, and its barely tweaked by
the author to make the technology just fractionally imaginary or fantastic. It
has, to my mind, the effect of science fiction.
If youd gone to a publisher in 1981 with a proposal for a science-fiction novel t
hat consisted of a really clear and simple description of the world today, theyd
have read your proposal and said, Well, its impossible. This is ridiculous. This
doesnt even make any sense. Granted, you have half a dozen powerful and really ex
cellent plot drivers for that many science-fiction novels, but you cant have them
all in one novel.
INTERVIEWER
What are those major plot drivers?
GIBSON
Fossil fuels have been discovered to be destabilizing the planets climate, with p
ossibly drastic consequences. Theres an epidemic, highly contagious, lethal sexua
l disease that destroys the human immune system, raging virtually uncontrolled t
hroughout much of Africa. New York has been attacked by Islamist fundamentalists
, who have destroyed the two tallest buildings in the city, and the United State
s in response has invaded Afghanistan and Iraq.
INTERVIEWER
And you havent even gotten to the technology.
GIBSON
You havent even gotten to the Internet. By the time you were telling about the In
ternet, theyd be showing you the door. Its just too much science fiction.
Ray Bradbury, The Art of Fiction No. 203
Interviewed by Sam Weller
PRINT | TWITTER | FACEBOOK | More
Ray Bradbury has a vacation house in Palm Springs, California, in the desert at
the base of the Santa Rosa mountains. Its a Rat Packera affair, with a chrome-and-
turquoise kitchen and a small swimming pool in back. A few years ago, Bradbury l
et me look through some files stored in his garage as part of my research for a
biography. Inside a tiny storage closet I found a compact filing cabinet covered
in dust and fallen ceiling plaster, which contained, amid a flurry of tear shee
ts and yellowing book contracts, a folder marked paris review. In the folder was
the manuscript of a remarkable unpublished interview that this magazine had con
ducted with the author in the late 1970s.
Its unclear why the interview was abandoned, but according to an attached editori
al memo, editor George Plimpton found the first draft a bit informal in places, m
aybe overly enthusiastic. Bradbury, who will turn ninety in August, cannot recall
why he never finished the interview; he figures that when he was asked to revis
it it, he had moved on to other projects. But with the rediscovery of the manusc
ript, he agreed to give it another go and bring it up to date. Since the origina
l interviewer, William Plummer, a Paris Review contributing editor, died in 2001
, we supplemented the original sessions with new conversations.
Bradbury was born in 1920 in Waukegan, Illinois, the son of a lineman for the lo
cal power company. As a child, he developed a passion for the books of L. Frank
Baum and Edgar Allan Poe and immersed himself in popular culture, from cinema to
comic strips to traveling circuses. Because Bradburys father was often out of wo
rk during the twenties and thirties, the family repeatedly moved between Illinoi
s and Tucson, Arizona. His sense of uprootedness and dislocation was compounded
by the death of his beloved grandfather when he was five, and his baby sisters de
ath from pneumonia two years later. The experience of great loss appears frequen
tly in his work.
By the spring of 1934, lured by the prospects of sunshine and steady employment,
the Bradbury family moved to California, where Bradbury has lived ever since. A
s a teenager, he roller-skated all over Hollywood, collecting autographs and tak
ing photos with stars like Jean Harlow, Marlene Dietrich, and George Burns. Afte
r he graduated from Los Angeles High School in 1938, he joined the Los Angeles S
cience Fiction League, befriending writers Robert Heinlein and Leigh Brackett. I
n 1940, with the help of Heinlein, he made his first professional sale, to a Wes
t Coast literary magazine called Script. Bradburys poor eyesight kept him out of
the Second World War, and it was during those years that he established himself
in the pages of pulp-fiction magazines like Weird Tales and Astounding Science F
iction. The Martian Chronicles, his second book, was embraced by the science-fic
tion community as well as critics, a rare achievement for the genre. Christopher
Isherwood hailed Bradbury as truly original and a very great and unusual talent. Th
ree years later Bradbury published the novel for which he is best known, Fahrenh
eit 451.
In all, Bradbury has written more than fifty books, including The Illustrated Ma
n, Dandelion Wine, Something Wicked This Way Comes, and his 2009 story collectio
n, Well Always Have Paris. He has worked often in television and film, writing te
leplays for Alfred Hitchcock Presents and the screenplay for John Hustons 1956 ad
aptation of Moby-Dick. In 1964, he established the Pandemonium Theatre Company,
where he started producing his own playshe is still actively involved with the th
eater today. He has also published several poetry collections, including When El
ephants Last in the Dooryard Bloomed. He has even worked in architecture, contri
buting to the design of San Diegos Westfield Horton Plaza and the interior of Spa
ceship Earth at Disneys EPCOT Center. For his lifes achievements, he was awarded t
he Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Bo
ok Foundation in 2000 and, in 2004, the National Medal of Arts.
Despite recent setbacksa stroke in 1999 and the death of Marguerite, his wife of
fifty-six years, in 2003Bradbury has remained extraordinarily active. He continue
s to write and he remains charming and filled with boyish jubilation. When dinin
g out he regularly orders vanilla ice cream with chocolate sauce for dessert. He
has just completed a new collection of short stories, tentatively titled Juggern
aut. He recently told me he still lives by his lifelong credo, Jump off the cliff
and build your wings on the way down.

INTERVIEWER
Why do you write science fiction?
RAY BRADBURY
Science fiction is the fiction of ideas. Ideas excite me, and as soon as I get e
xcited, the adrenaline gets going and the next thing I know Im borrowing energy f
rom the ideas themselves. Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head an
d doesnt exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and
nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes so
me small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art
of the possible, never the impossible.
Imagine if sixty years ago, at the start of my writing career, I had thought to
write a story about a woman who swallowed a pill and destroyed the Catholic Chur
ch, causing the advent of womens liberation. That story probably would have been
laughed at, but it was within the realm of the possible and would have made grea
t science fiction. If Id lived in the late eighteen hundreds I might have written
a story predicting that strange vehicles would soon move across the landscape o
f the United States and would kill two million people in a period of seventy yea
rs. Science fiction is not just the art of the possible, but of the obvious. Onc
e the automobile appeared you could have predicted that it would destroy as many
people as it did.
INTERVIEWER
Does science fiction satisfy something that mainstream writing does not?
BRADBURY
Yes, it does, because the mainstream hasnt been paying attention to all the chang
es in our culture during the last fifty years. The major ideas of our timedevelop
ments in medicine, the importance of space exploration to advance our specieshave
been neglected. The critics are generally wrong, or theyre fifteen, twenty years
late. Its a great shame. They miss out on a lot. Why the fiction of ideas should
be so neglected is beyond me. I cant explain it, except in terms of intellectual
snobbery.
INTERVIEWER
There was a time, though, wasnt there, when you wanted recognition across the boa
rd from critics and intellectuals?
BRADBURY
Of course. But not anymore. If Id found out that Norman Mailer liked me, Id have k
illed myself. I think he was too hung up. Im glad Kurt Vonnegut didnt like me eith
er. He had problems, terrible problems. He couldnt see the world the way I see it
. I suppose Im too much Pollyanna, he was too much Cassandra. Actually I prefer t
o see myself as the Janus, the two-faced god who is half Pollyanna and half Cass
andra, warning of the future and perhaps living too much in the pasta combination
of both. But I dont think Im too overoptimistic.
INTERVIEWER
Vonnegut was written off as a science-fiction writer for a long time. Then it wa
s decided that he wasnt ever a science-fiction writer in the first place, and he
was redeemed for the mainstream. So Vonnegut became literature, and youre still on
the verge. Do you think Vonnegut made it because he was a Cassandra?
BRADBURY
Yes, thats part of it. Its the terrible creative negativism, admired by New York c
ritics, that caused his celebrity. New Yorkers love to dupe themselves, as well
as doom themselves. I havent had to live like that. Im a California boy. I dont tel
l anyone how to write and no one tells me.
INTERVIEWER
Yet you did receive the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters
. How important was that for you?
BRADBURY
It was a fantastic evening. There was a real problem getting back to my hotel ro
om, though. The hotel where they held the ceremony in New York was so huge, it f
illed me with despair. Since my stroke, I walk very slowly. I saw a sign that ni
ght that said, next restroom: two hundred and eighty miles. The registration des
k was on the eighth floor. You have to wait ten minutes for an elevator just to
go up and register! That night some of the women were taking me back to my room
and I said, For Gods sake, wheres the mens room? We couldnt find one. One of the gir
ls said, Theres a potted palm over there, why dont you go use it? So I went over.
Nobody saw me. At least I dont think so.
INTERVIEWER
Was that award a signal that science fiction had become respectable?
BRADBURY
To some extent. It took a long time for people simply to allow us out in the ope
n and stop making fun of us. When I was a young writer if you went to a party an
d told somebody you were a science-fiction writer you would be insulted. They wo
uld call you Flash Gordon all evening, or Buck Rogers. Of course sixty years ago
hardly any books were being published in the field. Back in 1946, as I remember
, there were only two science-fiction anthologies published. We couldnt afford to
buy them anyway, since we were all too poor. Thats how bereft we were, thats how
sparse the field was, thats how unimportant it all was. And when the first books
finally began to be published, lots of them in the early fifties, they werent rev
iewed by good literary magazines. We were all closet science-fiction writers.
INTERVIEWER
Does science fiction offer the writer an easier way to explore a conceptual prem
ise?
BRADBURY
Take Fahrenheit 451. Youre dealing with book burning, a very serious subject. Youv
e got to be careful you dont start lecturing people. So you put your story a few
years into the future and you invent a fireman who has been burning books instea
d of putting out fireswhich is a grand idea in itselfand you start him on the adve
nture of discovering that maybe books shouldnt be burned. He reads his first book
. He falls in love. And then you send him out into the world to change his life.
Its a great suspense story, and locked into it is this great truth you want to t
ell, without pontificating.
I often use the metaphor of Perseus and the head of Medusa when I speak of scien
ce fiction. Instead of looking into the face of truth, you look over your should
er into the bronze surface of a reflecting shield. Then you reach back with your
sword and cut off the head of Medusa. Science fiction pretends to look into the
future but its really looking at a reflection of what is already in front of us.
So you have a ricochet vision, a ricochet that enables you to have fun with it,
instead of being self-conscious and superintellectual.
INTERVIEWER
Do you read your science-fiction contemporaries?
BRADBURY
Ive always believed that you should do very little reading in your own field once
youre into it. But at the start its good to know what everyones doing. When I was
seventeen I read everything by Robert Heinlein and Arthur Clarke, and the early
writings of Theodore Sturgeon and Van Vogtall the people who appeared in Astoundi
ng Science Fictionbut my big science-fiction influences are H.?G. Wells and Jules
Verne. Ive found that Im a lot like Vernea writer of moral fables, an instructor i
n the humanities. He believes the human being is in a strange situation in a ver
y strange world, and he believes that we can triumph by behaving morally. His he
ro Nemowho in a way is the flip side of Melvilles madman, Ahabgoes about the world
taking weapons away from people to instruct them toward peace.
INTERVIEWER
How about writers younger than you?
BRADBURY
I prefer not to read the younger writers in the field. Quite often you can be de
pressed by discovering theyve happened onto an idea you yourself are working on.
What you want is simply to get on with your own work.
INTERVIEWER
How early did you begin writing?
BRADBURY
It started with Poe. I imitated him from the time I was twelve until I was about
eighteen. I fell in love with the jewelry of Poe. Hes a gem encruster, isnt he? S
ame with Edgar Rice Burroughs and John Carter. I was doing traditional horror st
ories, which I think everyone who goes into the field starts out withyou know, pe
ople getting locked in tombs. I drew Egyptian mazes.
Everything went into ferment that one year, 1932, when I was twelve. There was P
oe, Carter, Burroughs, the comics. I listened to a lot of imaginative radio show
s, especially one called Chandu the Magician. Im sure it was quite junky, but not
to me. Every night when the show went off the air I sat down and, from memory,
wrote out the whole script. I couldnt help myself. Chandu was against all the vil
lains of the world and so was I. He responded to a psychic summons and so did I.
I loved to illustrate, too, and I was a cartoonist. I always wanted my own comic
strip. So I was not only writing about Tarzan, I was drawing my own Sunday pane
ls. I did the usual adventure stories, located them in South America or among th
e Aztecs or in Africa. There was always the beautiful maiden and the sacrifice.
So I knew I was going into one of the arts: I was drawing, acting, and writing.
INTERVIEWER
Where did you do your acting?
BRADBURY
One day in Tucson, Arizona, when I was twelve, I told all my friends I was going
to go down to the nearest radio station to become an actor. My friends snorted
and said, Do you know anyone down there? I said no. They said, Do you have any p
ull with anyone? I said no. Ill just hang around and theyll discover how talented
I am. So I went to the radio station, hung around for two weeks emptying ashtray
s and running out for newspapers and just being underfoot. And two weeks later I
wound up on radio every Saturday night reading the comics to the kiddies: Bring
ing Up Father, Tailspin Tommy, and Buck Rogers.
INTERVIEWER
You seem to have been open to a variety of influences.
BRADBURY
A conglomerate heap of trash, thats what I am. But it burns with a high flame. Ive
had my literary loves, too. I like to think of myself on a train going across Ame
rica at midnight, conversing with my favorite authors, and on that train would b
e people like George Bernard Shaw, who was interested in the fiction of ideas. H
e himself on occasion wrote things that could be dubbed science fiction. Wed sit
up late into the night turning over ideas and saying, Well, if this is true abou
t women in 1900, what is it going to be in the year 2050?
INTERVIEWER
Who else would be on that train?
BRADBURY
A lot of poets: Hopkins, Frost, Shakespeare. And writers like Steinbeck, Huxley,
and Thomas Wolfe.
INTERVIEWER
How has Wolfe helped you?
BRADBURY
He was a great romantic. When youre nineteen, he opens the doors of the world for
you. We use certain authors at certain times of our lives, and we may never go
back to them again. Wolfe is perfect when youre nineteen. If you fall in love wit
h Shaw when youre thirty its going to be a lifetime love. And I think thats true of
certain books by Thomas Mann as well. I read Death in Venice when I was twenty,
and its gotten better every year since. Style is truth. Once you nail down what
you want to say about yourself and your fears and your life, then that becomes y
our style and you go to those writers who can teach you how to use words to fit
your truth. I learned from John Steinbeck how to write objectively and yet inser
t all of the insights without too much extra comment. I learned a hell of a lot
from John Collier and Gerald Heard, and I fell madly in love with a number of wo
men writers, especially Eudora Welty and Katherine Anne Porter. I still go back
and reread Edith Wharton and Jessamyn WestThe Friendly Persuasion is one of my fa
vorite books of short stories.
INTERVIEWER
The Martian Chronicles, your first major success, was called a novel, but its rea
lly a book of short stories, many of which had appeared in pulp-fiction magazine
s during the forties. Why did you decide to collect them as a novel?
BRADBURY
Around 1947, when I published my first novel, Dark Carnival, I met the secretary
of Norman Corwin, a big name in radioa director, writer, and producer. Through h
er I sent him a copy of Dark Carnival and wrote a letter saying, If you like thi
s book as much as I like your work, Id like to buy you drinks someday. A week lat
er the phone rang and it was Norman. He said, Youre not buying me drinks, Im buyin
g you dinner. That was the start of a lifelong friendship. That first time he to
ok me to dinner I told him about my Martian story Ylla. He said, Wow, thats great,
write more of those. So I did. In a way, that was what caused The Martian Chroni
cles to be born.
There was another reason. In 1949, my wife Maggie became pregnant with our first
daughter, Susan. Up until then, Maggie had worked full-time and I stayed home w
riting my short stories. But now that she was going to have the baby, I needed t
o earn more money. I needed a book contract. Norman suggested I travel to New Yo
rk City to meet editors and make an impression, so I took a Greyhound bus to New
York and stayed at the YMCA, fifty cents a night. I took my stories around to a
dozen publishers. Nobody wanted them. They said, We dont publish stories. Nobody
reads them. Dont you have a novel? I said, No, I dont. Im a sprinter, not a marath
on runner. I was ready to go home when, on my last night, I had dinner with an e
ditor at Doubleday named Walter Bradburyno relation. He said, Wouldnt there be a b
ook if you took all those Martian stories and tied them together? You could call
it The Martian Chronicles. It was his title, not mine. I said, Oh, my God. I had
read Winesburg, Ohio when I was twenty-four years old, in 1944. I was so taken w
ith it that I thought, Someday Id like to write a book like this, but Id set it on
Mars. Id actually made a note about this in 1944, but Id forgotten about it.
I stayed up all night at the YMCA and typed out an outline. I took it to him the
next morning. He read it and said, Ill give you a check for seven hundred and fi
fty bucks. I went back to Los Angeles and connected all the short stories and it
became The Martian Chronicles. Its called a novel, but youre right, its really a b
ook of short stories all tied together.
INTERVIEWER
One of the most popular stories in the book is There Will Come Soft Rains, about a
mechanized house that continues to operate after the atomic bomb has been dropp
ed. There are no people in that story. Where did you get the idea for that?
BRADBURY
After Hiroshima was bombed I saw a photograph of the side of a house with the sh
adows of the people who had lived there burned into the wall from the intensity
of the bomb. The people were gone, but their shadows remained. That affected me
so much, I wrote the story.
INTERVIEWER
Some of the passages in The Martian Chronicles, as well as some of your other bo
oks, are intensely lyrical. Where did that lyricism come from?
BRADBURY
From reading so much poetry every day of my life. My favorite writers have been
those whove said things well. I used to study Eudora Welty. She has the remarkabl
e ability to give you atmosphere, character, and motion in a single line. In one
line! You must study these things to be a good writer. Welty would have a woman
simply come into a room and look around. In one sweep she gave you the feel of
the room, the sense of the womans character, and the action itself. All in twenty
words. And you say, Howd she do that? What adjective? What verb? What noun? How
did she select them and put them together? I was an intense student. Sometimes Id
get an old copy of Wolfe and cut out paragraphs and paste them in my story, bec
ause I couldnt do it, you see. I was so frustrated! And then Id retype whole secti
ons of other peoples novels just to see how it felt coming out. Learn their rhyth
m.
INTERVIEWER
What about Proust, Joyce, Flaubert, Nabokovwriters who tend to think of literatur
e in terms of style and form. Has that line of thought ever interested you?
BRADBURY
No. If people put me to sleep, they put me to sleep. God, Ive tried to read Prous
t so often, and I recognize the beauty of his style, but he puts me to sleep. Th
e same for Joyce. Joyce doesnt have many ideas. Im completely idea oriented, and I
appreciate certain kinds of French writing and English storytelling more. I jus
t cant imagine being in a world and not being fascinated with what ideas are doin
g to us.
INTERVIEWER
Youre self-educated, arent you?
BRADBURY
Yes, I am. Im completely library educated. Ive never been to college. I went down
to the library when I was in grade school in Waukegan, and in high school in Los
Angeles, and spent long days every summer in the library. I used to steal magaz
ines from a store on Genesee Street, in Waukegan, and read them and then steal t
hem back on the racks again. That way I took the print off with my eyeballs and
stayed honest. I didnt want to be a permanent thief, and I was very careful to wa
sh my hands before I read them. But with the library, its like catnip, I suppose:
you begin to run in circles because theres so much to look at and read. And its f
ar more fun than going to school, simply because you make up your own list and y
ou dont have to listen to anyone. When I would see some of the books my kids were
forced to bring home and read by some of their teachers, and were graded onwell,
what if you dont like those books?
I am a librarian. I discovered me in the library. I went to find me in the libra
ry. Before I fell in love with libraries, I was just a six-year-old boy. The lib
rary fueled all of my curiosities, from dinosaurs to ancient Egypt. When I gradu
ated from high school in 1938, I began going to the library three nights a week.
I did this every week for almost ten years and finally, in 1947, around the tim
e I got married, I figured I was done. So I graduated from the library when I wa
s twenty-seven. I discovered that the library is the real school.
INTERVIEWER
You have said that you dont believe in going to college to learn to write. Why is
that?
BRADBURY
You cant learn to write in college. Its a very bad place for writers because the t
eachers always think they know more than you doand they dont. They have prejudices
. They may like Henry James, but what if you dont want to write like Henry James?
They may like John Irving, for instance, whos the bore of all time. A lot of the
people whose work theyve taught in the schools for the last thirty years, I cant
understand why people read them and why they are taught. The library, on the oth
er hand, has no biases. The information is all there for you to interpret. You d
ont have someone telling you what to think. You discover it for yourself.
INTERVIEWER
But your books are taught widely in schools.
BRADBURY
Do you know why teachers use me? Because I speak in tongues. I write metaphors.
Every one of my stories is a metaphor you can remember. The great religions are
all metaphor. We appreciate things like Daniel and the lions den, and the Tower o
f Babel. People remember these metaphors because they are so vivid you cant get f
ree of them and thats what kids like in school. They read about rocket ships and
encounters in space, tales of dinosaurs. All my life Ive been running through the
fields and picking up bright objects. I turn one over and say, Yeah, theres a st
ory. And thats what kids like. Today, my stories are in a thousand anthologies. A
nd Im in good company. The other writers are quite often dead people who wrote in
metaphors: Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawth
orne. All these people wrote for children. They may have pretended not to, but t
hey did.
INTERVIEWER
How important is it to you to follow your own instincts?
BRADBURY
Oh, God. Its everything. I was offered the chance to write War and Peace for the
screen a few decades ago. The American version with King Vidor directing. I turn
ed it down. Everyone said, How could you do that? Thats ridiculous, its a great bo
ok! I said, Well, it isnt for me. I cant read it. I cant get through it, I tried. T
hat doesnt mean the books bad. I just am not prepared for it. It portrays a very s
pecial culture. The names throw me. My wife loved it. She read it once every thr
ee years for twenty years. They offered the usual amount for a screenplay like t
hat, a hundred thousand dollars, but you cannot do things for money in this worl
d. I dont care how much they offer you, and I dont care how poor you are. Theres on
ly one excuse ever to take money under those circumstances: If someone in your f
amily is horribly ill and the doctor bills are piled up so high that youre all go
ing to be destroyed. Then Id say, Go on and take the job. Go do War and Peace and
do a lousy job. And be sorry later.
INTERVIEWER
Why did you do Moby-Dick?
BRADBURY
I had fallen in love with John Hustons work when I was in my twenties. I saw The
Maltese Falcon fifteen times, and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre scores of tim
es. When I was twenty-nine I attended a film screening and John Huston was sitti
ng right behind me. I wanted to turn, grab his hand, and say, I love you and I w
ant to work with you. But I held off and waited until I had three books publishe
d, so Id have proof of my love. I called my agent and said, Now I want to meet Jo
hn Huston. We met on St. Valentines night, 1951, which is a great way to start a
love affair. I said, Here are my books. If you like them, someday we must work t
ogether. A couple of years later, out of the blue, he called me up and said, Do
you have some time to come to Europe and write Moby-Dick for the screen? I said,
I dont know, Ive never been able to read the damn thing. So here I was confronted
with a dilemma: Heres a man that I love and whose work I admire. Hes offering me
a job. Now, a lot of people would say, Grab it! Jesus, you like him, dont ya? I s
aid, Tell you what, Ill go home tonight and Ill read as much as I can, and Ill come
back for lunch tomorrow. By that time I will know how I feel about Melville. Be
cause Ive had copies of Moby-Dick around the house for years. So I went home and
I read Moby-Dick. Strangely enough, a month earlier Id been wandering around the
house one night and picked up Moby-Dick and said to my wife, I wonder when Im goi
ng to read this thing? So here I am sitting down to read it.
I dove into the middle of it instead of starting at the beginning. I came across
a lot of beautiful poetry about the whiteness of the whale and the colors of ni
ghtmares and the great spirits spout. And I came upon a section toward the end wh
ere Ahab stands at the rail and says: It is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking
sky; and the air smells now, as if it blew from a far-away meadow; they have be
en making hay somewhere under the slopes of the Andes, Starbuck, and the mowers
are sleeping among the new-mown hay. I turned back to the start: Call me Ishmael. I
was in love! You fall in love with poetry. You fall in love with Shakespeare. Id
been in love with Shakespeare since I was fourteen. I was able to do the job no
t because I was in love with Melville, but because I was in love with Shakespear
e. Shakespeare wrote Moby-Dick, using Melville as a Ouija board.
The day I went to see Huston I asked, Should I read up on the Freudians and Jung
ians and their interpretations of the white whale? He said, Hell no, Im hiring Br
adbury! Whatever is right or wrong about the screenplay will be yours, so we can
at least say the skin around it is your skin.
So after Id read the book multitudinous times, I wrote the beginning on the way t
o Europe on the boat, and that stayed. But everything else was so difficult. I h
ad to borrow bits and pieces from late in the book and push them up front, becau
se the novel is not constructed like a screenplay. Its all over the place, a gian
t cannonade of impressions. And its a play too. Shakespearean asides, stage direc
tions, everything.
I got out of the bed one morning in London, walked over to the mirror and said,
I am Herman Melville. The ghost of Melville spoke to me and on that day I rewrot
e the last thirty pages of the screenplay. It all came out in one passionate exp
losion. I ran across London and took it to Huston. He said, My God, this is it.
INTERVIEWER
Yet the ending is your own, not Melvilles.
BRADBURY
Yes, but it really works, because I came up with a revelation. To adapt for the
screen youve got to decide what to throw overboard. I didnt want Fedallah, the mys
terious Parsi harpooner, because hes a terrible bore and hed turn the whole thing
into comedy. Hes the extra mystical symbol that breaks the whales back. If youre no
t careful in tragedy, one extra rape, one extra incest, one extra murder and its
hoo-haw time all of a sudden. So I got rid of Fedallah, and that leaves us at th
e end with no one to go down with the whale. So, hell, its only natural that Moby
Dick takes Ahab down with him and comes back up with all these harpoon lines, a
nd Ahab gestures, so when the men follow him they are destroyed. Well, thats not
in the book. Im sorry, but Im proud of that. Awfully proud of that.
INTERVIEWER
Do the novel and short story present different problems to you?
BRADBURY
Yes, the problem of the novel is to stay truthful. The short story, if you reall
y are intense and you have an exciting idea, writes itself in a few hours. I try
to encourage my student friends and my writer friends to write a short story in
one day so it has a skin around it, its own intensity, its own life, its own re
ason for being. Theres a reason why the idea occurred to you at that hour anyway,
so go with that and investigate it, get it down. Two or three thousand words in
a few hours is not that hard. Dont let people interfere with you. Boot em out, tu
rn off the phone, hide away, get it done. If you carry a short story over to the
next day you may overnight intellectualize something about it and try to make i
t too fancy, try to please someone.
But a novel has all kinds of pitfalls because it takes longer and you are around
people, and if youre not careful you will talk about it. The novel is also hard
to write in terms of keeping your love intense. Its hard to stay erect for two hu
ndred days. So, get the big truth first. If you get the big truth, the small tru
ths will accumulate around it. Let them be magnetized to it, drawn to it, and th
en cling to it.
INTERVIEWER
What are some specific problems youve had with any of your novels?
BRADBURY
With Fahrenheit 451, Montag came up to me and said, Im going crazy. I said, Whats
the matter, Montag? Ive been burning books, he said. I said, Well, dont you want t
o anymore? He said, No, I love them. I said, Go do something about it. And he wr
ote the book for me in nine days.
INTERVIEWER
Do you keep a tight work schedule?
BRADBURY
My passions drive me to the typewriter every day of my life, and they have drive
n me there since I was twelve. So I never have to worry about schedules. Some ne
w thing is always exploding in me, and it schedules me, I dont schedule it. It sa
ys: Get to the typewriter right now and finish this.
INTERVIEWER
Where do you do your writing?
BRADBURY
I can work anywhere. I wrote in bedrooms and living rooms when I was growing up
with my parents and my brother in a small house in Los Angeles. I worked on my t
ypewriter in the living room, with the radio and my mother and dad and brother a
ll talking at the same time. Later on, when I wanted to write Fahrenheit 451, I
went up to UCLA and found a basement typing room where, if you inserted ten cent
s into the typewriter, you could buy thirty minutes of typing time.
INTERVIEWER
Have you ever used a computer?
BRADBURY
Up until my stroke, I used a typewriter. An IBM Selectric. Never a computer. A c
omputers a typewriter. Why would I need another typewriter? I have one.
INTERVIEWER
Most would argue that a computer makes revising a whole lot easier. Not to menti
on spell-check.
BRADBURY
Ive been writing for seventy years, if I dont know how to spell now?.?.?.
INTERVIEWER
Do you keep a notebook?
BRADBURY
No. As soon as I get an idea, I write a short story, or I start a novel, or I do
a poem. So I have no need for a notebook. I do keep files of ideas and stories
that didnt quite work a year ago, five years ago, ten years ago. I come back to t
hem later and I look through the titles. Its like a father bird coming with a wor
m. You look down at all these hungry little beaksall these stories waiting to be
finishedand you say to them, Which of you needs to be fed? Which of you needs to
be finished today? And the story that yells the loudest, the idea that stands up
and opens its mouth, is the one that gets fed. And I pull it out of the file an
d finish it within a few hours.
INTERVIEWER
In Zen in the Art of Writing, you wrote that early on in your career you made li
sts of nouns as a way to generate story ideas: the Jar, the Cistern, the Lake, t
he Skeleton. Do you still do this?
BRADBURY
Not as much, because I just automatically generate ideas now. But in the old day
s I knew I had to dredge my subconscious, and the nouns did this. I learned this
early on. Three things are in your head: First, everything you have experienced
from the day of your birth until right now. Every single second, every single h
our, every single day. Then, how you reacted to those events in the minute of th
eir happening, whether they were disastrous or joyful. Those are two things you
have in your mind to give you material. Then, separate from the living experienc
es are all the art experiences youve had, the things youve learned from other writ
ers, artists, poets, film directors, and composers. So all of this is in your mi
nd as a fabulous mulch and you have to bring it out. How do you do that? I did i
t by making lists of nouns and then asking, What does each noun mean? You can go
and make up your own list right now and it would be different than mine. The ni
ght. The crickets. The train whistle. The basement. The attic. The tennis shoes.
The fireworks. All these things are very personal. Then, when you get the list
down, you begin to word-associate around it. You ask, Why did I put this word do
wn? What does it mean to me? Why did I put this noun down and not some other wor
d? Do this and youre on your way to being a good writer. You cant write for other
people. You cant write for the left or the right, this religion or that religion,
or this belief or that belief. You have to write the way you see things. I tell
people, Make a list of ten things you hate and tear them down in a short story
or poem. Make a list of ten things you love and celebrate them. When I wrote Fah
renheit 451 I hated book burners and I loved libraries. So there you are.
INTERVIEWER
After youve made your list of nouns, where do you go from there?
BRADBURY
I begin to write little penses about the nouns. Its prose poetry. Its evocative. It
tries to be metaphorical. Saint-John Perse published several huge volumes of th
is type of poetry on beautiful paper with lovely type. His books of poetry had t
itles like Rains, Snows, Winds, Seamarks. I could never afford to buy his books
because they must have cost twenty or thirty dollarsand this was about fifty year
s ago. But he influenced me because I read him in the bookstore and I started to
write short, descriptive paragraphs, two hundred words each, and in them I bega
n to examine my nouns. Then Id bring some characters on to talk about that noun a
nd that place, and all of a sudden I had a story going. I used to do the same th
ing with photographs that Id rip out of glossy magazines. Id take the photographs
and Id write little prose poems about them.
Certain pictures evoke in me things from my past. When I look at the paintings o
f Edward Hopper, it does this. He did those wonderful townscapes of empty cafes,
empty theaters at midnight with maybe one person there. The sense of isolation
and loneliness is fantastic. Id look at those landscapes and Id fill them with my
imagination. I still have all those penses. This was the beginning of bringing ou
t what was me.
INTERVIEWER
Can you cite an example of a pense in your own work?
BRADBURY
The description of the foghorn in the short story The Fog Horn. The paragraph desc
ribing the dinosaur in A Sound of Thunder. Those are good examples.
INTERVIEWER
Why do you think you prefer short stories to novels? Is it an issue of patience?
They call it attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder these days.
BRADBURY
I think theres some truth to that. Turn a liability into an asset. My attention i
s not there. So, I write what I can write: short stories.
INTERVIEWER
If your first draft, as you often say, is primarily your subconscious speaking t
o the page, do you intellectualize in the rewriting stages?
BRADBURY
Sure. I go through and cut. Most short stories are too long. When I wrote the no
vel Something Wicked This Way Comes, the first draft was a hundred and fifty tho
usand words. So I went through and cut out fifty thousand. Its important to get o
ut of your own way. Clean the kindling away, the rubbish. Make it clear.
INTERVIEWER
You are a fast writer. Are you a fast editor?
BRADBURY
No. I type my first draft quickly, impulsively even. A few days later I retype t
he whole thing and my subconscious, as I retype, gives me new words. Maybe itll t
ake retyping it many times until it is done. Sometimes it takes very little revi
sion.
INTERVIEWER
What time of day do you do most of your writing?
BRADBURY
I write all the time. I get up every morning not knowing what Im going to do. I u
sually have a perception around dawn when I wake up. I have what I call the thea
ter of morning inside my head, all these voices talking to me. When they come up
with a good metaphor, then I jump out of bed and trap them before theyre gone. T
hats the whole secret: to do things that excite you. Also, I always have taken na
ps. That way, I have two mornings!
INTERVIEWER
Do you write outlines?
BRADBURY
No, never. You cant do that. Its just like you cant plot tomorrow or next year or t
en years from now. When you plot books you take all the energy and vitality out.
Theres no blood. You have to live it from day to day and let your characters do
things.
INTERVIEWER
Do you ever go back and reread your books and short stories?
BRADBURY
Every so often, late at night, I come downstairs, open one of my books, read a p
aragraph and say, My God. I sit there and cry because I feel that Im not responsi
ble for any of this. Its from God. And Im so grateful, so, so grateful. The best d
escription of my career as a writer is at play in the fields of the Lord. Its been
wonderful fun and Ill be damned where any of it came from. Ive been fortunate. Ver
y fortunate.
INTERVIEWER
I suppose its unnecessary to ask whether you enjoy writing.
BRADBURY
Its obvious that I do. Its the exquisite joy and madness of my life, and I dont und
erstand writers who have to work at it. I like to play. Im interested in having f
un with ideas, throwing them up in the air like confetti and then running under
them. If I had to work at it I would give it up. I dont like working.
INTERVIEWER
You mentioned the stroke you suffered in 1999. What do you remember about that e
xperience?
BRADBURY
I was out at my house in Palm Springs working on a short story. I was walking ar
ound the house and all of a sudden I felt unstable. I couldnt walk very well or t
alk very well. I called my wifeshe was back at our home in Los Angelesand she sent
my driver out to get me. When he arrived I said, I want to go home, and he said
, No, no. Im taking you right to the hospital. So he saved my life. He took me to
the Eisenhower Medical Center near Palm Springs and they ran tests and they saw
that I was in a lousy condition. My leg was paralyzed, my arm was paralyzed, I
found it difficult to speak.
I knew it was severe because I couldnt move. Id lie in bed and say to my leg, OK,
moveand it wouldnt. It was like a dead dog. Roll over, dead dog, roll over. And do
es your hand move? No. So after a period of weeks, finally, slowly, slowly, I go
t a finger to move, I got a toe to move. I thought Id never get through the first
month, but I did. And finally my leg began to come alive. God has been good to
me. Ive been given great genes and the whole experience was good for me because Iv
e taken off all this weight. My blood sugar is normal nowI dont have to take medic
ines for that. My blood pressure is normal again after many years. I did all thi
s to myselfI have no one else to blame. Lots of beer, lots of wine, overweight by
seventy pounds, and it was time to take it off.
INTERVIEWER
You never recovered the motor skills to type again. How have you been able to wr
ite?
BRADBURY
Just a few days after my stroke I called my daughter Alexandra, who works for me
as my assistant, and told her to come to the hospital. I told her to bring the
manuscript I was working on, my mystery novel Lets All Kill Constance. I dictated
the story to her and she typed it up. And thats the way I have written since. I
call her on the phone, dictate my stories to her, and she types them up and faxe
s them to me. Then I edit with a pen. Its not an ideal process, but what the hell
.
INTERVIEWER
Has this change in the physical act of writing altered your prose?
BRADBURY
Not much. If you look at the new collection of stories that Im working on right n
ow, Juggernaut, the stories are pretty damned strong. Id love to use my typewriter
again. I miss it terribly, but its just not possible. So I get by.
INTERVIEWER
How important has your sense of optimism been to your career?
BRADBURY
I dont believe in optimism. I believe in optimal behavior. Thats a different thing
. If you behave every day of your life to the top of your genetics, what can you
do? Test it. Find out. You dont knowyou havent done it yet. You must live life at
the top of your voice! At the top of your lungs shout and listen to the echoes.
I learned a lesson years ago. I had some wonderful Swedish meatballs at my mothe
rs table with my dad and my brother and when I finished I pushed back from the ta
ble and said, God! That was beautiful. And my brother said, No, it was good. See
the difference?
Action is hope. At the end of each day, when youve done your work, you lie there
and think, Well, Ill be damned, I did this today. It doesnt matter how good it is,
or how badyou did it. At the end of the week youll have a certain amount of accum
ulation. At the end of a year, you look back and say, Ill be damned, its been a go
od year.
INTERVIEWER
What do you think of e-books and Amazons Kindle?
BRADBURY
Those arent books. You cant hold a computer in your hand like you can a book. A co
mputer does not smell. There are two perfumes to a book. If a book is new, it sm
ells great. If a book is old, it smells even better. It smells like ancient Egyp
t. A book has got to smell. You have to hold it in your hands and pray to it. Yo
u put it in your pocket and you walk with it. And it stays with you forever. But
the computer doesnt do that for you. Im sorry.
INTERVIEWER
With the publication of Fahrenheit 451, you were hailed as a visionary. What wou
ld you warn us about today?
BRADBURY
Our education system has gone to hell. Its my idea from now on to stop spending m
oney educating children who are sixteen years old. We should put all that money
down into kindergarten. Young children have to be taught how to read and write.
If children went into the first grade knowing how to read and write, wed be set f
or the future, wouldnt we? We must not let them go into the fourth and fifth grad
es not knowing how to read. So we must put out books with educational pictures,
or use comics to teach children how to read. When I was five years old, my aunt
gave me a copy of a book of wonderful fairy tales called Once Upon a Time, and t
he first fairy tale in the book is Beauty and the Beast. That one story taught me
how to read and write because I looked at the picture of that beautiful beast, b
ut I so desperately wanted to read about him too. By the time I was six years ol
d, I had learned how to read and write.
We should forget about teaching children mathematics. Theyre not going to use it
ever in their lives. Give them simple arithmeticone plus one is two, and how to d
ivide, and how to subtract. Those are simple things that can be taught quickly.
But no mathematics because they are never going to use it, never in their lives,
unless they are going to be scientists, and then they can simply learn it later
. My brother, for example, didnt do well in school, but when he was in his twenti
es, he needed a job with the Bureau of Power and Light. He got a book about math
ematics and electricity and he read it and educated himself and got the job. If
you are bright, you will learn how to educate yourself with mathematics if you n
eed it. But the average child never will. So it must be reading and writing. Tho
se are the important things. And by the time children are six, they are complete
ly educated and then they can educate themselves. The library will be the place
where they grow up.
INTERVIEWER
You were married for fifty-six years before your wife passed away in 2003. What
was the secret to the longevity of your relationship?
BRADBURY
If you dont have a sense of humor, you dont have a marriage. In that film Love Sto
ry, theres a line, Love means never having to say youre sorry. Thats the dumbest thin
g I ever heard. Love means saying youre sorry every day for some little thing or
other. You make a mistake. I forgot the lightbulbs. I didnt bring this from the s
tore and Im sorry. You know? So being able to accept responsibility, but above al
l having a sense of humor, so that anything that happens can have its amusing si
de.
INTERVIEWER
The week after your wife passed away, you got back to writing. How were you able
to do that?
BRADBURY
Work is the only answer. I have three rules to live by. One, get your work done.
If that doesnt work, shut up and drink your gin. And when all else fails, run li
ke hell!
INTERVIEWER
Which of your recent stories are you particularly proud of?
BRADBURY
One of my very favorite stories from any era of my career is The Toynbee Convecto
r. Its about a man who convinces the world that he has invented a time machine and
that he has seen the future, and that if we dont change things, the world will g
o to hell. Of course, its all a lie, but people believe him. In many ways, that m
an in that story is me, warning people about the future.
INTERVIEWER
When you look back over your career, is there one moment that stands out as havi
ng been particularly exhilarating?
BRADBURY
The first really great thrill was when I was twenty. I submitted a short story, I
ts Not the Heat, Its the Hu, to Rob Wagners Script magazine. One day in August I got
a letter from Wagner saying that it was a lovely story and that they would publi
sh it immediately. I yelled and my mother came running down to the front yard an
d I showed her the letter. I was twenty years old, and we danced around the yard
. They didnt pay me anything, but they did send copies of the magazine so I could
show it to all my friends and prove that I was a writer. That first sale is so
important. The psychological effect of it lasts for a year! Maybe youre not going
to sell anything else for a year, but my God, you did it once.
INTERVIEWER
Do you write for an ideal reader or a particular audience?
BRADBURY
Every time you write for anyone, regardless of who they are, no matter how right
the cause you may believe in, you lie. Steinbeck is one of the few writers out
of the thirties whos still read, because he didnt write for causes at all. He wrot
e human stories that happened to represent causes indirectly. The Grapes of Wrat
h and his other books are not political treatises. Fahrenheit 451 is in a way a
political treatise, but it isnt, because all it is saying, emotionally, is: Every
one leave everyone else alone!
INTERVIEWER
Does literature, then, have any social obligation?
BRADBURY
Not a direct one. It has to be through reflection, through indirection. Nikos Ka
zantzakis says, Live forever. Thats his social obligation. The Saviors of God celeb
rates life in the world. Any great work does that for you. All of Dickens says l
ive life at the top of your energy. Edgar Rice Burroughs never would have looked
upon himself as a social mover and shaker with social obligations. But as it tu
rns outand I love to say it because it upsets everyone terriblyBurroughs is probab
ly the most influential writer in the entire history of the world.
INTERVIEWER
Why do you think that?
BRADBURY
By giving romance and adventure to a whole generation of boys, Burroughs caused
them to go out and decide to become special. Thats what we have to do for everyon
e, give the gift of life with our books. Say to a girl or boy at age ten, Hey, l
ife is fun! Grow tall! Ive talked to more biochemists and more astronomers and te
chnologists in various fields, who, when they were ten years old, fell in love w
ith John Carter and Tarzan and decided to become something romantic. Burroughs p
ut us on the moon. All the technologists read Burroughs. I was once at Caltech w
ith a whole bunch of scientists and they all admitted it. Two leading astronomer
sone from Cornell, the other from Caltechcame out and said, Yeah, thats why we beca
me astronomers. We wanted to see Mars more closely.
I find this in most fields. The need for romance is constant, and again, its pooh
-poohed by intellectuals. As a result theyre going to stunt their kids. You cant k
ill a dream. Social obligation has to come from living with some sense of style,
high adventure, and romance. Its like my friend Mr. Electrico.
INTERVIEWER
Thats the character who makes a brief appearance in Something Wicked This Way Com
es, right? And youve often spoken of a real-life Mr. Electrico, though no scholar
has ever been able to confirm his existence. The story has taken on a kind of m
ythic staturethe director of the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies calls the search
for Mr. Electrico the Holy Grail of Bradbury scholarship.
BRADBURY
Yes, but he was a real man. That was his real name. Circuses and carnivals were
always passing through Illinois during my childhood and I was in love with their
mystery. One autumn weekend in 1932, when I was twelve years old, the Dill Brot
hers Combined Shows came to town. One of the performers was Mr. Electrico. He sa
t in an electric chair. A stagehand pulled a switch and he was charged with fift
y thousand volts of pure electricity. Lightning flashed in his eyes and his hair
stood on end.
The next day, I had to go the funeral of one of my favorite uncles. Driving back
from the graveyard with my family, I looked down the hill toward the shoreline
of Lake Michigan and I saw the tents and the flags of the carnival and I said to
my father, Stop the car. He said, What do you mean? And I said, I have to get o
ut. My father was furious with me. He expected me to stay with the family to mou
rn, but I got out of the car anyway and I ran down the hill toward the carnival.
It didnt occur to me at the time, but I was running away from death, wasnt I? I wa
s running toward life. And there was Mr. Electrico sitting on the platform out i
n front of the carnival and I didnt know what to say. I was scared of making a fo
ol of myself. I had a magic trick in my pocket, one of those little ball-and-vas
e tricksa little container that had a ball in it that you make disappear and reap
pearand I got that out and asked, Can you show me how to do this? It was the righ
t thing to do. It made a contact. He knew he was talking to a young magician. He
took it, showed me how to do it, gave it back to me, then he looked at my face
and said, Would you like to meet those people in that tent over there? Those str
ange people? And I said, Yes sir, I would. So he led me over there and he hit th
e tent with his cane and said, Clean up your language! Clean up your language! H
e took me in, and the first person I met was the illustrated man. Isnt that wonde
rful? The Illustrated Man! He called himself the tattooed man, but I changed his
name later for my book. I also met the strong man, the fat lady, the trapeze pe
ople, the dwarf, and the skeleton. They all became characters.
