Author Chuck Palahniuk on Fifty Shades Of Grey, arousal

addiction and being visited by the ghost of his dad

Chuck Palahniuks words are not only scarred onto the minds of readers. Many of them are also
tattooed on their bodies. Few writers get that kind of obsessive response, but ever since Fight Club
was published, nearly 20 years ago, Palahniuk has been delving a little deeper and darker than most.
We learn so little from peace, hes written, the American authors own work, including Fight Club
(turned into a film with Ed Norton and Brad Pitt), Lullaby, Diary and Haunted, drawing on the
violence and tragedy of his own life. Palahniuks grandfather killed his wife and children, with
Chucks father just escaping before Grandpa Nick killed himself. Later, around the publication of
Fight Club, Chucks dad and his dads girlfriend were killed by her crazy ex-boyfriend. Palahniuks
writing is dark, gruesome (his story Guts famously made people pass out at readings) and funny, but
theres also a lot of heart in it. His new book Beautiful You is an over-the-top satire about a rich
powerful mans sexual relationship with a young impressionable woman, with more than a few
shades of grey
Click here for Chuck Palahniuk interview: Part Two
By Graeme Green
How much was Fifty Shades Of Grey part of Beautiful Yous inception?
The books working title was Fifty Shades Of The Twilight Cave Bear Wears Prada. I wanted to
pack it with as many tropes as possible, from the almost-as-pretty best friend, whos always a
person of colour, to the designer label fashions, the quest for a primitive mentor and, finally, a big
wedding scene. Ive hybridized the ultimate chick-lit novel.
That night, my father came to me and said, I was dead for 10 years. I had no idea I
was dead. I just wandered and wandered.
What kind of research did you do?
I wanted to do something I call Gonzo Erotica. I notice when I teach that with a lot of beginning
writers the first book they have to tackle is their memoir. So many of them are about their own
sexual abuse. Theyre taking the most important, weighty thing in their life, but to depict it they
need a skillset they dont have yet, so when they write about these seemingly tragic scenes theyre
using writing that is so bad that the scenes are hilarious. Theyre laugh-out-loud funny. They might
be weeping as they present their work, but everybody else is barely suppressing this intense impulse
to laugh. Theres nothing worse than badly written erotica. So my goal was to write this really
extreme, almost Marquis de Sade erotica, and to write it really poorly in over-the-top Barbara
Cartland language. Part of that involved sitting down with anyone Id ever known whod done sex
work and talking to them about their experiences. That was fascinating and really funny. They had
enormous stories.
Like what?
In New York City, one woman told me how shed been hired over the telephone and arrived to find
her client already involved in snorting speed and cavorting with two other woman hed hired for the
same evening. She declined the drugs and kept her head straight even as the man had a heart attack.
She administered cardiopulmonary resuscitation and phoned for medical help while the other

escorts fled. Finally, before help arrived, she held the man and comforted him as he died. Later, as
she gave her statement to the police, they told her that it was the first time in their experience that a
sex worker had stayed with a dying client. Its a common occurrence: clients dying during sex. Her
version was just enormously moving.

Were you keen to make a point with the book about consumerism and corporations wanting
total control over peoples bodies, minds and feelings?
God save us from another shrill warning about consumerism. Im much more fascinated with the
ways in which intimacy is being commoditized and sold. It seems that all of our peak life
experiences are purchased. Instead of bonding with other humans, were bonding with
products. That scares me more than consumerism. Arousal addiction seems to me to be the ultimate
result of these faux-yet-intense substitutes for human relationships.
Beautiful You is another of your books people might say is shocking, this time with sex
instead of violence. Do you mind being labelled as a shock writer?
I cant control that part, the public reception, so I dont think about it. I dont give it a thought.
Behind it all, are you a big softie?
Definitely. One thing that makes it both wonderful to tour and terrible to tour is that Ive become a
sort of confessor figure for people. They feel like Im unshockable and that Im not going to judge
or condemn them for whatever they tell me, so people tell me the most heartbreaking, touching
things. The burden of hearing that from endless people really is heartbreaking and troubling.
Theyre unburdening in heartbreaking ways. People tell me health issues, tragic things. Its a lot to
hear.
Among all the graphic sex, violence, blood, guts and dark humour of your books, do you think
people often miss the more emotional side? Does that bother you?
Probably most people miss that. The books are really meant to be read several times throughout
your life. The first time I read The Great Gatsby I was 13 and reading a book that made absolutely
no sense to me. I hated it. But reading it when I was 30, the age of the narrator, I adored it. My goal
is not to be liked. My goal is to be remembered. Public taste changes and personal taste changes
across time. But if youre remembered, then youll be revisited until theres a point youll find an
audience. Youll be accepted. So many things that I love, like Harold & Maude, oh my God, what a
treat When that was released, it was universally panned, terrible reviews, out of theatres in a
couple of days. But because it stayed in peoples awareness, it got brought back and is now one of
the mot popular films of all time. Citizen Kane got very mixed reviews.
Are the emotional lines in your books are about your own life, relationships, tragedies and
experiences?
Its just as well people didnt recognise that because in a way its about presenting this fantastically
personal, painful thing but doing it with a kind of costume on. When I read the stories in public,
theyve become so deeply personal that I need to take big amounts of anti-anxiety medicine, big
amounts, so that I dont react to what Im reading. It is emotionally charged stuff but it has to be
presented in a kind of charming way with a lot of laughter at the front end and kind of hiding any
profundity. That might occur later, maybe years later, or just as a reader reflects on a book. I just