Mr. Electrico was a beautiful man, see, because he knew that he had a little wei
rd kid there who was twelve years old and wanted lots of things. We walked along
the shore of Lake Michigan and he treated me like a grown-up. I talked my big p
hilosophies and he talked his little ones. Then we went out and sat on the dunes
near the lake and all of a sudden he leaned over and said, Im glad youre back in
my life. I said, What do you mean? I dont know you. He said, You were my best fri
end outside of Paris in 1918. You were wounded in the Ardennes and you died in m
y arms there. Im glad youre back in the world. You have a different face, a differ
ent name, but the soul shining out of your face is the same as my friend. Welcom
e back.
Now why did he say that? Explain that to me, why? Maybe he had a dead son, maybe
he had no sons, maybe he was lonely, maybe he was an ironical jokester. Who kno
ws? It could be that he saw the intensity with which I live. Every once in a whi
le at a book signing I see young boys and girls who are so full of fire that it
shines out of their face and you pay more attention to that. Maybe thats what att
racted him.
When I left the carnival that day I stood by the carousel and I watched the hors
es running around and around to the music of Beautiful Ohio, and I cried. Tears st
reamed down my cheeks. I knew something important had happened to me that day be
cause of Mr. Electrico. I felt changed. He gave me importance, immortality, a my
stical gift. My life was turned around completely. It makes me cold all over to
think about it, but I went home and within days I started to write. Ive never sto
pped.
Seventy-seven years ago, and Ive remembered it perfectly. I went back and saw him
that night. He sat in the chair with his sword, they pulled the switch, and his
hair stood up. He reached out with his sword and touched everyone in the front
row, boys and girls, men and women, with the electricity that sizzled from the s
word. When he came to me, he touched me on the brow, and on the nose, and on the
chin, and he said to me, in a whisper, Live forever. And I decided to.

*Part of this interview was excerpted from Listen to the Echoes, by Sam Weller.
Bret Easton Ellis, The Art of Fiction No. 216
Interviewed by Jon-Jon Goulian
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Bret Easton Ellis was born in 1964 in Los Angeles, grew up in the San Fernando V
alley, went to a local private school called Buckley, and drove his parents hand-
me-down Mercedes 450SL. In retrospect, we were pretty well-off, he told me. But at
the time, I didnt feel that way. Most of my friends lived in bigger houses in bet
ter neighborhoods and drove nicer cars.
At the age of twenty, while a junior at Bennington, Ellis sold his first novel,
Less Than Zero, to Simon and Schuster for five thousand dollars. The book is abo
ut a group of burned-out rich kids in L.A., with names like Clay and Rip and Bla
ir and Spin, who do almost nothing (other than have sex, do drugs, watch MTV, pl
ay video games, and drive around the city looking for one another) for two hundr
ed pages. Its funny, creepy, and vaguely gothic, with coyotes howling in the Holl
ywood Hills, lizards crawling out of glove compartments, and rumors about a were
wolf preying on people in Bel Air.
Not everyone at Simon and Schuster loved the book. In the words of one editor, a
s Ellis was later told, If theres an audience for a novel about coke-snorting, coc
k-socking zombies, then by all means lets publish the damn thing. It turned out th
ere was a audience for it. Less Than Zero would eventually sell millions of copi
es around the world and make Bret Easton Ellis one of the youngest literary star
s in American history.
Now forty-seven, Ellis has published six novelsLess Than Zero, The Rules of Attrac
tion (1987), American Psycho (1991), Glamorama (1998), Lunar Park (2005), and Im
perial Bedrooms (2010)and one short-story collection, The Informers (1995). Every
one of my books, he told me, is an exercise in voice and character, an exploration
, through a male narrator who is always the same age I am at the time, of the pa
in Im dealing with in my life. Whether hes writing about a serial killer who works
on Wall Street (American Psycho) or a suburban dad named Bret Easton Ellis (Luna
r Park), all his books deal with absent fathers, unrequited love, and the pressu
re to conform.
After college, Ellis moved to New York City, bought a small apartment off Union
Square, and lived there for most of the next twenty years. His memory for dates
is superhuman. Without consulting a diary or datebook, he would say things to me
like: The four worst summers of my life were in 92, 01, 07, and 08; I started workin
on Imperial Bedrooms in June 06, and during that time The Informers premiered at
the Sundance Film Festival in January of 09 but opened theatrically in the U.S. i
n April of 09, and then I finished Imperial Bedrooms in May 09; I left New York for
good, and with a bad coke hangover, on June 16, 2006.
Ellis is all about Hollywood now. At any one time he might be working on a dozen
different screenplays, television scripts, or pilots. Since finishing Imperial
Bedrooms, which was a sequel of sorts to Less Than Zero (same characters, same s
etting, but twenty-five years later), he hasnt started a new book, and its possibl
e hell never write another one. The form of the novel, he says, doesnt interest me ri
ght now.
Ellis lives in a nice two-bedroom apartment near Beverly Hills. One of the two b
edrooms serves as his office, and this is where I interviewed himthree times in th
e fall of 2010, three times the following spring, and always (at his request, si
nce he writes in the morning and takes meetings at night) in the afternoon, betw
een one and five. The sun had a way of coming through his office window that hur
t my eyes a bit and warmed the room up. After the first meeting, I kept asking h
im if we could maybe take some of our meetings to a different location, to a bar
or restaurant or caf, but he kept saying no, hed rather not, since it made him se
lf-conscious to be interviewed in public. At the beginning of the sixth and fina
l interview, I confessed that the sun was hurting my eyes and making me a little
hot, and he was embarrassed by this and gently scolded me: Dude, you should have
told me. I would have opened the window. I would have lowered the blinds.
He agreed, instead, to take our final meeting in his BMW, which he drove through
the Hollywood Hills, pointing out the houses where he partied in high school.
Jon-Jon Goulian

INTERVIEWER
Have you ever made money from anything other than writing?
ELLIS
No.
INTERVIEWER
No babysitting, no bartending, no teaching gigs?
ELLIS
Id be a terrible babysitter, a terrible teacher, maybe a so-so bartender. No, the
only money Ive ever made is from writing novels and short stories and screenplay
s and TV scripts and TV pilots and the occasional essay on pop culture.
INTERVIEWER
Is there anything youve ever wanted to be besides a writer?
ELLIS
A musician. I was in a band in L.A. in high school, and then I was in another ban
d at Bennington. I played keyboards and wrote songs. Then Less Than Zero happene
d. And once it became clear I could make a living from writing, I never seriousl
y thought about making money any other way. I still played in bands here and the
re after college, but writing gradually took over my life.
INTERVIEWER
When you say that Less Than Zero happened, what do you mean? You just whipped it o
ut and sold it?
ELLIS
No. When I sold Less Than Zero to Simon and Schuster in April 1984, I had been w
orking on that book, in one form or another, for five years, ever since I was a
sophomore in high school. There were many different drafts along the way. The ea
rlier drafts were more autobiographical and read like teen diaries or journal en
trieslots of stuff about the bands I liked, the beach, the Galleria, clubs, drivi
ng around, doing drugs, partying. When I was eighteen, I wrote an entirely new d
raft, in which the narrator is back in L.A. for Christmas break after a semester
spent back East at college. This was the draft I showed to Joe McGinniss, who w
as teaching at Bennington, and the draft that eventually became the published ve
rsion.
INTERVIEWER
Why McGinniss?
ELLIS
I first met Joe in 1982, when I was a freshman at Bennington. He was teaching a
course that was only open to juniors and seniorsa kind of nonfiction creative-wri
ting course. I forget what it was called but it was basically about using fictio
nal techniques in journalism, and reading the New Journalism of the sixties pers
onified by Wolfe, Talese, Mailer, Didion. And he let me in because he liked the
writing samples I submitted, which were sections of what became Less Than Zero.
At Bennington, which encourages students to be self-motivated, you could make up
your own courses, so the following year I proposed a Novel Writing Tutorial with
Joe McGinniss, which he agreed to teach because he liked the pieces I had writte
n for that journalism class, as well as the sections of the novel I had shown hi
m. There were, I think, a total of three students in that writing tutorialDonna T
artt was one of the other two.
INTERVIEWER
Was Donna Tartt writing The Secret History in that seminar?
ELLIS
Yes. When I first met Donna, in 1982, she was already working on the book that w
ould become The Secret History. Her roommate and my roommate were friends, and t
hey both thought that Donna and I would like each other. So Donna and I went outI
wouldnt call it a date exactly, we were just hanging outand in order to have some
thing to talk about, each of us put some work into the others mailbox. Hers was a
chapter from what was then called The Gods of Illusion, and I gave her part of
what would become Less Than Zero.
INTERVIEWER
How did a junior in college manage to publish a novel?
ELLIS
Joe McGinniss was instrumental. When I was writing Less Than Zero, I had no seri
ous hopes of publishing it. I was sophisticated enough to know that twenty-year-
olds dont publish novels. I was writing it because I enjoyed writing it and becau
se it was cathartic. Some people release their pain and anxiety through, oh, I d
ont know, playing sports, or a hobby, or through sex or drugs. Writing, for me, w
as always a great stress reliever, a way of dealing with pain. It was Joe McGinn
iss who thought the book had commercial potential, so he showed it to an agent,
Sterling Lord, who agreed. And Joe had shown parts of it to Morgan Entrekin, who
was then an editor at Simon and Schuster and working on Joes book Fatal Vision,
who also agreedthough when Less Than Zero was published in May of 1985, Morgan ha
d moved on to Grove, and I had switched agents to Amanda Urban at ICM. The book
was not an immediate success. It wasnt until the fall that the book blew up. And
not all the initial reviews were positive. About half were negative.
INTERVIEWER
Readers have always assumed that Clay, the narrator, is your alter ego.
ELLIS
And when American Psycho came out, people assumed I was Patrick Bateman, and whe
n Glamorama came out, they assumed I was Victor Ward. And when Imperial Bedrooms
came out, they assumed I was Clay again. I get, Dude, are you Clay? all the time.
Well, I write novels, and though there are autobiographical elements in them, w
ho really cares how much of me is in the book? As it happens, there is very litt
le in Less Than Zero thats based on my real life. Yes, like Clay I had two sister
s, and my parents were divorced, and many of my friends were wealthy and did dru
gs and seemed promiscuousor so I thought at the time. But I was a relatively well
-adjusted kid. I mean, I wasnt as severely alienated as Clay. I had a girlfriend.
I liked to dance. I liked to joke around. I liked going to parties. I liked see
ing bands. I loved movies. I enjoyed a lot of my life. Its not clear that Clay ac
tually loves doing anything. And I was relatively engaged, intellectuallyat least
relative to Clay. I was reading Joan Didion, and I was trying to write a novel,
and I was the film and rock-music critic for the high school newspaper .?.?. un
til I was kicked off.
INTERVIEWER
Kicked off why?
ELLIS
A lot of people hated my reviews. Id write a glowing review of something like Elv
is Costellos country-music record, Almost Blue, but no one at my high school want
ed to read about Elvis Costello, much less about his country album. They wanted
me to write about how great the latest Journey and Foreigner records were.
INTERVIEWER
In American Psycho, in chapters called Genesis, Whitney Houston, and Huey Lewis and t
he News, Patrick Bateman writes glowing reviews of every single album by those th
ree bands. Were these reviewsof bands that your classmates in high school presuma
bly likedyour way of making fun of the people who didnt appreciate your music crit
icism?
ELLIS
That had nothing to do with including those reviews in the book. No, the reason
Patrick Bateman loves this music, and wants to tell us all about it in excruciat
ing detail, is because he wants to fit in. And that was the music that was popul
ar at the time.
INTERVIEWER
Plot has never been a hugely important part of your books. To the extent that th
eres a plot in Less Than Zero, its Clay trying to get his money back from Julian.
ELLIS
And to the extent that theres a plot, thats my least favorite part of the book. In
the first draft, which was much longer, the plot was less relevant. But in the
course of being condensed, the plot took on more significance than I realized at
the time. I look back at that book and think of the plot as having imposed itse
lf on the material.
Incidentally, someone recently noted that if Less Than Zero were written now it
would be about twenty pages long because of cell phones and texting. Theres a lon
g stretch in the book where Clay is driving around looking for Julian, stopping
off at friends houses to use their phones. He even stops in at a McDonalds to use
a pay phone. But people can find each other very easily now. A single textDude, wh
ere the fuck are you? I want my moneywould take care of three-fourths of the actio
n in the book.
INTERVIEWER
Many critics took Less Than Zero almost literally, and were shocked by your blea
k account of life in L.A. for young rich kids. And yet the most shocking scenes in
the book, such as a bunch of surfers gang-raping a twelve-year-old girl, seem i
mplausible. Its hard to believe that these burned-out kidsspoiled and alienated, c
ertainly, but hardly psychopathsare capable of such violence.
ELLIS
On the cover of some editions of Less Than Zero theres a quote from Michiko Kakut
anis review in The New York TimesOne of the most disturbing novels Ive read in a lon
g time. It possesses an unnerving air of documentary reality. Thats the only nice
thing she said about it. In fact, thats the only nice thing shes ever said about a
ny of my books. I disturbed Michiko Kakutani. My novel, which was intended to be a
novel and not a documentary, disturbed her.
Look, you could very easily argue that the rape of the twelve-year-old girl is a
n implausible scene, but for me it seemed to matter a lot at the time. The momen
t in that book that meant the most to me occurs after Clay says to Rip, Oh God, R
ip, come on, shes eleven. Rip says, Twelve. And then Clay pauses, mulls that over fo
r a few seconds, and says, Yeah, twelve. For Clay, the girl being twelve and not e
leven is relevant. The distinction makes sense to him and to the society hes a pa
rt of. To me thats the most important moment of the book. Thats Clay.
INTERVIEWER
Did the success of Less Than Zero mess with your head when you were writing The
Rules of Attraction?
ELLIS
When Less Than Zero was published, I had already outlined The Rules of Attractio
n and written half of it. And by the time Less Than Zero became a best seller si
x months later, The Rules of Attraction had been put to bed. It was done. The su
ccess of Less Than Zero had no effect at all on that book.
INTERVIEWER
The person who wrote The Rules of Attraction didnt seem to love Bennington very m
uch.
ELLIS
Really? I loved Bennington. I remember parts of that novel being fairly lyrical
about the place, but maybe not. Maybe, at times, I was just writing about a grou
p of self-absorbed assholes, but really The Rules of Attraction was an attempt t
o write the kind of college novel I had always wanted to read and could never fi
nd. I related to all the characters. I was fairly bisexual in collegeI had girlfr
iends, I had boyfriends. I identified with Victor not realizing that there was t
his girl who cared for him a lot, but she was just a blip on his screen. I relat
ed to Sean, where maybe a guy really liked me, but nothing was going on, and yet
he was talking to other people about his feelings toward me, while I was fuckin
g everyone else in sight. I related to Paul and Lauren, liking someone and being
rebuffed by them. I was able to feel everything that everyone was going through
in that book, and thats one of the reasons why I wrote it. I had been all of the
m.
INTERVIEWER
How do you feel, looking back at that book twenty-five years later, about the ob
sessive use of stream of consciousness?
ELLIS
Would I write that book today? No. Because Im not reading Ulysses today, and Im not
in college. The year I wrote the bulk of The Rules of Attraction, I was taking
a seminar on Ulysses, and I was fascinated by the stream-of-consciousness techni
que. So I ended up writing a book that takes place on a college campus very much
like the one I was attending and with three main narrators who, through free-as
sociative monologues, describe, very differently, events that all three are expe
riencing. You might argue that there is not a lot at stake in this book, where t
he worst thing that can happen to these characters is that they dont end up at th
e right party or with the right girl or with the right drug. But isnt that what c
ollege, for most kids, is all about? I was trying to write a book that captures
what life is really like in college, the nonacademic side of it at least, and I
think it succeeds on that level. It is also, oddly enough, the only book of mine
with four stars on Amazon.
INTERVIEWER
You once said that you read the comments about your books on Amazon, because, in
part, they keep your ego in check. Still true?
ELLIS
That sounds like something I might have said, though Im not sure if I really mean
t it. I used to read the comments about my books from time to time. I dont now. A
lot of them were incredibly negative, but I dont know if they kept my ego in che
ck so much as they entertained me. I got used to negative comments in workshops
in college. Workshops are where you first start hearing people say really dumb t
hings about your writing and where you first start developing an ability to defl
ect those comments, or at least not let them change what you initially wanted to
do with a particular story. You need that kind of armor to survive as a writer.
INTERVIEWER
What kind of editorial advice did you get on The Rules of Attraction?
ELLIS
Robert Asahina, who became my editor at Simon and Schuster after Morgan Entrekin
went to Grove, made a number of editorial suggestions. The stream of consciousn
ess didnt always work for him. The syntax didnt always work for him. The grammar d
idnt always work for him. Certain characters who appeared out of nowhere and neve
r came back didnt work for him. Some of the scenes, which seemed impractical to h
is very practical Asian mind, didnt work for himthe book beginning and ending in m
id-sentence, for example, the monologue in French, the blank page after the abor
tion. And to all his suggestions I said, Stet, stet, stet. The book felt loose a
nd messy, and I liked it that way.
INTERVIEWER
How did Asahina respond to these many stets?
ELLIS
By letting me publish the book I wanted to publish. I was very obsessive, very p
rotective about that book, perhaps overly so. The font used for the characters na
mes? I insisted they change it. The amount of spacing between each characters mon
ologue? I insisted they make it bigger. I wanted huge space breaks, about two an
d a quarter inches wide. I was very uptight about that. The unflattering author
photo I gave them, which they hated? I insisted they use it. Why are you giving u
s this ugly black-and-white photo of you sitting on a stoop somewhere, squinting
and clearly hungover? Youre young and gorgeous, Bret! Youre so marketable! Give u
s something gorgeous! And I thought, No, Im not gorgeous, and this book isnt about
that. In a lot of ways it was a pretty severe takedown of where I thought my gen
eration was at during that timethe Empire decadence of the Reagan eightiesand I wa
nted a photo on the book that expressed what I thought was in the book. They wer
e pissed, of course, but they used the photo anyway.
INTERVIEWER
After Bennington, you moved to New York and wrote American Psycho. What was goin
g on in your life, or in your mind, that explains the crazy violence in that boo
k?
ELLIS
American Psycho came out of a place of severe alienation and loneliness and self
-loathing. I was pursuing a lifeyou could call it the Gentlemens Quarterly way of
livingthat I knew was bullshit, and yet I couldnt seem to help it. American Psycho
is a book about becoming the man you feel you have to be, the man who is cool,
slick, handsome, effortlessly moving through the world, modeling suits in Esquir
e, having babes on his arm. Its about lifestyle being sold as life, a lifestyle t
hat never seemed to include passion, creativity, curiosity, romance, pain. Every
thing meaningful wiped away in favor of surfaces, in favor of looking good, havi
ng money, having six-pack abs, dating the hottest porn star, going to the hottes
t clubs. On the surface, like Patrick Bateman, I had everything a young man coul
d possibly want to be happy and yet I wasnt. I think Fight Club is about this, tooth
is idea that men are sold a bill of goods about what they have to be in order to
feel good about themselves, or feel important. No one can really live up to the
se ideals, so theres an immense amount of dissatisfaction roiling through the col
lective male psyche. Patrick Bateman is the extreme embodiment of that dissatisf
action. Nothing fulfills him. The more he acquires, the emptier he feels. On a c
ertain level, I was that man, too.
INTERVIEWER
The violence in that book is directed against men, women, Jews, mimes, dogs, bums
, niggers, faggots, people who smoke cigarettes, slanty-eyed Chinese people, et ceter
and yet the novel aroused controversy only over its treatment of women. Why?
ELLIS
Months before the book was published, a few pages of the manuscript were leaked
to the media, and these were the pages in which Patrick Bateman kills women, or
fantasizes about killing women. The critics who read these pages naturally assum
ed they were representative of the whole book, and so a lot of outraged reviews
and editorials started appearing in The New York Timesan essay in the Book Review
attacking me, an op-ed by Lorrie Moore, and on and on and on. What has society c
ome to when a book like this can be published by a responsible publisher like Si
mon and Schuster? And keep in mind, these werent right-wing conservatives attackin
g me. These were well-meaning liberals, primarily feminists. I wasnt a misogynist wh
en I wrote the book, but the unearned feminist hysteria briefly turned me into o
ne.
INTERVIEWER
Did Simon and Schuster come to your defense?

ELLIS
They dropped me. The book was cancelled, either the last week of November or the
first week of December, in 1990. Sonny Mehta, who had recently become the editor
in chief of Knopf, picked it up, which made people even angrier because it was
a more respectable publishing house than Simon and Schuster. In January I got a
call from my agent. She said, and Im paraphrasing, Youve been getting death threats
, and we need to show them to you. Legal has talked it over. If we dont show them
to you, and youre not aware of them, then if something happens to you, we are li
able, and your parents can sue us. So were going to send you a packet of these de
ath threats, and you can look through them, and verify that you have seen them. T
hat was a very interesting afternoon.
Some of these threats included drawings of my body, and people describing how the
y were going to torture me, and what they were going to do to my corpse. They we
re going to do the same things to me that they thought I had done to the women in
this book they hadnt even read yet. But when the book came out a few months later
, the controversy stopped. The complaints, the protests, the screaming about wha
t a monster Bret Easton Ellis supposedly was, it all stopped. People finally rea
d the book, and they found out that it wasnt four hundred pages of torture and mu
tilation and advocating the death of women. Its just some boring novel.
INTERVIEWER
How did you come up with the incredibly detailed descriptions of whats happening
to these bodies while Patrick Bateman is ripping them apart? Were you completely
winging it, or did you hang out with a forensic pathologist for a few months?
ELLIS
When I wrote those scenes I was thinking about a lot of thingsthe EC comics of my
youth, like Tales from the Crypt and The Vault of Horror, and various slasher m
ovies I saw as a kid and a lot of horror fiction Id read. Then it was turned up a
notch just by being in Patrick Batemans mind-set for three years and by imaginin
g how a psychotic who works on Wall Street during the day might describe these t
hings. A lot of those details I couldnt make up, so there was some kind of FBI te
xtbook I got hold of that went into very graphic detail about various serial kil
lers and how they would torture people. But ultimately I winged it, more or less
. Its fiction.
INTERVIEWER
Did your new editor, Gary Fisketjon, suggest any changes?
ELLIS
Suggestions that I, for the most part, resisted. We almost came to blows over it
. I was in L.A. at the time, and Vintage, the Random House imprint that publishe
d the book, was on a tight deadline because they wanted to capitalize on the pub
licity the book had received, so they flew Gary out to L.A. and put him up in a
suite at the Hotel Bel-Airyes, this is how publishers spent their money in the ni
netiesso that we could go over his edits in person. It was a three-day frenzy of
Gary making suggestions and me resisting them. They even put me up in the hotel
one night so I wouldnt have to waste time coming and going from my moms house over
the hill. The process left him extremely frustrated. I think his plan when he a
cquired that novel was to radically fix it. The problem was that I didnt think it
needed to be fixed. Gary wrote me a very impassioned letter after the editing p
rocess was over. He told me, Youre going to be very embarrassed by a lot of this b
ook in five or ten years. And I said, Well, so what? And of course that never happe
ned. I was never embarrassed. I saw the violence as an integral part of the nove
l. He saw the violence as tasteless and juvenile. I consented to some things he
wantedlittle cuts, little clarifications, maybe two percent of the book overalland
when I see them now, they still annoy me.
INTERVIEWER
Were his objections to the violence on moral or aesthetic grounds?
ELLIS
He claimed aesthetic but I suspected moral, and it pissed me off. His argument w
as that these scenes are so shocking, so in-your-face, that they distract from t
he overall mood of the rest of the novel, which is pretty much 385 pages of a yo
ung man in a society he doesnt believe in and yet wants to be a part of. Thats wha
t the novels really about. And then there are these explosions of blood and visce
ra at certain moments that throw everything out of whack. Garys concern was, How
are we going to be able to concentrate on the next scene of social satire after
weve read two pages about how a woman has been nail-gunned to a floor, and raped,
et cetera, et cetera? Well, I think you can. I dare you. Deal with it. And thats
one of the things that I still find powerful about that book.
Gary and I have a weird relationship. Hes my friend, and hes my editor. But except
for Lunar Park, I really dont think he likes my books. We almost came to blows o
ver Imperial Bedrooms, too, specifically over the sequence set out in the desert
in Palm Springs with Clay and the teenage escorts. There were a couple of detail
s in my draft that he found repellent, even more repellent than what survived. H
e was so adamant about those details being removed that I just gave up. I remove
d them, and Im still not happy about that. In Lunar Park, I had a lot of one-sent
ence paragraphs that Gary really disliked. To me it just mimicked the way Stephe
n King, whose work Ive loved since I was a kid, would do some of his set pieces.
Gary thought the one-sentence paragraph was tacky. He thought it wasnt literary.
Who knows? Maybe hes right. The three music reviews in American Psycho we discuss
ed earlier? Gary tried to cut two of them. He said that three is overkill, ones e
nough, pick one. I refused. The reason they work is precisely because three is ov
erkill. One is not psychotic. Three is psychotic.
I think Gary wants to protect me. He wants me to come off better than I am. He m
ay not like my books, but he is what every writer dreams about in terms of total
focus on your book. From the moment he gets his hands on the manuscript, all th
e way to when it is finally published in paperback, he oversees everything. A lo
t of editors just read the book once and go, Cool, and then hand it off to copye
diting. To be honest, Gary might just as well do that with me, because I really
dont listen to a lot of what he says, and I think he is way too much of a stickle
r about syntax and grammar. I like the way my narrators talk. I know its not prop
er syntax or grammar. But its not supposed to be. My narrators arent English profe
ssors, and I dont want them to sound like they are.
INTERVIEWER
Is Gary Fisketjon the first person you show your book to when youre finished with
it?
ELLIS
No. Binky Urban, my agent, is the first person who sees everything I write.
INTERVIEWER
Has she ever suggested any changes?
ELLIS
No.
INTERVIEWER
You said that American Psycho didnt hit the mark for you. How so?
ELLIS
Did I say hit the mark? Its a stupid phrase. I shouldnt have used it. Theres no mark
to hit when youre writing a book. I write books to relieve myself of pain. Thats th
e prime motivator to write. Period. If I were forced to judge the book aesthetic
ally, I might concede that it could have been less obvious. Its hard to read that
book and not get it. There is a kind of obviousness to it, even a kind of earnest
ness that bothers me if I think about it too much.
INTERVIEWER
Maybe you made up for it with Glamorama. Ive read that book twice and I still dont
get it.
ELLIS
You arent alone. Many people didnt get that book. But its probably the best novel Iv
e written and the one that means the most to me. And when I say bestthe wrong word,
I suppose, but Im not sure what else to replace it withI mean that Ill never have
that energy again, that kind of focus sustained for eight years on a single proj
ect. Ill never spend that amount of time crafting a book that means that much to
me. And I think people who have read all of my work and are fans understand that
about Glamoramaits the one book out of the seven Ive published that matters the mo
st. But, of course, you can argue that writers are notoriously wrong about what
they think is their best work, and sometimes theyre perverse about it because the
book they admire the most is the one that got trounced the most by reviewers an
d readers, and they get defensive. And Glamorama was equally hated and admired w
hen it was first published, but out of all of my books Im probably most on the si
de of the admirers on this one, more so than I am with any of the others. I hate
admitting that, but really it was the most carefully composed and thought-out o
f anything Ive ever written or probably will ever write.
Glamorama was initially built on the idea of a fathers dislike for his son and hi
s desire to replace him with a different son. Then other things developed around
that initial idea. Id always wanted to write a Robert Ludlum novel. As a writer
I couldnt take the tropes of a Robert Ludlum novel seriously, but as a kid I love
d reading international thrillers, and I always wanted to write my own. Also, I
was writing Glamorama at what was arguably the height of my fame, such as it was
, and I wanted to wrestle with, and satirize, that world as wellwhat it would fee
l like to become lost in celebrity, to lose your identity to the publics concepti
on of yourself. It was a writing experience that wiped me out in a way because i
t took a long time to write and dealt with so many things going on in my lifethe
death of my father, the aftermath of American Psycho, the realization that celeb
rity is an illusion and that what kind of person people think you are has been c
reated by someone else, the media and, most frighteningly, your participation wi
th the media. It was so damning of where I thought I was at that time, and yet i
t was also exhilarating to write. Its a book that alienates a lot of readers and
is considered the most pretentious thing Ive written, butand Im quoting Bob Dylan h
erewhats wrong with being pretentious? I think American Psycho was just the prepar
ation for writing Glamorama, and I think Glamorama is the more complex and inter
esting book.
INTERVIEWER
Glamorama, on some level, is also about paranoia, no?
ELLIS
Yes.
INTERVIEWER
In fact, every single one of your books, on some level, is about paranoia. Did t
he Manson murders, which took place when you were five, traumatize you? In Less
Than Zero, we are constantly aware of ominous things going on in the hills.
ELLIS
More terrifying for me than the Manson murders themselves, which I wasnt aware of
at the time, was Vincent Bugliosis Helter Skelter, an account of the Manson pros
ecution, which was published in 74, when I was ten. The descriptions in that book
of what actually happened during those two nights of mayhem were terrifying. The
y didnt just kill Sharon Tatethey carved out her fetus. The idea that anybody coul
d come into your house at night and kill your entire family haunted me. It was p
art of the scary narrative of L.A. that I grew up with. The randomness of it all
based on the citys geography, of just being in the wrong place at the wrong time
, played heavily on my fears growing up. At the same time, there was a lot of sc
ary drama in my family. My dad was a very angry and abusive man when I was a kid
, verbally abusive for the most part, though on occasion physically, and, of cou
rse, he didnt get any happier when my parents finally separated, when I was in hi
gh school. It felt so strange. There were a lot of divorces going on, and there
were all of these unhappy children in the midst of this beautiful setting, and i
t seemed so incongruousbeautiful Southern California, unhappy kids, awful father,
a scary house. I guess that fear I felt could be traced back to the idea that w
hen a bad divorce goes down, a house that shouldnt be scary becomes really scary.
INTERVIEWER
Was anyone close to you murdered?
ELLIS
Not when I was a kid, but when I hit my twenties, yes, I actually knew three peo
ple who were murdered. What a strange thing to admit. I vaguely knew Dominique D
unne, who was in Poltergeist. She was killed by her boyfriend, whom I also vague
ly knewhe worked at Ma Maison, a restaurant my family went to a lot. I also knew
a guy named Ron Levin, whose killing was ordered by a guy named Joe Hunt. Joe Hu
nt was the head of what was called the Billionaire Boys Club, and he wanted to k
ill Levinit was something about moneyso he hired two members of this boys club he c
reated to kill him. Before that killing I remember being at a dinner with Joe Hu
nt at La Scala in Beverly Hillshe seemed nice. One of my best friends in L.A. was
a DJ named Lee Selwyn, who was murdered coming out of a club late one night. I
dont know what this all adds up to, but those are the facts. Also, I dont know wha
t the statistics are, but it seemed when I was growing up that there was an unus
ually high incidence of car accidents. Youd always hear about someone you casuall
y knew, or a friend of a friend, who totaled on the Pacific Coast Highway or vee
red off Mulholland.
Was I an unusually fearful kid? Probably. I was anxious, maybe I was even parano
id. And to some extent Im sure it has influenced my fiction, but this is not the
only reason paranoia is so pervasive in my work. My personal experiences aside,
paranoia serves an important technical function in my books. In a novel that isnt
exactly plot-driven, which you could argue is most of my novels, you need a sen
se of mystery, tension, menace, whatever it is, to keep it driving forward. Whats
around the corner? Whats going on in the hills? Whos behind the wheel of that bla
ck Mercedes with the tinted windows? Youve got to have a tight plan for the book,
with scenes of mystery and menace carefully placed, to make it work.
INTERVIEWER
Glamorama and American Psycho seem less tightly structured, more improvisatory,
than your other books.
ELLIS
They might seem that way, but they werent. The nonnarrative, or least plot-driven,
books that Ive written, to which I would add Less Than Zero, were actually the m
ost carefully structured. In Less Than Zero, where very little seems to be happe
ning for most of the book, what keeps the reader engaged? Not a riveting plot ce
rtainly, since theres no plot until the last fifth of the novel. Not depth of cha
racter, since these characters seem to have no depth. What keeps the reader enga
ged is, probably, a gradually intensifying sense of dread. It may seem that you
can shake the book up, dump the scenes on the table, and rearrange them any way
you want and it wouldnt matter muchbut thats not how it was created. If you took th
at approach, what youd end up with is a dead book, with zero momentum and zero at
stake. I was very careful about the placement of each scene, each chapter. Amer
ican Psycho is the same way. The scenes had to be put in a certain order. There
are subtle gradations of menace. Theres a faint hum of horror in the background a
t the beginning of the book, and as the book progresses the hum becomes, hopeful
ly, deafening. If you looked at the book in diagram, youd see that the scenes are
all carefully apportioned. Both Less Than Zero and American Psycho are highly s
tructured books. In fact, they all are. I cant write any other way. Glamorama was
outlined to death. So was Lunar Park.
INTERVIEWER
So all of your books are outlined before you write them?
ELLIS
Well, I start with a rough outline, an experimental, very free-form first draft
thats based on everything I want to include in the novel but that I also know wont
make it into the final draft. And in that first draft there are exercises, samp
les of how I imagine the narrator might speak if describing something. I ask que
stions like, Can I use metaphors with this narrator? Will he be able to see some
thing as something else? No, Patrick Bateman wont be able to do that. Everything
is all surface for him. Theres a scene early in Imperial Bedrooms where Clay take
s an actress out to lunch. The actress has auditioned for the movie Clay has wri
tten. Clay knows shes not going to get a part in the movie, but he wants to fuck
her, so he leads her on. Hes going to lie to her, tell her she has a good shot at
being in the movie, and then take her back to his place and fuck her. They have
lunch at this restaurant that I like to go to on Melrose. Theres a really beauti
ful silver wall in this restaurant, and depending on what time of day youre eatin
g there, the sunlight falls on it and creates these patterns and shapes. In my d
raft, Clay talked about the silver wall before turning his attention to the actr
ess at hand. I loved the language I used. I loved how cool the description of th
e wall was, the subtle way the light kept changing it. They were my favorite fiv
e lines in the book. But I knew, after I wrote it, that it couldnt go in the book
. It wasnt Clay. Clay was never going to notice the silver wall, and Clay was nev
er going to talk about the silver wall. The purpose of the scene is for him to c
oncentrate on the actress, which is what he wants to do, and this silver wall is
just the writer jerking off.
So in this first draft there is a sort of test run of what the narrator is going
to sound like in the final draft. When I move into the next stage of the writing
process, the emotional phase is more or less over. Ive dealt with the reasons I
wanted to write the bookpain, my issues at the time, my conflicts in that moment,
what Im confused about, whats hurting me, what Im fantasizing about. Its all in tha
t free-form first draft, which is a very, very long treatmenta diagram charting t
he movements of the characters, as well as a guide as to what the next phase of
the writing will entail. This is when the cool technician comes in and shapes it
into the book that the reader wants to readthe reader being me.
INTERVIEWER
What are your technical considerations when shaping the book?
ELLIS
I shouldnt have used the word technician. Its a term that suggests something robot
ic and too analytic. It suggests that there are objective criteria everyone agre
es on as to what makes a book good or bad. Well-written, dead novels are publish
ed a thousand times a year. The sentences are pretty and the dialogue is true to
life, but the books themselves are, more often than not, lifeless. Then there are
novels that sometimes arent so well written but have a pulse to them. You can te
ll the author isnt sitting in class waiting for his A to be given to him. And the
n there are the rare novels that fall somewhere in between. Ill give you an examp
le of a book that, despite its technical flaws, is aliveA Gate at the Stairs, Lorri
e Moores last book. Moore is a very good writer, maybe the best short-story write
r of my generation. As a novelist, shes a little bit hampered by the form. A Gate
at the Stairs is about a twenty-something college girl who talks exactly the wa
y Moore writes. Its spectacularly witty, and the details are great, and the writi
ng is almost perfectly composed and done in that very snappy Lorrie Moore way. B
ut the voice is unconvincing. It feels like were hanging out with Lorrie Moore. T
hen, one hundred pages in, something magical happens. The girls voice, the writers
voice, the idea for the novel all come together. Youre finally and completely con
vinced of the entire machine that has been put into play, whereas in the beginni
ng you were only half convinced by it. I dont know how a writer achieves this alc
hemy. The novelist is aware that the narrator might not speak this way in real lif
e, but they reimagine it in a way that works for the novel. I have been more oft
en than not accused of failing to achieve this myself.
INTERVIEWER
Is there an impulse toward moral criticism in your novels?
ELLIS
I talked about that a lot when I was wearing my writer mask in my twenties, and
I wanted to be taken more seriously, I suppose. When I had to go out and promote
a book and American Psycho would come up, I would say something defensive about
being a satirist. I would say that American Psycho is a moral indictment of a cer
tain type of shallow, narcissistic, American male, which, yes, it is, but is tha
t really the overriding motive behind American Psycho? No. I was also writing ab
out my life and how empty it was. Maybe I was too hard on myself. Maybe I should
have just relaxed, chilled out, enjoyed my good fortune. And I kind of did, I g
uess. It wasnt like I was curled up in a fetal position, sucking my thumb for thr
ee years. But my own demons got in the way of taking total pleasure in just abou
t anything. And so in a sense there is a kind of moral criticism, but for the mo
st part its directed at me.
INTERVIEWER
Patrick Bateman first made an appearance in your work toward the end of The Rule
s of Attraction, as Seans older brother. Does your tendency to reuse characters f
rom your previous books, sometimes so subtly that only someone deeply familiar w
ith your work could detect it, serve any purpose?
ELLIS
If its serving some purpose, Im not aware of it. I really have no idea why I do it
. Its clearly serving some emotional needone doesnt do something continually for no
reasonbut I dont know what it is. And Im not sure I care enough to dwell on it. An
d this is the problem with a literary interview and me. This is the problem with m
e as a serious novelist. A serious novelist would care about these questions. Or,
at a minimum, he would care about looking like he cared and would have a good an
swer for you. Why do characters recur in my work? If you forced me, at gunpoint,
to give you an answer, Id say maybe its playfulness on some level. Maybe I think,
No ones going to notice that Bret Easton Elliss neighbor in Lunar Park, Mitchell
Allen, whos now married with a kid, was Paul Dentons bisexual boyfriend eighteen y
ears earlier in The Rules of Attraction. But I like the fact that he is. Its my o
wn little joke.
INTERVIEWER
Do you not consider yourself a serious novelist?
ELLIS
I recently got into one of those weird, terrible fights writers can find themsel
ves in with a friend who has for a long time been writing novels he cant get publ
ished. For twenty-five years Ive been trying to help him. He cant rise to the occa
sion. He cant write a novel because he doesnt have the passion to write a novel. H
es writing a novel to make the money, get the film rights, become famous, whateve
rall the wrong reasons. When he asked me to read the latest one, I told him, Look,
if this novel is superpassionate, and it really is about shit youre going throug
h, and pain, and it means the fucking world to you, by all means send it to me. H
e said, Yeah, its totally all those things, and he sent it to me, and it was absolu
tely like all the others. I flipped out. I went ballistic on him. I said, You nev
er took this seriously! From the time you were twenty-three, it was always some
kind of sterile exercise, like an imitation of a novel. And you never talk passio
nately about writers. I never hear you talk about books youre reading. You just s
aw that a young writer in the eighties could make some cash from a literary nove
l. It was moneymaking to you. And my friend was shocked, or pretended to be. You k
now, its really amazing to hear you say that, Bret, because looking at your caree
r and reading your books, I never thought you actually took it seriously. I saw
your books as trendy knockoffs. I saw you as kind of a hack. I never thought you
were really serious. I mean, hes not representative of the kind of person anyone
should take seriously in literary matters, but when my friend said that, Ill admi
t it gave me pause. I thought, What does it mean to be a serious novelist? Regardl
ess of how my books have turned out, or how some people might have read them, I
clearly dont think I write trendy knockoffs. My books have all been very deeply f
elt. You dont spend eight years of your life working on a trendy knockoff. In tha
t sense Ive been serious. But I dont do lots of things that other serious writers d
o. I dont write book reviews. I dont sit on panels about the state of the novel. I
dont go to writer conferences. I dont teach writing seminars. I dont hang out at Y
addo or MacDowell. Im not concerned with my reputation as a writer or where I sta
nd relative to other writers. Im not competitive or professionally ambitious. I d
ont think about my work and my career in an overarching or systematic way. I dont
think about myself, as I think most writers do, as progressing toward some ideal
of greatness. Theres no grand plan. All I know is that I write the books I want
to write. All that other stuff is meaningless to me.
INTERVIEWER
But it wasnt always meaningless to you, right? You referred earlier to the writers
mask you wore in your twenties, when, as you put it, you wanted to be taken more s
eriously.
ELLIS
For the first few years after Less Than Zero was published, I tried my best to p
lay the serious young writer. I sat on panels about the state of the novel. I wr
ote a few book reviews. Looking back, I hate the fact that I did them. In a few
of those reviews, of books I really didnt like, I was probably more harsh than I
had to be, and Ive never really forgiven myself for it. And, yeah, I made sure to
wear a suit and tie in my author photos. I had a preconceived notion of how a w
riter should present himself.
I grew up with the Empire idea of the literary author, the postWorld War II liter
ary male author and how he presented himself to the public as a very serious man
complete with a very serious demeanorIm thinking of Mailer, Vidal, Updike, Roth,
even Capote and Kerouac. Even when you get to the sixties, with more playful pos
tmodernists like Richard Brautigan, Coover, and Pynchon, there was still a sense
that it was a very serious profession. Books mattered, you were a teacher of wr
iting, and every major male American writer seemed to come off in a way that, in
the end, when I became published, I realized I just couldnt relate to. But believ
e me, I tried.
INTERVIEWER
When did the mask come off?
ELLIS
It didnt come off completely, I suppose, until I finally left New York for good i
n 2006. Although I say I wasnt interested in all the incidental bullshit that had
to do with being a serious novelist, I was well immersed in the publishing scene
in New Yorkmost of my friends were writers or editorsso in that sense I was just l
ike everybody else. Ill cop to it. But I never felt that I belonged in the litera
ry scene of New York. I never felt smart enough. I never felt that I was a New Y
orker. I was always the kid from L.A., the kid from the Valley, the kid who wrot
e those weird books. That whole brat pack thingJay McInerney and Tama Janowitz and
Bret Easton Ellis and whoever else was supposed to be a part of itwas a myth. It
never existed. I hung out with my own friends who were my age. Occasionally, Jay
and I would go out, and wed be photographed, and the photographs would appear in
magazines, and people would see those photos and assume we were attached at the
hip.
INTERVIEWER
What compelled you to leave New York?
ELLIS
Most of my friends were settling down with families in Brooklyn or New Jersey. I
t got harder to hang out with them. Manhattan had gotten so expensive that my wri
ter friends, many of whom live check to check, couldnt afford it anymore because t
hey were starting families. And honestly? Drugscocaine specifically, really the o
nly drug Ive been intoare for some reason more accessible to me in New York, and I
didnt want access to them anymore. I was never what I would call a heavy drug us
er. It was at most a weekend thing. But its hard to resist if its staring you in t
he face, and Im not interested in doing it anymore. In New York it stares me in t
he face. In L.A., for some reason, it doesnt.
Finally, the publishing scene got too claustrophobic, too cliquey, too irritatin
g for me. I was tired of hearing people complain about the size of other peoples
advances, complain about who got an excerpt of their forthcoming novel in The Ne
w Yorker and who didnt, about who got their story published in The Paris Review a
nd who didnt. I was tired of all the gossip and of watching people suck up to edi
tors and agents and writers because they felt they had to stay connected. The ge
neral snootiness about Franzens success that you could smell wafting off the lite
rary scene grossed me out and became indicative of something ominous to me. The
Corrections and Freedom are the two best novels that came out of my generation,
so man up and deal with it, guys. It came to a point where I just couldnt put up
with the pettiness of it all anymore. Being confronted by it was making me miser
able. I didnt want to go to another pen dinner. I didnt want to hang with these pe
ople. I didnt want to have cocktails in the lobby of the Museum of Modern Art and
sit at a table and listen to writers give speeches. I didnt want to go to anothe
r book party at Pravda or at a loft in Tribeca. I found myself thinking more oft
en than not when Id receive an invitation, Id rather cut my head off with a knife.
INTERVIEWER
What are you working on right now?
ELLIS
Well, a shark movie is taking up a lot of my time right now. I wrote the script
a few years ago, and its now in preproduction. Its set in Tampa, Florida, but for
certain tax reasons it has to be shot in Spain. So Spain is going to be the sett
ing for Tampa. Last week I talked to John Taylor and Nick Rhodes of Duran Duran,
both of whom Ive known for a long time, about maybe writing a Duran Duran biopic
. I mean, there are three or four TV and movie projects that Im much more immerse
d in. But today? A shark and Duran Duran.
INTERVIEWER
A Duran Duran biopic? For real?
ELLIS
At first I thought it sounded ridiculous. Then I thought, Why not? It might be f
un. Unfortunately, theres no tragic material to work with. Theyre all very well of
f and very nice and they live in castles. Theyre married to beautiful women. No o
ne died of a drug overdose. I guess it would be a rise, barely fall, and then ris
e again biopic. But I grew up with their music and something about it resonated w
ith me.
INTERVIEWER
It certainly sounds like more fun to work on than a Joy Division biopic.
ELLIS
Yeah, and definitely more fun than writing a script about the suicides of Theres
a Duncan and Jeremy Blake, which I just finished, or a TV series about murderous
romantic obsession that I created for HBOvery intense, personal projects. But I
love the shark movie and I love Duran Duran, and those projects might not seem se
rious for a novelist to engage in, but Ive realized that as you get older you just
dont give as much of a shit as you did when you were younger and feeling your wa
y through society and caring about what people think about you. I dont have any n
eed to prove myself to people now. So this is where Ive ended upin a BMW in West H
ollywood, doing my Paris Review interview while talking about a Duran Duran biop
ic pitch. And even at twenty-one or twenty-two, I think I knew that this is wher
e I would end up. This is where I landed, and thats fine.
Jonathan Franzen, The Art of Fiction No. 207
Interviewed by Stephen J. Burn
PRINT | TWITTER | FACEBOOK | More
Jonathan Franzens fiction bears the mark of a Midwest upbringing, his books preoc
cupied with quiet lives nurtured there and broken apart by contact with the rest
of the world. But four long novels into an unusually public career, Franzen now
moves about the country quite a bit, living most of the year in New York, where
he writes in an office overlooking busy 125th Street, and some of it in a leafy
community on the outskirts of Santa Cruz, where I met him just a few days before
his most recent novel, Freedom, was released.
The scale of Freedoms rapturous reception isnt yet evident on the morning of our f
irst conversation, though the book has already been called the novel of the centu
ry, and its author has just become the first writer in a decade to appear on the
cover of Time magazine; a visit to the White House is soon to come. At the same
time, two popular female novelists have been arguing, via Twitter, that Franzen
owes his stature to the prejudices and gender asymmetries of book reviewing, and
there are hints, too, that a broader backlash is brewing. (In London a few week
s later, hell have his glasses stolen by pranksters at a book party.) As we drive
through the morning fog, Franzen recounts both sides to me as if he has no vest
ed interest in either positionhis stance is that of a detached, and slightly amus
ed, observer.
Jonathan Franzen was born in 1959, in Western Springs, Illinois, and raised in W
ebster Groves, a suburb of St. Louis. The youngest of three children, Franzen gr
ew up in a home dominated by pragmatic parentshis father an engineer, his mother
a homemakerwho saw little value in the arts and who encouraged him to occupy hims
elf instead with more practical subjects. A fascination with the sciences hangs
over much of Franzens early writing, composed before his arrival at Swarthmore Co
llege. One unpublished story describes a visit from Pythagoras. An early play ab
out Isaac Newton was championed by a physics teacher at Webster Groves High Scho
ol.
Franzen describes his first book, The Twenty-Seventh City (1988), as a sci-fi no
vel that is all fi and no scia concept-driven omnibus fiction in which a group of
influential and politically ambitious Indians, led by the former police commiss
ioner of Bombay, infiltrate the bureaucracy of an unspectacular Midwestern town
and terrorize its residents. The Twenty-Seventh City is set in his native St. Lo
uis, but Franzen wrote the majority of the novel while employed as a research as
sistant at Harvard Universitys Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, where
he worked crunching data on seismic activity. This experience would enrich his s
econd novel, Strong Motion (1992), an intimate depiction of a Massachusetts fami
ly whose emotional and economic lives are disrupted by a series of unexpected ea
rthquakes in the Boston area.
Strong Motion signaled the start of a turbulent decade for Franzen, as he suffer
ed personal lossesthe death of his father; divorce from Valerie Cornell, his wife
of fourteen yearsand struggled to come to terms with the purpose of writing fict
ion after his first two novels won critical praise but dishearteningly few reade
rs. Those struggles were the subject of much of the searching nonfiction he wrot
e during the nineties, and his midcareer masterpiece The Corrections (2001) was
the outcome. The expansive saga of a disjointed Midwestern family, The Correctio
ns won the National Book Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and intr
oduced Franzen, then a relatively obscure author of ambitious fiction, to the br
oad audience of readers he had long been seekinga broader audience than any liter
ary novelist of his generation.
The following interview took place over two days in an office borrowed from the
University of California, Santa Cruz. Situated amid redwoods on the mountain rim
above Santa Cruz and Monterey Bay, the office would have offered an ocean view,
but a makeshift arrangement of towels, bedsheets, and pillows had been engineer
ed to block out the combined dangers of light and distraction. Improvised window
treatments aside, Franzen prefers his work space to resemble Rene Seitcheks house
in Strong Motiona bare, clean place. Aside from a laptop, the only personal items
in the room were six books, arranged in a single pile: a study of William Faulkn
er, Friedrich Nietzsches Thus Spake Zarathustra, and four works by John Steinbeck
.

INTERVIEWER
Have you matured as a writer?
FRANZEN
When The Twenty-Seventh City was being misunderstood, and when Strong Motion was
failing to find an audience, I assumed that the problem was not the writer but
the wicked world. By the time I was working on Freedom, though, I could see that
some of the contemporaneous criticisms of those books had probably been validtha
t the first really was overdefended and inexplicably angry, and that the politic
s and thriller plotting (and, again, the inexplicable anger) of the second reall
y were sometimes obtrusive. The writers life is a life of revisions, and I came t
o think that what needed revision were my own earlier books.
One of the great problems for the novelist who persists is the shortage of mater
ial. We all solve the problem in different ways; some people do voluminous resear
ch on nineteenth-century Peru. The literature Im interested in and want to produc
e is about taking the cover off our superficial lives and delving into the hot s
tuff underneath. After The Corrections I found myself thinking, What is my hot m
aterial? My Midwestern childhood, my parents, their marriage, my own marriageId al
ready written two books about this stuff, but Id been younger and scared and less
skilled when I wrote them. So one of the many programs in Freedom was to revisi
t the old material and do a better job.
INTERVIEWER
Better how?
FRANZEN
I understand better how much of writing a novel is about self-examination, self-
transformation. I spend vastly more time nowadays trying to figure out whats stop
ping me from doing the work, trying to figure out how I can become the person wh
o can do the work, investigating the shame and fear: the shame of self-exposure,
the fear of ridicule or condemnation, the fear of causing pain or harm. That ki
nd of self-analysis was entirely absent with The Twenty-Seventh City, and almost
entirely absent with Strong Motion. It became necessary for the first time with
The Corrections. And it became the central project with Freedomso much so that t
he actual writing of pages was almost like a treat I was given after doing the r
eal work.
INTERVIEWER
There was a nine-year interlude between those two novels.
FRANZEN
The Corrections cast a shadow. The methods Id developed for itthe hypervivid charac
ters, the interlocking-novellas structure, the leitmotifs and extended metaphorsI
felt Id exploited as far as they could be exploited. But that didnt stop me from t
rying to write a Corrections-like book for several years and imagining that simp
ly changing the structure or writing in the first person could spare me the work
of becoming a different kind of writer. You always reach for the easy solution
before you, in defeat, submit to the more difficult solution.
There certainly was no shortage of content by the middle of the last decade. The
country was in the toilet, wed become an international embarrassment, and those
materialistic master languages that Id mocked in The Corrections were becoming on
ly more masterful. And I still had my own deep autobiographical material, which
Id employed in well-masked form in the first two novels. Eventually I realized th
at the only way forward was to go backward and engage again with certain very mu
ch unresolved moments in my earlier life. And thats what the project then became:
to invent characters enough unlike me to bear the weight of my material without
collapsing into characters too much like me.
INTERVIEWER
Your first publication was a collaborative play called The Fig Connection, which
you wrote in high school. What interested you about drama?
FRANZEN
Im that oddity of a writer who had a good high-school experience, and I did a lot
of acting in various plays. Theater for me was mainly a way of having fun in gr
oups, as opposed to pairing off into couples who necked all night in a back seat
. It was a kind of prolonged innocence. I wasnt particularly in love with the the
ater, and the plays that my friends and I wrote werent literary. We were just mak
ing stuff up for fun. Until I was twenty-one, I had no concept of literature, re
ally.
INTERVIEWER
Had your childhood been innocent, too?
FRANZEN
I always seemed to be the last person to find out about things that everybody el
se knew. I was literally still playing with building blocks, albeit artistically
and with friends, during my senior year in high school.
INTERVIEWER
Was your writing encouraged at home?
FRANZEN
Mostly not, no. I hate the word creative, but its not a bad description of my per
sonality type, and there was no place for that in my parents house. They consider
ed art of all kinds, including creative writing, frivolous. Art was something I
could do in my free time, and if I could get school credit for it, so much the b
etter. But it was actively discouraged as a serious pursuit. My parents were dis
mayed and perplexed and angry when my older brother Tom stopped studying archite
cture and majored in film, and when he went to the Art Institute in Chicago and
got an M.F.A. Tom was the only working artist I knew, and I idolized him and wan
ted to be like him, rather than like my parents. But Id seen the grief hed gotten
from them, so I kept my own plans secret for as long as possible.
My dad, although he didnt get a good formal education, was tremendously smart and
curious. He read to me every night throughout my early childhood, always my dad
, not my mom. Having grown up bathed nightly in his strong opinions, I became a
fairly opinionated person myself and was happy to be able to keep him company. H
e read Time magazine cover to cover every week, and we talked about whatever was
going on in the world. So, strangely, there was a lot of intellectual discussion
in that otherwise unintellectual house. But there were no literary books on my p
arents shelves. I had no category for what I wanted to do, and this was the great
excitement of writing The Fig Connection, seeing how well it worked as a studen
t drama, and then, wonder of wonders, getting it published. This was the moment
when a world of possibility opened up: I remember thinking, Im actually good at w
ritingand isnt this fun?
INTERVIEWER
It sounds like fun was an important part of your early writing.
FRANZEN
Fun is still an important part of writing. I want to bring pleasure with everyth
ing I write. Intellectual pleasure, emotional pleasure, linguistic pleasure, aes
thetic pleasure. I have in my mind five hundred examples of novels that have giv
en me pleasure, and I try to do work that gives back some of what those five hun
dred books have given me. The epigraph of Strong Motion is taken from Isaac Bash
evis Singer, who is very simpatico in this regard. His Nobel speech, in which he
asserts that the storytellers primary responsibility is to entertain, made a dee
p impression on me.
INTERVIEWER
Do you feel burdened by that obligation to entertain?
FRANZEN
More motivated than burdened. Its hard to feel burdened by the knowledge that ple
asure-seeking people are actually looking forward to my next book. For the first
half of my career, though, I had a very poor sense of who these people might be
. Some snarky person in England once accused me of writing the Harpers essay Why B
other? as market research.
INTERVIEWER
How did you feel about that?
FRANZEN
Well, in a narrow sense, he was absolutely right. When your first two novels hav
ent found much of an audience, it makes sense to stop and try to figure out who m
ight read a literary novel nowadays, and why they might be doing it.
And finding an audience has unquestionably changed the way I write. If theres a d
ifferent feel to Freedom than to The Corrections, its not unrelated to having met
however many thousand readers on various book tours. These are the people who a
re reading books, caring about books, and bothering to come out on a rainy Tuesd
ay night to hear somebody read aloud, as to a child, and then standing for half
an hour waiting to get a scribble on the title page of a book theyve spent money
for. These people are my friends. Im one of them myself. I once stood in a long s
igning line to get five seconds with William Gaddis, just so I could tell him ho
w great I thought The Recognitions was. Not everything in the world needs to be
laughed angrily at, you realize. There turn out to be more emotions available to
a working writer than I might have guessed earlier on. And one of them might be
lovelove and gratitude.
I got a lot of attention as a kid because everyone else in the house was so much
older than me. It was probably too much attentionthat can be a burdenbut one resu
lt is that I like attention. I just like attention, I do! But its counterbalanced
by a need and craving to be alone most of the time. This is one reason Ive found
being a writer a very suitable profession. You have the possibility of great bu
rsts of satisfying attention, and then youre left alone.
INTERVIEWER
When did you begin to think of yourself as a writer?
FRANZEN
I had a notion of myself as a writerly person by the time I got to college, whic
h meant that there were two things I could do: I could go out for the newspaper,
and I could send things to the college literary magazines. I did both. But I ha
ted being a journalist, because I was too shy to do interviews. I once got my fr
iend Tom Hjelm and me in trouble by making him do an interview with the vice pre
sident of the college, as part of a news story I was writing, and then twisting
the vice presidents words to make him look bad. In many ways, Hjelm was the tough
est critic I ever had. He was an E.?B. White worshiper, and he loved to ridicule
my worst sentences. We read each others papers, toothere was a mutual-apprentices
hip quality to our friendship.
INTERVIEWER
Was there a similar quality to your reading?
FRANZEN
It slowly became more serious in the course of four years of college. Id read a l
ot as a kideight hours a day all summer, some summersbut it was mostly mysteries an
d popular science and science fiction. Then, because I went to college as a pros
pective physics major, I took only one class in English literature during my fir
st three years, a survey of the modern English novel. Predictably, I was most sm
itten with Iris Murdoch. I was eighteen, and A Severed Head seemed to me a profo
und and important book.
The one writer I completely couldnt stand was D.?H. Lawrence. I wanted to kill him
for having inflicted Sons and Lovers on me. Much later, I went back and read th
e book again, or read half of it, because I felt that the Joey and Patty materia
l in Freedom had some kinship with the Morels. And I could see why Id hated it wh
en I was eighteen: It hit way too close to home. But frankly I still found it ki
nd of unbearable. I wanted to say to Lawrence, No, you have not found a way not
to make Mrs. Morels sexualized engulfment of her son icky and excruciating. In a
way, its great and heroic that Lawrence was willing to write such an excruciating
book, to lay it all out there. But for me the book also became a shining exampl
e of how not to approach this radioactive materiala reminder of the pressing need
to find a structure and a tone and a point of view that would ironize it enough
to make it fun.
My real problem with the survey class was that I was too young for it. Like most
eighteen-year-olds, I didnt have enough experience to understand what the stakes
even were in adult literature. Because I hadnt grown up in a household that plac
ed any value on culture, literature was just a game to me, and writing was just
a craft that I hoped to make a living with someday. I wrote whatever the newspap
er editors assigned me to write and worked on my sentences.
INTERVIEWER
Do you recall any pieces in particular?
FRANZEN
The piece I had the most fun with was a fall campus-fashion preview. I wrote it
as a joke, in very ornate prose.
INTERVIEWER
There are several fashion articles in the archive.
FRANZEN
Several articles? Good Lord. I was having a bad time at school. Those fashion pi
eces probably came out of a wish to antagonize.
INTERVIEWER
A bad time?
FRANZEN
I had bad dorm rooms, and Id landed in a nerdy situation as a prospective physics
major. There were very few cute girls, and those few had no interest in me. My
only significant ambition was to get laid, and I was failing spectacularly at it
, for reasons now obvious to me but completely invisible at the time. I thought
about transferring to a different school, but then I realized that if I majored
in German I could go to Europe for a year, and that things might be better there
.
Things were not better there, at least not girlwise. But I came back to the Stat
es less outrageously immature. And every once in a while a persons life feels lik
e a novel, and the eight weeks in the middle of my last year of college were a t
ime like that. Everything came together quickly, all the stuff that had been lat
ent suddenly crystallized, and I felt transformed in the space of eight weeks. I
became a human being. By the end of that January, I was having sex with the per
son I would end up married to for fourteen years, and Id become a determined, foc
used writer who wanted to do nothing but write ambitious novels.
INTERVIEWER
What had happened?
FRANZEN
I wrote about it in The Discomfort Zonemy discovery, as Rilke puts it in The Note
books of Malte Laurids Brigge, that I had an interior life Id previously known no
thing about. It had to do with reading Rilke and Kafka and the other modern Germ
an prose writers, and it had to do with my brother Tom. It had to do with having
been away from my family for so longwith coming back and suddenly being able to
see them in the framework that the German moderns had given me. It had to do wit
h falling in love.
INTERVIEWER
What about your brother?
FRANZEN
I was in deep emulation of Tom, who had begun as a still photographer and then m
oved into avant-garde film. I admired Toms equipment, as it were. Right before Id
gone to Germany, Id worked for him as a laborer in Chicago and had made enough mo
ney to buy a little Olympus, the smallest SLR on the market, which I took to Eur
ope and tried to do art photography with. I wanted to take odd pictures, especia
lly ones of the industrial areas, again in emulation of Tom, who had an urban-in
dustrial aesthetic.
But I always had an uneasy relationship with pictures. I could never figure out
what I was trying to do with photography. Landscape photography in particular: O
h, its a pretty sunset. Oh, thats a pretty rock formation. Who the fuck cares? Id c
ome to associate it with what I perceived as my mothers obsession with appearance
sher dictating what I wore to school, her constant fussing with the decoration of
our house, her shame about having kids who were different from her friends kids,
the general barrenness of worrying so much about surfaces. A persistent fantasy
I had throughout my late teens and twenties was that I was being followed with
a camera, and that people who hadnt respected me enough, girls who hadnt wanted me
, would see where I was now and be impressed. It was an awful reverie, because I
could feel, even as I was having it, that it was an inheritance of that obsessi
on with surfaces.
In the spring of my junior year in Europe, Tom had come over and traveled with me
, and when we were in Milan his movie camera was stolen. By the following Christ
mas, it was clear that he wasnt going to get a new one. Hed given up filmmaking, a
nd I now had the burden and the opportunity to be the family artist. And, specifi
cally, to be a writer, given my disenchantment with images.
INTERVIEWER
Is that obsession with appearances still a concern to you?
FRANZEN
Exhibitionism is a problem for any writer. The craving for an audience, coupled w
ith the shame of exposing yourself to it. This is stuff that I was always torment
ed by and have been working through as recently as in Freedom.
But I had all the clues I needed in Germany, in Nietzsche: Everything that is dee
p loves the mask. The Twenty-Seventh City is one big mask. And the long-term ambi
tion for all my work has been to find better and better masksto find the means to
make visible and feelable the unsayable things inside me.
INTERVIEWER
How did you accomplish it?
FRANZEN
I was a skinny, scared kid trying to write a big novel. The mask I donned was th
at of a rhetorically airtight, extremely smart, extremely knowledgeable middle-a
ged writer. To write about what was really going on in me with respect to my par
ents, with respect to my wife, with respect to my sense of self, with respect to
my masculinitythere was just no way I could bring that to the surface. Id tried w
riting about it directly in short stories before I got going with The Twenty-Sev
enth City, and I just hadnt had the chops to get at it, didnt have enough distance
on it, didnt understand it well enough. So I put on the mask of a middle-aged po
stmodern writer.
Looking back now, I see a twenty-five-year-old with a very compromised sense of
masculinity, of his own maleness. There was a direct transfer of libido to the b
rainthis was my way of leaving the penis out of the equation and going with what
I knew I had, which was that I was smarter than most people. It had been drummed
into me by my dad: You are smarter than most people. He felt himself to be smarte
r than most people, probably rightly so. He felt that it had taken him too long
to figure this out, and he said to me, many times, Dont make the mistake I made. So
I set a lot of store in being brainy. And satire was particularly appealing, be
cause, first, it was funny, and I always liked to be funny, and, second, you did
nt have to take responsibility for generating your own faith, your own core belief
s. You could simply expose the mendacity and falseness of others. It was a way f
or the baby of his familywhod been surrounded, as a kid, by three powerful male pr
esencesto exercise some kind of mastery and cut other people down to size. And, n
o less important, it was a way to ignore the maternal side of the equation. Duri
ng those amazing winter weeks of 1980 and 1981, my mother had literally been mad
e sick, seriously ill, by news about the sex life of one of my brothers. Id seen
firsthand that the mere expression of overt masculine sexuality could put a woma
n in the hospital! So its really no wonder that intellect presented itself as a s
afer alternative in The Twenty-Seventh City.
In the later books, as I began to put the worst of my own Sons and Lovers psycho
dramas behind me, I reached for different kinds of masks. The reason it took so
long to do Freedom was that the masks not only had to be extremely lifelike but
also had to be invented out of whole cloth, because, again, after much trying an
d failing, Id seen that there was no way I could write directly about certain cen
tral parts of my own experience, my experience with my mom and my experience in
my marriage. What made direct revelation impossible was partly my sense of shame
and partly a wish to protect third parties, but it was mostly because the materi
al was so hot that it deformed the writing whenever I came at it directly. And s
o, layer by layer, I built up the masks. Like with papier-mch, strip after strip,
molding ever more lifelike features, in order to perform the otherwise unperform
able personal drama.
INTERVIEWER
The mask is a way to convey truth, rather than to conceal it.
FRANZEN
Yes. But also recognizing, crucially, that the amorphous, unconscious, naked sou
l is a horror. The most terrifying scene in Rilkes Malte Laurids Brigge is the on
e in which Malte, as a boy, starts putting on party masks from a trunk in his fa
milys attic, one after another, until finally one of them takes control of him. H
e sees his masked self in the mirror and goes momentarily insane with terror tha
t there is no him, theres only the mask. Years later, as an adult, walking around
in Paris, he sees a woman on a park bench who puts her face in her hands and th
en looks up with a naked face, a horrifying Nothing, having left the mask in her
hands. Malte is essentially the story of a young writer working through a fear
of masks to a recognition of their necessity.
Rilke anticipated the postmodern insight that there is no personality, there are
just these various intersecting fields: that personality is socially constructe
d, genetically constructed, linguistically constructed, constructed by upbringin
g. Where the postmoderns go wrong is in positing a nullity behind all that. Its n
ot a nullity, its something raw and frightening and bottomless. Its what Murakami
goes looking for in the well in The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. To ignore it is to d
eny your humanity.
INTERVIEWER
The development of the American writer today most typically takes place within t
he university, in creative-writing programs. Did you consider that route?
FRANZEN
I got married instead to a tough reader with great taste. We had our own little
round-the-clock M.F.A. program. This phase of our marriage went on for about six
years, which is three times longer than the usual program. Plus, we didnt have t
o deal with all the stupid responses to writing that workshops generate.
We did actually apply to some programs one year, in hopes of getting a universit
y to support us financially, and we were both accepted at Brown. But the money B
rown offered wasnt good enough. In hindsight, Im glad I didnt go, because it might
have smoothed some kinks out of the work that were better not smoothed out. As a
journalist, Im always striving to become more professional, but as a fiction wri
ter Id rather remain an amateur.
INTERVIEWER
Did you devise another kind of program for yourselves? Did you go to readings?
FRANZEN
No, we didnt want to be around other writers. In some semiconscious way, we recog
nized that we werent good yet, and we needed to protect ourselves from depressing
exposure to people whod already gotten to be good.
INTERVIEWER
What books were you reading in those years?
FRANZEN
Everything. I read fiction four or five hours a night every night for five years
. Worked through Dickens, the Russians, the French, the moderns, the postmoderns
. It was like a return to the long reading summers of my youth, but now I was re
ading literature, getting a sense of all the ways a story could be made.
But the primal books for me remained the ones Id encountered in the fall of 1980:
Malte, Berlin Alexanderplatz, The Magic Mountain, and, above all, The Trial. In
each of these books the fundamental story is the same. There are these superfic
ial arrangements; there is the life we think we have, this very much socially co
nstructed life that is comfortable or uncomfortable but nonetheless what we thin
k of as our life. And theres something else underneath it, which was represented by
all of those German-language writers as Death. Theres this awful truth, this mask
less self, underlying everything. And what was striking about all four of those g
reat books was that each of them found the drama in blowing the cover off a life
. You start with an individual who is in some way defended, and you strip away o
r just explode the surface and force that character into confrontation with whats
underneath. This was very straightforwardly and explicitly the program with The
Twenty-Seventh City, to take the well-defended Probst and strip away and strip
away.
INTERVIEWER
And you saw Martin Probst as a parallel to Joseph K.?
FRANZEN
Yes, in my own vulgar reading of Kafka, I did. Suddenly one day, for no reason,
there were a bunch of Indians in St. Louis, and they were conspiring to ruin Pro
bsts life.
INTERVIEWER
I recall reading that you labored over the beginning of The Twenty-Seventh Citywr
ote and rewrote itand then wrote the final stages
FRANZEN
Most of the book.
INTERVIEWER
Most of the book, quite quickly.
FRANZEN
Id started by working for months and months on the first chapter, which was about
Probst walking his dog and thinking with culpably extreme satisfaction about hi
s accomplishments. I poured countless hours into very purple sentences describin
g the beauty of the light in Webster Groves, my hometown, on a late weekday afte
rnoon. It was a chapter that ended with the death of the dog. It was terribly ov
erwritten.
INTERVIEWER
What do you mean by overwritten?
FRANZEN
Trying to do too much with a sentence. I was very much still under the spell of
the Germans. You can do things in German with sentence structure that are less a
dvisable in Englishpack in all sorts of syntactical elements before the final verb
. I was playing with language and with the possibilities of sound, although not
so much with alliteration. Id read Rabbit, Run at a certain point and spent a cou
ple of weeks being highly alliterative before coming to my senses and realizing
that not only was my alliteration bad, Updikes was, too.
I was doing a lot of punning, though. I was very attached at that young age to p
ure linguistic play, and blissfully unaware of how it might all read. I thought
the concept of my book, the unfolding of a conspiracy, ought to be strong enough
to drag the reader through any amount of linguistic playfulness.
I was reaching; I was writing about stuff I didnt really know anything about and
trying to incorporate every scrap of information and interesting observation Id e
ver had. I would write as many pages as I could in a day. I once wrote seventeen
pages in a day. And those seventeen pages are in the finished book. When I got
rolling, my determination to get the book done and have it be good and get it pu
blished was so strong that I had limitless energy. The finished manuscript was thi
rteen hundred pages. I was twenty-five.
INTERVIEWER
Youve said you were writing eight hours a day.
FRANZEN
I could do ten sometimes.
INTERVIEWER
Even when things werent working?
FRANZEN
I didnt have the experience of things not working. I didnt know enough to know whe
n something wasnt all that good. The chapters just came clattering out.
INTERVIEWER
Im struck by the number of dream sequences in The Twenty-Seventh City.
FRANZEN
More and more, I think of novel writing as a kind of deliberate dreaming. John G
ardner described novels as vivid, continuous dreams, and though Im not sure Gardner
ever wrote a particularly excellent novel, he was right about the notion of the
dream. A notion reinforced by my feeling that all of Kafkas fiction reads like t
ranscribed dreams.
Most of the dreams in The Twenty-Seventh City were dreams Id had myself. I wanted
their uncanniness because I was trying to write an uncanny book. A book about m
aking strange a familiar place. And the fastest route to uncanniness is to fall
asleep and have a dream in which everything is at once familiar and strange. Tha
t was the feel I was after in that book: What kind of weird, surreal world have
I fallen into here, in the most boring of Midwestern cities?
If the dreams are falling away in the later books, Id like to think its because Im
getting better at making the book itself the dream. As I become more comfortable
with accessing the primary psychic stuff inside me, and finding adequate dramati
c vehicles for it, the need for the literal dream probably diminishes.
INTERVIEWER
How did you compose the book?
FRANZEN
I typed The Twenty-Seventh City on a Silver Reed typewriter. Then I set the book
aside for nearly a year while I tried to find an agent. In hindsight, the respo
nses of the top-drawer agents Id sent it to seem remarkably gracious, although I
didnt experience them that way at the time. Gloria Loomis told me on the phone, w
ith a little laugh, Ill get back to you when Ive read the secondbox.
Thats when I did a translation of Spring Awakening, and I was working on some sho
rt stories again, with no more success than before. When I struck out with the a
gents, I called up the only writer I had any personal connection to, Hugh Nissen
son, the novelist, and he proceeded to froth at the mouth for an hour about how
stupid and corrupt the publishing industry was, and how lazy certain well-known w
riters wereit was somewhat embittered frothing. Then he asked me, How long is the b
ook? And I told him, and he said, Im not going to read your book, but I can tell yo
u right now its two times too long. Youve got to go back and cut it by half. Then h
e said, Is there a lot of sex in it? Theres gotta be a lot of sex in it.
It was a wonderful gift. I set down the phone and picked up the manuscript, whic
h I hadnt looked at in eight months, and I said, My God, theres two hundred pages t
hat I can cut in half an hour. I just suddenly saw it. I suddenly made the connec
tion between my needs as a reader and what I was doing as a writer, which I had
never made before. That in fact I was not interested in punishing the reader, be
cause I didnt enjoy being punished myself. If I wanted the book to be read, it ne
eded to move, and so I had to make the cuts to make it move.
INTERVIEWER
David Foster Wallace wrote to you in the summer of 1988, after reading The Twent
y-Seventh City.
FRANZEN
Yes.
INTERVIEWER
When did you meet?
FRANZEN
I dont think we succeeded in meeting until 1990. I was away in Europe for a year,
and he flaked on our first two appointments to meet, for reasons that became cl
earer later. Its a telltale sign of a substance problem when people dont show up.
INTERVIEWER
Was this your first friendship with another writer?
FRANZEN
Well, apart from my wife, yes. Around the same time, I also got to know Bill Vol
lmann, who was living in New York then.
INTERVIEWER
And what difference did this make?
FRANZEN
Its all bound up in the story of my marriage, which I really would prefer not to
get into here. But, briefly put, it was a very hermetic marriage, and simply to
be in conversation with other people who I thought were doing good workand also t
o get their take on my marital situationwas huge. Soon after that, I got to know
David Means, too. So right around the beginning of the nineties I suddenly had t
hree male writer friends, as opposed to none. And because I was entering a perio
d of radical doubt about the point of writing literary novels, it was an incredi
ble blessing to talk with other people who were ambitious and thoughtful and tal
ented, who were dedicating their lives to trying to write good books.
INTERVIEWER
Youve said that you and Wallace corresponded about fiction less than people might
expect.
FRANZEN
At a certain point, you get to be good enough friends that you pick up the phone
rather than writing a letter. The letter-writing phase is sort of a feeling out
each others position phase. I came into those conversations with a feeling of an u
nattractively extreme rage against literary theory and the politicization of aca
demic English departments. It was related to my growing antagonism toward a stat
us model of the novelthe idea that a novels highest achievement is to be read and
studied by scholars. And yet my own attempts to connect with a larger audience h
ad so far failed. Dave was very comfortable in the academy, but he himself was g
oing through experiences that were making clear that there was more to life than
producing interesting texts that a small number of very smart readers might eng
age with. His own life was in crisis, and he was coming into new material, his a
uthentic personal material, and so he, too, welcomed a conversation about how to
move beyond pure intellectual play into realms of, for want of a better word, e
motional significance. The point of agreement that he and I eventually reached w
as the notion of loneliness: that fiction is a particularly effective way for st
rangers to connect across time and distance. The formulation had slightly differ
ent meanings for the two of us, but it was the bridge we eventually found to con
nect his view to my view.
INTERVIEWER
And the difference?
FRANZEN
I took the notion, finally, as a call to arms to continue trying to write books
that ordinary people, nonprofessionals, could connect with. I think that Dave, u
p to the time when he stopped writing, was still struggling with his distrust of
the part of himself that wanted to please people.
I perceived, rightly or wrongly, that our friendship was haunted by a competitio
n between the writer who was pursuing art for arts sake and the writer who was tr
ying to be out in the world. The art-for-arts-sake writer gets a certain kind of
cult credibility, gets books written about his or her work, whereas the writer o
ut in the world gets public attention and money. Like I say, I perceived this as
a competition, but I dont know for a fact that Dave perceived it that way. Theres
some evidence that he did, but he was a troubled person and was tormented by th
e possibility of people misperceiving him. His instinct was to keep people at a
distance and let the work speak for itself, and I do know that he enjoyed the st
atus hed attained. He might have denied it, but he denied all sorts of obviously
true things at different moments. He came from an academic family, and the fact
that lots of books were being written about his work really was gratifying to hi
m. In the way that sibling competition works, Ive consistently maintained a posit
ion of not caring about that stuff. And Daves level of purely linguistic achievem
ent was turf that I knew better than to try to compete on.
INTERVIEWER
When did you first come across DeLillo?
FRANZEN
I remember a Christmas visit to my wifes family during which she gave me Players.
I remember reading it on the train back up to Boston and having one of the pure
st aesthetic responses Ive ever had. Id finally found somebody who was putting on
the page the apocalyptic, postindustrial urban aesthetic that Id been looking for
in film and photographs and had found expressed in music, particularly by Talki
ng Heads. And here was somebody who was getting it on the page and writing like
a dream. His prose was like a call to duty: You must write better. Here, see, it
can be done. I find it remarkable that people dont talk more about Players. In ce
rtain ways, DeLillo never wrote better.
INTERVIEWER
What did you find so attractive about him?
FRANZEN
It came as no surprise when I learned, later, that he sometimes composed books w
ith one paragraph on each page, starting a new page after only a few sentences.
His paragraphs really do have a stand-alone quality. It was through reading him
that I came to see pages as collections of individual sentences. For a young wri
ter, in particular, the terrors of the paragraph become more manageable when you
see it as a system of sentences. I also started to see all the junk DNA that ha
d cluttered my paragraphs before then, and that Id been unaware of.
INTERVIEWER
DeLillos sentences seem to involve intimate connections between individual words,
even lettersa visual patterning.
FRANZEN
Yes. In my own work, I can see his visual influence in the dinner-table scene in
The Corrections that I wrote immediately after reading Underworld. But I dont th
ink my pages read like his, because I had a preference for rounder lettersc?s and
ps. I think of him as being more into l?s and as and i s.
INTERVIEWER
C?s and ps?
FRANZEN
I kept seeing a plate of food with beet greens and liver and rutabagaintense purpl
e green, intense orange, rich rusty brownand feeling a wish to write sentences th
at were juicy and sensuous.
INTERVIEWER
Do you mean the sound, too?
FRANZEN
No, the way they looked, the roundness of bs and g s, the juiciness. Thats almost t
he last time I remember thinking about the words that way. Nowadays I have almos
t the opposite aestheticIm looking for transparency.
INTERVIEWER
And when did you discover Pynchon?
FRANZEN
Id come up with the plot of The Twenty-Seventh City when I was a college sophomor
e, in a playwriting workshop, and our instructor had told me Id better take a loo
k at Pynchon. I finally got around to it after I graduated and went back to Germ
any. I took Gravitys Rainbow along in mass-market paperback, and it utterly consume
d me. It was like getting the flu to read that book. It was like I was fighting
off some very aggressive infection. I started writing Pynchonian letters to my t
hen-fiance, and I think its significant that she hated those letters and made her h
atred of them known, and that I steered away from that voicebecause of our relati
onship, because of an intense relationship with a woman. Which now seems to me e
mblematic: You could either play with the boys like that, and relegate women to
minor and substantially objectified characters on the margin, or you could try t
o have a full-fledged relationship with a woman, in which case that kind of boy
writing, however brilliant and masterful, was necessarily subordinate. Its worth n
oting that at this point in my life, I feel much more indebted to various female
writersAlice Munro, Christina Stead, Flannery OConnor, Jane Smiley, Paula Fox, to
name a fewthan I do to Pynchon.
INTERVIEWER
What about the letters was Pynchonian?
FRANZEN
The tangly sentences, the overfullness of them, and a kind of dirty explicitness
. A hipster jadedness. Seen it all, done it all, dont mean shit. Like the dark side
of R. Crumb.
And yet Pynchons enterprise in that bookcreating an immensely complex world in whi
ch conspiracy is the organizing principlewas something I internalized and tried t
o build on. I saw that I might be able to go beyond the unseen conspiracy to a s
een conspiracy, inhabited by complicated characters with whom we might, moreover
, sympathize. To turn the whole notion of the victim of conspiracy inside out an
d make the victim himself a problematic figure and the conspirators perhaps well
justified. That was my best shot, as a twenty-three-year-old, at dealing with m
y brief but life-threatening infection with Pynchon.
INTERVIEWER
And that infection did not last to your later novels?
FRANZEN
No. Even in my first book, I found a better model in Coover. He had some of the
same satiric and encyclopedic ambitions as Pynchon, but he was working at the le
vel of characters and their relationships to one another, and I just gravitated
to that.
INTERVIEWER
Youve described your first two books as systems novels.
FRANZEN
I had an idea of the social novel that I didnt realize was already outmoded. I ra
ther naively believed that, if I could capture the way large systems work, reade
rs would understand their place in those systems better and make better politica
l decisions. Id taken real delight in the books of the previous generation that h
ad revealed these kinds of systems to me. In The Twenty-Seventh City, the system
s were city and county government and regional economics. And there were various
systems in Strong Motion, most notably the systems of science and religiontwo vi
olently opposing systems of making sense in the world.
This conception of the novel, I think, came out of my engagement with science fi
ction, which is all about concepts. You have a cool idea: What if we could trave
l back in time? What if in the future theres only one sex? And then the character
s come into being to make that story happen. Going into my first two books, I di
d have several characters firmly stuck in my head, but many of the smaller chara
cters were invented to serve the systems. Whereas, in my last two novels, the sy
stems are there to serve the characters. There are lingering elements of the old
method in The CorrectionsId been fascinated, for example, by my parents stories of
cruises and, like Dave Wallace, I saw the cruise ship as somehow emblematic of
our time. But my priorities have mostly flipped.
INTERVIEWER
How did you begin to write Strong Motion?
FRANZEN
A bunch of things had happened. My first book had been published, and my wife an
d I had fled to Europe; things were getting hard in the marriage. And, perhaps n
ot coincidentally, Id fallen under the spell of religious writers, particularly F
lannery OConnor and Dostoyevsky. My wife and I began touring cathedrals and looki
ng at medieval sculpture and Romanesque churches. Wise Blood, The Brothers Karam
azov, and the cathedral at Chartres are all examples of religious art, which is
neither just religion nor just art; its a special category, a special binding of
the aesthetic and the devotional. OConnor and Dostoyevsky venture intensely into
the extremes of human psychology, but always with serious moral purpose. Because
of the difficulties in my marriage, I was attracted to their search for moral p
urpose in emotional extremity. I imagined static lives being disrupted from with
outliterally shaken. I imagined violent scenes that would strip away the veneer a
nd get people shouting angry moral truths at each other. I had the title Strong
Motion very early on.
INTERVIEWER
When had you become interested in earthquakes?
FRANZEN
Id been a research assistant in seismologythis was the excellent job that had fund
ed the writing of The Twenty-Seventh Cityand so I knew a lot about it, including
the fact that human beings can cause earthquakes by pumping liquids underground.
There are very few bridges between the geologic scale and the human scale, betw
een the large forces of nature and the small forces of the heart, and I recogniz
ed early on that the phenomenon of humanly induced seismicity was kind of a gold
mine literarily.
But Strong Motion is mainly a novel about an intense love affair. It spins outwa
rd from there to encompass an alternative Boston in which earthquakes are occurr
ing. By that point in my life, relationships, for want of a better word, had pre
sented themselves as being of undeniable primary importance. The conflict in my m
arriage could no longer be ignored.
INTERVIEWER
And that found its way into the novel?
FRANZEN
Strong Motion was a novel written by a person to whom things were happening as h
e wrote it. It was a third party in the relationship. My wifes own second novel w
as a fourth party. We brought these two extra figures into the house, so as to h
ave much longer and more complicated discussions and fights. But I honestly have
a poor recollection of how I wrote that book. It was a bad time, and we were tr
aveling a lotrunning, reallyattempting geographic solutions to non-geographic prob
lems.
One of the lines from The Trial that has always stayed with me is, approximately,
He had so much important, urgent work to do at the office, and he was losing so
much time to his trial. Precisely now, when he needed to devote all his wits and
strength and attention to his career, he instead had to worry about his trial. W
hen I think about my own trajectory as a writer, its in those terms. I began with
an ambitious wish to be a writer of a certain stature, and to be mentioned in t
he company of such and such, and to produce a certain kind of masterful book tha
t engages with contemporary culture and all that. I wanted to get on with the se
rious business of being an ambitious writer, but there was this damn trial welli
ng up from within. It was certainly true in Strong Motion, when things were gett
ing hard in the marriage, and it became all the more true in The Corrections: Pr
ecisely then, when I needed to focus all of my attention on writing a novel, my
parents were falling apart. If you suffer with that for enough years, it eventua
lly dawns on you that, in fact, youve misconstrued the real work of being a novel
ist.
INTERVIEWER
You once described The Corrections as an attack on the novels enemies, as an argu
ment for the novel.
FRANZEN
The enemy I had in mind was materialism. The fear out of which that book was wri
tten was that the new materialism of the brain, which has given us drugs to chan
ge our personalities, and the materialism of consumer culture, which provides en
dless distractions and encourages the endless pursuit of more goods, were both a
ntithetical to the project of literature, which is to connect with that which is
unchanging and unchangeable, the tragic dimension of life.
INTERVIEWER
Patty describes the responsibility of parents to raise children who recognize re
ality.
FRANZEN
I am indeed interested in self-deception. Realist fiction presupposes that the a
uthor has access to the truth. It implies a superiority of the author to his or
her comically blundering characters. The Corrections was written as a comedy, a
somewhat angry comedy, and so the self-deception model worked perfectly. Self-de
ception is funny, and the writer gets to aggressively inflict painful knowledge
on one character after another.
In Freedom, the recurrent metaphor is sleepwalking. Not that youre deceiving yours
elfyoure simply asleep, youre not paying attention, youre in some sort of dream stat
e. The Corrections was preoccupied with the unreal, willfully self-deceptive worl
ds we make for ourselves to live in. You know, enchantment has a positive connot
ation, but even in fairy tales its not a good thing, usually. When youre under enc
hantment, youre lost to the world. And the realist writer can play a useful and e
ntertaining role in violently breaking the spell. But something about the positi
on this puts the writer in, as a possessor of truth, as an epistemological enfor
cer, has come to make me uncomfortable. Ive become more interested in joining the
characters in their dream, and experiencing it with them, and less interested i
n the mere fact that its a dream.
INTERVIEWER
The Corrections was your first effort to build a novel around Andy Aberant, but
eventually you excised him, as you would later from Freedom.
FRANZEN
Yes, Andy of the undead has now failed twice to make the cut. He was a self-cons
ciously morally compromised character, first as a Securities and Exchange Commis
sion attorney, later as the operator of a bogus land trust. In The Corrections I
imagined him involving himself in a family that was really, really shut down, an
d coming to have a relationship with each member of the family, helping them ach
ieve what they couldnt achieve themselves. Im always looking for ways to see thing
s through fresh eyes, and it seemed to me potentially interesting to observe a f
amily from the perspective of an essentially adopted sonself-adopted in adulthood w
as the notion. It was akin to observing the Probsts through the eyes and ears of
those eavesdropping Indians.
INTERVIEWER
In an early section, published in Granta, you say that Andy came into the world
needing people to believe that he knew everything.
FRANZEN
One of the reasons Andy never worked is that he was too much like me, at least t
he depressive side of me. I get depressed when Im failing to get a novel going, a
nd Andy seems to come along as the voice of my depressive, hyperintellectual dis
tance from my own life. If hed ever been able to rise to the level of parody, he
might have worked as a character.
But those Lamberts just kept getting larger and larger. Alfred and Enid were alw
ays Alfred and Enid, their voices were taken from life. My parents were not Alfr
ed and Enid, but on bad days they could sound like them. Chip and Gary and Denis
e had been floating around in my mind, in different avatars, for some years, wit
h different occupations and in different situations. Figuring out how to gather
these five characters into some believable semblance of a family took several ver
y unpleasant years of false starts and note taking.
INTERVIEWER
The Corrections was the first book you wrote entirely on a computer.
FRANZEN
In terms of process, the one small difference between a typewriter and a compute
r is that a computer makes it easier to find fragments youve written and then for
gotten about. When you work at a book for as long as I do, you end up doing a lo
t of assemblage from scavenged materials. And with a computer youre more likely,
on a slow morning, to drift over to another file folder and open up something ol
d. Chunks of text travel with you, rather than getting buried in a drawer or sto
red in some remote, inaccessible location.
One afternoon in 1995 I wrote six or eight pages about the gerontocracy of St. J
ude, based on some Midwestern houses that I happened to know well. Id just finish
ed reading the manuscript of Infinite Jest. Id been trying for several years to l
aunch a grotesquely overplotted novel about Philadelphia and prisons, and readin
g a good friends amazing manuscript roused me from my dogmatic slumbers, so to sp
eak. Around the same time, I was also working on a short story about a person li
ving in New York, trying to have a life, trying to make contact with women, and
impeded by the fact that his father was sleeping in an enormous blue chair in hi
s living room. I couldnt figure out where to go with the story, so I set it aside
. But a few months later, when I desperately needed something to read at a Paris
Reviewsponsored event with David Means, I searched my computer and found these tw
o chunks of writing that I could put together and read. Donald Antrim and Jeff E
ugenides, whom I hardly knew, but who subsequently became good friends, came up
afterward and said, That was really good. The Paris Review went on to publish that
chunk, and it became something I wanted to use in the novel, too.
INTERVIEWER
And it went smoothly after that?
FRANZEN
No. Then came further bad years, trying to make that ridiculous, overplotted mon
ster work. It was finally another friends work that roused me; I read the manuscr
ipt of Underworld on a Mexican vacation. I came home from that vacation and set a
side the still-monstrous plot and plunged into the cruise-ship chapter and had a
n experience very similar to Alfreds in that chapter. Id intended to write a simpl
e, quick narrative about cruise-ship hilarities, and I fell through the surface
of the present action into a long, long flashback. I was writing about an ordinar
y evening with the Lambertsbasically just a small drama of Chips refusal to eat his
food. But DeLillos method in the recycling chapter of Underworld, where various
lines of thought are crisply sorted into alternating paragraphs in the same way
that his main character is sorting his household trash, had attuned me to how mu
ch suspense and foreboding you can create simply by deploying paragraph breaks.
In my case, I was sorting the familys four points of view by paragraph.