dont want it to be on the page and obvious.

What does writing do for you?
One part is catharsis. One part is a sense of mastering the thing, that I can control the story. I can
make the story serve me. I can make my pain serve me, rather than being constantly subjected,
tortured by the pain. I have some sense of power over the pain. And one sense is of it being the
thing that occupies my consciousness so that time passes. If I write three books about my parents
deaths, at the end of the third book Ill be a different person, Ill have a new life and Ill no longer
have that impulse to pick up the telephone and call my parents. On a Sunday night, my father
always used to call me. Until a couple of years ago, not a Sunday night went by where I didnt
think, Dads going to call. Id think Did Dad call? Did I forget? And then Id think, Dads been
dead for 14 years. So writing is about mastering and using the situation, getting a cathartic release
by somehow presenting the truth, and also passing the time with some kind of diversion.
Does it work?
It always works. It works beautifully. Even if I didnt sell anything, Id still do it.
Some writers keep coming back to the same thing in their lives, whether its John Irving with
his absent father or Joseph Conrad never getting off the boat. When it comes to the violence
in your own life, do you think youll ever get off the boat?
One issue with getting off the boat is that theres always crap. Theres always a fresh tragedy you
have to deal with.
Its just life?
Exactly. Something horrible is always going to happen. I just developed this one very effective
method for dealing with terrible things that I cant resolve, I cant fix and I cant bear to be with. Its
just my way of tolerating these intolerable things. Theres another aspect too. Steve Almond, a
cultural commentator in the States, wrote about how writing workshops have become the new talk
therapy, a process for dealing with issues. Therapy was just too expensive for most people and was
being replaced by pharmacopeia; it was easier to give people pills than talking with a therapist or
group. But going to book workshops allows people a kind of therapeutic group session and to talk
about their personal problems in a very masked crafted way. I noticed something in the workshop
Ive been a part of since 1990: theyre the oldest friends I ever had. People have come and gone and
died but we still get together on Monday nights. Were discussing our fiction but were really
discussing whats not working in our lives.

Youve written ghost stories too, another way of dealing with your past. Have you ever seen or
experienced anything you couldnt explain?
This is going out on a limb. I bought this huge old ramshackle house in the woods, a rotting old
place, the pits. I had plans for years to renovate it. When my mother died, I finally dug in and
renovated the house. It took two years to gut and completely remodel this house in the middle of
nowhere. Its isolated, in the woods, no neighbours for maybe two or three miles in any direction.
Some decorators came in and asked to have access to the house. They were going to decorate the
whole house over two weeks and they asked me not to come in; they wanted to surprise me with all
of the results. I gave them the keys. For two weeks, I lived out in the barn. I came by every evening