The writing process for that flashback was different from any process before or
since, and it really changed my idea of what I was doing as a novelist. Id quit c
igarettes a month earlier, and as a result I was drinking tons of coffee. Id get
up in the morning and drink so much coffee that I made myself almost sick. Then
Id have to lie down and take a hard nap, which I could suddenly do because I was
in better contact with my natural body rhythms. Instead of having a cigarette wh
en I was feeling sleepy, why not just lie down and sleep? For the first time in
my life, I could take these wonderful, intense twenty-minute naps. But then, bec
ause I was so loaded up with caffeine, I would come surging back up to the surfa
ce and go straight to the desk and write a page. And that was it for the day.
INTERVIEWER
Just one page?
FRANZEN
A page was enough, by then. If you read the biographies of people who have writt
en good books, you often see the point where they suddenly come into themselves,
and those weeks in the spring of 1997 were when I came into myself as a writer.
They feel like some of the best weeks of writing Ill ever have. The discovery th
at I could write better about something as trivial as an ordinary family dinner
than I could about the exploding prison population of the United States, and the
corporatization of American life, and all the other things Id been trying to do,
was a real revelation.
INTERVIEWER
How did you conceive of the structure of the book?
FRANZEN
I was very aware of how time would be handled. Once Id finally figured out that a
large novel could be constructed out of multiple short novels, each of them bui
lding to a crisis in which the main character can no longer escape reality, I ha
d an opportunity to play with time managementhow far back into the past to plunge
after the opening section, how to parcel out the gradual return toward the pres
ent, where to situate the meeting of the backstory with the present story. I ske
tched out in pencil how the chronology would work in each of the five novellas,
and I was pleased to have a different structure for each of them. I also liked t
he way the graphs looked: A horizontal line, representing the present action, wa
s interrupted by chunks of backstory which would rise at various slopes like som
ething surfacing. Like a missile rising up out of the past to intersect with a p
lane flying horizontally in the present.
INTERVIEWER
Both of your first two novels end with motion, with important issues still open,
and that seems to offer an interesting contrast to the endings of your last two
novels, which in certain ways are more tightly resolved.
FRANZEN
I can see that lack of resolution now as a young writers move. You find that you
have talent as a novelist, you understand a lot more about the world than many o
ther people your age do, and yet you havent lived enoughcertainly I hadntto really h
ave something to say. Everything is still guessed at, every conclusion is provis
ional. And this came to be my gripe with the postmodern aversion to closure. Its
like, Grow up already! Take some responsibility for your narrative! Im not looking
for the meaning, but I am looking for a meaning, and youre denying me a vital el
ement of making sense of any story, which is its ending! Aversion to closure can
be refreshing at certain historical moments, when ossified cultural narratives
need to be challenged. But it loses its subversive bite in a culture that celebr
ates eternal adolescence. It becomes part of the problem.
INTERVIEWER
Where were you writing The Corrections?
FRANZEN
I built an office up in Harlem in 1997. It had a huge south-facing window lookin
g directly at 125th Street, which is one of the noisier streets of New York. I k
new I had to block out the light, because the space was so intensely bright, but
I also built a second window for sound protection.
Working without cigarettes had made me much more prone to distraction. Cigarette
s had always been the way Id snapped myself to attention. Cigarettes had made me
smart, and smart had been the organizing principle for a couple of books. Smart
had been the locus of my manhood, but it was no longer getting me anywhere. Id qu
it because Id decided that they were getting in the way of feeling. Without cigar
ettes, though, I was so easily irritated by even moderately bright light or moder
ate noise that I immediately became dependent on earplugs. They became a kind of
a cigarette replacement, as did a darkened room. And thats been the scene ever s
ince.
INTERVIEWER
Despite the silence, music often features in your books.
FRANZEN
Im more envious of music than of any other art formthe way a song can take your he
ad over and make you feel so intensely and so immediately. Its like snorting the
powder, it goes straight to your brain.
Each of my books has had a set of songs associated with it. Theres always rock an
d roll in the mix, but the most important music for The Corrections was probably
Petrushka, the Stravinsky ballet. Petrushka corresponded not only to the feelin
g I was after but to the structure, too, the relation of tonally disparate parts
to an ultimately unified whole. I also kept coming back to Steve Reichs Music fo
r 18 Musicians as a model for the kind of metaphoric layering and interconnectio
n I was after.
INTERVIEWER
The Corrections is full of references to the brain, but in Freedom the whole lan
guage of brain chemistry and brain architecture barely registers.
FRANZEN
Well, you know, new times, new enemies. Freedom was conceived and eventually wri
tten in a decade where language was under as concerted an assault as weve seen in
my lifetime. The propaganda of the Bush administration, its appropriation of wo
rds like freedom for cynical short-term political gain, was a clear and present
danger. This was also the decade that brought us YouTube and universal cell-phon
e ownership and Facebook and Twitter. Which is to say: brought us a whole new wo
rld of busyness and distraction. So the defense of the novel moved to different
fronts. Lets take one of those buzzwords, freedom, and try to restore it to its p
roblematic glory. Lets redouble our efforts to write a book with a narrative stron
g enough to pull you into a place where you can feel and think in ways that are
difficult when youre distracted and busy and electronically bombarded. The impuls
e to defend the novel, to defend the turf, is stronger than ever. But the foes c
hange with the times.
INTERVIEWER
Did you conceive Freedom initially as a political novel?
FRANZEN
Yes, I spent several years looking for some interesting way into our national po
litical narrative, some Washingtonian wrinkle that hadnt been explored to death i
n other media. But I couldnt find that wrinkle, and, frankly, I was also never ab
le to get past my immediate partisan anger to the more open-minded place where t
ruthful novels are written. I was making the same mistake I always seem to make
initially, trying to write from the top down. I always have to learn the hard wa
y to begin with character.
INTERVIEWER
When did you begin to see the shape of the book?
FRANZEN
Only near the end. As late as seven months before I handed it in, I had in mind
a completely different form for the book. I thought it was going to be a novel o
f documents. My perennial refrain when Im working is I dont know what the book is a
bout! I dont have a story! Really only when the last couple of chapters come into
focus does that refrain cease.
In the spring of 2007, after five years of periodic failure with the book, Id mad
e enough progress that I could have a very strong drink with my editor and sketc
h out a love-triangle story with a Patty-like character at its center. He said, T
hat sounds like a great, funny short novel, Ill give you a contract for it. So we
wrote up a contract with a delivery date of ten months later, because I was stil
l intending to write about politics and wanted the book out before the 2008 elec
tions. I went to Berlin, to breathe the good old German literary air, and I trie
d to use the isolation and the deadline pressure to get some chapters banged out
. But the characters werent there yet. I came back home and flagellated myself al
l summer, but the characters still werent there. Eventually I reached a point of
such despair that I decided to take a year off.
INTERVIEWER
And you did take a year off?
FRANZEN
Well, nearly. I put five solid months into a New Yorker piece on the environment
al situation in China. I also researched a second piece, a medium-term longitudi
nal study of twenty-two-year-olds arriving in New York City, fresh out of colleg
e. I ultimately decided not to write that one, out of kindness to my subjects, w
ho were wonderful kids and said far more to a New Yorker reporter than they shou
ld have.
That piece grew out of my coming to terms with not having had children, my sense
that I was getting old before my time, that Id lost a vital connection with yout
h and thus with hope and possibility. The China piece came out of a question tha
t Dave and I talked about constantly: How can we keep sitting in our rooms and s
truggling with fiction when there is so much wrong with the world? During the su
mmer after I signed the book contract, my sense of duty became utterly oppressiv
e. So much bad stuff was happening in the countryand happening to wild birds arou
nd the world!that I felt I just couldnt keep wasting months. I had to go out and d
o something, get my hands dirty with some problem. Only after the China piece fa
iled to find a discernible audience or have any discernible impact did I get it
through my head that I might actually have more effect on the world by retreatin
g to my room and doing what I was put on earth to do.
INTERVIEWER
How do you know when the work is going well?
FRANZEN
The word Ive been using to talk about that lately is adequacy. My primary reader
and consultant for Freedom was my friend Elisabeth Robinson, whos been struggling
with her own new novel, and one of her gifts to me was her saying, You only have
to make this book adequate. To which she was nice enough to add: Your adequate is
very good.
When I was younger, the main struggle was to be a good writer. Now I more or less
take my writing abilities for granted, although this doesnt mean I always write w
ell. And, by a wide margin, Ive never felt less self-consciously preoccupied with
language than I did when I was writing Freedom. Over and over again, as I was pr
oducing chapters, I said to myself, This feels nothing like the writing I did for
twenty yearsthis just feels transparent. I wasnt seeing in the pages any of the si
gns Id taken as encouraging when I was writing The Corrections. The sentences bac
k then had had a pop. They were, you know, serious prose sentences, and I was ab
le to vanquish my doubts simply by rereading them. When I was showing Correction
s chapters to David Means, I basically expected his rubber stamp, because the se
ntences had a level of effulgence that left me totally defended. But here, with
Freedom, I felt like, Oh my God, I just wrote however many metaphor-free pages ab
out some weird days in the life of a college student, I have no idea if this is
any good. I needed validation in a way I never had before.
I was admittedly somewhat conscious that this was a good signthat it might mean t
hat I was doing something different, pressing language more completely into the
service of providing transparent access to the stories I was telling and to the
characters in those stories. But it still felt like a leap into the void.
INTERVIEWER
It is often said about your recent books that they look more like nineteenth-cen
tury novels than twenty-first-century ones.
FRANZEN
The people at the Swedish Academy, who bestow the Nobel Prize, recently confesse
d their thoroughgoing lack of interest in American literary production. They say
were too insular, were not writing about the world, were only writing about oursel
ves. Given how Americanized the world has become, I think theyre probably wrong ab
out thiswe probably say more about the world by writing about ourselves than a Sw
edish author does by writing about a trip to Africa. But even if theyre right, I
dont think our insularity is necessarily a bad thing.
Nineteenth-century Russia strikes me as a parallel. Russia is its own little wor
ld, famously good at repelling incursions by foreign powers, and its maintained a
separate superpower identity for centuries. Maybe that very insularity, that fe
eling of living in a complete but not quite universal world, creates certain kin
ds of literary possibility. All of those old Russians were dramatically engaged
with the question of what would become of their country, and the question didnt s
eem inconsequential, because Russia was a vast nation. Whereas, when a Liechtens
teiner wrestles with the future of Liechtenstein, who really cares? Its possible
that the U.S. and Russia are exactly the right size to be hospitable to a certain
kind of expansive novelistic project. England was, too, for a time, thanks to i
ts empire, and the golden age of the English novel coincided with its imperial d
omination. There again, it wasnt the whole world, it was just a very large microc
osm. True cosmopolitanism is incompatible with the novel, because novelists need
particularity. But we also need some room to move around. And were lucky to have
both here.
That said, I dont feel particularly nineteenth century. All of the issues that be
came problematic with modernism still need to be negotiated in every book.
INTERVIEWER
And yet it doesnt seem that novelty is all that important to you anymore.
FRANZEN
Im wary of the pursuit of novelty for noveltys sake. At the same time, if I dont fe
el like Im doing something new, I cant do anything. Reading time is so scarce nowa
days, and alternative entertainment is so widely available, that Im keenly attune
d, as a reader, to whether a books author seems to be experiencing something new
or is just turning the crank.
Theres always new content, of course. Content will carry you a certain distance;
it can rescue you when youre in trouble formally. I think the importance of conten
t is what Harold Bloom, for example, really underestimates in the novel. Blooms at
his best with poetry, because poetry is so purely language. But his approach bec
omes something close to nonsense when he applies it to novels, because hes still
basically just looking at language. Language is important, absolutely, but the h
istory of the novel is only partly stylistic. Faulkner obviously begat many infl
uences, ditto Hemingway, ditto Joyce, ditto Carver and Lish, ditto DeLillo. But
rhetorical innovation is just one of the many streams that feed into the river o
f fiction.
INTERVIEWER
Where do the modernists figure in your development?
FRANZEN
I have learned and feel I will continue to learn an enormous amount from Prousthi
s purely novelistic gifts, his recognition of how much you can gain by letting a
story slowly extend over long stretches of time, his method of rendering the se
nse of gradual dawning as we live our lives. Things are not what they initially
seem, things are often exactly the opposite of what they seem.
And Conrad: the prescience of The Secret Agent, the psychological brutality and
intensity of Victory, the incisive critique of colonialism in Nostromo. Those bo
oks are marvels to me in both content and method. Conrad devotes the first half
of Nostromo to slowly building to a set piece that he then omits, so that he can
jump to a different place at a different time and blow your socks off there. He
built himself up to a scene, he was then not interested in writing, at which po
int he miraculously discovered, Oh, but there is a story here, its just not the on
e I thought! Its breathtaking. I love it, love it.
INTERVIEWER
You once gave a beautiful description of Ulysses as being like a cathedral.
FRANZEN
Maybe my Joyce time is still coming. I like Portrait of the Artist a lot. I like
Dubliners even more. But I can never shake the feeling that, after those books,
Joyce was chasing a certain kind of status. He was inventing the very category
in which he wanted his work to place him. And thats where the cathedral image com
es from: Im going to build something grand that youre going to admire and study fo
r decades. Theres a sort of chilly Jesuitical quality to Joyce, and the Jesuits a
re, of course, great statusmongers and elitists. Im an old egalitarian Midwestern
er, and that kind of personality just rubs me the wrong way. I find someone like
Beckett much more sympathetic. Hes often harder to read than Joyce, so its not a
matter of the difficulty. Its the feeling that Beckett is going after a really per
sonally felt horror and finding comedy and universality in that horror. Hes obvio
usly very concerned with language, but the language is in the service of somethi
ng not merely thought but also felt. And that, to me, is a friendlier enterprise
.
I should also say something about those words status and contract. Probably thro
ugh faults of its own, my essay on literary difficulty and William Gaddis has be
en somewhat misunderstood. The primary thing I failed to make clear was that the
terminology of status and contract was Gaddiss own. As far as one can tell from
his rather confused and opaque nonfiction writings, he was a big status guy. He
seems to have believed that the world really was better off in the late Middle A
ges than it is today, when the world is arranged by vulgar contract. He seems to
have preferred the older status system, where high was high and low was low and
great works of art were understood by very few. The reason I seized on those wo
rds is that status has another, more common meaning in this countrystatus symbol, li
terary status, and so on.
INTERVIEWER
Is the response of critics important to you?
FRANZEN
Id be lying if I pretended that Terrence Raffertys vicious review of The Twenty-Se
venth City in The New Yorker didnt have an effect on the way I went about writing
Strong Motion. Basically, though, with very few exceptions, I stopped reading m
y reviews after James Woods piece on The Corrections. Id looked to forward to it b
ecause he can be a very perceptive reader, and I knew that we had some common en
emies and enthusiasms. And what he wrote was a quibbling and carping and narrowl
y censorious thing, with a willfully dense misreading of my Harpers essay. That d
isappointment, along with fifteen unwisely spent minutes of Googling myself in 2
001, pretty well cured me of the need to read about myself.
INTERVIEWER
And the overwhelming response to Freedom hasnt changed that?
FRANZEN
Nah.
INTERVIEWER
What are people missing or overlooking in your work?
FRANZEN
I think they may be overlooking Strong Motion a little bit. But what seems to me
most often overlooked is that I consider myself essentially a comic writer. Thi
s was particularly true with The Discomfort Zone, which I wrote for laughs, and
which Im told wasnt laughed at in all quarters.
Im reminded of a very earnest young Italian man who came up to me after a reading
in Rome at which Id read some of my breakup stories. He said to me, with this ki
nd of tragic face, I dont understand. Youre reading about people who are going thro
ugh terrible pain, and everyone in the audience is laughing. I dont remember what
I said to him, but Id like to think I said, Exactly.
Jeffrey Eugenides, The Art of Fiction No. 215
Interviewed by James Gibbons
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Born in Detroit in 1960, Jeffrey Eugenides lived through the citys last glory yea
rs as the heart of the American auto industry. His first two novels, The Virgin
Suicides (1993) and Middlesex (2002), are rooted in Detroit and the adjacent sub
urb of Grosse Pointe, where he spent much of his youth. These two settingsthe onc
e-proud, dying city and its affluent suburb, separate yet inextricably linkedare
rendered as vividly as the characters in these two books. The Virgin Suicides ta
kes place in Grosse Pointe (our waterlocked spit of land French explorers had nam
ed the Fat Tip). The story of five sisters and their gruesome deaths is told in the
collective voice of their would-be suitors, now older but still haunted by the
girls suicides.
Eugenidess use of the first-person-plural voice in The Virgin Suicides was an aud
acious gambit; no less risky was his choice of an intersex person to narrate Mid
dlesex. Raised a girl, Callie Stephanides decides, after a tumultuous puberty an
d several visits to a creepy specialist in Manhattan, to cross the divide of gen
der and live as a man. To understand who he issocially, biologically, and genetic
allythe grown-up, male Cal not only revisits his childhood memories of the sixtie
s and seventies but also reconstructs, as best he can (and at times fancifully),
a family history that moves from the early twentieth century in a Turkish mount
ain village to Detroit during the boom years of the automotive age.
Middlesex received the Pulitzer Prize. In 2007, Oprah Winfrey chose it for her b
ook club, making Eugenides a household name. By that time, he was deep into The
Marriage Plot, a novel that looks back at his college years at Brown in the eigh
ties, dramatizing the collision of radical French theory and the orthodoxies of
New Criticism. The story of three bright, restless characters on the cusp of adu
lthood, The Marriage Plot is in some sense a novel of ideas, but ideas that matt
er only as they bear on the messy business of living.
Our interview was conducted over two sessions last August in Eugenidess home in P
rinceton, New Jersey, where he lives with his wife and daughter. As we reviewed
the transcripts, Eugenides began an extended book tour of the United States, Can
ada, and Europe. Questions were revisited by phone, and many answers were clarif
ied, or rewritten, by hand on hotel stationeryevidently during moments of turbule
nceas Eugenides flew between Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Chica
go, and Toronto.
James Gibbons
INTERVIEWER
This is a beautiful room. Do you write here?
EUGENIDES
This is my summer office. Its mostly glass and looks onto the garden. I thought i
t would be my dream studio, but actually the glass is distracting, so I end up u
sing a dismal bedroom upstairs. Leonardo said that small rooms concentrate the m
ind. I find that I like working in small, cramped rooms with not much in them, a
s compared to a pretty studio. But I feel guilty about not using this room, so I
come down here in the summer and try to do something useful. Thank you for givi
ng me the opportunity to use my nice studio. Actual composition I dont want to do
in a pleasant space. Im even thinking of moving up into the attic because its the
most austere and removed place in the house.
INTERVIEWER
In the other places youve lived, have you done your work in similarly small rooms
?
EUGENIDES
In college and in the apartments I lived in after college, I had just one room t
hat was minemy bedroom. So Im used to working at a desk thats not that far from the
bed. I worked in the living room for part of Middlesex. Finally, when we moved
to Berlin, we got a bigger apartment, and I worked in one of the extra bedrooms.
Mainly Ive written my books in bedrooms of apartments. This is the first house w
eve ever owned, so now I have an actual studio. I was almost fifty by the time I
had one.
INTERVIEWER
Do you keep to a strict writing schedule?
EUGENIDES
I do. I try to write every day. I start around ten in the morning and write unti
l dinnertime, most days. Sometimes its not productive, and theres a lot of downtim
e. Sometimes I fall asleep in my chair, but I feel that if Im in the room all day
, somethings going to get done. I treat it like a desk job.
With The Marriage Plot, the last year or so, I started doing double sessions whe
re I would work all day, have dinner, and then go back and work at night. I didnt
want to put myself through that, but I had so much to do and a lot of things we
re coming together, so I had to work long hours. Id go to bed at midnight and wak
e up at seven or eight and start again.
INTERVIEWER
Do you have any special rituals, or is writing something you just have to hunker
down and do?
EUGENIDES
Nothing out of the ordinary. The usual stimulantscoffee or tea. And at the end of
a book, when Im extremely exhausted, mentally fatigued, I sometimes sneak off in
to the yard and smoke a cigar, maybe six or seven times per book. Thats a bad hab
it I picked up when I lived in Berlin.
INTERVIEWER
Cal in Middlesex smokes cigars.
EUGENIDES
Thats why that got in there. Occasionally, instead of having a Red Bull, as a twe
nty-year-old might, I resort to the Thomas Mann method, the Maria Mancinis, but
not very often. Cigars are the perfect literary drug. I understand why Mann, Fre
ud, and so many durable people smoked cigars. It really focuses the mind. But I
didnt do it much with The Marriage Plot. I was in healthy, nonsmoking America and
stayed mainly clean.
INTERVIEWER
Do you always write on the computer?
EUGENIDES
I compose on the computer. Now and then, I print out what Im working on and make
handwritten corrections. Theres usually a period where I make corrections by hand
, turn the page over, and write new paragraphs on the back of the sheet. I used
to do that almost every day. It seems I do that less and less often. Now I can g
o as long as a month before printing something out. But there are always handwri
tten corrections at some point.
INTERVIEWER
Do you rewrite your sentences over and over again or do they come out fairly fin
ished in a first draft?
EUGENIDES
The Virgin Suicides was written in a slow, methodical fashion, sentence by sente
nce. Parts of my other books were written that way as well. There were small tra
nsitions in Middlesex, even though they were only three or four sentences long,
where I had to spend a long time to get them to move. There are so many time shi
fts in the book, and it was difficult to give the right signposts so that the re
ader knew what was happening. I rewrite a lot. Thats why I dont publish books very
often. The fact that Im working every day and publish so seldom shows that Im rew
orking and rewriting a lot on the sentence level, and on the paragraph and struc
tural levels, too.
INTERVIEWER
Do you outline your novels?
EUGENIDES
I dont start with an idea and outline it. I dont see how you can know whats going t
o happen in a book or what the book is about beforehand. So I plunge in headlong
, and after a while I get worried that I dont know what Im doing or where Im going,
so I begin to make a fuzzy outline, thinking about what might happen in the boo
k or how I might structure it. And then that outline keeps getting revised. Ill h
ave it there, like a security blanket, to make me feel better about what Im doing
, but its provisional. Always you discover things and have ideas of how it might
work out as youre writing, and often the surprise of coming to these conclusions
is what makes the books plot points surprising to the reader, too. If you can see
on your first day whats going to happen, the reader can likely guess as well. Its
the more complex ideas, the more difficult-to-foresee consequences of your stor
y, that are more interesting to write about, and to read about as well.
INTERVIEWER
What about metaphoric patterning? Silk, for example, is so important throughout
Middlesex. How extensively do you plan for those sorts of recurring motifs?
EUGENIDES
You just delve into certain subjects, and the patterns start to crop up. With Mi
ddlesex, the narrators grandparents were silk farmers. I was interested in writin
g about that and the town in Asia Minor they came from. Then, as I started readi
ng about silk, I came upon the legend of the Chinese princess said to have disco
vered it. This is a beautiful story, and it immediately seemed to have a connect
ion with the story I was writing. So when youre working on something, especially
something as long as MiddlesexI think Joyce said thiseverything out in the world s
eems to refer to your story. You constantly find things that metaphorically alig
n with what youre working on. Slowly, as you write the book, you become aware of
these correspondences, and then you make them cohere into a pattern. So in the c
ase of Middlesex, the thread of silk becomes a metaphor not only for genetic tra
nsmission but for storytelling itself.
INTERVIEWER
Silk enables a highly unlikely confluence of the character Desdemona and the Nat
ion of Islam in Detroit. Was this something youd planned to write about from the
beginning?
EUGENIDES
That was serendipity. I was already long engaged with my story of Greek immigran
ts, former silk farmers, newly arrived to the Detroit of the thirties, when I ca
me across an article by Darryl Pinckney in The New York Review of Books about th
e Nation of Islam. The founder was a man named W.?D. Fard. He was reportedly fro
m the near East. He was a silk merchant. He propagated theories full of racial ant
agonism and genetic engineeringand there he was, right in Detroit in 1932. He beg
ged to become part of the novel, and soon he was.
INTERVIEWER
At what point do you feel comfortable giving drafts to other people to read?
EUGENIDES
Extremely late. Years and years go by without anyone seeing anything. I want my
mistakes to become obvious to me before anyone else has to suffer reading them,
so I never feel the need to show anything for a long time. Finally I do, but, fo
r instance, The Marriage Plot was entirely written before my editor, Jonathan Ga
lassi, read a word of it, except for the excerpt that was in The New Yorker. But
I dont know if its the most effective way to work. I think Im so scared the book i
s going to be bad that I dont want anyone to see it until Ive fixed everything tha
t can be fixed. And you can keep fixing things ad infinitum.
INTERVIEWER
How much revising do you do in proofs?
EUGENIDES
Usually Im turning the book in at the last minute. I always say its like the Greek
OlympicsHope the torch lights.
With The Marriage Plot, I handed in the manuscript in December 2010. At that poi
nt, the penultimate chapter was unfinished and the last chapter unwritten. I exp
ected that Jonathan would want to publish in the spring of 2012, but, after read
ing the book, he told me that it was almost there and that he wanted to publish
in the fall of 2011, nine or ten months away. For the next four monthsfrom Christ
mas until just after Easter, I worked like a madman, finishing the last two chap
ters and revising the entire four-hundred-and-fifty-page manuscript. I turned in
the final draft in May, at the time when most fall books would already have bee
n copyedited and printed in galley form. But those four months were enoughJonatha
n was right. The thing was done.
INTERVIEWER
Were the changes prompted by Jonathan Galassi, or were they largely your own?
EUGENIDES
I had four readers for the book, Jonathan, my wife, Karen, Lorin Stein, and my G
erman publisher, Alexander Fest. I responded to all of their queries and suggest
ions. And I worked on passages and sections I wasnt happy with myself. My wife, w
hos a very good reader, and whose help was immeasurable, got a tad overzealous. H
er notes ran to a hundred and fifty pages. Finally, I told her that her notes we
re going to be longer than my book and that she should publish them as a novel o
f her own!
When the first page proofs came back, I bore down on the book once again, this t
ime listening only to my inner promptings. I inserted new transitions and polish
ed everything I could. I kept going deep into the summer, staying alone for a mo
nth in Berlin. When the final proofs were sent to me, there was little left to d
o. It was July by thenthree months until it was to be publishedbut the book was do
ne. I sprinted the last mile and held out the sacred flame, in the form of a red
pencil.
INTERVIEWER
When did you decide to be a writer?
EUGENIDES
I decided very earlymy junior year of high school. We read A Portrait of the Arti
st as a Young Man that year, and it had a big effect on me, for reasons that see
m quite amusing to me now. Im half Irish and half Greekmy mothers family were Kentu
ckians, Southern hillbillies, and my paternal grandparents immigrants from Asia
Minorand, for that reason, I identified with Stephen Dedalus. Like me, he was boo
kish, good at academics, and possessed an absurd name, an ancient Greek. Joyce wri
tes somewhere that Dedalus sees his name as an omen of his destiny, and I, at th
e dreamy age of sixteen, did as well. Eugenides was in The Waste Land. My Latin
teacher pointed that out to me. The only reason I was given to these fantasies i
n the first place, of course, was that the power of Joyces language and the story
of Stephen Dedalus refusing to become a priest in order to take up the mantle o
f art were so compelling to me. Dedalus wants to form the uncreated conscience of
his race. Thats what I wanted to do, even though I didnt really know what it meant
. I do remember thinking, however, that to be a writer was the best thing a pers
on could be. It seemed to promise maximum alertness to life. It seemed holy to m
e, and almost religious.
I went about it very methodically. I chose Brown largely in order to study with
John Hawkes, whose work I admired. I entered the honors program in English, whic
h forced me to study the entire English tradition, beginning with Beowulf. I fel
t that since I was going to try to add to the tradition, I had better know somet
hing about it.
INTERVIEWER
When you were younger what sort of reading did you do?
EUGENIDES
In the house I grew up in, there was a large, built-in bookcase in the living ro
om. My parents, who had grown up in modest circumstancesmy mother quite pooraspire
d to a higher condition, culturally and financially. And so they were the perfec
t marks for encyclopedia salesmen. In those days, salesmen came to your door and
rang the bell, and my parents invited many of them in. With three boys to educa
te, my parents invested in various sorts of books: the Great Books series, the W
orld Book Encyclopedia, the Modern Library editions, et cetera. My mother was, a
nd is, a big reader of novels, so there were lots of contemporary books as well.
The big bookshelf exerted a power over me as a kid, not unlike the fascination
the family bookshelves have for Madeleine in The Marriage Plot. Sometimes in hig
h school, as I grew to be aware of literature, I found we had many canonical wor
ks on our shelvesoften unread. I found Ulysses that way and An American Tragedy a
nd, way up on the top shelf, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex. At
the same time, I was being forced to read Henry James at school. I hated it. Wit
h the result that James became one of my favorite writers.
I arrived at college not knowing much, however. It wasnt until my twenties that I
became a serious reader. Between the ages of twenty and thirty, I read with a v
oraciousness unmatched in any other decade of my life. I was trying to become le
ss stupid.
INTERVIEWER
Do you remember your first efforts at fiction?
EUGENIDES
In elementary school, our teachers used to give us the first half of a story and
then tell us to finish it. I loved doing that. It excited me like nothing else.
Later, in junior high and high school, I began writing short stories and submit
ting them to the lit magazines and the school literary contest.
INTERVIEWER
Who were some of the writers important to you later on?
EUGENIDES
In college, the writers I was most interested in were the great modernists. Joyc
e, Proust, Faulkner. From these I went on to discover Musil, Woolf, and others,
and soon my friends and I were reading Pynchon and John Barth. My generation gre
w up backward. We were weaned on experimental writing before ever reading much o
f the nineteenth-century literature the modernists and postmodernists were react
ing against. It was like studying art history by starting with Cubism before goi
ng to look at the Italian Renaissance. In my early twenties, I read Tolstoy for
the first time and discovered what Id been missing.
I liked the muscular cerebration in Joyce, the high-priestly manner, the puns, t
he play of language. I liked the specificity of his Dublin portraits and the sel
f-reflective nature of modernist texts themselves. But I liked the clarity of To
lstoy even more, and the vividness, the lifelikeness of his characters. His meth
od didnt seem worn-out to me. It was still conveying meaning to me, directly from
Yasnaya Polyana to my third-floor apartment. My entire career so far has been a
n attempt to reconcile these two poles of literature, the experimentalism of the
modernists and the narrative drive and centrality of character of the nineteent
h-century realists.
INTERVIEWER
You mentioned John Hawkes. How did he affect your development?
EUGENIDES
Hawkes taught me how to write sentences and how to think fictively. He disciplin
ed my prose, pointing out where it was fuzzy or overwritten or where the tone or
voice slipped. And in his enthusiasm for portions of my work and the work of ot
hers in the class, he taught us to recognize what was good about itgood, for Jack
, being the presence of arresting, deeply psychological, often sexual or sensual
moments. Sometimes he misread our stuff, seeing things in it that werent there.
But in doing so he often provided a lesson in how to think about art. We watched
him doing it right in front of us. Much of what you learn from a writing instru
ctor happens by osmosis.
INTERVIEWER
Was there anyone else important to you at that time, including your contemporari
es?
EUGENIDES
Rick Moody and I were in a number of workshops with Hawkes. It was great to have
a friend who was as serious as I was about writing. There were also two women,
Carrie Twichell and Melora Wolff, who were serious writers, and we were kind of
a foursome, reading one anothers work and bathing in Hawkess attention and approva
l.
INTERVIEWER
Were you ever interested in poetry?
EUGENIDES
I started out as a poet. I wrote poetry in high school and in college both. The
first prize money I ever received from writing came from winning second place in
a college poetry contest. My submission was an imagist poem, strongly influence
d by Pound, called Fox Point. I got seventy-five bucks and was thrilled.
It was narrative that came between me and poetry. My favorite poems, in a sense,
were ancient epics, the Iliad, Odyssey, and Aeneid. I wanted poetic language to
be in service of narrative, and that seemed to me to be
the province of the novel nowa lyrical novel, maybe, like my first, The Virgin Su
icides.
INTERVIEWER
The Virgin Suicides is so vivid and dreamlike that it comes across as a sort of
prose poem. Were you very conscious of the Updike-Cheever tradition of suburban
fiction while writing it?
EUGENIDES
Not really. I was aware that you werent supposed to write about suburbia, that it
was undignified in some way, the subject matter not momentous enough. And so, f
or a long time, that kept me from writing about it. But once I began, I realized
it was just as interesting as anywhere else. Id been writing for years before I
wrote The Virgin Suicides. But The Virgin Suicides was, oddly, one of the first
things I set in my hometown, even though I didnt name it.
Like a lot of young writers, when I started out, I had a dim conception of my ma
terial. I wrote about people and places that were vastly separated from those I
knew. Then, too, if I tried to write about my own self, the results were far fro
m illuminating, for the simple reason that I didnt understand myself too well. As
soon as I began writing The Virgin Suicides, however, I suddenly realized that
I knew a lot, not about my own psychological dimensions so much but about the to
wn where I grew up. I knew everything about the people who lived on our old stre
et. I remembered their oddities and family histories, the rumors and gossip, and
I remembered the weather, the local legends, the racial tensions, the flora and
fauna. I stopped being embarrassed about being from a suburb in the Midwest. I
treated it like my own Yoknapatawpha County and, for the first time, produced so
mething that interested adult readers.
INTERVIEWER
Suburbia is designed to be a safe, uneventful place, and yet, of course, some ba
sic human impulses, and especially the unruly energy of adolescence, work agains
t that. The Virgin Suicides takes shape around this tension. The setting occasio
ns a particular sort of longing and, inevitably, its disappointment.
EUGENIDES
The Virgin Suicides is about the city, too. Its about Detroit in an indirect but
crucial way. It was years after writing the book that I came to understand this.
When I was born, Detroit was the fourth-largest city in the country. The popula
tion stood at more than a million people. But people were already beginning to f
lee, and in 1967, when the riots occurred, the trickle turned into a flood. My e
ntire childhood coincided with the demise of Detroit. I grew up watching houses
and buildings fall apart and then disappear. It imbued my sense of the world wit
h a strong elegiac qualitya direct experience of the fragility and evanescence of
the material world.
That was what I was really writing about. I had imagined a family of suicidal si
sters, five brief lives, and Id put them in an atmosphere of ruin and decaythe dyi
ng automobile plants, the dying elm treesbut the source of all this, psychologica
lly and emotionally, had to do with the impermanence of everything I knew as a c
hild.
INTERVIEWER
Did you always plan on telling The Virgin Suicides in the first-person plural?
EUGENIDES
Yes, I started it with the we voice. In an early draft of the first chapter, I had
one of the boys speak for the others. Donald Antrim read it and gave me a very
useful suggestion. He said, Why do you have this one I after all these wes? You do
nt really need to. And he was right. The whole thing was we except for one or two
instances. I had the we voice, but I wasnt trusting it completely. And Don gave m
e the confidence to do so.
INTERVIEWER
If you were pedantically minded you could try to find out which of the boys is n
arrating, but youd fail. It makes The Virgin Suicides the most obviously experimen
tal of your three novels.
EUGENIDES
In James Woods How Fiction Works, he writes, The house of fiction has many windows
, but only two or three doors. I can tell a story in the third person or in the
first person, and perhaps in the second person singular, or in the first person
plural, though successful examples of these latter two are rare indeed. They are
rare, and on that basis alone, The Virgin Suicides qualifies as experimental. Th
e first-person plural was very rare when I used it back in 1993. I only knew of
two examplesFaulkners A Rose for Emily and Gabriel Garca Mrquezs The Autumn of the Pa
iarch. Lately, a lot
of writers have been using it, often, as I did, in novels about childhood and ad
olescence.
A narrative voice allows you to say things you couldnt otherwise. It frees you fr
om the prison of the ego and the limitations of habitual thinking. One of the gr
eat mysteries of writing fiction, and one of the greatest pleasures, is the disc
overy of a voice that opens up a channel to impersonal, but specific, knowledge.
INTERVIEWER
The idea of an intersex narrator seems completely novel. Were there any preceden
ts you looked to with Middlesex?
EUGENIDES
In the eighties, I read Michel Foucaults Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Dis
covered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century French Hermaphrodite. The story intrigue
d meI wanted to know what it was like to be Herculine. Unfortunately, she was una
ble to describe her own life in the detail I desired. The memoir is evasive abou
t Herculines anatomy. The style is melodramatic. Herculine was a convent-school g
irl, and she writes with the reticence about sex and the lack of psychological i
nsight you might expect. The memoir frustrated me. I wanted it to be a different
document from the one it was. And so I decided to write that document myself.
The precedents were obviousthe ancient myths, Ovids Metamorphoses especially, and
Woolfs Orlando. Unlike those examples, I didnt want to write a story about a fanci
ful figure who magically changes sex. I wanted to write about a real person to w
hom this happened, and I wanted to be as accurate as I could about the biologica
l facts. To that end, I began to do research at the Columbia medical library, re
ading about the various so-called pseudo-hermaphroditic conditions. The one I ch
ose to give my narrator5-alpha-reductase deficiency syndromesuited my purposes dra
matically. People born with the condition appear female at birth and then virili
ze significantly at puberty. The salient fact of this condition, however, is tha
t it results from a recessive genetic mutation. As soon as I learned that, the b
ook became a different thing altogether. Instead of a short fictional memoir on
the level of a Herculine Barbin, the book would be the story of a mutated gene t
hat is passed down through three generations of a single family, until two copie
s of the gene end up in the body of my narrator and bring about his unusual, but
very plausible and real, life.
INTERVIEWER
Theres a line in the novel that says to know Cal you have to know what came befor
e.
EUGENIDES
The genetics led me back a few generations and, inevitably, into history. Becaus
e 5-alpha-reductase deficiency syndrome only occurs among inbred, isolated popul
ations, I got the idea to begin the book among Greeks living in a small village
in Asia Minor.
INTERVIEWER
Did it turn out even longer than you expected?
EUGENIDES
At that point, I knew it would be a comic epic. It took me a long time to get th
e right voice for the novel, but I knew I had a big book on my hands.
One last pointpeople often ask me why I chose to narrate a novel from the point o
f view of an intersex person, and my answer is, every novel should be narrated b
y an intersex person. The job of the novelist is to inhabit both male and female
characters, so in a sense every novelist should possess a hermaphroditic imagin
ation.
INTERVIEWER
What do you feel is the difference between male and female points of view?
EUGENIDES
I dont think in terms of a male or female point of view. I think in terms of indi
vidual people. I never write about women. I write about one woman, or one man, or
one intersex person. Fiction should be specific rather than general, because peo
ple are specific.
INTERVIEWER
Do you have a view on whether men and women write differently?
EUGENIDES
The stereotypes are that men write in a linear, forward-driven, logical fashion,
and women write in a more circuitous, intuitive one. Well, that first descripti
on fits Flannery OConnor, and the second description fits Proust. So I dont think
the distinction is terribly useful.
INTERVIEWER
Kate Christensen talks about unleashing her inner dick to write one of her novels,
disputing the notion that theres some kind of essentialist way of writing for ei
ther gender.
EUGENIDES
Again, with Middlesex I tried to be as specific as possible. I analyzed Cal as a
doctor would. Cal has XY chromosomes. He was exposed to normal male levels of t
estosterone in utero, neonatally, and at puberty. If these things affect brain c
hemistry, and if that in turn results in a linguistic patterning that is identif
iably male or femaleand again, the jury is out on thatthen Cal would write in a so
-called male way, whatever that means. All I needed to do was to devise a voice
that was Cals particular voice. I didnt have to sound feminine or hermaphroditic,
which was good, because Im skeptical of those categorizations anyway.
INTERVIEWER
Did you get any responses from intersex people?
EUGENIDES
When the book first came out, I was in Portland, Oregon, doing a reading, and I
got picketed by a splinter group of the Intersex Society of North America. They
were upset that I had used the word hermaphrodite, which they consider pejorativ
e. After my reading, I had a discussion with them and we came to an agreement.
I agreed never to refer to actual, living people as hermaphrodites. I promised t
o promote this distinction as much and often as I was able. However, I reserved
the right to use hermaphrodite when speaking about mythical and literary figures
, such as Tiresias. The term hermaphrodite has a long history, and it would be w
rong to make it entirely off-limits. The demonstrators thought this was reasonab
le and none of my readings has been picketed since.
After the book had gained more notoriety, I began receiving letters from interse
x peopleall of them positive. Then, when I was on Oprah, the show was mainly devo
ted to the issue.
Just last week, a person came up to me at a reading and whispered in my ear that
he has 5-alpha-reductase deficiency syndrome. He was the first person Ive ever m
et with the condition, on account of its rarity. He gave me a letter, thanking m
e for writing Middlesex. He said that the book had saved his life in high school
. He also said that, in addition to being grateful to me, he is sometimes angry
because he feels that I wrote the book he should have written himself.
INTERVIEWER
The first half of Middlesex is basically a historical novel. Was that difficult
to write?
EUGENIDES
It was difficult because I dont tend to like historical novels. To claim to be ab
le to understand and re-create a lost time, perhaps a century before your birth,
is, at a minimum, hubristic. And then there is the narrative tone of so many hi
storical novels. They try to sound period, with the result that the prose become
s wooden. They become inflected by the bygone days they seek to chronicle. And s
o I had to avoid those pitfalls with Middlesex, and how I did it was to make no
claim of total omniscience. Cal tells the story of his grandparents as truthfull
y as he can, but its clear hes making things up, embellishing his tale. There are
many asides to the reader where Cal admits as much. I felt that this admission w
as an honest way to treat the reader. I also felt that the tone of the book acco
rded with Cals character. His need to understand how he came to be the way he is
drives him to tell this historical tale, sometimes in the first person and somet
imes in the third, literally breaking out of the confines of his ego. Cals narrat
ive method is a response to his genetic condition. The history is all personal,
even when hes narrating events before his birth.
INTERVIEWER
Did you go to Izmir, the city that used to be Smyrna?
EUGENIDES
I was there in 1985 without realizing the significance. At that time, I knew lit
tle about my grandparents history in Turkey. Only when I decided to write about a
Greek village near Bursa did I begin to learn about it. It was years after writ
ing Middlesex that I finally visited the village where my grandparents came from
.
INTERVIEWER
The burning of Smyrna and the Detroit riot echo each other in the book.
EUGENIDES
The book is full of echoes, of repetitions, as any novel about genetics is likel
y to be. The burning of Smyrna brings up the other difficulty I had in writing t
he historical sections of Middlesex, the difficulty being that I didnt know anyth
ing. I was at Yaddo when I was writing about Smyrna, and the book wasnt proceedin
g at all. I was trying to body forth the city and the fire completely from my im
agination. One day, I despaired. I was about to give up on the whole novel when
I discovered a book on a table in the mansion. The book was by Marjorie Housepia
n Dobkin, and it was called Smyrna 1922. That book taught me everything I needed
to know about the burning of Smyrna, and it taught me to start doing more serio
us research. Imagination wasnt enough.
INTERVIEWER
One of the things I admire about Middlesex is the way you manage the incest betw
een Lefty and Desdemona. Because its such a fundamental human taboo, the incest r
isks overtaking the rest of the narrative.
EUGENIDES
Not everyone thinks I managed it. Ive heard that some people slam the book shut a
t that point. Incest was necessary for the story, however. I needed to dramatize
inbreeding. Inbreeding is slow and invisible and takes place over centuries. I
had to make it happen quickly, so I have a brother and sister who fall in love.
Zeus and Hera were brother and sister, too, of course. Middlesex begins as a kin
d of fairy tale. The idea was to have the book recapitulate the DNA of the Novel
. Therefore, it begins with epic events and becomes, in its second half, more mo
dern, psychological, and realist. The incest happens in the mythic, fabulist por
tions of the novel. It doesnt possess the realism that might make it offensive. S
o, yes, youre right. I was trying to manage this scandalous material, to handle i
t lightly.
INTERVIEWER
When Calliope goes to private school she is something of an outcast, not because
of her condition but because of class, and similarly in The Marriage Plot you h
ave Mitchell, when he comes to stay with Madeleines family, being exposed to a di
fferent world, one presided over by the college-president father and his formida
ble wife. It seems like youre interested in writing about the upper class from th
e perspective of people who are connected to it but not of it.
EUGENIDES
My mother was born into a rural Kentucky family who were thoroughly Southern in
their speech and manners. During the Depression, like so many poor Southerners,
they loaded up their truck with every possession they had and lit out for Detroi
t, hoping to find work in the factories. In Detroit, my mothers father abandoned
the family, so she was raised by my grandmother, who supported herself as a wait
ress and, later, as a worker at the Packard plant. My father was the son of Gree
k immigrants. My grandfather ran a bar and grill on Detroits east side. As a youn
g man, my father considered taking over the bar and, later, he pursued a career
in the military, but he finally ended up in the mortgage business. He did well,
and by the time I came along, the youngest of three sons, our family had moved i
nto the upper middle class, at least financially.
I mention all this to give you a sense of where I was coming from when, in seven
th grade, I was sent to private school. There, for the first time, I came in con
tact with kids from monied familiesthis was Grosse Pointe, after all. These kids
gave off a strong sense of entitlement. Around them, I became conscious that I w
as one generation removed from hillbillies. We didnt have the same kind of furnit
ure in our house as those rich kids had. We didnt have the same traditions, didnt
summer in Vinalhaven, or have boozy cocktail parties.
For some reason, I felt that they were doing it the right way and we were doing
it wrong. I became self-conscious about my curly hair and aquiline nose. As a Gr
eek, I was considered ethnic, a word I loathewho isnt ethnic, when you come down to
it? I was fourteen years old, and I had become aware of class.
The rich kids at my school, the Waspy kids, tended to do poorly as students. Tha
t was part of their entitlement. The ethnic kids did well. So I developed both a s
uperiority and an inferiority complex vis--vis the rich kids. We looked funny and
didnt know how to dress, but we were smarter. As school went on, I became close
with many of the gentry, and these divisions faded, as they have generally in th
e United States. But this experience shaped my thinking about the world, no ques
tion.
Ian McEwan just wrote me about the new book and said, People say theres not a clas
s system in America. Now I know there is, and I can tell them what to read if th
ey dont know. I didnt know The Marriage Plot was that much about the class system,
but I guess it is.
INTERVIEWER
The snooty clique of rich girls at Baker and Inglis, the Charm Bracelets, are de
picted satirically. Have you ever thought about writing a full-blown satire?
EUGENIDES
Middlesex is as close as I get to satire. Parts of it are broadly comic. But Im a
realist at heart, even in my most fanciful moments. The Marriage Plot is my mos
t realistic book yet, and more serious emotionally than a satiric treatment woul
d allow. Ive tried to write pure comic satire, but I havent found the right subjec
t for the satire to be not only biting but bracing.
INTERVIEWER
There are incomplete novels youve set aside?
EUGENIDES
I have four or five novels, each about 120 pages in length. One is a satiric nov
el very much like the one youre wondering if I would ever write.
INTERVIEWER
Didnt The Marriage Plot come out of one of those unfinished novels?
EUGENIDES
Yes. Appropriately for a novel titled The Marriage Plot, the book began as an in
stance of literary adultery. In the late nineties, while I was writing Middlesex
, I hit a rough patch and put the manuscript aside. I hadnt fallen out of love wi
th the book, but I wasnt sure where the relationship was headed. Predictably, I s
tarted flirting with another book, about a rich family throwing a debutante part
y. I thought this new book would be less demanding and easier to be with, but af
ter a month or so I realized that I was dreaming. I missed Middlesex, too. I tho
ught I knew why we hadnt been getting along and so I returned to it, chastened bu
t fervent. After Middlesex came out, I went back to the debutante book and worke
d on it for another couple years. It was all right, but I had qualms about. It f
elt vaguely antique. Then one day I wrote a sentence that changed everything. Its
on page nineteen of The Marriage Plot now, and it goes like
this, Madeleines love troubles had begun at a time when the French theory she was
reading deconstructed the very notion of love. This didnt feel antique. It felt fr
esh, connected with personal memories of college. I became so interested in Made
leine and the two male figures who orbit around her that I kept writing about th
em all, greatly extending that section of the book. One dark winter day in Chica
go, I came to the conclusion that I had two novels on my hands. Over the course
of the next weeks, I surgically separated them, leaving the debutante party behi
nd, and followed Madeleine, Mitchell, and Leonard on an entirely different journ
ey. I didnt know, at that point, that the book would have anything to do with the
marriage plot or that the marriage plot would provide me with a structure for t
he novel.
INTERVIEWER
How did you respond in college to the literary theory that Madeleine reads?
EUGENIDES
When I arrived at Brown, French theory was just washing up on American shores. M
any of my English professors were distrustful of it. Another cohort in the Engli
sh department was so smitten with Derrida and company that they finally decamped
and created the Program in Semiotic Studies. To be an English major at the time
was like being the child of divorcing parents. You loved both. I was attracted
to the rigor of semiotic literary theory, especially in comparison with some of
the vague pedagogy that constituted the by-then old New Criticism. I was persuad
ed that it was possible to examine the underlying structures of literature and,
in a sense, anatomize the body of literature. At the same time, I wanted to be a
writer. I resisted the idea that the author was dead. And I still believed, as
I believe today, that its possible for a novel to transmit meaning, something tha
t was being called into question by deconstruction.
INTERVIEWER
In a recent interview, Philip Roth said that after finishing a long book, a writ
er stages a rebellion against that previous book in the next project. Did you fe
el a desire after Middlesex to do something quite different?
EUGENIDES
When you finish a booklong or shortyou do feel rebellious. Youre tired of working i
n one mode, and you want to do something different. Middlesex is quite different
from The Virgin Suicides. The Marriage Plot is quite different from both of tho
se. Maybe Ill settle into a period where I can do a number of books, like Roths Am
erican Trilogy, where Im working in a certain manner, but at the end of that Im su
re Id want to change it up again. Thats what keeps it interesting. Youre trying to
learn how to write new books. You dont want to just repeat the same thing.
INTERVIEWER
One evident departure in The Marriage Plot is the narrative voice, which is less
playful, more austere, than those of The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex. Was it
a conscious decision to tell the story in a more restrained way?
EUGENIDES
It was. I was trying to find a narrative voice that would be at once omniscient
and authoritative, but also flavored with the consciousnesses of the characters
I was writing about. On the one hand, it had to sound the way my characters thin
k and be expressive of their youth, personalities, and level of education, and o
n the other it had to be flexible enough to open up gaps where authorial comment
could operate, to move in or out depending on necessity. I dont think the voice
is austere, but its certainly less showy than the voices of my other novels.
The Virgin Suicides is a book that exists purely in its voice. The plot is given
away in the first paragraph, and the characterization is handled in an objectiv
e way. I never go into the heads of the Lisbon girls to tell the reader what the
y are thinking. That was the strategyto make the girls mysterious and unknowable
to the boys who are so obsessed by them. These self-imposed limitations were use
ful to me as a first-time novelist because, at that point, I didnt have the skill
s needed to develop character directly, and so I managed to do it indirectly. Yo
ung writers should be advised not to try everything at once. Often, by limiting
your options and maximizing one aspect of a bookin this case, narrative perspecti
veyou can achieve much more than you expect.
The progression of my work has gone as follows: from sentence, to plot, to chara
cter. For the first ten years of my apprenticeship in the art of fiction, all I
thought about were sentences. How do you write a good sentence? What distinguish
ed dull or clumsy prose from engaging, precise writing? Stylists like Nabokov an
d Bellow were my models. With Middlesex, I taught myself to plot. The narrative
strands of that book are quite complex. They depart and interweave, and a whole
lot happens. The atmosphere is completely different from the insularity of The V
irgin Suicides. I began to go more deeply into character in Middlesexto go into p
eoples headsand with The Marriage Plot Ive gone even deeper. Its a highly character-
driven book. In order for the characters to move into the foreground, the langua
ge had to recede a bit. The sentences werent necessarily any easier to write, but
I was working in a Jamesian, rather than Flaubertian, mode.
The question is, How do you move the novel forward? For a long time, I was a car
d-carrying postmodernist. I thought the way to make something new was a question
of form. I think you can see that with The Virgin Suicides. But now I dont think
its that simple. A lot of the so-called experiments people attempt today are not
really new. People did them in the seventies already, or the twenties! People f
orget, or just dont know, and theyll do something they think is original, and its n
ot.
INTERVIEWER
How have you done new things with the novel?
EUGENIDES
By a process of hybridization. By mixing the old and the new. By pushing ahead f
ormally at times, but also in terms of sheer content. Middlesex is in some ways
an old-fashioned novel. There are classical allusions and epic events. At the sa
me time, the emotional content of the bookthe realistic account of the life of an
intersex personis not traditional at all. The general mode of the book is postmo
dern, but the narrative movement is Aristotelian, and the sensibility, while com
ic, is anything but ironic. With The Marriage Plot, Im hybridizing again, playing
off the most traditional plot of the novelthe marriage plotin order to create som
ething entirely different. Adam Thirlwell, the British novelist, wrote a wonderf
ul article about Roland Barthes in The New Republic. In it, he talks about Barth
ess theory of the reality effect. Barthes believed that realism wasnt realit was just
a system of codesand he mentions a passage from Flaubert where Flaubert describe
s a barometer hanging on the wall. Barthes said that Flauberts barometer was ther
e only to denote reality.
At the end of his life, however, Barthes came to believe that there were certain
moment in novelsthe death of Bolkonsky in War and Peace and the death of Marcels
grandmother in Remembrance of Things Pastthat werent mere reality effects. On the
contrary, Barthes found such moments to be expressive of absolute truth. The tru
th isnt about realistic details so much, or not entirely. It arises out of the dr
amatic sweep of a book. This great literary theorist, so distrustful of realism,
began to believe in verisimilitude, in the capacity of the novel to convey mean
ing. And I agree. There are moments in novels that are absolutely trueand those a
re the kinds of novels I want to write.
INTERVIEWER
Is there anything in particular critics have gotten wrong about your work? Were
there misperceptions you feel were unfair or somehow missing something you wante
d to get across?
EUGENIDES
All you can ask is that the reviewer review the book you wrote, and not some oth
er book they wish you had written. Some reviews bring their own agendas to your
work. For instance, some critics were unhappy that Cal discovers his male identi
ty largely because he falls in love with his female best friend. Some critics ha
ve taken issue with this because, obviously, same-sex attraction doesnt determine
gender identity. Gay men are men. The thing is, though, Middlesex isnt a novel a
bout gay identity. Its a novel about intersex identity. And not all intersex iden
tity, but just that of one particular person. That Cal discovers his sexuality i
n the way he does is not indicative of other peoples experience, only his. Critic
s like to generalize. Novelists particularize. But many critics do review the ac
tual book you wrote, and thats all you can ask.
But let me give you an example of how impermanent reviews can be. When Middlesex
came out, The Economist gave it a negative review. I havent been reading my revi
ews for The Marriage Plot, but my mother read part of the review in The Economis
t over the phonebefore I could stop her. Now the magazine claimed to be a tiny bi
t disappointed by the new book. Why? Because it didnt live up to the impossibly hi
gh standard of Middlesex! Which they hadnt liked when it came out!
Books make their own reputations over time. Thats the thing to remember.
INTERVIEWER
Has there ever been a negative criticism you found useful?
EUGENIDES
Writers are quite aware of the flaws in their books. We know what we havent manag
ed to do and what wed like to do better the next time.
INTERVIEWER
Do you write with a sense of your audience? Or is it more like Gertrude Stein sa
id, that you write for yourself and strangers?
EUGENIDES
I tell my students that when you write, you should pretend youre writing the best
letter you ever wrote to the smartest friend you have. That way, youll never dum
b things down. You wont have to explain things that dont need explaining. Youll ass
ume an intimacy and a natural shorthand, which is good because readers are smart
and dont wish to be condescended to.
I think about the reader. I care about the reader. Not audience. Not readership. Jus
t the reader. That one person, alone in a room, whose time Im asking for. I want
my books to be worth the readers time, and thats why I dont publish the books Ive wr
itten that dont meet this criterion, and why I dont publish the books I do until t
heyre ready. The novels I love are novels I live for. They make me feel smarter,
more alive, more tender toward the world. I hope, with my own books, to transmit
that same experience, to pass it on as best I can.
Michel Houellebecq, The Art of Fiction No. 206
Interviewed by Susannah Hunnewell
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Do you like the Stooges? Michel Houellebecq asked me on the second day of our inte
rview. He put down his electric cigarette (it glowed red when he inhaled, produc
ing steam instead of smoke) and rose slowly from his futon couch. Iggy Pop wrote
some songs based on my novel The Possibility of an Island, he offered. He told me
its the only book he has liked in the last ten years. Frances most famous living wr
iter flipped open his MacBook and the gravelly voice of the punk legend filled t
he kitchenette, chanting: Its nice to be dead.
Michel Houellebecq was born on the French island of La Runion, near Madagascar, i
n 1958. As his official Web site states, his bohemian parents, an anesthesiologi
st and a mountain guide, soon lost all interest in his existence. He has no pictur
es of himself as a child. After a brief stay with his maternal grandparents in A
lgeria, he was raised from the age of six by his paternal grandmother in norther
n France. After a period of unemployment and depression, which led to several st
ays in psychiatric units, Houellebecq found a job working tech support at the Fr
ench National Assembly. (The members of parliament were very sweet, he says.)
A poet since his university days, he wrote a well-regarded study of the American
science-fiction writer H.?P. Lovecraft in 1991. At the age of thirty-six, he pu
blished his first novel, Whatever (1994), about the crushingly boring lives of t
wo computer programmers. The novel attracted a cult following and inspired a gro
up of fans to start Perpendiculaire, a magazine based on a movement they called d
epressionism. (Houellebecq, who accepted an honorary place on the masthead, says
he didnt really understand their theory and, frankly, didnt care.) His next novel, T
he Elementary Particles (1998), a mixture of social commentary and blunt descrip
tions of sex, sold three hundred thousand copies in France and made him an inter
national star. So began the still fierce debate over whether Houellebecq should
be hailed as a brilliant realist in the great tradition of Balzac or dismissed a
s an irresponsible nihilist.(One flummoxed New York Times reviewer called the no
vel a deeply repugnant read. Another described it as lurch[ing] unpleasantly betwee
n the salacious and the psychotic.) The Perpendiculaire staff was offended by wha
t they saw as his reactionary denunciation of the sexual-liberation movement and
booted him from the magazine.
Several years later, his mother, who felt she had been unfairly presented in cer
tain autobiographical passages of the novel, published a four-hundred-page memoi
r. For the first and last time in his public life, Houellebecq received widespre
ad sympathy from the French press, who were forced to concede that even the hars
h portrait of the hippie mother in The Elementary Particles didnt do justice to t
he self-involved character that emerged from her autobiography. During her book
tour, she famously asked, Who hasnt called their son a sorry little prick?
In 2001, Houellebecq published Platform, about a travel agency that decides to a
ggressively promote sexual tourism in Thailand. In the novel this leads to a ter
rorist attack by Muslim extremists. Some views expressed by his main character
(Every time I heard that a Palestinian terrorist, or a Palestinian child or a pre
gnant Palestinian woman, had been gunned down in the Gaza Strip, I felt a quiver
of enthusiasm at the thought of one less Muslim) led to charges of misogyny and
racism, which Houellebecq has yet to live down, to his evident dismay. How do you
have the nerve to write some of the things you do? I asked him. Oh, its easy. I ju
st pretend that Im already dead.
During an interview while promoting Platform, Houellebecq made his now notorious
statement: Et la religion la plus con, cest quand mme lIslam. (An unsatisfying mild
translation is Islam is the stupidest religion.) He was sued by a civil-rights gro
up for hate speech and won on the grounds of freedom of expression. I didnt think
Muslims had become a group that took offense at everything, he explains. I knew th
at about the Jews, who are always ready to find a strain of anti-Semitism somewh
ere, but with the Muslims, honestly, I wasnt up to speed. In 2005, he published Th
e Possibility of an Island, about a future race of clones.
Given Houellebecqs reputation for getting drunk and making passes at his female i
nterviewers, I was slightly apprehensive as I rang the doorbell of his modest sh
ort-term rental in Paris. But during the two days we spent together, he was scru
pulously polite and rather shy. Wearing an old flannel shirt and slippers, he wa
s clearly suffering from a bout of his chronic eczema. He spent most of the inte
rview seated on the futon, smoking. (He is trying to cut down from four packs a
day, hence the electric cigarette.) We spoke French and, very occasionally, Engl
ish, a language Houellebecq understands quite well. Each of my questions met wit
h a funereal silence, during which he blew smoke and closed his eyes. More than
once I began to wonder whether he had fallen asleep. Eventually the answer would
emerge, in an exhausted monotone which grew only slightly less weary the second
day. His follow-up e-mails were whimsical and charming.
Houellebecq has won many major French literary prizes, though not the coveted Go
ncourt, which many in the French literary establishment feel has been unfairly w
ithheld. He has also published several volumes of poetry and essays. Some of his
poems have been set to music, and Houellebecq has performed them in Parisian ni
ghtclubs. Frances first lady, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy has also recorded a song based
on his poetry. Most recently, Bernard-Henri Lvy, the other public intellectual th
e French love to hate, collaborated with him on Public Enemies, an exchange of l
etters between the two men, which is scheduled to appear in translation next win
ter. His latest novel, La Carte et le Territoire, appears in France this Septemb
er.
Currently single, Houellebecq is twice divorced and has a son by his first marri
age. Since 2000, he has lived on Irelands west coast and spends his summers at hi
s condominium in Andalusia.


INTERVIEWER
Who are your literary precursors?
HOUELLEBECQ
Recently Ive wondered. My answer has always been that I was very struck by Baudel
aire, by Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, by Dostoyevsky and, a little later, by Balz
ac. All of which is true. These are people I admire. I also love the other Roman
tic poets, Hugo, Vigny, Musset, Nerval, Verlaine, and Mallarm, both for the beaut
y of their work and for its terrifying emotional intensity. But Ive started to wo
nder whether what I read as a child wasnt more important.
INTERVIEWER
Like what?
HOUELLEBECQ
In France, there are two classic authors for children, Jules Verne and Alexandre
Dumas. I always preferred Jules Verne. With Dumas, the whole historical thing b
ored me. Jules Verne had this exhaustive vision of the world that I liked. Every
thing in the world seemed to interest him. I was also very struck by the tales o
f Hans Christian Andersen. They upset me. And then there was Pif le chien, a com
ic book published by Editions Vaillant and sponsored by the Communist Party. I r
ealize now when I reread it that there was a Communist bent to many of Pifs adven
tures. For example, a prehistoric man would bring down the local sorcerer in sin
gle combat and explain to the tribe that they didnt need a sorcerer and that ther
e was no need to fear thunder. The series was very innovative and of exceptional
quality. I read Baudelaire oddly early, when I was about thirteen, but Pascal w
as the shock of my life. I was fifteen. I was on a class trip to Germany, my fir
st trip abroad, and strangely I had brought the Penses of Pascal. I was terrified
by this passage: Imagine a number of men in chains, all under sentence of death,
some of whom are each day butchered in the sight of the others; those remaining
see their own condition in that of their fellows, and looking at each other wit
h grief and despair await their turn. This is an image of the human condition. I
think it affected me so deeply because I was raised by my grandparents. Suddenly
I realized that they were going to die and probably soon. Thats when I discovere
d death.
INTERVIEWER
What other authors affected you?
HOUELLEBECQ
I read a lot of science fiction. H.?P. Lovecraft and Clifford Simak. City is a m
asterpiece. Also Cyril Kornbluth and R.?A. Lafferty.
INTERVIEWER
What attracts you to science fiction?
HOUELLEBECQ
I think sometimes I need a break from reality. In my own writing, I think of mys
elf as a realist who exaggerates a little. But one thing definitely influenced m
e in The Call of Cthulhu by H.?P. Lovecraft: his use of different points of view
. Having a diary entry, then a scientists log, followed by the testimony of the l
ocal idiot. You can see that influence in The Elementary Particles, where I go f
rom discussions of animal biology, to realism, to sociology. If not for science
fiction, my biggest influences would all belong to the nineteenth century.
INTERVIEWER
You are a fan of the nineteenth-century social reformers, especially Auguste Com
te, the founder of Positivism.
HOUELLEBECQ
Most people find Comte unreadable because he repeats himself to the point of mad
ness. And medically speaking, he certainly wasnt far from insanity. As far as I k
now, he is the only philosopher who tried to commit suicide. He threw himself in
to the Seine because of a broken heart. They pulled him out and he spent six mon
ths in a sanitorium. And this was the father of Positivism, which is considered
to be the height of rationalism.
INTERVIEWER
Youve said that you are an old Calvinist pain-in-the-ass. What do you mean?
HOUELLEBECQ
I tend to think that good and evil exist and that the quantity in each of us is
unchangeable. The moral character of people is set, fixed until death. This rese
mbles the Calvinist notion of predestination, in which people are born saved or
damned, without being able to do a thing about it. And I am a curmudgeonly pain
in the ass because I refuse to diverge from the scientific method or to believe
there is a truth beyond science.
INTERVIEWER
You have a bit of a scientific background. After high school, you studied agrono
my. What is agronomy?
HOUELLEBECQ
Its everything having to do with the production of food. The one little project I
did was a vegetation map of Corsica whose purpose was to find places where you
could put sheep. I had read in the school brochure that studying agronomy can le
ad to all sorts of careers, but it turns out that was ridiculous. Most people st
ill end up in some form of agriculture, with a few amusing exceptions. Two of my
classmates became priests, for example.
INTERVIEWER
Did you enjoy your studies?
HOUELLEBECQ
Very much. In fact, I almost became a researcher. Its one of the most autobiograp
hical things in The Elementary Particles. My job would have been to find mathema
tical models that could be applied to the fish populations in Lake Nantua in the
Rhne-Alpes region. But strangely, I turned it down, which was stupid, actually,
because finding work afterward was impossible.
INTERVIEWER
In the end you went to work as a computer programmer. Did you have previous expe
rience?
HOUELLEBECQ
I knew nothing about it. But this was back when there was a huge need for progra
mming and no schools to speak of. So it was easy to get into. But I loathed it i
mmediately.
INTERVIEWER
So what made you write your first novel, Whatever, about a computer programmer a
nd his sexually frustrated friend?
HOUELLEBECQ
I hadnt seen any novel make the statement that entering the workforce was like en
tering the grave. That from then on, nothing happens and you have to pretend to
be interested in your work. And, furthermore, that some people have a sex life a
nd others dont just because some are more attractive than others. I wanted to ack
nowledge that if people dont have a sex life, its not for some moral reason, its ju
st because theyre ugly. Once youve said it,
it sounds obvious, but I wanted to say it.
INTERVIEWER
The poor undesirable Tisserand is a pretty poignant character.
HOUELLEBECQ
Hes a good character. Looking back, I was surprised that you could get such an in
teresting character from just the one springboard of his sexual frustration. The
success of Tisserand was a great education.
INTERVIEWER
According to the narrator in Whatever, one hates the young.
HOUELLEBECQ
Thats the other part of the trap. The first is professional life, the fact that n
othing else is going to happen to you. The second is that now theres this person
who will replace you and who will have experiences. This leads to the natural ha
tred of the father for his son.
INTERVIEWER
The father and not the mother?
HOUELLEBECQ
Yes. There is some kind of physiological and psychological change in a woman whe
n she gets pregnant. Its animal biology. But fathers dont give a shit about their
offspring. Hormonal things occur, things that no culture can do anything about,
that generally make women like children and men basically not give a damn.
INTERVIEWER
What about marriage?
HOUELLEBECQ
I think that there is a sharp contrast for most people between life at universit
y, where they meet lots of people, and the moment when they enter the workforce,
when they basically no longer meet anyone. Life becomes dull. So as a result pe
ople get married to have a personal life. I could elaborate but I think everyone
understands.
INTERVIEWER
So marriage is just a reaction to?.?.?.
HOUELLEBECQ
To a largely solitary life.
INTERVIEWER
You had trouble finding a publisher for Whatever. Why were editors
rejecting it?
HOUELLEBECQ
I have no idea. But it didnt look much like anything that was being published at
the time. I think Le Clzio was considered a great writer, for example.
INTERVIEWER
What do you think of Le Clzio, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2
008?
HOUELLEBECQ
I havent read him. I tried and I got bored. But as far as what was being publishe
d, there was a lot of art for arts sake, people writing in the tradition of the n
ouveau roman. There was nothing about people with office jobs.
INTERVIEWER
So you are not a fan of the nouveau roman?
HOUELLEBECQ
Every now and then, I like to indulge some materialist theory. One of which is t
hat the Livres de Poche [the French paperback collection of classics] completely
changed the transmission of culture and made it more international and less coh
esive. I never studied literature at university. The nouveau roman wasnt publishe
d in Livres de Poche, so I never read one until much later. Too late reallythe br
ain atrophies.
INTERVIEWER
And what about poetry?
HOUELLEBECQ
I think poetry is the only domain where a writer you like can truly be said to i
nfluence you, because you read and reread a poem so many times that it simply dr
ills itself into your head. A lot of people have read Baudelaire. I had the more
unusual experience of reading virtually all of Corneille. No one reads Corneill
e, but I came across a little pile of classics, and for some reason, I loved it.
I loved the alexandrine, the traditional twelve-syllable verse. When I was at u
niversity, I wrote quite a bit of classical verse in tetrameters, which appealed
to the other poets. They said, Hey, thats not bad. Why not write in classical ve
rse? It can be done.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think of yourself as a poet as well as a novelist?
HOUELLEBECQ
Not really. Its sad to say, but when you write novels that have a certain impact,
you start to sense that editors are publishing your poems out of charity. And i
t becomes embarrassing.
INTERVIEWER
But you do put poems in all your novels.
HOUELLEBECQ
But it doesnt work. Ive always tried to put poems in my novels, but Ive never reall
y succeeded.
INTERVIEWER
You have said, The struggle between poetry and prose is a constant in my life. If
you obey the poetic impulse, you risk becoming unreadable. If you disobey, youre
ready for a career as an honest storyteller.
HOUELLEBECQ
You might get the impression that I have a mild contempt for storytelling, which
is only somewhat true. For example, I really like Agatha Christie. She obeys th
e rules of the genre at first, but then occasionally she manages to do very pers
onal things. In my case, I think I start from the opposite point. At first, I do
nt obey, I dont plot, but then from time to time, I say to myself, Come on, theres
got to be a story. I control myself. But I will never give up a beautiful fragme
nt merely because it doesnt fit in the story.
INTERVIEWER
What do you think of your first novel now?
HOUELLEBECQ
Its brutal, but its good. That was the beginning of my long relationship with Les
Inrockuptibles, who loved it instantly.
INTERVIEWER
Les Inrockuptibles?
HOUELLEBECQ
Its a magazine which is devoted roughly one third to music, one third to literatu
re, and one third to everything else. When it was launched [as a monthly in 1986
, then as a weekly in 1995], it terrorized the French media because it was so pl
ainly much better than everything else out there. The traditional weeklies with
their literary supplements looked ridiculous by comparison. Everyone who counted
intellectually in Paris was at their feet. Unfortunately, none of them had a re
al sense of responsibility and so no one really took charge. Now its washed up.
INTERVIEWER
What were the values at the beginning?
HOUELLEBECQ
You could say there was only onea little reality, man! Show us the real world, th
e things that are happening now, anchored in the real lives of people.
INTERVIEWER
In 1998, you published your now famous second novel, The Elementary Particles, a
bout the tragic love lives of a brilliant scientist and his sexually frustrated
half-brother. What led you to write it?
HOUELLEBECQ
The real inspiration was the experiments of Alain Aspect in 1982. They demonstra
ted the EPR paradox: that when particles interact, their destinies become linked
. When you act on one, the effect spreads instantly to the other, even if they a
re great distances apart. That really struck me, to think that if two things are
connected once, they will be forever. It marks a fundamental philosophical shif
t. Ever since the disappearance of religious belief, the current reigning philos
ophy has been materialism, which says we are alone and reduces humanity to biolo
gy. Man as calculable as billiard balls and completely perishable. That worldvie
w is undermined by the EPR paradox. So the novel was inspired by this idea of wh
at could be the next metaphysical mutation. It has to be less depressing than ma
terialism. Which, lets face it, is pretty depressing.
INTERVIEWER
How did you go from this idea to a story?
HOUELLEBECQ
I started with the central character, Michel, being a physics researcher. Then,
because I still felt intense regret at having killed off Tisserand too early in
Whatever, that led to Bruno, who is an extended Tisserand. This time I got to wr
ite his life story. That was a real pleasure. Michel less so because I had to re
ad all these books.
INTERVIEWER
You had to do a lot of quantum-theory research?
HOUELLEBECQ
Oh, it was awful. I remember books that were so difficult that I would reread th
e same page three times over. Its not bad to make an intellectual effort sometime
s, but I doubt I would do it again.
INTERVIEWER
What did you most want to accomplish with the novel?
HOUELLEBECQ
What I really wanted was to have scenes that were, as you say in English, heartbr
eaking.
INTERVIEWER
Heartbreaking?
HOUELLEBECQ
The death of Michels girlfriend was very moving, I think. I really wanted to get
those kinds of scene right above all.
INTERVIEWER
And why did you want to get those scenes right in particular?
HOUELLEBECQ
Because thats what I like best in literature. For example, the last pages of The
Brothers Karamazov: not only can I not read them without crying, I cant even thin
k of them without crying. Thats what I admire most in literature, its ability to
make you weep. There are two compliments I really appreciate. It made me weep, and
I read it in one night. I couldnt stop.
INTERVIEWER
Of course, it was the numerous sex scenes that got you a lot of attention in the
media.
HOUELLEBECQ
Im not sure that there are such an unusual number of sex scenes in my novel.
I dont think thats what was shocking. What shocked people was that I
depicted sexual failure. I wrote about sexuality in a nonglorifying way. Most of
all I described a basic reality: a person filled with sexual desire who cant sat
isfy it. Thats what people dont like to hear about. Sex is supposed to be positive
. Showing frustrated sexual desire is obscene. But its also the truth. The real q
uestion is, Who is allowed to have sex? I dont understand, for example, how teach
ers survive with all these alarming young girls. When women become sexual touris
ts, that is even more hidden, shameful, and taboo than when men do it. Just as,
when a woman professor puts her hand on a students thigh, its even worse, even mor
e unspeakable.
INTERVIEWER
A constant refrain in your novels is that sex and money are the dominant values
of this world.
HOUELLEBECQ
Its strange, Im fifty years old and I still havent made up my mind whether sex is g
ood or not. I have my doubts about money too. So its odd that Im considered an ide
ological writer. It seems to me that I am mostly exposing my doubts. I do have c
ertain convictions. For example, the fact that you can pay a girl, that I think
is a good thing. Undeniably. An immense sign of progress.
INTERVIEWER
You mean prostitutes?
HOUELLEBECQ
Yes. Im all for prostitution.
INTERVIEWER
Why?
HOUELLEBECQ
Because everybody wins. It doesnt interest me personally, but I think its a good t
hing. A lot of British and Americans pay for it. Theyre happy. The girls are happ
y. They make a lot of money.
INTERVIEWER
How do you know that the girls are happy?
HOUELLEBECQ
I talk to them. Its very difficult because they dont really speak English, but I t
alk to them.
INTERVIEWER
What about the more commonly held idea that these women are victims who are forc
ed into these circumstances?
HOUELLEBECQ
Its not true. Not in Thailand. Its just stupid to have objections about it.
INTERVIEWER
They say that you are on the right politically because in The Elementary Particl
es you seem to be against the liberalism of the sixties. What do you think of th
at interpretation?
HOUELLEBECQ
What I think, fundamentally, is that you cant do anything about major
societal changes. It may be regrettable that the family unit is disappearing. Yo
u could argue that it increases human suffering. But regrettable or not, theres n
othing we can do. Thats the difference between me and a reactionary. I dont have a
ny interest in turning back the clock because I dont believe it can be done. You
can only observe and describe. Ive always liked Balzacs very insulting statement t
hat the only purpose of the novel is to show the disasters produced by the chang
ing of values. Hes exaggerating in an amusing way. But thats what I do: I show the
disasters produced by the liberalization of values.
INTERVIEWER
You have written that you are not only a religious atheist but a political one. Ca
n you elaborate?
HOUELLEBECQ
I dont believe much in the influence of politics on history. I think that the maj
or factors are technological and sometimes, not often, religious. I dont think po
liticians can really have a true historical importance, except when they provoke
major catastrophes Napoleon-style, but thats about it. I also dont believe indivi
dual psychology has any effect on social movements. You will find this belief ex
pressed in all my novels. I was speaking to someone this morning about Belgium,
a country that doesnt work at all. And nobody understands why, from a psychologic
al standpoint, because Belgians themselves seem sympathetic and willing to make
it all work. And yet it doesnt. The country is going to disappear. So we have to
believe that there are powerful sociological forces at work that cannot be expla
ined in terms of individual psychology.
INTERVIEWER
Were you surprised by the response you got for Particles?
HOUELLEBECQ
Yes. I was expecting a success similar to my first novels. A critical success wit
h modest sales. It was a pivotal moment in my life because I was able to stop wo
rking.
INTERVIEWER
Your French critics are irritated by what they see as your cynical use of media
to market every book beginning with The Elementary Particles. What was your atti
tude at the time?
HOUELLEBECQ
Back then I thought you had to do a lot of media if you wanted to sell books, an
d its true that I really wanted to make money so that I could quit my job. Thats t
he only point of having money, to have the freedom of your days, but its fundamen
tal. Now Im not so sure that media sells books.
INTERVIEWER
What sells then?
HOUELLEBECQ
Word of mouth. At the moment, for example, Marc Levy is the biggest seller in Fr
ance. And he never does any media.
INTERVIEWER
The Elementary Particles is also the novel that made critics focus on your biogr
aphy because the characters seem to have many points in common with you. But it
seems you find it irritating, that people reduce everything to biography.
HOUELLEBECQ
Yes, its annoying because it denies what is the essential trait of fiction writin
g, namely, that the characters develop by themselves. In other words, you start
with a few real facts and then you let the thing roll with its own momentum. And
the further along you get, the more likely you are to leave reality behind alto
gether. You cant tell your own story in fact. You can use elements of itbut dont im
agine that you can control what a character is going to do a hundred pages later
. The only thing you can do is, for example, give the character your literary ta
stes. Theres nothing easier. Just have him open a book.
INTERVIEWER
Speaking of your biography, you wrote recently that you had a happy childhood wi
th your grandmother.
HOUELLEBECQ
Yes, my paternal grandmother. I lived with her between the ages of six and eight
een. There were two periods, the first of which was truly happy, between the age
s of six and twelve. We lived in the countryside in Yonne. I rode my bike. I bui
lt dams. I read a lot. There wasnt much TV. It was good. But then we moved to Crcy
-en-Brie. If you went there now, you wouldnt get quite the right idea. It was mor
e rural then. Now its basically suburban projects. Still I didnt feel as comfortab
le. There were too many people. I liked the solitude of the countryside.
But frankly, adolescence is never as pleasant as childhood.
INTERVIEWER
And your grandmother was a Communist?
HOUELLEBECQ
That overstates it somewhat. At the time, everyone from a certain social class i
n France voted Communist, without having a clue who Marx was. It was a class vot
e.
INTERVIEWER
Did she work?
HOUELLEBECQ
No, she was retired.
INTERVIEWER
What had been her job?
HOUELLEBECQ
She worked for the railroad. I think she had been in charge of the village train
station.
INTERVIEWER
Were you close to your grandmother?
HOUELLEBECQ
Yes. I loved her very much.
INTERVIEWER
You have a remarkable sense of humor. Was she funny?
HOUELLEBECQ
No. She didnt joke much.
INTERVIEWER
Was she maternal?
HOUELLEBECQ
Yes. Her four children adored her. She was a very good mother.
INTERVIEWER
Did you see your parents often?
HOUELLEBECQ
My mother, very little. My father, yes. During winter and summer vacations.
INTERVIEWER
Were you close to him?
HOUELLEBECQ
Not really. He was a difficult man to be close to. He was an odd person,
a loner really. Still I was closer to him than to my mother. I knew him better.
INTERVIEWER
Until the age of six, you lived with your maternal grandparents in Algeria. Do y
ou remember your early childhood?
HOUELLEBECQ
Very little. I have vague memories of playgrounds with leaves. I also remember t
he smell of tear gas, which I liked. I remember little things about the war, lik
e machine-gun fire in the streets.
INTERVIEWER
Was that frightening?
HOUELLEBECQ
No, not at all. Children are amused by that sort of thing.
INTERVIEWER
Was there a lot of reading in your house growing up?
HOUELLEBECQ
My grandparents didnt read at all. They were not educated people.
INTERVIEWER
So how did your life change after The Elementary Particles?
HOUELLEBECQ
The biggest consequence of The Elementary Particles, apart from the money and no
t having to work, is that I have become known internationally. Ive stopped being
a tourist, for example, because my book tours have satisfied any desire I might
have to travel. And as a result there are countries I have visited that you woul
dnt ordinarily go to, like Germany.
INTERVIEWER
Why do you say that?
HOUELLEBECQ
Nobody does tourism in Germany. It doesnt exist. But theyre wrong not to. Its not s
o bad.
INTERVIEWER
Tourism is the focus of your third novel, Platform, about a mainstream travel ag
ency that decides to market sex tours.
HOUELLEBECQ
The hardest thing about writing a novel is finding the starting point, the thing
that will open it up. And even that doesnt guarantee success. I basically failed
with Platform, even though tourism is an excellent point of departure for under
standing the world.
INTERVIEWER
What was your fascination with the tourism industry?
HOUELLEBECQ
I find it an absolute pleasure to read travel guides, especially the Michelin gu
ides, and their description of places I know Ill probably never visit. I spend a
large part of my life reading descriptions of restaurants. I like the vocabulary
they use. I like the way they present the world. I love the descriptions of hap
piness and discovery. And then there are some basic questions I started to ask m
yself. China in seven days, for instance. How do they choose the different stage
s? How do they turn the real world into a pleasant, consumable world?
INTERVIEWER
Tell us about Pattaya, Thailand, where the sex tours take place.
HOUELLEBECQ
I was completely fascinated by Pattaya, where the books ending takes place. Every
one goes there. The Anglo-Saxons go there. The Chinese go there. The Japanese go
there. The Arabs go there, too. That was the strangest part. It was something I
read in a guidebook that made me make the trip to Thailand. They said that in o
ne hotel in Bangkok, the Thai prostitutes wore veils to please their Arab client
s. I found that fascinating, that adaptability. There are lots of French Algeria
ns from the projects who go to Pattaya for the whores. So the Thai girls speak F
rench but with a ghetto accent. Ouais, jtassure! Ouais, ta mre!
There are karaoke bars for the Japanese, restaurants for Russians with lots of v
odka. And theres a poignant side to it, too, something end-of-the-road about all
these people, especially the old Anglo-Saxons. You sense theyll never be able to
leave. And theres the dust, in the afternoon, when the go-go bars are still close
d. Theres something very poignant about that moment when the girls start arriving
on their scooters and you see the old Anglo-Saxon tourists start to come out li
ke turtles walking in the dust. There is something very, very strange about that
town.
INTERVIEWER
The terrorist bombing in Pattaya at the end of the book foreshadowed the real-li
fe nightclub bombing in Bali the year after the book was published.
HOUELLEBECQ
That wasnt hard to predict. It also could have happened in Malaysia, another Musl
im country with lots of prostitutes for Westerners.
INTERVIEWER
But what about your notion that prostitution is a great idea for everyone?
HOUELLEBECQ
Well, Islam would have to disappear. Otherwise it wont work.
INTERVIEWER
So in a perfect world, there is prostitution but not Islam?
HOUELLEBECQ
I never said anything about a perfect world. I said its not a disaster.
INTERVIEWER
Why do you consider Platform a failure?
HOUELLEBECQ
There isnt enough analysis of the tourist industry. And one character, Valerie, d
ominates the book too much. Not that you can do much about that sort of thing. I
liked Valerie as a character and, as a result, I find the male character bland.
INTERVIEWER
Youve said book reviewers dont focus enough on the characters.
HOUELLEBECQ
One precious thing about ordinary readers is that sometimes they develop feeling
s for the characters. This is something critics never discuss. Which is a shame.
The Anglo-Saxon critics do good plot summaries but they dont talk about the char
acters either. Readers, however, do it uninhibitedly.
INTERVIEWER
What about your critics? Can you just sum up briefly what you hold against the F
rench press?
HOUELLEBECQ
First of all, they hate me more than I hate them. What I do reproach them for is
nt bad reviews. It is that they talk about things having nothing to do with my bo
oksmy mother or my tax exileand that they caricature me so that Ive become a symbol
of so many unpleasant thingscynicism, nihilism, misogyny. People have stopped re
ading my books because theyve already got their idea about me. To some degree of
course, thats true for everyone. After two or three novels, a writer cant expect t
o be read. The critics have made up their minds.
INTERVIEWER
When did you first start writing?
HOUELLEBECQ
Its hard for me to say. We had to write creative essays in school, as in describe
a fall afternoon, and it is true that I took a slightly disproportionate pleasure
in writing them and that I kept them. Plus, I kept a journal, although Im not su
re what I could have been writing about. I think I was more inclined to describe
my dreams than things in my daily life.
INTERVIEWER
What is your writing schedule now?
HOUELLEBECQ
I wake up during the night around one a.m. I write half-awake in a semi-consciou
s state. Progressively, as I drink coffee, I become more conscious. And I write
until Im sick of it.
INTERVIEWER
Do you have other requirements for writing?
HOUELLEBECQ
Flaubert said you had to have a permanent erection. I havent found that to be the
case. I need to take a walk now and then. Otherwise, in terms of dietary requir
ements, coffee works, its true. It takes you through all the different stages of
consciousness. You start out semicomatose. You write. You drink more coffee and
your lucidity increases, and its in that in-between period, which can last for ho
urs, that something interesting happens.
INTERVIEWER
Do you plot the novels?
HOUELLEBECQ
No.
INTERVIEWER
You dont know whats happening from one page to the next?
HOUELLEBECQ
I never plan anything at all.
INTERVIEWER
What about your style? You have a habit of making brutal, often amusing
juxtapositions, as in On the day of my sons suicide, I made a tomato omelet.
HOUELLEBECQ
Thats not really what I call style. Its just the way I perceive the world. I have
a kind of nervousness that leads to rapid juxtapositions. Its not so different fr
om punk rock. You scream but you modulate a little. There have been graduate stu
dies of my style.
INTERVIEWER
What are the conclusions?
HOUELLEBECQ
I have a sentence of medium length with rich punctuation. In other words, my sen
tences are medium-size but are cut up in a variety of ways. One thing people hat
e is adverbs. I use adverbs. Theres another thing which comes from the fact that
Im a poet. Copy editors always want you to take out repetitions. I like repetitio
ns. Repetition is part of poetry. So I dont hesitate to repeat myself. In fact, I
think I am the most repetitive novelist writing today.
INTERVIEWER
You love citing product names. For example, loup au cerfeuil Monoprix Gourmet [Mono
prix Gourmet sea bass with chervil].
HOUELLEBECQ
Sea bass with chervil?.?.?. Its appealing. Its well written. I also use product name
s because they are, objectively, part of the world I live in. But I do, its true,
tend to choose the product with the most enticing name. For example the word ch
ervil is very attractive, though I have no idea what chervil is. You want to eat
something with chervil. Its pretty.
INTERVIEWER
Youve written that one source of inspiration is the stories people tell you about
their lives. Apparently, strangers like to confess things to you.
HOUELLEBECQ
I think I could have been one of the best psychiatrists in the world because I g
ive the impression of being nonjudgmental. Which isnt quite true. Sometimes I am
very shocked by what Im being told. I just dont show it.
INTERVIEWER
You wrote a biography of H.?P. Lovecraft and I was struck by the similarity betw
een his own disastrous love story and the ones in your books.
HOUELLEBECQ
Yes, the woman who is courageous and dynamic and does everything she can to make
it work and the man who is hapless and incompetent.
INTERVIEWER
What is your concept of the possibility of love between a man and a woman?
HOUELLEBECQ
Id say that the question whether love still exists plays the same role in my nove
ls as the question of Gods existence in Dostoyevsky.
INTERVIEWER
Love may no longer exist?
HOUELLEBECQ
Thats the question of the moment.
INTERVIEWER
And what is causing its disappearance?
HOUELLEBECQ
The materialist idea that we are alone, we live alone and we die alone. Thats not
very compatible with love.
INTERVIEWER
Your last novel, The Possibility of an Island, ends in a desolate world populate
d by solitary clones. What made you imagine this grim future in which humans are
cloned before they reach middle age?
HOUELLEBECQ
I am persuaded that feminism is not at the root of political correctness. The ac
tual source is much nastier and dares not speak its name, which is simply hatred
for old people. The question of domination between men and women is relatively
secondaryimportant but still secondarycompared to what I tried to capture in this
novel, which is that we are now trapped in a world of kids. Old kids. The disapp
earance of patrimonial transmission means that an old guy today is just a useles
s ruin. The thing we value most of all is youth, which means that life automatic
ally becomes depressing, because life consists, on the whole, of getting old.
INTERVIEWER
In your preface to The Possibility of an Island, you mentioned a journalist who
inspired the idea for the novel. Can you explain?
HOUELLEBECQ
It was a pretty strange moment. I was in Berlin at a caf on a lake, waiting to be
interviewed. It was very quiet. It was ten oclock in the morning. There was no o
ne around. And this German journalist arrives and, it was very curious, she wasnt
behaving normally. She didnt have a tape recorder and she wasnt taking notes. And
she said, I had a dream that you were in a phone booth after the end of the worl
d and you were speaking to all of humanity but without knowing whether anyone wa
s listening. It was like being in a zombie film.
INTERVIEWER
And that lead to the main premise of the book: a clone who writes a journal mean
t for his successor.
HOUELLEBECQ
I thought about the situation: Im in a phone booth after the end of the world and
I seem to be talking, but I dont know whether theres anyone on the end of the lin
e or if Im talking to myself, just to hear my own voice. And it did seem like a s
triking metaphor for all my novels. The idea took a while to bear fruit. I wrote
my third novel in the meantime. Then I bought an apartment in the south of Spai
n and went in the off-season, January, and there was nobody there. I was in this
deserted beach house which gave me the impression of being alone at the end of
humanity. I wrote the first pages. For a long time, I wrote nothing more.
INTERVIEWER
How did you become interested in the Ral sect, which inspired the bizarre religio
us sect in the book?
HOUELLEBECQ
I bought books on cults. I went to an orientation session for non-Ralians.
INTERVIEWER
And what happened?
HOUELLEBECQ
There were panel discussions with the prophet who told us things were going to g
et much better thanks to science. Its a mix of total optimism about scientific pr
ogress and nonmoralism about sex. Thats what attracts participants. They say that
there are extraterrestrials who are way ahead of us and can bring us their reci
pes for technological happiness.