to make sure the doors were locked but never went in. One November, I was walking from the
house back to the barn, several hundred feet through the woods, and I was thinking, I wish my
father was alive because my father would have loved this house. This would be his dream house. I
had no idea what it looked like inside. That night, my father came to me. This was two years after
my mother had died. My father at that point had been dead for 12 years. He came to me and said, I
was dead for 10 years. I had no idea I was dead. I just wandered and wandered, and then your
mother just came to me. Your mother just died. She explained to me, Fred, youre dead. Everyone
in my family had really similar dreams to this, dreams of my father coming to them, bleeding,
saying, Can you help me? Someones trying to kill me. So my father said hed been lost for 10
years and my mother had resolved that. Then he said, Now, will you show me the house? So I
walked him through the finished house, the house I had no idea how it would look inside. He said,
Im so happy. Ive never been more at peace and filled with joy as I am now. This is terrific. We
looked throughout the house. He admired everything. Theres a long upstairs hallway and bright
striped paintings hanging in the hallway. He said, I really like these, these are great. Then he went
to the master bedroom and lay down. He said, Is there anything youd like to ask me? The only
question I could think of was What happens when we die? but it seemed insulting to him to ask
him to state something hed just demonstrated so beautifully, by how he was and how he talked
about his current state. He said, If its ok, Im going to go now, and he lay down on the bed and
fell asleep and vanished. I woke up at dawn and I was just weeping hysterically, weeping in my
sleep. That was the day the decorators were going to show me the house. So they think Im furious
because Im so shutdown, saying nothing. But as we went into the house, the upstairs hallway,
which wasnt visible from the outside, had those paintings Id seen in my dream. Id never seen
them before. I saw them in my dream but not before that. I was so shaken by having been through
the house and knowing what it would look like from my dream that I really was upset. The
decorators thought that was anger but I couldnt express how shaken I was.
What do you make of that? Do you file it under unexplained?
I file that under proof. Ive had three dreams during my life that filled me with complete
resolution, at least for a few days. Its proof of an afterlife, of contact, proof of an ongoing presence
of these entities that we interact with or lose contact with.
It sounds like religious faith, which maybe not a lot of people expect from you.
I think thats what it is: faith. Religion is when we apply the social functions of what the church
provides in order to maintain society and our lives.
How does that belief feel?
For the first couple of days, it feels fantastic. Then it goes away. Theres no kind of glorious thing.
The world rushes in and replaces it with anxiety and everything. But it does linger on, in a way that
I feel permanently changed.
Beautiful You by Chuck Palahniuk is out now on Jonathan Cape (UK)/Doubleday (US).

In Part Two of our interview, Chuck Palahniuk talks about the

sequel to Fight Club, religion, violence, the death of his mother
and writing as a teenage girl
Click here for Chuck Palahniuk interview: Part One
By Graeme Green

Fight Club is nearly 20 years old. What are your thoughts on the book now?
Well, Im writing a sequel actually, as a graphic novel. The test title is Manifesto, the working title
for Fight Club when I first wrote that. The original book is rich enough that Im able to go back and
find all the bits in it that were not really explored. For example, the narrators parents were referred
to with just a couple of lines, so I can go back and invent the parents for him and also to give him a
child, to revisit him 10 years later and see him failing as badly with his son as he felt his father
failed with him. He has no one to blame his problems on. So much of the first book was about
blaming fathers. The second book has to be about accepting responsibility.
Im searching and curious and scared that my whole life will go by before Im able to
have any kind of experience.
Have you felt pressure in your career to live up to Fight Club?
No. I get so much enjoyment and utility out of the writing process. It allows me to be with my
friends at least once a week in this context. Thats the only thing that matters to me.
Because of your books, do people think of you as a deranged mind or a disturbed character?
They used to expect a kind of werewolf or Charles Manson sort of person, that Id be really
outlandish in some readily apparent way. Im hoping they recognise that Im more of an accountant
or a bookkeeper who has a fairly good memory for things that move me emotionally. Im able to
hold on to them for years and years until I find exactly the right place to put them in a book.

We ran an interview with Irvine Welsh recently where he said people often wanted him to be a
debauched drug addict, like one of his characters.
I sometimes see the heartbreak right in peoples face that theyre not meeting Tyler Durden. Its one
reason I avoid meeting writers I like, when Im so in love with their characters. I dont want that
character to be negated by the existence of the author. So much of what I do on tour is to mitigate
the pain people feel when they realise their favourite character is just a fictional character.
When really they want someone to fight with?
Right. Someone who will engage with them and perpetuate that story in their life. But Im not that
person any more.
At least it shows theyre invested in what youre doing.
It shows theyre reading books, young people reading books. And I think thats terrific.
You have had wild times though, havent you, with Santa Rampages (annual event where
people dress as Santa and go on a rampage) and the Cacophony Society (network of people

seeking out experiences outside the mainstream)?