INTERVIEWER
Why did you make your main character a comedian?
HOUELLEBECQ
The character came from two things. First of all, I went to a resort in Turkey a
nd there was one of those talent shows produced by the guests. There was this gi
rlshe must have been fifteenwho was doing Cline Dion and clearly for her, this was
very, very important. I said to myself, Man, this girl is really going for it. A
nd its funny because the next day, she was sitting alone at the breakfast table a
nd I thought, Already the solitude of the star! I sensed that something like tha
t can decide an entire life. So the comedian has a similar experience. He discov
ers all of sudden that he can make whole crowds laugh and it changes his life. T
he second thing was that I knew a woman who was editor in chief of a magazine an
d she was always inviting me to these hip events with Karl Lagerfeld, for exampl
e. I wanted to have someone who was part of that world.
INTERVIEWER
Like the comedian, you compulsively take the politically sensitive subjects of t
he moment and then are irreverent to the point of insult. And its funny. It makes
you laugh out of shock.
HOUELLEBECQ
You laugh because the insult claims merely to state the obvious. This may be unu
sual in literature but it isnt in private life. Well, you have to admit, Islam is
moronic is something you could easily say in private. This sort of slightly apolo
getic statement seems to me a part of French culture. For example, a girl was te
lling me about a friend who was pretty ugly and was fighting for abortion rights
. She was describing their conversation and she said, I dont mean to be mean, but
nobody would want to get her pregnant anyway. In conversations the French use tha
t kind of apologetic insult all the time. Theres a common-sense side to it, which
I quite like.
INTERVIEWER
You have a special talent for insult. Do you take pleasure in insulting?
HOUELLEBECQ
Yes. It is, I have to say, satisfying.
INTERVIEWER
Youve said that you were proud of having made poetry triumph in a novel in the la
st part of The Possibility of an Island. Its when the clone leaves his restricted
area without permission to wander the desert in search of another clone.
HOUELLEBECQ
I personally like the last part of The Possibility of an Island. I dont think it
resembles anything Ive done before, but no reviewer has mentioned it. Its hard to
explain but I have the feeling that theres something very, very beautiful in that
last part. He opens the door, and its another world. When I wrote that passage I
wasnt thinking much about the story, I was completely intoxicated by the beauty
of my own words.
I did something special to prepare for that last section. I stopped writing. For
two weeks, I did nothingand I mean nothing. I saw no one. I spoke to no one. In
principle, you shouldnt stop when youre writing a novel. If you stop to do somethi
ng else, its a catastrophe. But in this case, I stopped to do nothing, just to le
t the desire grow.
INTERVIEWER
You have said that you are cyclothymic. What does that mean?
HOUELLEBECQ
It means you go back and forth from depression to exultation. But in the end, I
doubt Im really depressive.
INTERVIEWER
What are you then?
HOUELLEBECQ
Just not very active. The truth is, when I go to bed and do nothing, Im not badly
off. Im quite content. So it isnt really what you would call depression.
INTERVIEWER
But what stops you from succumbing to what you have said is the greatest danger
for you, which is sulking in a corner while repeating over and over that everyth
ing sucks?
HOUELLEBECQ
For the moment my desire to be loved is enough to spur me to action. I want to b
e loved despite my faults. It isnt exactly true that Im a provocateur. A real prov
ocateur is someone who says things he doesnt think, just to shock. I try to say w
hat I think. And when I sense that what I think is going to cause displeasure, I
rush to say it with real enthusiasm. And deep down, I want to be loved despite
that.
Of course, theres no guarantee this will last.
INTERVIEWER
Your conversation with Bernard-Henri Lvy, Public Enemies, is now out in translati
on in the United States. What possessed you to do the book?
HOUELLEBECQ
It started out as a bit of a game. I had never done anything like that. What cou
nts is what made us continue and eventually publish, which is simple. We thought
the result was interesting.
INTERVIEWER
Why dont you live in France?
HOUELLEBECQ
Partly to pay fewer taxes and partly to learn your beautiful language, madam. An
d because Ireland is quite beautiful, especially the west.
INTERVIEWER
Not to escape your own country?
HOUELLEBECQ
No. I left in full undisputed glory without any enemies.
INTERVIEWER
And what do you think of this Anglo-Saxon world?
HOUELLEBECQ
You can tell that this is the world that invented capitalism. There are private
companies competing to deliver the mail, to collect the garbage. The financial s
ection of the newspaper is much thicker than it is in French papers.
The other thing Ive noticed is that men and women are more separate. When you go
into a restaurant, for example, you often see women eating out together. The Fre
nch from that point of view are very Latin. A single-sex dinner would be conside
red boring. In a hotel in Ireland, I saw a group of men talking golf at the brea
kfast table. They left and were replaced by a group of women who were discussing
something else. Its as if theyre separate species who meet occasionally for repro
duction. There was a line I really liked in a novel by Coetzee. One of the chara
cters suspects that the only thing that really interests his lesbian daughter in
life is prickly-pear jam. Lesbianism is a pretext. She and her partner dont have
sex anymore, they dedicate themselves to decoration and cooking.
Maybe theres some potential truth there about women who, in the end, have always
been more interested in jam and curtains.
INTERVIEWER
And men? What do you think interests them?
HOUELLEBECQ
Little asses. I like Coetzee. He says things brutally, too.
INTERVIEWER
Youve said that you possibly had an American side to you. What is your evidence f
or this?
HOUELLEBECQ
I have very little proof. Theres the fact that if I lived in an American context,
I think I would have chosen a Lexus, which is the best quality for the price. A
nd more obscurely, I have a dog that I know is very popular in the United States
, a Welsh Corgi. One thing I dont share is this American obsession with large bre
asts. That, I must admit, leaves me cold. But a two-car garage? I want one. A fr
idge with one of those ice-maker things? I want one too. What appeals to them ap
peals to me.
INTERVIEWER
Your much-awaited new novel La Carte et le Territoire is about to come out in Fr
ance but very little is known about it. I read that it is a five-hundred-page bo
ok which examines contemporary society through the prism of an artists success. App
arently you are a character in it. Is this correct?
HOUELLEBECQ
The novel is only four hundred and fifty pages. The main character is an artist.
Houellebecq remains a secondary character though his appearance does make the s
tructure much more complicated. I dont really want to say more.
INTERVIEWER
What do you think is the appeal of your work, in spite of its brutality?
HOUELLEBECQ
There are too many answers. The first is that its well written. Another is that y
ou sense obscurely that its the truth. Then theres a third one, which is my favori
te: because its intense. There is a need for intensity. From time to time, you ha
ve to forsake harmony. You even have to forsake truth. You have to, when you nee
d to, energetically embrace excessive things. Now I sound like Saint Paul.
INTERVIEWER
What do you mean?
HOUELLEBECQ
Now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is chari
ty. For me the sentence would be Now abideth beauty, truth, and intensity; but the
greatest of these is intensity.
INTERVIEWER
You once wrote in your biography of H.?P. Lovecraft No aesthetic creation can exi
st without a certain voluntary blindness.
HOUELLEBECQ
Yes, its true that you have to choose your family, so to speak. You have to exagg
erate a little.
INTERVIEWER
Who would you say is your family?
HOUELLEBECQ
It may surprise you, but I am convinced that I am part of the great family of th
e Romantics.
INTERVIEWER
Youre aware that may be surprising?
HOUELLEBECQ
Yes, but society has evolved, a Romantic is not the same thing that it used to b
e. Not long ago, I read de Tocquevilles Democracy in America. I am certain that i
f you took, on the one hand, an old-order Romantic and, on the other
hand, what de Tocqueville predicts will happen to literature with the developmen
t of democracytaking the common man as its subject, having a strong interest in t
he future, using more realist vocabularyyou would get me.
INTERVIEWER
What is your definition of a Romantic?
HOUELLEBECQ
Its someone who believes in unlimited happiness, which is eternal and possible ri
ght away. Belief in love. Also belief in the soul, which is strangely persistent
in me, even though I never stop saying the opposite.
INTERVIEWER
You believe in unlimited, eternal happiness?
HOUELLEBECQ
Yes. And Im not just saying that to be a provocateur.
Mark Leyner, The Art of Fiction No. 219
Interviewed by Sam Lipsyte
PRINT | TWITTER | FACEBOOK | More
Mark Leyners name has been familiar to readers of experimental fiction since 1995
, when he published his first story collection, I Smell Esther Williams, but it
was his second collection, My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist (with its memorable
opening riff: I was an infinitely hot and dense dot raised by huge and lurid puppet
s), followed by the novel Et Tu, Babe, that made him one of the most acclaimed an
d publicized writers of that decade. Profiled in major magazines, Leyner also ap
peared on late-night talk shows and in a contentious segment of Charlie Rose alo
ngside David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen.
After a second novel, The Tetherballs of Bougainville, was published in 1998, Le
yner dropped away from the literary world. He worked in Hollywood, where one of
his cowritten scripts, War, Inc., was made into a movie starring John Cusack. Le
yner ?????????????also coauthored a series of best-selling medical humor books b
eginning with Why Do Men Have Nipples? Hundreds of Questions Youd Only Ask a Doct
or After Your Third Martini.
Fourteen years after Tetherballs, Leyner returned with The Sugar Frosted Nutsack
, both an epic and the exegesis of an epic. It begins when a claque of gods (wit
h names like Fast-Cooking Ali and XOXO) return from spring break to create a unive
rse whose mortal hero is an unemployed butcher in Jersey City. Reviewing The Sug
ar Frosted Nutsack in the New York Times Book Review, Ben Marcus wrote that Leyn
er demonstrates how much is still possible for the novel when tradition is left b
ehind, proving that fiction can be robust, provocative and staggeringly inventiv
e, without for a moment forfeiting entertainment.
The bulk of this interview took place at the Elysian Cafe, a bistro across the s
treet from Leyners home in Hoboken, New Jersey. Born in 1956, Leyner, a self-desc
ribed gym rat, is handsome, smallish, and very fit, with muscular arms that in man
y lifting circles would qualify as guns. He seemed both proud and sheepish about t
hem, the type of contradiction that, as the conversation developed, Leyner revea
led as a central tension in his life and his writing.
Sam Lipsyte

LEYNER
Let me tell you about my morning.
INTERVIEWER
Let me ask. How was your morning?
LEYNER
Funny you ask. I had a meeting this morning with my editor, Michael Pietsch. I r
eally like having a breakfast meeting. First of all, its caffeine and not alcohol
. Its more what a businessman would do. Otherwise, I just basically wander around
in my pajamas.
INTERVIEWER
So youve been to Manhattan and back today, back for your lunch meeting.
LEYNER
Yeah. Im just a dynamo. Ive done fifty critically important things already today,
including this terrific meeting this morning about what my next book should be.
Ive just decidedand this is a huge scoop for The Paris Review, because Michael Pie
tsch and I just made this decisionIve just decided that Im going to write a book ab
out Mussolini.
INTERVIEWER
About Mussolini.
LEYNER
Yeah. The web of my own life and the web of his life.
INTERVIEWER
Why Mussolini? Have you been thinking about him since you were a kid?
LEYNER
No, that would be too weird. Mom, read me that manifesto. Dad, put on the black
shirt again. Sing me that song. But Im fascinated by demagogues. Ive seen some of
Fidels speeches where hed harangue crowds of people in the blazing Havana sun for
seven hours. Hed speak extemporaneously about very technical agricultural issues
for hours.
INTERVIEWER
I think of that footage of Mussolini skiing shirtless in the Alps.
LEYNER
You know who has a similar theatrics of masculinity is Putin. Hes always shirtles
s, hunting in Siberia shirtless or somethingBoy, Im hot!
INTERVIEWER
So this book will be about masculinity, or models of masculinity?
LEYNER
Something like that. I think I have a particular interest in dictatorsgenerally,
in worlds of violence and physical prowess, because thats all so much what I feel
Im not. Then again, there were enormous shelves of books in the houses of my par
ents and my grandparents, and that, too, seemed completely unattainable, such an
exotic, unattainable endeavor, writing a book. Almost everything I do can be an
alyzed on this grid, as a response to this ambivalence about the sort of man Im s
upposed to be. Ill die with this not reconciled.
INTERVIEWER
You were made to feel not tough enough?
LEYNER
I think I was, for perfectly good reasons. I was a small, sensitive kid close to
his mom. This is all textbook, the first child in the extended family, le petit
prince.
INTERVIEWER
Sorry, this Richie Sambora solo is getting to me.
LEYNER
Should I ask her to turn it down a little? She could. Wait, here she comes. [To
waitress] Can you do me a tiny favor?
WAITRESS
Sure.
LEYNER
Were doing this interview. Do you think you could turn that down a tiny bit?
WAITRESS
Yeah.
INTERVIEWER
Do you always have one project in mind? Or a steady stream of possibilities?
LEYNER
The steady stream doesnt work for me. I do write all the time. Some of it is conn
ected thematically to what I did the day beforeoften not. Its just what I always h
ave, an accumulation of material to rummage through.
INTERVIEWER
So there are troves of it.
LEYNER
Theres one trove. Some artistsCornell, Rauschenbergused to find things in the stree
t or in flea markets, some kind of cultural detritus to bring back and look at a
nd juxtapose with other things. I do something similar. But I have to make my ow
n garbage to sift through. Things I overhear, things Ive overheard that Ive misrem
embered.
But you used a good word that I responded to. I said, That doesnt work for me. What
was that?
INTERVIEWER
A stream? A steady stream?
LEYNER
A forceful stream, I think they say in urology. In response to what you were say
ing about the forceful, steady stream, I think there has to be some kind of cris
is before I really feel theres a book I should write. When I started, I wanted to
see if a certain kind of line, shaded with poetry, could sustain itself in pros
e. Not out of idle curiosityI thought it would be a wonderful thing. The poetry I
read and the music I listened to had an immersive, unmodulated intensity to the
m, and I wanted to do that in prose. After several books, I felt that I had expl
ored this notion.
INTERVIEWER
Had you proven to yourself you could do it?
LEYNER
At a certain point after I wrote The Tetherballs of Bougainville, I wasnt feeling
the urgency anymore. That had something to do with why I stopped. I had been do
ing a little movie stuff, a lot of magazine work. In fact there was a whole coll
ection of magazine work, Tooth Imprints on a Corn Dog. I think out of everything
Ive done, that book gives me qualms. I dont know why.
INTERVIEWER
Can you speculate?
LEYNER
Because it exists under the sign of an American magazine culture.
INTERVIEWER
Ive always wondered about your magazine writing. I understand why every magazine
wanted you, but I wondered if you felt constrained by your assignments.
LEYNER
I had to think of myself as an architect who had a client and the client had cer
tain requirements, but they had hired me because there was something unique abou
t my work and they wanted that inflection. So whether thats Shouts & Murmurs or bac
k pages for Time, thats what I did. I dont know if this is true for every writer,
but my writing and the way I configure myself, my pride in myself and my identit
ythose things are very interwoven.
At some point I didnt like being some go-to funny magazine guy. It didnt comport w
ith how I felt as an artist, as a writer. But I wasnt bad at it. Im a good guy, fi
rst of all. Im sort of responsible. If someone needed a Shouts & Murmurs or a Time
magazine back page or something for Esquire, I wouldnt just send them a bunch of
my stuff and say, Put that on the back page or dont bother me. Id try to do it for
them. Using that architect analogy, if a woman comes and says, My husband is no
nambulatory, so we need ramps in the house and things like that, you have to say
, Okay. You cant bewell, you could be sadistic and perverse and make a house thats
even harder to navigate, but . . .
INTERVIEWER
To stretch that metaphor, a lot of architects make work that fits the specifica-
tions of the client, and then they also design, perhaps, buildings that might n
ever be built. But your fiction gets to be published and shown so its not quite t
he same. Or is it?
LEYNER
I was always completely divided and somewhat confounded by the fact that I was g
etting opportunities to write for these magazines or to go on televi- sion based
on this work of mine. I thought that was the most amazing thing. Now I think it
was really kind of aberrant. That doesnt usually happen to writers who are adven
turous in a formal way, who arent just straight-up realistic, denotative writers.
INTERVIEWER
I dont think anybodys going on television anymore.
LEYNER
No, no one is. And it used to be fairly common. If you wrote a novel, at the ver
y least you could be on the Today show for five, ten minutes.
INTERVIEWER
You made the rounds.
LEYNER
It was an enormous rush to be asked to do all of these things. And it was happen
ing in this fast and furious way. It took me a while to sit back and think about
it.
INTERVIEWER
It all shows up in transformed ways in your books. Tetherballs took those forms
you were working inmagazines, scriptsand worked them brilliantly from a fictional
standpoint.
LEYNER
Thats much better said than I could ever say it. You dont even need me for this.
I would add that some of the first commercial work I did had nothing to do with
magazines at allit was advertising.
INTERVIEWER
Do you see a similarity between poetry and advertising? In both cases youre worki
ng in a limited amount of space and trying to get the most bang for your buck, i
n a sense, from language.
LEYNER
Thats an idealized version of advertising. I like Mad Men as much as the next guy
, but when Don Draper sits back smugly and delivers whats supposed to be a devast
atingly brilliant campaign and insights into consumer psychology, Im not that imp
ressed by it. I think what I liked best about those years was maneuvering throug
h office politics. It gave me an opportunity to act outand get out of my systemthi
s notion of what a man does. As I started to say before, I grew up with a very c
lear, almost Lvi-Straussian idea that there were two kinds of men, two archetypes
, a paired opposition. And I think Ive tried in some way or another to be both.
You know this Yiddish word luftmensch?
INTERVIEWER
A dreamer?
LEYNER
A dreamer, a kind of intellectual, someone who just sits at home and reads the Y
iddish papers and for whom any kind of practical endeavor is impossible. Fixing
anything in the house impossible. Making any kind of moneyimpossible. Which was v
ery appealing. It seemed like a beautiful life to me. Then on the other hand, an
d completely polar to that, was the shtarker, tougher, a sort of businessperson
who had a strange, murky, unidentifiable business. If you look at a book like My
Cousin, its got all the aggressiveness and impertinence of the quasimob guy sitti
ng on his stoop at the end of the day in a wifebeater and the lyrical musings of
the luftmensch model, mashed up together.
INTERVIEWER
Not just in Cousin.
LEYNER
In everything I do. And I think in The Sugar Frosted Nutsack I actually made a c
haracter who represents, who embodies, both those things for the first time.
INTERVIEWER
Then the gods are kind of tough guys. And the drug-addled bards are maybe more l
uftmenschen?
LEYNER
Its a big, ongoing problem for me. I think being short led me toward the question
of how I could be tough, how I could have a forceful kind of physicality. And y
et thats all very alien to my predilections, which are just to keep to myself and
be a sweet, sensitive Proustian boy with his mom. Trailing along behind his mom
at Saks Fifth Avenue, tugging at her skirts, asking, Can we go home now?
INTERVIEWER
Did your parents grow up here?
LEYNER
My parents did, and their parents did not. And men like my fatheryoung, ambitious
, virile menwere aspiring to the white-collar nomenklatura, which would have been
unheard-of in previous generations. Also, my father had been a musician earlier
in his life, and my mother had wanted to be an artist, so I was aware of Polloc
k and de Kooning and certain kinds of jazz. My parents seemed to me like Rob and
Laura Petrie. When I watch The Dick Van Dyke Show, it seemed like it was about
them. They were dashing figures to menot glamorous in terms of being wealthy, but
hip, youthful, intellectually and culturally inquisitive people.
INTERVIEWER
They were young?
LEYNER
They were young for parents. When I was in high school, they were in their thirt
ies. Everyone would come over and say, Oh, you have such cool parents. I had the
least tortured upbringing I can imagine. It was really sort of paradise for me.
[A man familiar to Leyner enters the Elysian Cafe. Leyner hails him from our tab
le, nodding toward his bandaged wrist.]
LEYNER
Hey, dude, what happened? Whats on your wrist?
MAN
I just dropped a...
LEYNER
This is Sam Lipsyte. Were doing an interview, a conversation. You want to say som
ething?
MAN
I have a herpetic lesion on my
LEYNER
Show us. Sams an amateur dermatological proctologist. He specializes in lesions o
n the buttocks.
INTERVIEWER
In fact, I just started today, so . . .
MAN
Excellent!
INTERVIEWER
So, if you dont mind I could
LEYNER
Can you warm up a knife so its blazing hot and well take a look?
MAN
Notice how you put yourself in, too. Well take a look. Youre not a proctologist.
LEYNER
No, but he needs an assistant.
MAN
Anyway, we listened to you on the way home yesterday, on audiobook.
LEYNER
Oh, you bought that? Is it any good?
MAN
Its really good.
LEYNER
[To interviewer] Have you recorded your books?
INTERVIEWER
Yes, my last one.
LEYNER
Its such a grueling thing to do, right? Because its not a real audience. The right
way to do it, I think, would be with a live audience.
INTERVIEWER
Like Castro.
LEYNER
Exactly. You have to force them to stay.
MAN
They did Great Gatsby.
LEYNER
In its entirety?
MAN
Yes. They read it and acted it at the same time. It was fantastic.
LEYNER
Who did? Various celebrities?
MAN
Uh, yeah.
LEYNER
The Kardashians?
INTERVIEWER
Theyre still doing it.
LEYNER
Theyre still doing it meaning they still havent finished . . . as we speak?
MAN
[To interviewer] Nice to meet you.
LEYNER
Talk to you later. Where were we?
[Distracted, Leyner points to a man in a postal uniform who is taking a stool at
the bar.] Hey, theres my mailman, right there! Hes going to sit down, have some d
rinks. Thats why we never get our mail!
INTERVIEWER
Itll get there eventually.
LEYNER
No one uses mail anymore anyway.
INTERVIEWER
I remember first coming across your work in the late eighties, in Fiction Intern
ational.
LEYNER
There was a time when I thought that if I could have anything in Fiction Interna
tional, Id be happy. Id make a pact with God. It seemed like one of these unattain
able things, to be in there with Raymond Federman or Russell Edsonremember how
he wrote those gnomic little paragraphs?and Gilbert Sorrentino, Ronald Sukenick.
Those guys.
INTERVIEWER
Thats a whole world. Or a few worlds.
LEYNER
I thought, Ah, wouldnt it be nice someday to get a nod from these guys?
INTERVIEWER
There are many moments like that when youre young and starting out.
LEYNER
When I started this book, The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, I was feeling very much bac
k in that time. I had no idea what interest there would be in a book of mine, or
if thered be some hostility to me, or if I could even do this.
INTERVIEWER
Was that invigorating?
LEYNER
It was fantastic. This last book is a very pure, very true example of my work at
its most forceful. And what the work also means to me as a person. I backed mys
elf into this corner, from which I then felt comfortable fighting myself out. Di
d I tell you this story about the giant cockroach in Jamaica?
INTERVIEWER
I dont think so.
LEYNER
When I was at Brandeis, I met this girl named Rachel Horowitz, and we really lov
ed reggae music. This was in 1970. We decided, Why dont we go to Jamaica? So we w
ent and we got some really nifty little bungalow place in Montego Bayvery cheap,
because we couldnt afford much then. And it had a little pool for the couple of b
ungalows and a little kitchen. And Id never really stayed in place like this on m
y own, with a girlfriend. I mean, nothing quite like that. I had been away the y
ear before with another girl, took a trip to Israel and in Europe and things, bu
t Id never been in a groovy tropical place like this. And we had a car, so one da
y we drove into town and got some stuff, because we had a refrigerator and a pan
try. We also got some Red Stripe. And this guy at Brandeis had given me some aci
d to bring to Jamaica. This guy was like the Johnny Appleseed of acid. He would
take a load of acid and explain an album cover to you for just hours. He would t
ake a Hot Tuna album that you had seen a trillion times and he would begin to ex
amine it with these long lectures that were like Fidel Castro giving a lecture a
t the Sorbonne. He also once set his hand on fire and watched it for quite a whi
le because he was so high. That really impressed me. Anyway, this guy had given
me some acid and one night, when Rachel and I were just hanging out in the hotel
, I said, You wanna take some? She said no. I said, Okay, I think Im going to. So
I took it, and it comes on, and then I want a beer and I go into the little kit
chen, and by now the acids full on and this guy, this big flying cockroach, like
a palmetto bugyou know those things?it crawls out of the six pack, and to me, at t
he time, it was like a pterodactyl, in some Raquel Welch movie set in prehistori
c times. According to Rachel, I batted this thing in the little kitchen for, lik
e, five hours. She heard pans and things breaking and she said I emerged with a
torn shirt, sweatyand victorious. Thats what my experience of writing The Sugar Fr
osted Nutsack was like. Battling this pterodactyl in the closet with a pan. At a
certain point, of course, the book attained a mind of its own, a subjectivity o
r an autocatalytic machinelike quality.
INTERVIEWER
Then you just have to feed it.
LEYNER
Yeah, but dont get your arm caught! Because itll take it right off.
INTERVIEWER
Itll eat anything.
LEYNER
As I was saying, before the book was really underway, it felt like being back in
the day, like being young. Me against the world. Because when I started the boo
k I was at wits end. My back was against the wall. I needed to use my purest and
most deadly kung fu.
INTERVIEWER
Your secret style. It seems like you experienced a different literary culture ba
ck when your earlier books were coming out.
LEYNER
When My Cousin and Et Tu, Babe came out, I was on Letterman. I read from one of
my books on Conan. I almost lost my place, thinking, How fucking great is this?
Youre reading from one of your books on television. But I would also think, Why d
id I ever even want this? Id just rather be home. We wouldnt do what we do if we l
oved being with people. We like to be by ourselves.
INTERVIEWER
Ive always said I became a writer so that I wouldnt have to speak to people in per
son.
LEYNER
Exactly. But you teach now.
INTERVIEWER
I teach, yes. Did you ever do any teaching?
LEYNER
Very little. I did it in graduate school because I had a teaching fellowship. Wh
en I first moved to Hoboken, I was an adjunct at Brooklyn College. Students love
me the first time around, because Im entertaining, but then they get wise to me.
I dont really have any interest in reading their stuff. I did this thing for a w
hile in Toronto, where they put us up in a really nice hotel and paid for everyt
hing, and then paid us a bunch of money. I would just have students read what th
ey wrote, out loud in class, which I thought was brilliant because then I didnt h
ave to actually read it in the hotel. People seem okay with that kind of thing f
or a while. But ultimately they turn on me.
INTERVIEWER
Complaints?
LEYNER
They turn on me. I have to leave town in the middle of the night, or theyll strin
g me up by my feet like Mussolini.
INTERVIEWER
Tie you up with your mistress.
LEYNER
Exactly. I have multilevel affinities with Mussolini, actuallyfear of being run o
ut of town with my mistress and being strung up by my feet.
INTERVIEWER
Recently I saw the movie War, Inc., which you cowrote. In the first few minutes
John Cusack says he feels like a character from a Cline novel. Was that your line?
LEYNER
Thats something Cusack might have improvised. I think Cusack and I had a conversa
tion once about Cline. It always surprises people that some artist they like is a
Fascist. Its always unpleasant news you have to deliver to somebody. And I think
I had to tell him.
INTERVIEWER
Sorry, man.
LEYNER
I think you should sit down. But waitdoesnt that line also mention The Island of Dr.
Moreau? It does. I remember. I think that must be me. If not, its a Leyner plagi
arist.
INTERVIEWER
There were a lot of projects that never got made, right?
LEYNER
There was this one thing, about a guy sort of based on John Lydon, Johnny Rotten
, only he was a virtuoso surgeon who did his surgeries in an actual theater, tra
nsposing the idea of a medical theater into a real theater. It was called Iggy V
ile M.D. That was the first script I wrote. MTV bought it and made a pilot, then
it sort of died. Although one of the executives at MTV said it was the most rev
olting thing hed ever seen.
INTERVIEWER
Do you have a copy?
LEYNER
Yeah. And actually, its not that revolting. It was just prescient in its revoltin
gness. It had a great scene, which Im still proud of. Theres a club or restaurant
that Iggy Vile would go to, and at the club theres a ring, and two martial arts g
uys fight, and then the loser is slaughtered and served. Thats the fare of the re
staurant. And thats where Iggy Vile would go. Hes there with a friend, drinking an
d talking, and a woman, a fat woman, comes up and says, Youre Iggy Vile, the great
surgeon! Iggy Vile, M.D. And he says, Fuck off, Im drinking with my mate here. And
she comes back and says, Oh please, please, Iggy, Ive spent my whole adult life tr
ying to slim down in every possible way. Ive done the grapefruit diet and the Bev
erly Hills Diet, and Ive had the gastric surgery and staples and nothings worked.
Youre the last hope for me. And she bothers him until finally he turns her around
and bends her over, and he takes a straw from his friends drink, and he jabs it i
nto her ass, and he sucks the fat out of her, and he spits it into a pitcher in
the middle of the table. And we made the stuff! We made the stuff that looked li
ke fat! Its pretty wonderful to watch. Thats the scene I admire. I take a certain
amount of childlike sadistic pleasure in thinking Ive caused all of these people
to spend their time and money making a thing like that. Its like de Sade in priso
n getting all the other inmates to perform his plays.
INTERVIEWER
That might be the real seduction in film and television. But I wanted to ask you
about literary influences.
LEYNER
I used to have this little pen. It was a Yankees penI was a Yankees fanatic as a
little boyand I had a game I would play endlessly in my room. My right hand was t
he pitcherI used it to flick a marbleand my left hand was the batter. And I would
announce the whole game. Three batters an inning, both sides, it could take two
hours. And Id do this little thing at the beginning of the game where Id talk abou
t injuries and what to expect and how people are feeling. Id do the whole thing m
yself, for my own delectation. I think these are the things that are the precurs
ors to writing. People ask, What writers inspired you? But it happens deeper and
earlier than that. The important things antecede reading. Growing up in houses
where, at dinner, people are asked, Do you have any good stories? And people tra
de elaborate jokes back and forth. Thats the world I come from.
For a while, I would decapitate my sisters dolls. That was a little French Revolu
tion period. Im still in that period.
INTERVIEWER
So you dont have any influences?
LEYNER
I have some. What was that stuff that Dennis Hopper would inhale in Blue Velvet?
Amyl nitrite? If I need something like the literary equivalent of poppers it te
nds to be Wallace Stevens. I started with poetrya concentrated, brilliantly titra
ted dose of very compressed language.
INTERVIEWER
What were you writing before I Smell Esther Williamsstraight narrative stuff, or
poetry?
LEYNER
I wrote poems. I dont think I could recover from the embarrassment of reading tho
se. And then I wrote a column for my high-school paper that was a half-fictional
ized, half-journalistic, fragmented account of what my friends and I would do. I
had an interest thenI still do, you can see it in almost everything Ive writtenin
what happens if you use certain forms from public discourse in the world of inti
macy, or intimate discourse in public. When I was in junior high school, I would
read these big interviews in Rolling Stone. They would always be called The Pete
Townshend Interview or The Keith Richards Interview. I used to think, What if you
just picked someone, some kid in high school, and did a massive interview with h
im, just about things in his life? Today, because of reality TV, that doesnt seem
so mind-boggling. But it was an interesting idea then, and one that Ive played w
ith. Et Tu, Babe is really just an involuted elaboration of that idea.
INTERVIEWER
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack strikes me as different from your earlier books. While
it certainly partakes of pop-cultural allusions and the like, it doesnt play as
fast and loose with them as earlier works do. It seems more interested in accrui
ng its own distinct set of resonances with the constant recursion of its storyte
lling. Its not that you are avoiding naming the things and the brands of the worl
d, so much as you dont seem as concerned about precisely which associations we ca
n all agree on.
LEYNER
When I started writing this book, I realized that, for the first time, I was goi
ng to have to forget the notion of a consensual canon of imagery and allusion an
d citations. Instead, I was going to just write the book using what I use and no
t worry about it.
INTERVIEWER
What happened in the culture in those fourteen years between Tetherballs and Nut
sack?
LEYNER
A couple of things. When I first started publishing my work, I had a very defini
te feeling of surfing the zeitgeist, of being fluent in all the prevailing memes
. This might have been completely delusory, but its how I feltthat I was, in some
very essential way, plugged into the culture. And it also seemed to me a time wh
en people my age, people in my grade, as we used to say, had ascended to significa
nt positions at magazines and publishing houses. So I felt as if there were a ve
ry specific and kindred and somewhat influential audience out there for me. And
this audience and I were very much in sync. These were people whod watched the sa
me TV shows as I did as a kid, read the same comics, listened to the same music.
There were all of these shared allusions and references I felt I could count on
. But this audience has become more diffuse as we all age, and various strata of
younger people enter into the mix. More to the point, the culture has become ba
lkanized, so theres no possibility of surfing the zeitgeist because there is no o
ne zeitgeist, theres a plurality of zeitgeists. Theres no real question now of cul
tural fluencythat notion seems completely quaint and archaic today. So my feeling
s about writing from some privileged cultural perspective for an identifi- able,
kindred, and optimally receptive audience have changed completely. Now I feel l
ike a completely alienated and marginalized person who traffics in some form of
discredited esoterica. But Im much happier!
Theres another issue people sometimes bring up with me, which is the ascendance o
f the Internet and how somehow I was prescient about the phenomenon of Google, h
ypertext, and so on. The idea being that the kinds of radical tangentiality and
manic eclecticism that you could say characterize my style are now available to an
yone who goes online, that anyone can now cobble together a lyrical sentence com
prising references to Jivaro tribesmen, stigmata, male lactation, Julius Evola,
the hair-plucking ceremonies of Jain nuns, Don Kirshners Rock Concert, or what ha
ve you. I have my doubts about all this. Ive always been after a methodology that
was about evading my own taste and escaping from my own predilections and culti
vating mutations and maximizing accidents. The search engine, it seems to me, is
all about goal-orientated efficiency, rote procedures, and the reinforcement of
habit. I would much rather depend on the serendipity offered by the chance phys
ical proximity of disparate volumes in an old library, of basically lurching in
the dark. Its all about getting lost for me. Efficacy is the mortal enemy of my s
tyle.
INTERVIEWER
So you dont think the worlds become Leynerized?
LEYNER
Were living in a world in which were all surveilled, targeted, herded, and indoctr
inated to an unprecedented degree. Our fallen, debased state is ghastly. Our bod
ies have been transformed into profit-optimized enterprise zones, our minds have
been hacked and neutered, our social milieus have been completely leached of au
thenticity. Leynerized? I fucking hope not.
INTERVIEWER
I take it youre not delighted with the state of things.
LEYNER
Bro, were living in the Kali Yuga, a Dark Age of petite bourgeoisie ideology, a p
etite bourgeoisie ideology whose resources and ruses are infinite and which ubiq
uitously permeates the worldhigh culture, low culture, bienpensant media, prestig
e literature, pop music, commerce, sports, academia, you name it. The only reaso
nable response to this situation is to maintain an implacable antipathy toward e
verything. Denounce everyone. Make war against yourself. Guillotine all grovelin
g intellectuals. That said, I think its important to maintain a cheery dispositio
n. This will hasten the restoration of Paradise. Ive memorized this line from And
r Bretons magnificent homage to Antonin ArtaudI salute Antonin Artaud for his passio
nate, heroic negation of everything that causes us to be dead while alive. Given
the state of things, thats what we need to be doing, all the timenegating everythi
ng that causes us to be dead while alive.
INTERVIEWER
What about the stuff that just causes us to be dead?
LEYNER
Exactly. The Sugar Frosted Nutsack is the only book where I thoroughly integrate
a personal crisis and an aesthetic crisis. On the one hand, there are the socie
tal catastrophes I just mentioned, and, on the other, the stuff Ive been undergoi
ng in my own life. Just getting older, health things, losing people you love.
INTERVIEWER
My grandfather always told me, Dont get old.
LEYNER
Because it aint good. But then, superimposed and grafted onto that stuff is my en
ormous trepidation about what audience there might be for what Im doing, what my
relationship to that audience might be, and who I am as a writer.
A certain kind of writer will say, I needed to discover the narrative voice of t
his book before I could do anything. My problem was prior to that. I felt like I
had to discover, invent, concoct, configure the writer.
INTERVIEWER
Your earlier books have a certain amount of swagger. If you tried to simulate it
now, I dont think it would work in quite the same way.
LEYNER
My memory of writing those earlier books was not that theyd been effortless but t
hat I could do no wrong. I had such a feel for the sort of line I was writingwhat
ever the sensibility was that was producing that language. It was very sensitive
and impeccable. Or you can think its a lot of dreck. But I had a feeling that I
was producing an impeccable version of that dreck, whatever it was. And I didnt f
eel that way going into this book. Its not that I had lost it, as an athlete would
say.
INTERVIEWER
Youre a different person.
LEYNER
Im a different person. And it meant I had to jettison some things that once seeme
d fundamental to me. The whole stage-diving thing I used to do. I used to say to
people, Were all in this together. Im making books out of a consensual world. Whe
reas Nutsack comes from an isolated, alienated place. This is something I probab
ly would have bristled at years ago, but I think it gives this book a kind of hu
manity that wasnt in anything else Id written.
WAITER/p>
How is everything, guys?
LEYNER
I think were good.
INTERVIEWER
What about the influence of your family?
LEYNER
One of my grandmothers was a great book lover and an enormous admirer, in sort o
f a religious way, of writers. She also did a great impression from the movie Pr
ide of the Marines. John Garfield is in it. This is one of those funny things th
at haunted me thats part of the store of haunting things I constantly reach for w
hen I think Ive nothing to type. Theres a scene in the movie where the Marines are
fighting the Japanese, and theyre hunkered down in some jungle, and theres a woma
ns voice, I dont know if it was Tokyo Rose or an actual flesh-and-blood woman some
where near them. Shed say, Marines, tonight you die. Marines, tonight you die. My g
randmother could do a great impersonation of that woman, and sometimes shed be fe
eding me oatmeal in the morning or putting me to bed, and Id say, Nanna, do the t
onight-you-die thing, and shed do it for me. Id fall asleep to her beautiful littl
e voice, Marines, tonight you die. Oh thanks, Nanna. Then, Id just fall off to slee
p.
INTERVIEWER
That could be at the core of everything. Were there other family members who fir
ed your imagination that way?
LEYNER
Each and every one. Both of my grandfathers were dandies. One of them had gone t
o law school but was a kind of entrepreneur. He was always very well dressed. Ev
en when he was casual, he would wear a polo shirt with a very nice jacket and sl
acks, as you called nice pants. He had a cane hed walk with sometimes. Like Bat M
asterson, I thought. My other grandfather, for a lot of my childhood, had a mens
clothing store in Jersey City. It was called Rickys of Hollywood. Now, theres no R
icky in my family, and this was as far from Hollywood as you could possibly get.
If you ask me to list my progenitors, Rickys of Hollywood is more literarily pro
generative than literature to me. The patently absurd fiction-makingand no one ev
er questioned it! Because it was axiomatically brilliantthats a great name for a m
ens store in Jersey City, Rickys of Hollywood.
INTERVIEWER
Did that come from a need for reinvention?
LEYNER
I think the need for reinvention was an ongoing, ubiquitous maneuver on the part
of almost everyone in my family, because no man I knew was particularly interes
ted in recapitulating the shtetl life or any version of that. They wanted to be
successful American guys. That other grandfather, the lawyer, was a militant Ang
lophile. When I first started shaving, he was very curious about what blades I u
sed. He said the only kind of blades I should use were Wilkinson. He was like th
at about everything. Shoes had to be a special sort of English shoes. And he wou
ld rolls his rs. This was the time when you could get on the phone and talk to an
operator and ask for a certain exchange, which I think he just did to browbeat
other people. He would get on and he would say, Madame, Id like Henderson 3-3563.
This is just some Estonian guy who basically lived in Jersey City all his life.
Theres no geographical justification for any of this Anglophile r rolling at all
. So I loved it.
INTERVIEWER
Did your family have literary opinions?
LEYNER
My parents were aware of things like the Beats and writers like Burroughs and He
nry Miller. I think my grandparents were proud that I had a column in the school
paper and that I was writing poetry. I had a poem published in Rolling Stone wh
en I was eighteen. It was a poem about Tina Turner.
INTERVIEWER
You published a poem about Tina Turner in Rolling Stone?
LEYNER
What I wrote would have been fairly inconsequential to my grandparents, but they
were very proud of me. Still, they didnt think that writing was a particularly g
ood life, and they turned out to be right. They were right. I never had any prac
tical, vocational aspirations. They were only obsessional. I wanted to be a Beat
le. I wanted to be a baseball player. That was really the main one. For many yea
rs, Id come home from school and get my baseball glove and a tennis ball. At this
point, we lived in West Orange, so we had a driveway, and the garage door was s
ectioned off into squares. Lets say there were nine squares. The middle square wo
uld be the strike zone. I would pitch until it was dark. I would eat dinner and
then come out and do it more, always with this chatter in my head of the game, b
ut it got more and more complicated. I would start pitching a game, and a story
would emerge of whomever I was being.
Ive always had a very fluid, multiple sense of who I am. It never felt like a cle
arly unitary person was in charge. Its not completely up for grabs. I have some c
ontrol over it.
INTERVIEWER
And is there a particular sense of who you are that you require to write?
LEYNER
Feeling beleaguered and heretical and persecuted and embattled is where Im comfor
table starting.
INTERVIEWER
Your work certainly makes fun of some sacred cows, but it makes people uncomfort
able also because it dismantles certain clichs concerning literature, how books s
hould be approached, how we ought to talk about novels.
LEYNER
Im really after keeping the reader in a heightened state of vigilance, like some
kind of animal in a field who senses a hawk, where all the senses are really key
ed, most hyperacute, because I think thats a condition that will make that reader
mostI was going to say vulnerable, but again thats just my fascistic, aggressive
personalitymost wonderfully susceptible to what Im going to do. Thats what I want a
s a reader, or watching a movie or hearing music. Now, it seems to me the best w
ay to do this is to ensure that the reader doesnt know quite what theyre confronti
ng.
INTERVIEWER
You mean, you dont want to write prose thats not full-on
LEYNER
Thats not full-on, full-on . . . I was going to use my name but thats horrible. Fu
ll-on Leyner. Leyner stuff.
INTERVIEWER
You write a lot of Leyner stuff.
LEYNER
If you look over my work, over my lifetime, theres a lot of Leyner there. You kno
w that movie where Keith Richards is making a Chuck Berry birthday concert, Hail
! Hail! Rock n Roll? Theres actually this funny story that Bruce Springsteen tells.
Springsteens one of these guys, kind of like Jonathan Franzen, that normally you
think wouldnt be that funny. Feel however you feel about that. But Springsteen t
ells this story about how Chuck Berry travels around and will just show up at a
venue expecting that therell be a backing band for him. He doesnt have one of his
own. He just has his guitar, he goes to the place, he gets his check firstwhich h
e said was keyand so Chuck Berry arrives in College Park, Maryland, and Springste
en, who I guess was head honcho of the few guys who were the backup band, says t
o him, Chuck, man, what are we playing tonight? And Chuck says, Chuck Berry song
s.
I just want to write Mark Leyner books, you know?
INTERVIEWER
Heres one. [Shows Leyner an old copy of My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist.] Nice a
uthor photo.
LEYNER
Look at that, before the ravages of modern life.
INTERVIEWER
You still look younger than your age. Youre one of those people.
LEYNER
Yeah, but Ill just drop dead suddenly. And theyre going to say, But he looked grea
t!
INTERVIEWER
Great blurbs, too. Theres a fantastic one from David Foster WallaceMy Cousin, My Ga
stroenterologist will blow away your expectation of what late-model literature h
as to be. Unified by obsessions too eerie not to be real, this gorgeous rearrang
ement of our centurys mental furniture is testimony to a new talent of Burroughs/
Coover/Acker scale.
LEYNER
Oh, look! If you hadnt shown me that I wouldnt have remembered that he did that.
INTERVIEWER
Later, in E Unibus Pluram, he wrote at length about My Cousin, My Gastroenterologi
st. He quoted you extensively and, it seemed, with grudging admiration, but emer
ged with the verdict that your work was amazing but forgettable, calling the book ext
remely witty, erudite, extremely high-quality prose television. I heard he apolog
ized for what he wrote in the essay.
LEYNER
He apologized, but not for the essay. David wanted to have a kind of epistolary
exchange about these issues, about the objections he had to what I was writing.
And I didnt. I demurred. I said I would rather just do my work. This was an amica
ble conversation. I just told him that thismy writingwas the most precise and thor
ough way I could respond to him. And he sort of accepted that, I think. What he
apologized for was calling me the Antichrist [laughs]. In the Times Magazine.
INTERVIEWER
But what about all the stuff he says in the essay?
LEYNER
Well, I dont know. Hes not here to ask. When he apologized for the Antichrist thin
g, I said, Dont be silly. When the day comes that I mind being called the Antichr
ist, Ill pack it up.
INTERVIEWER
And yet you claim youre the best father in the world. I remember that someone onc
e asked me, Do you think having kids will change your writing? And I said, Boy I
hope so. Mostly because if it didnt then what kind of desensitized human am I?
WAITRESS
You guys need a dessert menu or anything?
LEYNER
No.
INTERVIEWER
Im okay.
LEYNER
I would say it invariably makes you a more generous person when you have a child
. Whom you love in a way that youve never experienced before. That changes you, o
r distills, magnifies whatever is dormant in you thats loving. To what degree tha
t changes your work I dont know.
INTERVIEWER
I dont know, either. There was some kind of shift, from feeling only like a son t
o this other thing.
LEYNER
Yes, but I would saynot that youre asking such a dumbass, simplistic question
INTERVIEWER
I didnt ask a question!
LEYNER
Listen, you havent asked one single dumbass, simplistic question this entire lunc
h. I would say that getting older has probably been the more significant thing t
han having a kid. Having a kid in a way feels like what all the other kids are d
oing. Everybodys having kids. And you love this person more than you could have t
hought you could love anything. But you have loved things before, its not a compl
etely alien feeling. There are other things that happen to you as you get older
that are stunning, that shake you up. All the rude, shuddering intimations of mo
rtality. Seeing people get sick, dealing with certain kinds of illnesses or acci
dents, or just the tension of being a certain age and being wary about the resul
ts of tests, and your parents getting much older, and naturally losing friends t
o vari- ous things along the way. I think the impact of those things appears in
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack. I think, for the first time in my books, a certain ra
nge of common human tribulations appears. In a very honest way, for the first ti
me.
INTERVIEWER
I would agree with that.
LEYNER
Having a kid was a wonderful thing, and it does make you feel like an adult. I t
hought when I was younger that fucking would make me feel like an adult. And it
did, to a degree. But not really. And having a child does. Youve then done someth
ing, pretty much everything, that your parents have done. They dont have anything
on you. Thats what you think, but then they do. Which is getting older and facin
g death. I mean, Im not a man of honor yet. I havent faced my own death yet with t
hat proximity. But those things begin to seep into yournot seep, really, just kin
d of rupture your life, and they do affect your work as an artist. How old are y
ou?
INTERVIEWER
Im forty-four.
LEYNER
So, what ... oh, I was going to ask you a question. What are you thinking?
INTERVIEWER
What am I thinking? I was waiting for your question.
LEYNER
We were like family for a minute there. It was like, I wonder what hes thinking.
INTERVIEWER
Whats up with him?
LEYNER
I wonder whats up with this guy.
INTERVIEWER
I cant take it when he does this.
LEYNER
I was just talking.
INTERVIEWER
Thats all he does, he just does that.
LEYNER
He just sits there, doing that. What does he expect me to do? And then he gets m
ad when I ask him, Whats up with you?
INTERVIEWER
Being a father, did that affect your decision to write for Hollywood?
LEYNER
I was trying to make money. Whenever I went to Los Angeles, Id feel like one of t
hese guys who has to go work on one of those deep-sea things so he can send mone
y back. I missed my family terribly. I still miss Gaby. Shes eighteen now. And wh
en she was a little girl I really didnt like being away. But when Im gone I want h
er to have that feeling like John Gottis daughter, who said, My father is the last
of the Mohicans. When John Gottis daughter said that, I said, You know, Gabsthats h
ow I want you to feel about me. Theres nothing like having a daughter, to love ev
erything you do. The way I behave, the way I maneuver myself in the world, I thi
nk Gaby sees it as unique. And it is.
But this leads back into the question of why I havent done things that would have
been easier, like teaching, because it hasnt been easy for me with money. Writin
g the sort of work that I write, its been hard to make a living.
INTERVIEWER
No, you cant expect to make a living that way.
LEYNER
Ive been protected in a lot of ways by some kind of navet, but its complicated.
INTERVIEWER
This goes back to the luftmensch/tough-guy divide.
LEYNER
The interview is over, and I feel as if weve just started. We should try some dif
ferent ways of doing this. We can just go to a quiet place sometime. We can go o
ut and drink drinks. Or whatever else you like to do. We can do that. You can gi
ve me different drugs.
INTERVIEWER
I have no hobbies, so . . .
LEYNER
Give me sodium pentothal.
INTERVIEWER
Tie you down.
LEYNER
Waterboard me. You know, youre funny. I read that recent story. Your shit is funn
y. Here, turn that off, I was going to say
INTERVIEWER
I want to record your praise.
LEYNER
No, you [Leyner reaches across table, turns off tape recorder.]
[There were plans for another in-person session, but certain events, including H
urricane Sandy, which hit Hoboken particularly hard, interrupted them. The inter
view was concluded by e-mail.]
INTERVIEWER
I take it the Mussolini idea is no longer a go. What happened?
LEYNER
First of all, I think I was really enamored of the whole breakfast thing, meetin
g Michael Pietsch for breakfast at a swanky, corporate place near Grand Central
Station. It was so totally incongruous for me, because I really do live in my ow
n little world and wander around my house like some Indian sadhu in a wifebeater
and plaid sweat pants, so a breakfast meeting, a power meeting near Grand Central
Station to decide the subject matter of one of my books, just seemed so wonderful
, so ludicrously uncharacteristic of how I actually go about things, that I was
entranced by the whole process for a little while. And Michaels a dear friend and
there was some genuine validity to the idea. And I did, for quite a while, wall
ow in all sorts of Fascist material and make notes, which I added to the mass of
notes that Im always accumulating, which becomes this great festering heap, like
some vast garbage dump on the outskirts of Lagos. Anyway, Ive always been fascin
ated by this image of standing on a balcony, gesticulating, and spellbinding a c
rowd in the piazza below. Ive really coveted this image of myself since I was a l
ittle boy. Its an abiding fantasy of mine. So I started out being manically enthu
si- astic about the book and e-mailing people about it and talking it up at bars
, et cetera. Then, as is invariable, I started to sour on it with equal fervor.
It began to feel too facile, like a sort of one-note pater le bourgeois. And it w
ould involve a considerable political contortion on my part because my animating
political impulse is a pure, murderous, Jacobin hatred of aristocrats. I really
think that the apogee of political rhetoric was Robespierre and Saint-Just. The
Mussolini book was simply too constraining, it made me feel claustrophobic, it
was insufficiently carnivalesque. And my shit has to be sufficiently carnivalesq
ue. I needed that balcony to somehow detach itself from the building and rise ov
er the piazza and then zoom off to parts unknown. I had a sense of the kinetics
of a new book. I wanted something that would hurtle the reader forward or barrag
e the reader with such a torrent of language that thered be the sensation of hurt
ling forward, even though the reader is, of course, perfectly sedentary. If youre
a real artist (and not just some sycophantic careerist), your writing should be
at all times a phenomenology of reading. Writing is, literally, brain surgery.
It helps me a lot to think of my readers as shaved, intubated, and catheterized.
Anyway, writing a new book involves a whole series of difficult decisions for m
e. Whos writing it, first of all? I have to invent the writer of the book anew ea
ch time. Not the narrator. The writer. This machine needs to be engineered, some
thing that, with all its alien hydraulics and algorithms, can think itself into
existence. It needs to mangle me like a piece of farm machinery. It eats me aliv
e. Im a lump in the snake. I love doing this more than anything in the world, but
its a sort of ghastly war waged against myself. This is how its done: I bring mys
elf to a pitch of crisis and hysteria, then perfect clarity and resolve about ho
w to proceed, which is accompanied by the most exquisite euphoria and grandiosit
y, and which is then almost immediately followed by total abject disillusionment
and self-loathing. And then its on to the next sentence! So the ideal book is an
index of this whole tumultuous illness, this whole garish nightmare of being di
gested by a machine and then excreted on the side of the highway. So, I abandone
d the Mussolini idea and renounced it at bars, et cetera, and then one Sunday mo
rning I had an epiphany (actually an epiphany which was long in gestation) and I
decided to write Gone with the Mind. Gone with the Mind is my autobiography in
the form of a first-person-shooter gamewell, a sort of hybrid of a first-person-s
hooter game, racing game, and flight simulation. Because the reader-player is hu
rtling back through my life as he simultaneously hurtles forward in his, hes buff
eted by temporal trajectories coming from every possible direction. It reminds m
e a bit of that climactic scene in Throne of Blood where Toshiro Mifune is impal
ed by a shitstorm of arrows, except that in Gone with the Mind, youre traversed b
y vectors of time.
The true identity of a book remains incognito to me for a long, long while. So w
ho knows what this will eventually be? Perhaps it will go backward, begining at
that breakfast meeting with Pietsch and culminate in utero. Youll have to blast y
our way back into my mothers womb. Perhaps along the way an incarnation of Mussol
ini will appear after all. I guarantee that the book (the game) will be mined wi
th leaking implants and secret cysts that confer power. And I think I understand
the meaning of the title at least. It means that, borne aloft on my mind, Ive lef
t the building. Gone fishing. That Im out of here. And it may turn out to mean that by
the inversion of a single lettersimply by turning one letter upside-down!a 1939 h
istorical epic starring Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh can be transformed into the
story of a little demagogue on a flying balcony.
INTERVIEWER
Last question. At lunch you talked about music with an immersive, unmodulated int
ensity that inspired you as a writer. What music were you referring to?
LEYNER
Off the top of my head: the Rolling Stones version of Around and Around from 12 x 5
, Led Zeppelins Black Dog, that amazing Junior Walker song Shotgun. Ill always remembe
r a particular night in Waltham, Massachusetts, in this little house I lived in
with my girlfriend and a couple of other people during my senior year in college
, pretty high on weed, so enthralled the first time I seriously heard Thelonious
Monk, and then again the first time I saw a video of him playingthe way he hit t
he keys, the attitude of his body, that whole arcane, sorcerers dance. Or we coul
d even be talking about a moment when I was just driving around some mall parkin
g lot and Lou Christies Lightnin Strikes came on the radio. Lightnin Strikes is a ter
fic example, actually, because its insanely modulated!
Really, in a certain crucial sense, I was undiscerning. I was always more intere
sted in the impact of the total sound as opposed to particular instruments or me
lody or vocals or solos. And pretty much indifferent to something like virtuosit
y. I was inspired by music that was about the impact of its gestalt, as they say
. As I got older, I started deliberately seeking out music that had that quality
for meFletcher Henderson, Charles Ives, Moroccan music like the Master Musicians
of Jajouka. I took out albums from the librarycomposers like Karlheinz Stockhaus
en, La Monte Young, Cecil Taylor. And of course, I was very enthusiastic about p
unkthe Sex Pistols, the Voidoids, Mars, DNA, all the New York noise and no-wave s
tuff, and people like John Cale and Glenn Branca. Ive always been a huge My Blood
y Valentine fan, a huge Sonic Youth fan. And I definitely still have a strong pr
edilection for this whole immersive, total-impact thing. I love hip-hop for the
same reasonthe amalgamated sound of it, the sum torque of that sound. Im really ke
en on Sunn O))) and the Japanese band Boris, and all the original Norwegian blac
k metal, like Burzum and Darkthrone and Mayhem. I love this doom-metal band from
Florida called Dark Castle. Ive been into Indian classical music lately and Paki
stani Sufi musicAbida Parveen, Saieen Zahoor.
Heres something funny, though. Last night, I was listening to the Beatles song You
Cant Do That and it brought tears to my eyes. I mean, big fat tears rolling down
my cheeks. Because I have (and have always had) this helpless, completely homoer
otic affinity for the voices of John and Paul. Maybe its not such a tangent from
what Ive been talking about. Its the unified quality of that sound that gets to me
. Their voices evoke for me this ever-receding paradise, the impossibility of ho
lding on to things you love most, the evanescence of everything, all thatand its j
ust heartbreakingly beautiful. I remember how people used to bitch about those c
razy tapes of the Beatles at Shea Stadium, about how you couldnt hear the music,
that all you could hear was the screaming, the screaming of all those thousands
of girls. But Ive always loved that din especiallythat vast, unrelenting din of sc
reaming girls that almost completely overwhelms the sad, beautiful voices of Joh
n and Paul. Thats great. That whole thing for me is the real music.
Joan Didion, The Art of Nonfiction No. 1
Interviewed by Hilton Als
PRINT | TWITTER | FACEBOOK | More |View a manuscript page
The last time this magazine spoke with Joan Didion, in August of 1977, she was l
iving in California and had just published her third novel, A Book of Common Pra
yer. Didion was forty-two years old and well-known not only for her fiction but
also for her work in magazinesreviews, reportage, and essayssome of which had been
collected in Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968). In addition, Didion and her hu
sband, John Gregory Dunne (who was himself the subject of a Paris Review intervi
ew in 1996), had written a number of screenplays together, including The Panic i
n Needle Park (1971); an adaptation of her second novel, Play It As It Lays (197
2); and A Star Is Born (1976). When Didions first interview appeared in these pag
es in 1978, she was intent on exploring her gift for fiction and nonfiction. Sin
ce then, her breadth and craft as a writer have only grown deeper with each proj
ect.
Joan Didion was born in Sacramento, and both her parents, too, were native Calif
ornians. She studied English at Berkeley, and in 1956, after graduating, she won
an essay contest sponsored by Vogue and moved to New York City to join the maga
zines editorial staff. While at Vogue, she wrote fashion copy, as well as book an
d movie reviews. She also became a frequent contributor to The National Review,
among other publications. In 1963, Didion published her first novel, Run River.
The next year she married Dunne, and soon afterwards, they moved to Los Angeles.
There, in 1965, they adopted their only child, Quintana Roo.
In 1973, Didion began writing for The New York Review of Books, where she has re
mained a regular contributor. While she has continued to write novels in recent
decadesDemocracy (1984) and The Last Thing He Wanted (1996)she has increasingly ex
plored different forms of nonfiction: critical essay, political reportage, memoi
r. In 1979, she published a second collection of her magazine work, The White Al
bum, which was followed by Salvador (1983), Miami (1987), After Henry (1992), Po
litical Fictions (2001), and Where I Was From (2003). In the spring of 2005, Did
ion was awarded a Gold Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
In December of 2003, shortly before their fortieth anniversary, Didions husband d
ied. Last fall, she published The Year of Magical Thinking, a book-length medita
tion on grief and memory. It became a best-seller, and won the National Book Awa
rd for nonfiction; Didion is now adapting the book for the stage as a monologue.
Two months before the books publication, Didions thirty-nine-year-old daughter di
ed after a long illness.
Our conversation took place over the course of two afternoons in the Manhattan a
partment Didion shared with her husband. On the walls of the spacious flat, one
could see many photographs of Didion, Dunne, and their daughter. Daylight floode
d the book-filled parlor. When we got the place, we assumed the sun went all thro
ugh the apartment. It doesnt, Didion said, laughing. Her laughter was the addition
al punctuation to her precise speech.

INTERVIEWER
By now youve written at least as much nonfiction as you have fiction. How would y
ou describe the difference between writing the one or the other?
JOAN DIDION
Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at
least the first half of the novel, and sometimes all the way through. The work p
rocess is totally different from writing nonfiction. You have to sit down every
day and make it up. You have no notesor sometimes you do, I made extensive notes
for A Book of Common Prayerbut the notes give you only the background, not the no
vel itself. In nonfiction the notes give you the piece. Writing nonfiction is mo
re like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing. Nov
els are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you
have to go with. Of course you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still t
here in the texture of the thing.
INTERVIEWER
Do you do a lot of rewriting?
DIDION
When Im working on a book, I constantly retype my own sentences. Every day I go b
ack to page one and just retype what I have. It gets me into a rhythm. Once I ge
t over maybe a hundred pages, I wont go back to page one, but I might go back to
page fifty-five, or twenty, even. But then every once in a while I feel the need
to go to page one again and start rewriting. At the end of the day, I mark up t
he pages Ive donepages or pageall the way back to page one. I mark them up so that
I can retype them in the morning. It gets me past that blank terror.
INTERVIEWER
Did you do that sort of retyping for The Year of Magical Thinking?
DIDION
I did. It was especially important with this book because so much of it depended
on echo. I wrote it in three months, but I marked it up every night.
INTERVIEWER
The book moves quickly. Did you think about how your readers would read it?
DIDION
Of course, you always think about how it will be read. I always aim for a readin
g in one sitting.
INTERVIEWER
At what point did you know that the notes you were writing in response to Johns d
eath would be a book for publication?
DIDION
John died December 30, 2003. Except for a few lines written a day or so after he
died, I didnt begin making the notes that became the book until the following Oc
tober. After a few days of making notes, I realized that I was thinking about ho
w to structure a book, which was the point at which I realized that I was writin
g one. This realization in no way changed what I was writing.
INTERVIEWER
Was it difficult to finish the book? Or were you happy to have your life backto l
ive with a lower level of self-scrutiny?
DIDION
Yes. It was difficult to finish the book. I didnt want to let John go. I dont real
ly have my life back yet, since Quintana died only on August 26.
INTERVIEWER
Since you write about yourself, interviewers tend to ask about your personal lif
e; I want to ask you about writing and books. In the past youve written pieces on
V. S. Naipaul, Graham Greene, Norman Mailer, and Ernest Hemingwaytitanic, contro
versial iconoclasts whom you tend to defend. Were these the writers you grew up
with and wanted to emulate?
DIDION
Hemingway was really early. I probably started reading him when I was just eleve
n or twelve. There was just something magnetic to me in the arrangement of those
sentences. Because they were so simpleor rather they appeared to be so simple, b
ut they werent.
Something I was looking up the other day, thats been in the back of my mind, is a
study done several years ago about young womens writing skills and the incidence
of Alzheimers. As it happens, the subjects were all nuns, because all of these w
omen had been trained in a certain convent. They found that those who wrote simp
le sentences as young women later had a higher incidence of Alzheimers, while tho
se who wrote complicated sentences with several clauses had a lower incidence of
Alzheimers. The assumptionwhich I thought was probably erroneouswas that those who
tended to write simple sentences as young women did not have strong memory skil
ls.
INTERVIEWER
Though you wouldnt classify Hemingways sentences as simple.
DIDION
No, theyre deceptively simple because he always brings a change in.
INTERVIEWER
Did you think you could write that kind of sentence? Did you want to try?
DIDION
I didnt think that I could do them, but I thought that I could learnbecause they f
elt so natural. I could see how they worked once I started typing them out. That
was when I was about fifteen. I would just type those stories. Its a great way t
o get rhythms into your head.
INTERVIEWER
Did you read anyone else before Hemingway?
DIDION
No one who attracted me in that way. I had been reading a lot of plays. I had a
misguided idea that I wanted to act. The form this took was not acting, however,
but reading plays. Sacramento was not a place where you saw a lot of plays. I t
hink the first play I ever saw was the Lunts in the touring company of O Mistres
s Mine. I dont think that thats what inspired me. The Theater Guild used to do pla
ys on the radio, and I remember being very excited about listening to them. I re
member memorizing speeches from Death of a Salesman and Member of the Wedding in
the period right after the war.
INTERVIEWER
Which playwrights did you read?
DIDION
I remember at one point going through everything of Eugene ONeills. I was struck b
y the sheer theatricality of his plays. You could see how they worked. I read th
em all one summer. I had nosebleeds, and for some reason it took all summer to g
et the appointment to get my nose cauterized. So I just lay still on the porch a
ll day and read Eugene ONeill. That was all I did. And dab at my face with an ice
cube.
INTERVIEWER
What you really seem to have responded to in these early influences was stylevoic
e and form.
DIDION
Yes, but another writer I read in high school who just knocked me out was Theodo
re Dreiser. I read An American Tragedy all in one weekend and couldnt put it downI
locked myself in my room. Now that was antithetical to every other book I was r
eading at the time because Dreiser really had no style, but it was powerful.
And one book I totally missed when I first read it was Moby-Dick. I reread it wh
en Quintana was assigned it in high school. It was clear that she wasnt going to
get through it unless we did little talks about it at dinner. I had not gotten i
t at all when I read it at her age. I had missed that wild control of language.
What I had thought discursive were really these great leaps. The book had just s
eemed a jumble; I didnt get the control ?in it.
INTERVIEWER
After high school you wanted to go to Stanford. Why?
DIDION
Its pretty straightforwardall my friends were going to Stanford.
INTERVIEWER
But you went to Berkeley and majored in literature. What were you reading there?
DIDION
The people I did the most work on were Henry James and D. H. Lawrence, who I was
not high on. He irritated me on almost every level.
INTERVIEWER
He didnt know anything about women at all.
DIDION
No, nothing. And the writing was so clotted and sentimental. It didnt work for me
on any level.
INTERVIEWER
Was he writing too quickly, do you think?
DIDION
I dont know, I think he just had a clotted and sentimental mind.
INTERVIEWER
You mentioned reading Moby-Dick. Do you do much rereading?
DIDION
I often reread Victory, which is maybe my favorite book in the world.
INTERVIEWER
Conrad? Really? Why?
DIDION
The story is told thirdhand. Its not a story the narrator even heard from someone
who experienced it. The narrator seems to have heard it from people he runs int
o around the Malacca Strait. So theres this fantastic distancing of the narrative
, except that when youre in the middle of it, it remains very immediate. Its incre
dibly skillful. I have never started a novelI mean except the first, when I was s
tarting a novel just to start a novelIve never written one without rereading Victo
ry. It opens up the possibilities of a novel. It makes it seem worth doing. In t
he same way, John and I always prepared for writing a movie by watching The Thir
d Man. Its perfectly told.
INTERVIEWER
Conrad was also a huge inspiration for Naipaul, whose work you admire. What drew
you to Naipaul?
DIDION
I read the nonfiction first. But the novel that really attracted meand I still re
ad the beginning of it now and thenis Guerillas. It has that bauxite factory in t
he opening pages, which just gives you the whole feel of that part of the world.
That was a thrilling book to me. The nonfiction had the same effect on me as re
ading Elizabeth Hardwickyou get the sense that its possible simply to go through l
ife noticing things and writing them down and that this is OK, its worth doing. T
hat the seemingly insignificant things that most of us spend our days noticing a
re really significant, have meaning, and tell us something. Naipaul is a great p
erson to read before you have to do a piece. And Edmund Wilson, his essays for T
he American Earthquake. They have that everyday-traveler-in-the-world aspect, wh
ich is the opposite of an authoritative tone.
INTERVIEWER
Was it as a student at Berkeley that you began to feel that you were ?a writer?
DIDION
No, it began to feel almost impossible at Berkeley because we were constantly be
ing impressed with the fact that everybody else had done it already and better.
It was very daunting to me. I didnt think I could write. It took me a couple of y
ears after I got out of Berkeley before I dared to start writing. That academic
mind-setwhich was kind of shallow in my case anywayhad begun to fade. Then I did w
rite a novel over a long period of time, Run River. And after that it seemed fea
sible that maybe I could write another one.
INTERVIEWER
You had come to New York by then and were working at Vogue, while writing at nig
ht. Did you see writing that novel as a way of being back in California?
DIDION
Yes, it was a way of not being homesick. But I had a really hard time getting th
e next book going. I couldnt get past a few notes. It was Play It As It Lays, but
it wasnt called thatI mean it didnt have a name and it wasnt what it is. For one, i
t was set in New York. Then, in June of 1964, John and I went to California and
I started doing pieces for The Saturday Evening Post. We needed the money becaus
e neither one of us was working. And during the course of doing these pieces I w
as out in the world enough that an actual story for this so-called second novel
presented itself, and then I started writing it.
INTERVIEWER
What had you been missing about California? What were you not getting in New Yor
k?
DIDION
Rivers. I was living on the East Side, and on the weekend Id walk over to the Hud
son and then Id walk back to the East River. I kept thinking, All right, they are
rivers, but they arent California rivers. I really missed California rivers. Als
o the sun going down in the West. Thats one of the big advantages to Columbia-Pre
sbyterian hospitalyou can see the sunset. Theres always something missing about la
te afternoon to me on the East Coast. Late afternoon on the West Coast ends with
the sky doing all its brilliant stuff. Here it just gets dark.
The other thing I missed was horizons. I missed that on the West Coast, too, if
we werent living at the beach, but I noticed at some point that practically every
painting or lithograph I bought had a horizon in it. Because its very soothing.
INTERVIEWER
Why did you decide to come back east in 1988?
DIDION
Part of it was that Quintana was in college here, at Barnard, and part of it was
that John was between books and having a hard time getting started on a new one
. He felt that it was making him stale to be in one place for a long time. We ha
d been living in Brentwood for ten years, which was longer than we had ever live
d in any one place. And I think he just thought it was time to move. I didnt part
icularly, but we left. Even before moving, we had a little apartment in New York
. To justify having it, John felt that we had to spend some periods of time ther
e, which was extremely inconvenient for me. The apartment in New York was not ve
ry comfortable, and on arrival you would always have to arrange to get the windo
ws washed and get food in?.?.?.?It was cheaper when we stayed at? the Carlyle.
INTERVIEWER
But when you finally moved to New York, was it a bad move?
DIDION
No, it was fine. It just took me about a year, maybe two years all told. The tim
e spent looking for an apartment, selling the house in California, the actual mo
ve, having work done, remembering where I put things when I unpackedit probably t
ook two years out of my effective working life. Though I feel that its been the r
ight place to be after John died. I would not have wanted to be in a house in Br
entwood Park after he died.
INTERVIEWER
Why not?
DIDION
For entirely logistical reasons. In New York I didnt need to drive to dinner. The
re wasnt likely to be a brush fire. I wasnt going to see a snake in the pool.
INTERVIEWER
You said that you started writing for The Saturday Evening Post because you and
John were broke. Is that where the idea of working for movies came fromthe need f
or cash?
DIDION
Yes it was. One of the things that had made us go to Los Angeles was we had a nu
tty idea that we could write for television. We had a bunch of meetings with tel
evision executives, and they would explain to us, for example, the principle of
Bonanza. The principle of Bonanza was: break a leg at the Ponderosa. I looked bl
ankly at the executive and he said, Somebody rides into town, and to make the st
ory work, hes got to break a leg so hes around for two weeks. So we never wrote fo
r Bonanza. We did, however, have one story idea picked up by Chrysler Theatre. W
e were paid a thousand dollars for it.
That was also why we started to write for the movies. We thought of it as a way
to buy time. But nobody was asking us to write movies. John and his brother Nick
and I took an option on The Panic in Needle Park and put it together ourselves.
I had read the book by James Mills and it just immediately said movie to me. I
think that the three of us each put in a thousand dollars, which was enormous at
the time.
INTERVIEWER
How did you make it work as a collaboration? What were the mechanics?
DIDION
On that one, my memory is that I wrote the treatment, which was just voices. Tho
ugh whenever I say I did something, or vice versa, the other person would go ove
r it, run it through the typewriter. It was always a back-and-forth thing.
INTERVIEWER
Did you learn anything about writing from the movie work?
DIDION
Yes. I learned a lot of fictional technique. Before Id written movies, I never co
uld do big set-piece scenes with a lot of different speakerswhen youve got twelve
people around a dinner table talking at cross purposes. I had always been impres
sed by other peoples ability to do that. Anthony Powell comes to mind. I think th
e first book I did those big scenes in was? A Book of Common Prayer.
INTERVIEWER
But screenwriting is very different from prose narrative.
DIDION
Its not writing. Youre making notes for the directorfor the director more than the
actors. Sidney Pollack once told us that every screenwriter should go to the Act
ors Studio because there was no better way to learn what an actor needed. Im guilt
y of not thinking enough about what actors need. I think instead about what the
director needs.
INTERVIEWER
John wrote that Robert De Niro asked you to write a scene in True Confessions wi
thout a single word of dialoguethe opposite of your treatment for The Panic in Ne
edle Park.
DIDION
Yeah, which is great. Its something that every writer understands, but if you tur
n in a scene like that to a producer, hes going to want to know where the words a
re.
INTERVIEWER
At the other end of the writing spectrum, theres The New York Review of Books and
your editor there, Robert Silvers. In the seventies you wrote for him about Hol
lywood, Woody Allen, Naipaul, and Patty Hearst. All of those essays were, broadl
y speaking, book reviews. How did you make the shift to pure reporting for the R
eview?
DIDION
In 1982, John and I were going to San Salvador, and Bob expressed interest in ha
ving one or both of us write something about it. After wed been there a few days,
it became clear that I was going to do it rather than John, because John was wo
rking on a novel. Then when I started writing it, it got very long. I gave it to
Bob, in its full length, and my idea was that he would figure out something to
take from it. I didnt hear from him for a long time. So I wasnt expecting much, bu
t then he called and said he was going to run the whole thing, in three parts.
INTERVIEWER
So he was able to find the through-line of the piece?
DIDION
The through-line in Salvador was always pretty clear: I went somewhere, this is wh
at I saw. Very simple, like a travel piece. How Bob edited Salvador was by constan
tly nudging me toward updates on the situation and by pointing out weaker materi
al. When I gave him the text, for example, it had a very weak ending, which was
about meeting an American evangelical student on the flight home. In other words
it was the travel piece carried to its logical and not very interesting conclus
ion. The way Bob led me away from this was to suggest not that I cut it (its stil
l there), but that I follow itand so ground itwith a return to the political situa
tion.
INTERVIEWER
How did you decide to write about Miami in 1987?
DIDION
Ever since the Kennedy assassination, I had wanted to do something that took pla
ce in that part of the world. I thought it was really interesting that so much o
f the news in America, especially if you read through the assassination hearings
, was coming out of our political relations with the Caribbean and Central and S
outh America. So when we got the little apartment in New York, I thought, Well t
hats something useful I can do out of New York: I can fly to Miami.
INTERVIEWER
Had you spent time down south before that?
DIDION
Yes, in 1970. I had been writing a column for Life, but neither Life nor I was h
appy with it. We werent on the same page. I had a contract, so if I turned someth
ing in, they had to pay me. But it was soul-searing to turn things in that didnt
run. So after about seven columns, I quit. It was agreed that I would do longer
pieces. And I said that I was interested in driving around the Gulf Coast, and s
omehow that got translated into The Mind of the White South. I had a theory that i
f I could understand the South, I would understand something about California, b
ecause a lot of the California settlers came from the Border South. So I wanted
to look into that. It turned out that what I was actually interested in was the
South as a gateway to the Caribbean. I should have known that at the time becaus
e my original plan had been to drive all over the Gulf Coast.
We began that trip in New Orleans and spent a week there. New Orleans was fantas
tic. Then we drove around the Mississippi Coast, and that was fantastic too, but
in New Orleans, you get a strong sense of the Caribbean. I used a lot of that w
eek in New Orleans in Common Prayer. It was the most interesting place I had bee
n in a long time. It was a week in which everything everybody said was astonishi
ng to me.
INTERVIEWER
Three years later you started writing for The New York Review of Books. Was that
daunting? In your essay Why I Write you express trepidation about intellectual, o
r ostensibly intellectual, matters. What freed you up enough to do that work for
Bob?
DIDION
His trust. Nothing else. I couldnt even have imagined it if he hadnt responded. He
recognized that it was a learning experience for me. Domestic politics, for exa
mple, was something I simply knew nothing about. And I had no interest. But Bob
kept pushing me in that direction. He is really good at ascertaining what might
interest you at any given moment and then just throwing a bunch of stuff at you
that might or might not be related, and letting you go with it.
When I went to the political conventions in 1988it was the first time Id ever been
to a conventionhe would fax down to the hotel the front pages of The New York Ti
mes and The Washington Post. Well, you know, if theres anything you can get at a
convention its a newspaper. But he just wanted to make sure.
And then hes meticulous once you turn in a piece, in terms of making you plug in
all relevant information so that everything gets covered and defended before the
letters come. He spent a lot of time, for example, making sure that I acknowled
ged all the issues in the Terri Schiavo piece, which had the potential for elici
ting strong reactions. Hes the person I trust more than anybody.
INTERVIEWER
Why do you think he pushed you to write about politics?
DIDION
I think he had a sense that I would be outside it enough.
INTERVIEWER
No insider reportingyou didnt know anyone.
DIDION
I didnt even know their names!
INTERVIEWER
But now your political writing has a very strong point of viewyou take sides. Is
that something that usually happens during the reporting process, or during the
writing?
DIDION
If I am sufficiently interested in a political situation to write a piece about
it, I generally have a point of view, although I dont usually recognize it. Somet
hing about a situation will bother me, so I will write a piece to find out what
it is that bothers me.
INTERVIEWER
When you moved into writing about politics, you moved away from the more persona
l writing youd been doing. Was that a deliberate departure?
DIDION
Yes, I was bored. For one thing, that kind of writing is limiting. Another reaso
n was that I was getting a very strong response from readers, which was depressi
ng because there was no way for me to reach out and help them back. I didnt want
to become Miss Lonelyhearts.
INTERVIEWER
And the pieces on El Salvador were the first in which politics really drive the
narrative.
DIDION
Actually it was a novel, Common Prayer. We had gone to a film festival in Cartag
ena and I got sick there, some kind of salmonella. We left Cartagena and went to
Bogot, and then we came back to Los Angeles and I was sick for about four months
. I started doing a lot of reading about South America, where Id never been. Ther
es a passage by Christopher Isherwood in a book of his called The Condor and the
Cows, in which he describes arriving in Venezuela and being astonished to think
that it had been down there every day of his life. That was the way that I felt
about South America. Then later I started reading a lot about Central America be
cause it was becoming clear to me that my novel had to take place in a rather sm
all country. So that was when I started thinking more politically.
INTERVIEWER
But it still didnt push you into an interest in domestic politics.
DIDION
I didnt get the connection. I dont know why I didnt get the connection, since I was
nt interested in the politics of these countries per se, but rather in how Americ
an foreign policy affected them. And the extent to which we are involved abroad
is entirely driven by our own domestic politics. So I dont know why I didnt get th
at.
I started to get this in Salvador, but not fully until Miami. Our policy with Cu
ba and with exiles has been totally driven by domestic politics. It still is. Bu
t it was very hard for me to understand the process of domestic politics. I coul
d get the overall picture, but the actual words people said were almost unintell
igible to me.
INTERVIEWER
How did it become clearer?
DIDION
I realized that the words didnt have any actual meaning, that they described a ne
gotiation more than they described an idea. But then you begin to see that the l
ack of specificity is specific in itself, that it is an obscuring device.
INTERVIEWER
Did it help you when you were working on Salvador and Miami to talk to the polit
ical figures you were writing about?
DIDION
In those cases it did. Though I didnt talk to a lot of American politicians. I re
member talking to the then-president of El Salvador, who was astounding. We were
talking about a new land reform law and I explained that I couldnt quite underst
and what was being said about it. We were discussing a provisionProvision 207that
seemed to me to say that landowners could arrange their affairs so as to be unaf
fected by the reform.
He said, 207 always applied only to 1979. That is what no one understands. I ask
ed, Did he mean that 207 applied only to 1979 because no landowner would work ag
ainst his interests by allowing tenants on his land after 207 took effect? He sa
id, Exactly, no one would rent out land under 207. They would have to be crazy t
o do that.
Well, that was forthright. There are very few politicians who would say exactly.
INTERVIEWER
Was it helpful to talk with John about your experiences there?
DIDION
It was useful to talk to him about politics because he viscerally understood pol
itics. He grew up in an Irish Catholic family in Hartford, a town where politics
was part of what you ate for breakfast. I mean, it didnt take him a long time to
understand that nobody was saying anything.
INTERVIEWER
After Salvador, you wrote your next novel, Democracy. It seems informed by the r
eporting you were doing about Americas relationship to the world.
DIDION
The fall of Saigon, though it takes place offstage, was the main thing on my min
d. Saigon fell while I was teaching at Berkeley in 1975. I couldnt get those imag
es out of my head, and that was the strongest impulse behind Democracy. When the
book came out, some people wondered why it began with the bomb tests in the Pac
ific, but I think those bomb tests formed a straight line to pushing the helicop
ters off the aircraft carriers when we were abandoning Saigon. It was a very cle
ar progression in my mind. Mainly, I wanted to show that you could write a roman
ce and still have the fall of Saigon, or the Iran-Contra affair. It would be har
d for me to stay with a novel if I didnt see a very strong personal story at the
center of it.
Democracy is really a much more complete version of Common Prayer, with basicall
y the same structure. There is a narrator who tries to understand the character
whos being talked about and reconstruct the story. I had a very clear picture in
my mind of both those women, but I couldnt tell the story without standing way fa
r away. Charlotte, in Common Prayer, was somebody who had a very expensive dress
with a seam that was coming out. There was a kind of fevered carelessness to he
r. Democracy started out as a comedy, a comic novel. And I think that there is a
more even view of life in it. I had a terrible time with it. I dont know why, bu
t it never got easy.
In Brentwood we had a big safe-deposit box to put manuscripts in if we left town
during fire season. It was such a big box that we never bothered to clean it ou
t. When we were moving, in 1988, and I had to go through the box, I found I dont
know how many different versions of the first ninety pages of Democracy, with di
fferent dates on them, written over several years. I would write ninety pages an
d not be able to go any further. I couldnt make the switch. I dont know how that w
as solved. Many of those drafts began with Billy Dillon coming to Amagansett to
tell Inez that her father had shot her sister. It was very hard to get from ther
e to any place. It didnt work. It was too conventional a narrative. I never hit t
he spot where I could sail through. I never got to that point, even at the very
end.
INTERVIEWER
Was that a first for you?
DIDION
It was a first for a novel. I really did not think I was going to finish it two
nights before I finished it. And when I did finish it, I had a sense that I was
just abandoning it, that I was just calling it. It was sort of like Vietnam itse
lfwhy dont we say just weve won and leave? I didnt have a real sense of completion a
bout it.
INTERVIEWER
Your novels are greatly informed by the travel and reporting you do for your non
fiction. Do you ever do research specifically for the fiction?
DIDION
Common Prayer was researched. We had someone working for us, Tina Moore, who was
a fantastic researcher. She would go to the UCLA library, and I would say, Brin
g me back anything on plantation life in Central America. And she would come bac
k and say, This is really what youre looking foryoull love this. And it would not b
e plantation life in Central America. It would be Ceylon, but it would be fantas
tic. She had an instinct for what was the same story, and what I was looking for
. What I was looking for were rules for living in the tropics. I didnt know that,
but thats what I found. In Democracy I was more familiar with all the places.
INTERVIEWER
The last novel you wrote was The Last Thing He Wanted. That came out in 1996. Ha
d you been working on it for a long time?
DIDION
No. I started it in the early fall or late summer of 1995, and I finished it at
Christmas. It was a novel I had been thinking about writing for a while. I wante
d to write a novel about the Iran-Contra affair, and get in all that stuff that
was being lost. Basically its a novel about Miami. I wanted it to be very densely
plotted. I noticed that conspiracy was central to understanding that part of th
e world; everybody was always being set up in some way. The plot was going to be
so complicated that I was going to have to write it fast or I wouldnt be able to
keep it all in my head. If I forgot one little detail it wouldnt work, and half
the readers didnt understand what happened in the end. Many people thought that E
lena tried to kill Treat Morrison. Why did she want to kill him? they would ask
me. But she didnt. Someone else did, and set her up. Apparently I didnt make that
clear.
I had begun to lose patience with the conventions of writing. Descriptions went
first; in both fiction and nonfiction, I just got impatient with those long para
graphs of description. By which I do not meanobviouslythe single detail that gives
you the scene. Im talking about description as a substitute for thinking. I thin
k you can see me losing my patience as early as Democracy. That was why that boo
k was so hard to write.
INTERVIEWER
After Democracy and Miami, and before The Last Thing He Wanted, there was the no
nfiction collection After Henry, which strikes me as a way of coming back to New
York and trying to understand what the city was.
DIDION
It has that long piece Sentimental Journeys, about the Central Park jogger, which
began with that impulse. We had been in New York a year or two, and I realized t
hat I was living here without engaging the city at all. I might as well have bee
n living in another city, because I didnt understand it, I didnt get it. So I real
ized that I needed to do some reporting on it. Bob and I decided I would do a se
ries of short reporting pieces on New York, and the first one would be about the
jogger. But it wasnt really reporting. It was coming at a situation from a lot o
f angles. I got so involved in it that, by the time I finished the piece, it was
too long. I turned it in and Bob had some commentsmany, many comments, which cau
sed it to be even longer because he thought it needed so much additional materia
l, which he was right about. By the time Id plugged it all in, Id added another si
x to eight thousand words. When I finally had finished it, I thought, Thats all I
have to do about New York.
INTERVIEWER
Although it is about the city, Sentimental Journeys is really about race and class
and money.
DIDION
It seemed to me that the case was treated with a lot of contempt by the people w
ho were handling it.
INTERVIEWER
How so?
DIDION
The prosecution thought they had the press and popular sentiment on their side.
The case became a way of expressing the citys rage at being broke and being in an
other recession and not having a general comfort level, the sense that there wer
e people sleeping on the streetswhich there were. We moved here six months after
the 87 stock market crash. Over the next couple of years, its effect on Madison A
venue was staggering. You could not walk down Madison Avenue at eight in the eve
ning without having to avoid stepping on people sleeping in every doorway. There
was a German television crew here doing a piece on the jogger, and they wanted
to shoot in Harlem, but it was late in the day and they were losing the light. T
hey kept asking me what the closest place was where they could shoot and see pov
erty. I said, Try Seventy-second and Madison. You know where Polo is now? That b
uilding was empty and the padlocks were broken and you could see rats scuttling
around inside. The landlord had emptied itI presume because he wanted to get high
er rentsand then everything had crashed. There was nothing there. That entire blo
ck was a mess.
INTERVIEWER
So from California you had turned your attention to the third world, and now you
were able to recognize New York because of the work you had done in the third w
orld.
DIDION
A lot of what I had seen as New Yorks sentimentality is derived from the stories
the city tells itself to rationalize its class contradictions. I didnt realize th
at until I started doing the jogger piece. Everything started falling into place
on that piece. Bob would send me clips about the trial, but on this one I was o
n my own, because only I knew where it was going.
INTERVIEWER
In some of your early essays on California, your subject matter was as distincti
vely your own as your writing style. In recent decades, though, its not so much t
he story but your take on the story that makes your work distinctive.
DIDION
The shift came about as I became more confident that my own take was worth doing
. In the beginning, I didnt want to do any stories that anyone else was doing. As
time went by, I got more comfortable with that. For example, on the Central Par
k jogger piece I could not get into the courtroom because I didnt have a police p
ass. This forced me into another approach, which turned out to be a more interes
ting one. At least to me.
INTERVIEWER
Wasnt it around the same time that you were also doing the Letter from Los Angeles
for Robert Gottlieb at The New Yorker?
DIDION
Yes. Though I wasnt doing more than two of those a year. I think they only ran si
x to eight thousand words, but the idea was to do several things in each letter.
I had never done that before, where you just really discuss what people are tal
king about that week. It was easy to do. It was a totally different tone from th
e Review. I went over those New Yorker pieces when I collected them. I probably
took out some of the New Yorkers editing, which is just their way of making every
thing sound a certain way.
INTERVIEWER
Can you characterize your methods as a reporter?
DIDION
I cant ask anything. Once in a while if Im forced into it I will conduct an interv
iew, but its usually pro forma, just to establish my credentials as somebody whos
allowed to hang around for a while. It doesnt matter to me what people say to me
in the interview because I dont trust it. Sometimes you do interviews where you g
et a lot. But you dont get them from public figures.
When I was conducting interviews for the piece on Lakewood, it was essential to
do interviews because that was the whole point. But these were not public figure
s. On the one hand, we were discussing what I was ostensibly there doing a piece
about, which was the Spur Posse, a group of local high school boys who had been
arrested for various infractions. But on the other hand, we were talking, becau
se it was the first thing on everyones mind, about the defense industry going dow
nhill, which was what the town was about. That was a case in which I did intervi
ewing and listened.
INTERVIEWER
Did the book about California, Where I Was From, grow out of that piece, or had
you already been thinking about a book?
DIDION
I had actually started a book about California in the seventies. I had written s
ome of that first part, which is about my family, but I could never go anywhere
with it for two reasons. One was that I still hadnt figured out California. The o
ther was that I didnt want to figure out California because whatever I figured ou
t would be different from the California my mother and father had told me about.
I didnt want to engage that.
INTERVIEWER
You felt like you were still their child?
DIDION
I just didnt see any point in engaging it. By the time I did the book they were d
ead.
INTERVIEWER
You said earlier that after The White Album you were tired of personal writing a
nd didnt want to become Miss Lonelyhearts. You must be getting a larger personal
response from readers than ever with The Year of Magical Thinking. Is that diffi
cult?
DIDION
I have been getting a very strong emotional response to Magical Thinking. But its
not a crazy response; its not demanding. Its people trying to make sense of a fai
rly universal experience that most people dont talk about. So this is a case in w
hich I have found myself able to deal with the response directly.
INTERVIEWER
Do you ever think you might go back to the idea of doing little pieces about New
York?
DIDION
I dont know. It is still a possibility, but my basic question about New York was
answered for me: its criminal.
INTERVIEWER
That was your question?
DIDION
Yes, its criminal.
INTERVIEWER
Do you find it stimulating in some way to live here?
DIDION
I find it really comfortable. During the time we lived in California, which last
ed twenty-four years, I didnt miss New York after the first year. And after the s
econd year I started to think of New York as sentimental. There were periods whe
n I didnt even come to New York at all. One time I realized that I had been to Ho
ng Kong twice since I had last been to New York. Then we started spending more t
ime in New York. Both John and I were really happy to have been here on 9/11. I
cant think of any place else I would have rather been on 9/11, and in the immedia
te aftermath.
INTERVIEWER
You could have stayed in Sacramento forever as a novelist, but you started to mo
ve out into the worlds of Hollywood and politics.
DIDION
I was never a big fan of people who dont leave home. I dont know why. It just seem
s part of your duty in life.
INTERVIEWER
Im reminded of Charlotte in A Book of Common Prayer. She has no conception of the
outside world but she wants to be in it.
DIDION
Although a novel takes place in the larger world, theres always some drive in it
that is entirely personaleven if you dont know it while youre doing it. I realized
some years after A Book of Common Prayer was finished that it was about my antic
ipating Quintanas growing up. I wrote it around 1975, so she would have been nine
, but I was already anticipating separation and actually working through that ah
ead of time. So novels are also about things youre afraid you cant deal with.
INTERVIEWER
Are you working on one now?
DIDION
No. I havent felt that I wanted to bury myself for that intense a period.
INTERVIEWER
You want to be in the world a bit.
DIDION
Yeah. A little bit.
Kazuo Ishiguro, The Art of Fiction No. 196
Interviewed by Susannah Hunnewell
PRINT | TWITTER | FACEBOOK | More |View a manuscript page
The man who wrote The Remains of the Day in the pitch-perfect voice of an Englis
h butler is himself very polite. After greeting me at the door of his home in Lo
ndons Golders Green, he immediately offered to make me tea, though to judge from
his lack of assurance over the choice in his cupboard he is not a regular four P
.M. Assam drinker. When I arrived for our second visit, the tea things were alre
ady laid out in the informal den. He patiently began recounting the details of h
is life, always with an amused tolerance for his younger self, especially the gu
itar-playing hippie who wrote his college essays using disembodied phrases separ
ated by full stops. This was encouraged by professors, he recalled. Apart from one
very conservative lecturer from Africa. But he was very polite. He would say, Mr
. Ishiguro, there is a problem about your style. If you reproduced this on the e
xamination, I would have to give you a less-than-satisfactory grade.
Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki in 1954 and moved with his family to the sma
ll town of Guildford, in southern England, when he was five. He didnt return to J
apan for twenty-nine years. (His Japanese, he says, is awful.) At twenty-seven he
published his first novel, A Pale View of Hills (1982), set largely in Nagasaki,
to near unanimous praise. His second novel, An Artist of the Floating World (19
86), won Britains prestigious Whitbread award. And his third, The Remains of the
Day (1989), sealed his international fame. It sold more than a million copies in
English, won the Booker Prize, and was made into a Merchant Ivory movie starrin
g Anthony Hopkins, with a screenplay by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. (An earlier script
by Harold Pinter, Ishiguro recalls, featured a lot of game being chopped up on k
itchen boards.) Ishiguro was named an Officer of the Order of the British Empire
and, for a while, his portrait hung at 10 Downing Street. Defying consecration,
he surprised readers with his next novel, The Unconsoled (1995), more than five
hundred pages of what appeared to be stream-of-consciousness. Some baffled criti
cs savaged it; James Wood wrote that it invents its own category of badness. But o
thers came passionately to its defense, including Anita Brookner, who overcame h
er initial doubts to call it almost certainly a masterpiece. The author of two mor
e acclaimed novelsWhen We Were Orphans (2000) and Never Let Me Go (2005)Ishiguro h
as also written screenplays and teleplays, and he composes lyrics, most recently
for the jazz chanteuse Stacey Kent. Their collaborative CD, Breakfast on the Mo
rning Tram, was a best-selling jazz album in France.
In the pleasant white stucco house where Ishiguro lives with his sixteen-year-ol
d daughter, Naomi, and his wife, Lorna, a former social worker, there are three
gleaming electric guitars and a state-of-the-art stereo system. The small office
upstairs where Ishiguro writes is custom designed in floor-to-ceiling blond woo
d with rows of color-coded binders neatly stacked in cubbyholes. Copies of his n
ovels in Polish, Italian, Malaysian, and other languages line one wall. On the o
ther are books for researchfor example, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 b
y Tony Judt and Managing Hotels Effectively by Eddystone C. ?Nebel III.

INTERVIEWER
You had success with your fiction right from the startbut was there any writing f
rom your youth that never got published?
KAZUO ISHIGURO
After university, when I was working with homeless people in west London, I wrot
e a half-hour radio play and sent it to the BBC. It was rejected but I got an en
couraging response. It was kind of in bad taste, but its the first piece of juven
ilia I wouldnt mind other people seeing. It was called Potatoes and Lovers. When I
submitted the manuscript, I spelled potatoes incorrectly, so it said potatos. It
was about two young people who work in a fish-and-chips caf. They are both sever
ely cross-eyed, and they fall in love with each other, but they never acknowledg
e the fact that theyre cross-eyed. Its the unspoken thing between them. At the end
of the story they decide not to marry, after the narrator has a strange dream w
here he sees a family coming toward him on the seaside pier. The parents are cro
ss-eyed, the children are cross-eyed, the dog is cross-eyed, and he says, All ri
ght, were not going to marry.
INTERVIEWER
What possessed you to write that story?
ISHIGURO
This was a time when I was starting to think about what my career was going to b
e. Id failed to make it as a musician. Id had lots of appointments with A&R people
. After two seconds, theyd say, Its not going to happen, man. So I thought Id have
a go at a radio play.
Then, almost by accident, I came across a little advertisement for a creative-wr
iting M.A. taught by Malcolm Bradbury at the University of East Anglia. Today its
a famous course, but in those days it was a laughable idea, alarmingly American
. I discovered subsequently that it hadnt run the previous year because not enoug
h people had applied. Somebody told me Ian McEwan had done it a decade before. I
thought he was the most exciting young writer around at that point. But the pri
mary attraction was that I could go back to university for a year, fully funded
by the government, and at the end I would only have to submit a thirty-page work
of fiction. I sent the radio play to Malcolm Bradbury along with my application
.
I was slightly taken aback when I was accepted, because it suddenly became real.
I thought, these writers are going to scrutinize my work and its going to be hum
iliating. Somebody told me about a cottage for rent in the middle of nowhere in
Cornwall that had previously been used as a rehabilitation place for drug addict
s. I called up and said, I need a place for one month because Ive got to teach my
self to write. And thats what I did that summer of 1979. It was the first time I
really thought about the structure of a short story. I spent ages figuring out t
hings like viewpoint, how you tell the story, and so on. At the end I had two st
ories to show, so I felt more secure.
INTERVIEWER
Was it during that year at East Anglia that you first wrote about Japan?
ISHIGURO
Yes. I discovered that my imagination came alive when I moved away from the imme
diate world around me. When I tried to start a story: I came out of Camden Town t
ube station and went into McDonalds and there was my friend Harry from university
, I couldnt think of what to write next. Whereas when I wrote about Japan, somethi
ng unlocked. One of the stories I showed the class was set in Nagasaki at the ti
me the bomb dropped, and it was told from the point of view of a young woman. I
got a tremendous boost to my confidence from my fellow students. They all said,
This Japanese stuff is really very exciting, and youre going places. Then I got a
letter from Faber accepting three stories for their Introduction series, which
had an excellent track record. I knew that Tom Stoppard and Ted Hughes had been
discovered like this.
INTERVIEWER
Is that when you began writing A Pale View of Hills?
ISHIGURO
Yes, and Robert McCrum at Faber gave me my first advance so that I could finish
it. I had started a story set in a Cornish town about a young woman with a distu
rbed child, who had a murky background. I had it in my mind that this woman woul
d alternate between saying, Im going to devote myself to the child, and, Ive falle
n in love with this man and this child is a nuisance. Id met many people like thi
s when I was working with the homeless. But when I got this tremendous response
to the Japanese short story from my classmates, I went back and looked at the st
ory set in Cornwall. I realized that if I told this story in terms of Japan, eve
rything that looked parochial and small would reverberate.
INTERVIEWER
You hadnt been back to Japan since you were five, but how typically Japanese were
your parents?
ISHIGURO
My mothers very much a Japanese lady of her generation. She has a certain kind of
mannersprefeminist Japanese by todays standards. When I see old Japanese movies,
I recognize a lot of the women behaving and speaking exactly like my mother does
. Japanese women traditionally used a slightly different formal language from me
n, and these days thats gotten much more mixed up. When my mother visited Japan i
n the eighties, she said she was stunned that young girls were using male langua
ge.
My mother was in Nagasaki when the atomic bomb was dropped. She was in her late
teens. Her house got kind of distorted, and only when it rained did they realize
the extent of the damage. The roof started leaking all over the place, like a t
ornado had hit it. As it happened, my mother was the only one in her familyfour s
iblings, two parentswho suffered an injury when the bomb dropped. A flying piece
of debris hit her. She was at home recovering when the rest of her family went o
ff to other parts of the city to help. But she says that when she thinks of the
war, the atomic bomb wasnt what frightened her most. She remembers being in an un
derground air-raid shelter in the factory where she worked. They were all lined
up in the dark and the bombs were landing right on top of them. They thought the
y were going to die.
My father wasnt typically Japanese at all because he grew up in Shanghai. He had
a Chinese characteristic, which was that when something bad happened, he smiled.
INTERVIEWER
Why did your family move to England?
ISHIGURO
Initially it was only going to be a short trip. My father was an oceanographer,
and the head of the British National Institute of Oceanography invited him over
to pursue an invention of his, to do with storm-surge movements. I never quite d
iscovered what it was. The National Institute of Oceanography was set up during
the cold war, and there was an air of secrecy about it. My father went to this p
lace in the middle of the woods. I only went to visit it once.
INTERVIEWER
How did you feel about the move?
ISHIGURO
I dont think I understood the implication of it. My grandfather and I had been to
a department store in Nagasaki to buy this great toy: there was a picture of a
hen, and you had a gun, and you fired at the hen. If you hit the right part, an
egg would drop out. But I wasnt allowed to take the toy with me. That was the mai
n thing I was disappointed about. The journey took three days on a BOAC jet. I r
emember trying to sleep on a chair and people bringing grapefruit around and wak
ing me up every time the plane stopped for refueling. I was nineteen before I go
t on a plane again.
I dont remember being unhappy at all in England, though. Had I been older, I thin
k it would have been much more difficult. And I dont remember struggling with the
language either, although I never had lessons. I loved cowboy films and TV seri
es, and I learned bits of English from them. My favorite was Laramie, with Rober
t Fuller and John Smith. I used to watch The Lone Ranger, which had been famous
in Japan as well. I idolized these cowboys. Theyd say sure instead of yes. And my
teacher would say, Kazuo, what do you mean by sure? I had to figure out that th
e way the Lone Ranger spoke was different from the way the choirmaster spoke.
INTERVIEWER
What did you think of Guildford?
ISHIGURO
We arrived at Easter time, and my mother was taken aback by what seemed to be go
ry, sadistic images of this man nailed to a cross, bleeding. And these images we
re being shown to children! If you look at it from a Japanese point of view, or
even a Martians point of view, it looks almost savage. My parents were not Christ
ians. They did not believe that Jesus Christ was a god. But they were very polit
e about it, of course, in much the same way you would respect the customs of a s
trange tribe if you were their guest.
To me, Guildford looked completely different. It was rural and austere and quite
monochromevery green. And there were no toys. In Japan, everythings dizzy with im
ages, you know, wires everywhere. It was quiet in Guildford. I remember being ta
ken by this nice English lady, Auntie Molly, to buy some ice cream in a shop. Id
never seen a shop quite like it. It was so blank, just one person behind a count
er. And the double-decker buses. I remember going on one of those during the fir
st few days. It was quite a thrill. When you ride in those buses in narrow stree
ts, it feels like youre riding up on the hedges. I remember associating this fact
with hedgehogs. Do you know what a hedgehog is?
INTERVIEWER
The quintessential English rodent?
ISHIGURO
Youll never see one these days, even in the country. I think theyve become quite e
xtinct. But they were everywhere where we lived. They look like porcupines, exce
pt theyre not vicious. Theyre sweet little creatures. They would come out at night
and typically theyd get run over. Youd see this little thing with prickles, and i
nnards bubbling around the outside, neatly swept into the gutter at the side of
the road. I remember being puzzled by this. I saw these flattened, dead things,
and I associated them with the buses that ran so close to the pavement.
INTERVIEWER
Did you read much as a child?
ISHIGURO
Just before I left Japan, this superhero called Gekko Kamen was very popular. I
used to stand in bookshops and try to memorize images from his adventures in ill
ustrated childrens books, and then I would go home and draw my own. Id get my moth
er to stitch my pages together so theyd look like a proper book.
As a child in Guildford, though, probably the only English things I read were Lo
ok and Learn comics. Theyre educational books for British children, dull articles
about how you get electricity and so on. I didnt like them. Compared to the stuf
f I was being sent from my grandfather in Japan, they were rather colorless. The
res a particular Japanese series that I think still exists, a much livelier versi
on of Look and Learn. Its a big digest, and some of it is just pure entertainment
, comic strip and prose with colorful illustrations. All kinds of learning aids
would fall out when you opened it.
Through these books I became aware of characters whod become famous in Japan afte
r I left, like the Japanese version of James Bond. He was called James Bond but
he had little resemblance to either Ian Flemings or Sean Connerys James Bond. He w
as a manga character. I thought him quite interesting. In the respectable Britis
h middle classes, James Bond was seen as representing everything that was wrong
about modern society. The movies were disgustingfoul language was used. Bond had
no morals because he would beat up people in a way that wasnt gentlemanly, and th
ere were all these girls in bikinis with whom he was presumably having sex. To s
ee the movies as a child, you had first to find an adult who didnt think James Bo
nd was corroding civilization. But in Japan he appeared in this educational, app
roved context, so that showed me that the attitudes were very different.
INTERVIEWER
Did you do any writing at school?
ISHIGURO
Yes. I went to the local state primary school where they were experimenting with
modern teaching methods. It was the mid-sixties, and my school rather complacen
tly had no defined lessons. You could muck about with manual calculating machine
s, or you could make a cow out of clay, or you could write stories. This was a f
avorite activity because it was sociable. You wrote a bit, then you read each ot
hers things, and you read out loud.
I created a character called Mr. Senior, which was the name of my friends scoutma
ster. I thought this was a really cool name for a spy. I got into Sherlock Holme
s around then in a big way. Id do a pastiche of a Victorian detective story that
began with a client arriving and telling a long story. But a lot of the energy w
ent into decorating our books to look exactly like the paperbacks we saw in the
shopsdrawing bullet holes on the front and putting quotations from newspapers on
the back. Brilliant, chilling tension. Daily Mirror.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think the experience affected you as a writer?
ISHIGURO
It was good fun, and it made me think of stories as effortless things. I think t
hat stayed with me. Ive never been intimidated by the idea of having to make up a
story. Its always been a relatively easy thing that people did in a relaxed envi
ronment.
INTERVIEWER
What was your next obsession, after detective stories?
ISHIGURO
Rock music. After Sherlock Holmes, I stopped reading until my early twenties. Bu
t Id played the piano since I was five. I started playing the guitar when I was f
ifteen, and I started listening to pop recordspretty awful pop recordswhen I was a
bout eleven. I thought they were wonderful. The first record that I really liked
was Tom Jones singing The Green, Green Grass of Home. Tom Jones is a Welshman, bu
t The Green, Green Grass of Home is a cowboy song. He was singing songs about the
cowboy world I knew from TV.
I had a miniature Sony reel-to-reel that my father brought me from Japan, and I
would tape directly from the speaker of the radio, an early form of downloading
music. I would try to work out the words from this very bad recording with buzze
s. Then when I was thirteen, I bought John Wesley Harding, which was my first Dy
lan album, right when it came out.
INTERVIEWER
What did you like about it?
ISHIGURO
The words. Bob Dylan was a great lyricist, I knew that straightaway. Two things
that I was always confident about, even in those days, were what was a good lyri
c and what was a good cowboy film. With Dylan, I suppose it was my first contact
with stream-of-consciousness or surreal lyrics. And I discovered Leonard Cohen,
who had a literary approach to lyrics. He had published two novels and a few vo
lumes of poetry. For a Jewish guy, his imagery was very Catholic. Lot of saints
and Madonnas. He was like a French chanteur. I liked the idea that a musician co
uld be utterly self-sufficient. You write the songs yourself, sing them yourself
, orchestrate them yourself. I found this appealing, and I began to write songs.
INTERVIEWER
What was your first song?
ISHIGURO
It was like a Leonard Cohen song. I think the opening line was, Will your eyes ne
ver reopen, on the shore where we once lived and played.
INTERVIEWER
Was it a love song?
ISHIGURO
Part of the appeal of Dylan and Cohen was that you didnt know what the songs were
about. Youre struggling to express yourself, but youre always being confronted wi
th things you dont fully understand and you have to pretend to understand them. T
hats what life is like a lot of the time when youre young, and youre ashamed to adm
it it. Somehow, their lyrics seem to embody this state.
INTERVIEWER
When you finally got on a plane again, at age nineteen, where did you go?
ISHIGURO
I went to America. That was my ambition from quite early on. I was obsessed with
American culture. I saved up money working at a baby products company. I packed
baby food and checked 8mm films with names like Quads Are Born and Caesarean for da
mages. In April of 1974, I got on a Canadian plane, which was the cheapest way t
o get over there. I landed in Vancouver and crossed the border by Greyhound in t
he middle of the night. I was in the United States for three months, traveling o
n a dollar a day. At that time, everyone had a romantic attitude toward these th
ings. You had to figure out where you were going to sleep, or crash, each night. T
here was a whole network of young people hitchhiking along the West Coast.
INTERVIEWER
Were you a hippie?
ISHIGURO
I suppose I was, at least superficially. Long hair, mustache, guitar, rucksack.
Ironically, we all thought we were very individual. I hitchhiked up the Pacific
Coast Highway, through Los Angeles, San Francisco, and all over northern Califor
nia.
INTERVIEWER
What did you think of the whole experience?
ISHIGURO
It more than fulfilled my expectations. Some of it was nerve-racking. I rode a f
reight train from Washington state across Idaho to Montana. I was with a guy fro
m Minnesota, and wed spent the night in a mission. It was a pretty sleazy place.
You had to strip at the door and enter a shower with all these winos. You tiptoe
d your way through black puddles, and at the other end they gave you laundered n
ightclothes and you slept in bunks. The next morning, we went to the freight yar
d with these old-fashioned hobo types. They had nothing to do with the hitchhiki
ng culture, which mostly consisted of middle-class student types and runaways. T
hese guys traveled by freight, and they went from skid row to skid row in differ
ent cities. They lived by donating blood. They were alcoholics. They were poor a
nd sick, and they looked awful. There was nothing romantic about them at all. Bu
t they gave us a lot of good advice. They told us, Dont try to jump the train whe
n its moving, because youll die. If anyone tries to get on your boxcar, just throw
them off. It doesnt matter if you think it might kill them. Theyll want to steal
something and youre stuck with them until the train stops. If you go to sleep, yo
ull be flung out just because youve got fifty dollars.
INTERVIEWER
Did you ever write about this trip?
ISHIGURO
I was keeping a diary, in this kind of pastiche Kerouac prose. Every day I would
write what happened: Day 36. Met so-and-so. We did this. When I got home, I too
k these thick diaries and sat down and wrote out two of the episodes, in depth,
using a first-person narrator. One was about the time my guitar was stolen in Sa
n Francisco. Thats the first time I started thinking of a structure. But Id adopte
d this strange transatlantic twang in my prose, and because Im not American, it s
ounded phony.
INTERVIEWER
Like your cowboy phase?
ISHIGURO
There was an echo of that. There was something cool to me about the American acc
ent. And words like freeway instead of motorway. I loved to be able to say with
impunity, How far is it to the freeway?
INTERVIEWER
It seems as if there was this pattern throughout your youth: you idolize somethi
ng and then you mimic it. First with Sherlock Holmes, then Leonard Cohen, and th
en Kerouac.
ISHIGURO
When youre an adolescent, thats how you learn. Songwriting was actually one area w
here I appreciated that I had to do more than imitate. If my friends and I walke
d past somebody who was playing the guitar and sounding like Bob Dylan, we had u
tter contempt for him. It was all about finding your own voice. My friends and I
were very conscious of the fact that we were British, and we couldnt authentical
ly write American-type songs. When you said on the road, you imagined Highway 61,
not the M6. The challenge was to get an equivalent sound that felt authentically
English. Being stuck on some lonely road in the drizzle, but by some gray round
about on the Scottish border with the fog coming in, rather than in a Cadillac o
n a legendary freeway in America.
INTERVIEWER
It says in your biographies that you were a grouse beater. Please explain.
ISHIGURO
My first summer after leaving school I worked for the Queen Mother at Balmoral C
astle, where the royal family spend their summer holidays. In those days they us
ed to recruit local students to be grouse beaters. The royal family would invite
people to shoot on their estate. The Queen Mother and her guests would get into
Land Rovers with shotguns and whiskey and drive over bits of the moor from shoo
ting butt to shooting butt. Thats where they would aim and shoot. Fifteen of us w
ould walk in formation across the moor, spaced about a hundred yards apart in th
e heather. The grouse live in the heather, and they hear us coming, and they hop
. By the time we arrive at the butts, all of the grouse in the vicinity have acc
umulated and the Queen Mum and her friends are waiting with shotguns. Around the
butts theres no heather, so the grouse have got no choice but to fly up. Then th
e shooting starts. And then we walk to the next butt. Its a bit like golf.
INTERVIEWER
Did you meet the Queen Mother?
ISHIGURO
Yes, quite regularly. Once she came round to our quarters, frighteningly, when t
here was only me and this other girl there. We didnt know what on earth to do. We
had a little chat, and she drove off again. But it was very informal. Youd often
see her on the moors, though she herself didnt shoot. I think there was a lot of
alcohol consumed and it was all very chummy.
INTERVIEWER
Was that the first time you were in a world like that?
ISHIGURO
It was the last time I was in a world like that.
INTERVIEWER
What did you make of it?
ISHIGURO
I thought it was interesting. But more fascinating was the world of the people w
ho ran those estates, the gillies. They spoke in a Scottish dialect that none of
usincluding the Scottish studentscould understand. They knew the moors very, very
well. They were tough characters. And they were deferential toward us because w
e were studentsuntil the actual grouse-shoot started. It was their job to keep us
in absolute formation. If any of us went out of line, there was a chance that t
he grouse would escape. So theyd turn into these mad sergeant majors. Theyd stand
up on the cliff and curse at us in this strange Scottish, just absolutely scream
their heads offYou bloody bastard! Then theyd come down off the cliff and be utte
rly polite and deferential again.
INTERVIEWER
What were your university years like?
ISHIGURO
I studied English and philosophy at the University of Kent. But I found universi
ty dull compared to the year that had taken me from the royal family to freight
trains via baby-product packaging. After a year, I decided to take another year
out. I went to a place called Renfrew, near Glasgow, for six months to volunteer
as a community worker on a housing estate. I was completely at sea when I first
arrived. Id grown up in a very middle-class environment in southern England, and
this was the industrial Scottish heartland at a time of declining manufacturing
. Typically these little housing estates, which were really no more than two str
eets, divided themselves into enemy factions that hated each other. There was a
tension between the third-generation people whod been living in the area and the
families whod suddenly arrive having been evicted from some other estate. Politic
s was very much alive there, but it was real politics. It was a different planet
from student politics, which tended to be about whether or not you were going t
o protest the latest NATO move.
INTERVIEWER
What impact did this experience have on you?
ISHIGURO
I grew up a lot. I stopped being this person who whizzed around at a hundred mil
es an hour saying that everything was far out. When I was traveling around America
, the third question, after What bands are you into? and Where are you from? was What
do you think is the meaning of life? Then youd exchange views and weird quasi-Bud
dhist meditation techniques. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was being
passed around. No one really read it, but it was a cool name. When I came back
from Scotland, Id grown out of that. Id seen a world where that kind of thing mean
t nothing. These were people who were struggling. There was a lot of drink and d
rugs. Some people were going about things with real courage, but it was quite ea
sy just to give up.
INTERVIEWER
What was going on with your writing then?
ISHIGURO
At the time, people werent talking about books. They were talking about TV plays,
fringe theater, cinema, rock music. Then I read Jerusalem the Golden by Margare
t Drabble. By this time Id begun reading the big nineteenth-century novels, so it
came as an absolute revelation to me that the same techniques could be applied
to tell a story of modern life. You didnt have to write about Raskolnikov murderi
ng an old lady, or the Napoleonic Wars. You could just write a novel about hangi
ng around. I attempted to write a novel at that time, but I didnt get far. It was
pretty bad. I have it upstairs. It was about these young students drifting arou
nd England one summer. Conversations in pubs, girlfriends and boyfriends.
INTERVIEWER
That is one of the striking things about your workyou never did what is so common
now, which is to fictionalize your own story: life in contemporary London, or g
rowing up in a Japanese home in England.
ISHIGURO
Thats what Im telling youI did do it. But it was half-hearted, because my main thin
g still was trying to write songs that went over the same territory.
INTERVIEWER
Looking back at your first published novel, A Pale View of Hills, what do you th
ink of it now?
ISHIGURO
Im very fond of it, but I do think its too baffling. The ending is almost like a p
uzzle. I see nothing artistically to be gained by puzzling people to that extent
. That was just inexperiencemisjudging what is too obvious and what is subtle. Ev
en at the time the ending felt unsatisfactory.
INTERVIEWER
What were you trying to accomplish?
ISHIGURO
Lets say somebody is talking about a mutual friend, and hes getting angry about th
is friends indecisiveness about a relationship hes in. Hes getting absolutely furio
us. Then you realize that hes appropriating the friends situation to talk about hi
mself. I thought this was an interesting way to narrate a novel: to have somebod
y who finds it too painful or awkward to talk about his own life appropriate som
eone elses story to tell his own. Id spent a lot of time working with homeless peo
ple, listening to peoples stories about how theyd got to this place, and Id gotten
very sensitive to the fact that they werent telling those stories in a straightfo
rward way.
In A Pale View of Hills, the narrator is a late-middle-aged woman, and her grown
-up daughter has committed suicide. This is announced at the beginning of the bo
ok. But instead of explaining what led up to that, she starts to remember a frie
ndship she had back in Nagasaki, just after the end of the Second World War. I t
hought the reader would think, Why the hell are we hearing about this other thin
g? What does she feel about her daughters suicide? Why did the daughter commit su
icide? I hoped readers would start to realize that her story is being told throu
gh the story of her friend. But because I didnt know how to create the texture of
memory, I had to resort to something quite gimmicky at the end, where a scene b
ack in Japan blurs into a scene that obviously took place much more recently. Ev
en now, when I do an event to talk about my latest book, somebody asks, Were tho
se two women the same woman? What happens at the end on the bridge when you switch
es to we?
INTERVIEWER
Would you say the writing program helped make you a writer?
ISHIGURO
The way I see it, I tried to be a songwriter, but the door never opened. I went
to East Anglia, everyone encouraged me, and within months Id published stories in
magazines and gotten a publishing contract for my first novel. And it helped me
technically as a writer. Ive never felt that I have a particular facility at wri
ting interesting prose. I write quite mundane prose. I think where Im good is bet
ween the drafts. I can look at one draft, and I have lots of good ideas for what
to do with the next one.
After Malcolm Bradbury, my other important mentor was Angela Carter, who taught
me a lot about the business of writing. She introduced me to Deborah Rogers, whos
still my agent today. And Angela sent my stuff to Bill Buford at Granta without
telling me. There was a pay phone in the kitchen in the flat I was renting in C
ardiff. One day it rang, and I thought, This is odd, the pay phone is ringing, a
nd there was this man Bill Buford at the other end.
INTERVIEWER
What inspired your second novel, An Artist of the Floating World, about a painte
r whose pro-militarist stance during the war comes back to haunt him?
ISHIGURO
There was a subplot in A Pale View of Hills about an old teacher who has to reth
ink the values on which hes built his life. I said to myself, I would like to wri
te a full-blown novel about a man in this situationin this case, an artist whose
career becomes contaminated because he happens to live at a certain time.
Then The Remains of the Day was set in motion by that novel. I looked at An Arti
st of the Floating World and thought, This is quite satisfactory in terms of exp
loring this theme about the wasted life in terms of career, but what about in yo
ur personal life? When youre young, you think everything is to do with your caree
r. Eventually you realize that your career is only a part of it. And I was feeli
ng that. I wanted to write the whole thing again. How do you waste your life car
eerwise, and how do you waste your life in the personal arena?
INTERVIEWER
Why did you decide that Japan was no longer the appropriate setting for that sto
ry?
ISHIGURO
By the time I started The Remains of the Day, I realized that the essence of wha
t I wanted to write was moveable.
INTERVIEWER
I think thats very particular to you. It shows a certain chameleon-like ability.
ISHIGURO
I dont think it is that chameleon-like. What Im saying is Ive written the same book
three times. I just somehow got away with it.
INTERVIEWER
You think you have, but everyone who read your first novels and then read The Re
mains of the Day had a psychedelic momentthey were transported from this convinci
ng Japanese setting to Lord Darlingtons estate.
ISHIGURO
Thats because people see the last thing first. For me, the essence doesnt lie in t
he setting. I know that it does in some cases. In Primo Levi, take away the sett
ing and youve taken away the book. But I went to a great performance of The Tempe
st recently, set in the Arctic. Most writers have certain things that they decid
e quite consciously, and other things they decide less consciously. In my case,
the choice of narrator and setting are deliberate. You do have to choose a setti
ng with great care, because with a setting come all kinds of emotional and histo
rical reverberations. But I leave quite a large area for improvisation after tha
t. For example, Ive arrived at an odd setting for the novel Im writing at the mome
nt.
INTERVIEWER
Whats it about?
ISHIGURO
I wont talk too much about it, but let me use its early stages as an example. Id w
anted for some time to write a novel about how societies remember and forget. Id
written about how individuals come to terms with uncomfortable memories. It occu
rred to me that the way an individual remembers and forgets is quite different t
o the way a society does. When is it better to just forget? This comes up over a
nd over again. France after the Second World War is an interesting case. You cou
ld argue that De Gaulle was right to say, We need to get the country working aga
in. Lets not worry too much about who collaborated and who didnt. Lets leave all th
is soul-searching to another time. But some would say that justice was ill serve
d by that, that it leads eventually to bigger problems. Its what an analyst might
say about an individual whos repressing. If I were to write about France, though
, it becomes a book about France. I imagined myself having to face all these exp
erts on Vichy France asking me, So what are you saying about France? What are yo
u accusing us of? And Id have to say, Actually, it was just supposed to stand for
this bigger theme. Another option was the Star Wars strategy: in a galaxy far, f
ar away. Never Let Me Go went in that direction, and that has its own challenges.
So for a long time, I had this problem.
INTERVIEWER
What did you decide?
ISHIGURO
A possible solution was to set the novel in Britain in 450 A.D. when the Romans
left and the Anglo-Saxons took over, which led to the annihilation of the Celts.
Nobody knows what the hell happened to the Celts. They just disappeared. It was
either genocide or assimilation. I figured that the further you go back in time
, the more likely the story would be read metaphorically. People see Gladiator a
nd interpret it as a modern parable.
INTERVIEWER
How did the English setting come about for The Remains of the Day?
ISHIGURO
It started with a joke that my wife made. There was a journalist coming to inter
view me for my first novel. And my wife said, Wouldnt it be funny if this person
came in to ask you these serious, solemn questions about your novel and you pret
ended that you were my butler? We thought this was a very amusing idea. From the
n on I became obsessed with the butler as a metaphor.
INTERVIEWER
As a metaphor for what?
ISHIGURO
Two things. One is a certain kind of emotional frostiness. The English butler ha
s to be terribly reserved and not have any personal reaction to anything that ha
ppens around him. It seemed to be a good way of getting into not just Englishnes
s but the universal part of us that is afraid of getting involved emotionally. T
he other is the butler as an emblem of someone who leaves the big political deci
sions to somebody else. He says, Im just going to do my best to serve this person
, and by proxy Ill be contributing to society, but I myself will not make the big
decisions. Many of us are in that position, whether we live in democracies or n
ot. Most of us arent where the big decisions are made. We do our jobs, and we tak
e pride in them, and we hope that our little contribution is going to be used we
ll.
INTERVIEWER
Were you a fan of Jeeves?
ISHIGURO
Jeeves was a big influence. Not just Jeeves, but all butler figures that walked
on in the backgrounds of films. They were amusing in a subtle way. It wasnt slaps
tick humor. There was some pathos in the way they would come out with a dry line
for something that would normally require a more frantic expression. And Jeeves
is the pinnacle of that.
By then I was very consciously trying to write for an international audience. It
was a reaction, I think, against a perceived parochialism in British fiction of
the generation that preceded mine. Looking back now I dont know if that was a ju
st charge or not. But there was a conscious feeling among my peers that we had t
o address an international audience and not just a British one. One of the ways
I thought I could do this was to take a myth of England that was known internati
onallyin this case, the English butler.
INTERVIEWER
Did you do a lot of research?
ISHIGURO
Yes, but I was surprised to find how little there was about servants written by
servants, given that a sizable proportion of people in this country were employe
d in service right up until the Second World War. It was amazing that so few of
them had thought their lives worth writing about. So most of the stuff in The Re
mains of the Day about the rituals of being a servant was made up. When Stevens
talks of the staff plan, thats made up.
INTERVIEWER
In that book, and in so many of your novels, the main character seems tragically
to miss his or her chance at love by seconds.
ISHIGURO
I dont know if they miss it by seconds. In a way theyve missed it by miles. They m
ight look back and think, There was this moment when it could have all been diff
erent. Its tempting for them to think, Oh, it was just a little twist of fate. Bu
t in fact, there are colossal things that make them miss not just love but somet
hing essential in life.
INTERVIEWER
Why do you think you have these characters, one after another, do this?
ISHIGURO
Without psychoanalyzing myself, I cant say why. You should never believe an autho
r if he tells you why he has certain recurring themes.
INTERVIEWER
The Remains of the Day won the Booker Prize. Did success change anything for you
?
ISHIGURO
When I published An Artist of the Floating World, I was still living the life of
the obscure author. That all changed overnight, about six months after it was p
ublished, when it was nominated for the Booker, and it won the Whitbread award.
That was when we decided to buy an answering machine. Suddenly, people I barely
knew were asking us to dinner. It took me a while to figure out that I didnt have
to say yes to everything. Otherwise you lose control over your life. By the tim
e I won the Booker Prize three years later, Id learned how to politely turn peopl
e down.
INTERVIEWER
Does the publicity side of a writers lifebook tours, interviewsend up affecting you
r writing?
ISHIGURO
It affects your writing in two obvious ways. One is that it takes up a third of
your working life. The other is that you spend a lot of your time being quizzed
by often very insightful people. Why is there always a three-legged cat in your
stuff, or whats this obsession with pigeon pie? A lot of what goes into your work
can be unconscious, or at least the emotional reverberations from these images
might have been unanalyzed. Its difficult for these things to remain that way whe
n you do a book tour. In the past, I used to think it was nicer to be as honest
and open as possible, but Ive seen the damage that this does. Some writers get qu
ite screwed up. They end up feeling resentful and violated. And its got to have s
ome effect on how you write. You sit down to write and you think, I am a realist
and I suppose I am a kind of absurdist as well. You start to become much more s
elf-conscious.
INTERVIEWER
Do you actively think of problems translators might have when youre writing?
ISHIGURO
When you find yourself in different parts of the world, you become embarrassingl
y aware of the things that culturally just dont translate. Sometimes you spend fo
ur days at a time explaining a book to Danes. I dont particularly like, for examp
le, to use brand names and other cultural reference points, not just because the
y dont transfer geographically. They dont transfer very well in time either. In th
irty years time, they wont mean anything. Youre not just writing for people in diff
erent countries. Youre writing for different eras.
INTERVIEWER
Do you have a writing routine?
ISHIGURO
I usually write from ten oclock in the morning until about six oclock. I try not t
o attend to e-mails or telephone calls until about four oclock.
INTERVIEWER
Do you work on a computer?
ISHIGURO
I have two desks. One has a writing slope and the other has a computer on it. Th
e computer dates from 1996. Its not connected to the Internet. I prefer to work b
y pen on my writing slope for the initial drafts. I want it to be more or less i
llegible to anyone apart from myself. The rough draft is a big mess. I pay no at
tention to anything to do with style or coherence. I just need to get everything
down on paper. If Im suddenly struck by a new idea that doesnt fit with whats gone
before, Ill still put it in. I just make a note to go back and sort it all out l
ater. Then I plan the whole thing out from that. I number sections and move them
around. By the time I write my next draft, I have a clearer idea of where Im goi
ng. This time round, I write much more carefully.
INTERVIEWER
How many drafts do you typically write?
ISHIGURO
I rarely go beyond the third draft. Having said that, there are individual passa
ges that Ive had to write over and over again.
INTERVIEWER
Very few writers have had such positive reviews as you did for your first three
books. And then The Unconsoled came out. Although some critics now consider it y
our finest work, others said it was the worst thing theyd ever read. How did you
feel about that?
ISHIGURO
I think I was almost urging myself to enter more controversial territory. If the
re was a criticism of my work during the first three books, perhaps it was that
it wasnt brave enough. I did feel that there was some echo of truth about that. T
here was a review of The Remains of the Day in The New Yorker that appeared to b
e a glowing review right up until the end. Then it said: the trouble with this i
s that everything works like clockwork.
INTERVIEWER
Its too perfect.
ISHIGURO
Yes. It doesnt have a messiness, a daringness on my part. Everything is so contro
lled. Other people might not think much of being criticized for being too perfec
t. Wow, such criticism! But in this case it echoed with something I was feeling.
I was refining and refining the same novel. So I felt quite hungry at that poin
t to do things I wasnt so sure of.
Shortly after the publication of The Remains of the Day, my wife and I were sitt
ing in a greasy spoon, having a discussion about how to write novels for an inte
rnational audience and trying to come up with universal themes. My wife pointed
out that the language of dreams is a universal language. Everyone identifies wit
h it, whichever culture they come from. In the weeks that followed, I started to
ask myself, What is the grammar of dreams? Just now, the two of us are having t
his conversation in this room with nobody else in the house. A third person is i
ntroduced into this scene. In a conventional work, there would be a knock on the
door and somebody would come in, and we would say hello. The dreaming mind is v
ery impatient with this kind of thing. Typically what happens is well be sitting
here alone in this room, and suddenly well become aware that a third person has b
een here all the time at my elbow. There might be a sense of mild surprise that
we hadnt been aware of this person up until this point, but we would just go stra
ight into whatever point the person is raising. I thought this was quite interes
ting. And I started to see parallels between memory and dream, the way you manip
ulate both according to your emotional needs at the time. The language of dreams
would also allow me to write a story that people would read as a metaphorical t
ale as opposed to a comment on a particular society. Over some months I built up
a folder full of notes, and eventually I felt ready to write a novel.
INTERVIEWER
When you were writing it, did you have a conception of a plot?
ISHIGURO
There are two plots. Theres the story of Ryder, a man who has grown up with unhap
py parents on the verge of divorce. He thinks the only way they can be reconcile
d is if he fulfills their expectations. As a result, he ends up as this fantasti
c pianist. He thinks that if he gives this crucial concert, it will heal everyth
ing. Of course, by then, its too late. Whatever has happened with his parents has
happened long ago. And theres the story of Brodsky, an old man who is trying, as
a last act, to make good on a relationship that hes completely messed up. He thi
nks that if he can bring it off as a conductor, hell be able to win back the love
of his life. Those two stories take place in a society that believes all its il
ls are the result of having chosen the wrong musical values.
INTERVIEWER
How did you react to your baffled critics?
ISHIGURO
Its never my intention to be willfully obscure. The novel was as clear as I could
make it at the time, given that it was meant to follow dream logic. In a dream,
one character often will be portrayed by different people. I used that techniqu
e and I think that led to some confusion. But I wouldnt change a word of The Unco
nsoled. Thats who I was at the time. I think it has found its place over the year
s. I get asked about it more than anything else. When Im touring with a book, I k
now that a section of the evening has to be devoted to The Unconsoled, particula
rly on Americas West Coast. Academics write about it more than any of my other no
vels.
INTERVIEWER
Next came When We Were Orphans, about an English detective, Christopher Banks, w
ho tries to unravel the mystery of his parents disappearance in Shanghai.
ISHIGURO
When We Were Orphans is one of the few examples in my career when I did want to
write something that was set in a particular time and place. I had a fascination
with Shanghai in the thirties. It was a prototype for the cosmopolitan city of
today, with all these racial groups in their little sectors. My grandfather had
worked there and my father was born there. In the eighties, my father brought ba
ck photograph albums from the time my grandfather was there. There were a lot of
company photographs: people in white suits sitting in offices with ceiling fans
. It was a different world. He told me various storiesfor example, my grandfather
packing a gun to take my father to say good-bye to their manservant, who was dy
ing of cancer in a restricted Chinese area. All these things are evocative.
And I had wanted to write a detective story. The figure of the English detectiveS
herlock Holmeshas a lot of similarities with the English butler. Cerebral rather
than devoted to duty, but locked into a professional persona. Emotionally distan
t. Like the musician in The Unconsoled, theres something in his personal world th
at is broken. Theres a peculiar elision in Christopher Bankss mind between solving
the mystery of his parents and stopping the Second World War. Thats the odd logi
c that I wanted to have at the heart of When We Were Orphans. It was an attempt
to write about that part of ourselves that always sees things as we did as child
ren. But the novel didnt really work the way I wanted it to. My original concept
was that there would be a genre novel within the novel. I wanted Banks to be sol
ving another proper mystery in the Agatha Christie way. But I ended up throwing
out almost a years work, a hundred and nine pages. When We Were Orphans gave me m
ore trouble than any other book.
INTERVIEWER
I understand there were also a few aborted versions of Never Let Me Go.
ISHIGURO
Yes. The original idea was to write a story about students, young people who are
going to go through a human life span in thirty years instead of eighty. I thou
ght that they were going to come across nuclear weapons that were being moved ar
ound at night in huge lorries and be doomed in some way. It finally fell in plac
e when I decided to make the students clones. Then I had a sci-fi reason for why
their life spans are limited. One of the attractions about using clones is that
it makes people ask immediately, What does it mean to be a human being? Its a se
cular route to the Dostoyevskian question, What is a soul?
INTERVIEWER
Were you particularly interested in the boarding-school setting?
ISHIGURO
Its a nice metaphor for childhood. Its a situation where the people in charge can,
to a large extent, control what the kids know and dont know. This seems to me no
t so different from what we do with our children in real life. In many ways, chi
ldren grow up in a bubble. We try to maintain that bubblequite properly, I think.
We shield them from unpleasant news. We do this so thoroughly that if you walk
around with a small child, strangers you meet enter into the conspiracy. If theyr
e having a row, theyll stop. They dont want to give the kid the bad news that adul
ts have rows, let alone torture each other. A boarding school is a physical embo
diment of that phenomenon.
INTERVIEWER
Do you see the novel, as many critics have, as very dark?
ISHIGURO
Actually, I always thought of Never Let Me Go as my cheerful novel. In the past,
I had written about characters failings. They were warnings to myself, or how-no
t-to-lead-your-life books.
With Never Let Me Go I felt that for the first time I had given myself permissio
n to focus on the positive aspects of human beings. OK, they might be flawed. Th
ey might be prone to the usual human emotions like jealousy and pettiness and so
on. But I wanted to show three people who were essentially decent. When they fi
nally realize that their time is limited, I wanted them not to be preoccupied wi
th their status or their material possessions. I wanted them to care most about
each other and setting things right. So for me, it was saying positive things ab
out human beings against the rather bleak fact of our mortality.
INTERVIEWER
How do you choose your titles?
ISHIGURO
Its a bit like naming a child. A lot of debate goes on. Some of them I didnt inven
tThe Remains of the Day, for example. I was at a writers festival in Australia, si
tting on a beach with Michael Ondaatje, Victoria Glendinning, Robert McCrum, and
a Dutch writer named Judith Hertzberg. We were playing a semi-serious game of t
rying to find a title for my soon-to-be-completed novel. Michael Ondaatje sugges
ted Sirloin: A Juicy Tale. It was on that level. I kept explaining that it had t
o do with this butler. Then Judith Hertzberg mentioned a phrase of Freuds, Tagesr
este, which he used to refer to dreams, which is something like debris of the day
. When she translated it off the top of her head, it came out as remains of the da
y. It seemed to me right in terms of atmosphere.
With the next novel, it was a choice between The Unconsoled and Piano Dreams. A
friend had persuaded me and my wife to choose the right name for our daughter, N
aomi. Wed been torn between Asami and Naomi, and he had said, Asami sounds like a
cross between Saddam and Assadwho was then the dictator of Syria. Well, this sam
e guy said, Dostoyevsky might have chosen the title The Unconsoled, Elton John m
ight have chosen Piano Dreams. So I went for The Unconsoled.
INTERVIEWER
You are, in fact, a fan of Dostoyevsky.
ISHIGURO
Yes. And of Dickens, Austen, George Eliot, Charlotte Bront, Wilkie Collinsthat ful
l-blooded nineteenth-century fiction I first read in university.
INTERVIEWER
What do you like about it?
ISHIGURO
Its realist in the sense that the world created in the fiction is more or less ak
in to the world we live in. Also, its work you can get lost in. Theres a confidenc
e in narrative, which uses the traditional tools of plot and structure and chara
cter. Because I hadnt read a lot as a child, I needed a firm foundation. Charlott
e Bront of Villette and Jane Eyre; Dostoyevsky of those four big novels; Chekhovs
short stories; Tolstoy of War and Peace. Bleak House. And at least five of the s
ix Jane Austen novels. If you have read those, you have a very solid foundation.
And I like Plato.
INTERVIEWER
Why?
ISHIGURO
In most of his Socratic dialogues, what happens is, some guy is walking along th
e street who thinks he knows it all, and Socrates sits down with him and demolis
hes him. This might seem destructive, but the idea is that the nature of what is
good is elusive. Sometimes people base their whole lives on a sincerely held be
lief that could be wrong. Thats what my early books are about: people who think t
hey know. But there is no Socrates figure. They are their own Socrates.
Theres a passage in one of Platos dialogues in which Socrates says that idealistic
people often become misanthropic when they are let down two or three times. Pla
to suggests it can be like that with the search for the meaning of the good. You
shouldnt get disillusioned when you get knocked back. All youve discovered is tha
t the search is difficult, and you still have a duty to keep on searching.