Boy, the term wild is almost perjorative. I see it as curious. I think Id score very high on the
Aspergers scale. I have no idea how people behave. I just dont know. I care very much and I want
to do everything right. In a way, my life is a constant study of how people live their lives so I can
make sure Im doing the right thing.
Are you someone whos always searching and looking for experiences?
Im searching and curious and scared that my whole life will go by before Im able to have any kind
of experience of this or that. I dont want to be this person who avoids violence my whole life. I
want to find a structured consensual way to experience violence, so I know what its like to be hit or
to hit someone. So much of Fight Club was about that, this structure/laboratory situation where
people could engage in violence. And so many of the books are about creating structured ways of
experiencing something really intense and short-lived, out of curiosity more than anything.
When you first went to Hollywood for Fight Club, you talked about being an outsider. Several
of your books are films now, with more on the way. Are you more of a Hollywood insider now?
A little bit. But its not something I really cultivate. It feels so artificial, so unless we really have a
reason to be working together its hard to maintain those relationships. Occasionally Im in touch
with people but not unless theres a real professional reason.
Does film influence your writing?
Not really. For the work to hold my interest, it has to do something that movies and television cant
do, so they quickly become very extreme and depict things that are unfilmable. My screen agent
would love to see me do something commercial and easy, but
Do you get excited to see film versions of your books?
I cant control it, so I dont put a lot of emotion into it. Im curious to see how people meet that
challenge. But because its not my problem, Im not too worried about it.

Youre also two books (Doomed and Damned) into a trilogy where youre writing as the ghost
of a young girl. Whats it like to write as a young girl?
I wanted her to be a really smart 13-year-old, like an Emily Bronte 13-year-old. I wanted to have
someone whos very book smart, but very innocent at the same time and who is pre-genital
sexuality. She really has no mechanical idea about how things work. One thing I really envy about
my friends who have kids, as their children develop theyre able to revisit their own developmental
stages and recognise themselves and recognise the fallacies that they decided as kids. Theyre able
to undo a lot of things they decided or ways of being they attached to at an age. Their kids really
give them a second chance of living a better life for themselves. Im never going to have kids. So
Madison (in Damned and Doomed) gave me a sort of surrogate child to walk backwards in time
with and revisit all these assumptions about life. I like her. And I like the fact shes being revealed
as an incredibly frightened person, that what looks like cleverness is something she hides behind,
her constant avoidance of everything.
And that was a way to look at yourself?
I think for me and my entire generation, we had to define ourselves against the hippies. We took on
this kind of sarcastic, ironic, snarkiness, because it seemed to be the most extreme reaction to the

earnestness of hippies. Im just reaching the age where Im terrified of being snarky for the rest of
my life. So after a lifetime of snarkiness, how do we arrive at something more important, more
heartfelt, more sensitive?
When will the final book in the trilogy be out?
The third book wouldnt be out until at least 2016. Its called Delivered. In the end, Madison is
delivered. Her goal is to reconcile God and Satan and in doing so to resolve all of human conflict by
resolving that big conflict.
Theres a line in Damned where Madison describes the Bible: As fanciful as anything penned
by Tolkien or Anne Rice, this new tome presented an elaborate yarn about creation. Did you
enjoy having a dig at religion?
My goal is never to make fun of religion. My goal is to acknowledge the ways in which religion
still serves us, still provides a very useful blueprint for how to get through perennial horrible parts
of life. I miss that ever since my family left the Catholic church. The impetus for writing the first
book, Damned, was my mothers death and I still remember the absurdity of being there with her
dead body and my sister and none of us knowing what to do next. If we were in the church, we
would have a whole blueprint of what we would do and what would become of her and her soul, but
wed left the church decades before so all we had was this body and all the painkillers. I miss
having that narrative, that script to follow. When I write a book, in a way, Im trying to replicate
some of the things that occur in religion and to create a model in which people can come together
and express their worst selves. Thats in a lot of my books, right back to Fight Club.

You dont often give religion an easy ride, though. In Haunted, you write about the
destruction of all religion buildings and holy sites around the world?
The most serious thing I wanted to look at is that people need the structure that religion provides, a
space to go to, a ritual to take part in, in order to expunge their worst selves and to be in
communication with one another and to recreate community. They need ritualistic things to preserve
the society in which they live. Once religion has been pooh-poohed and dismissed by primarily an
intellectual class of people, we lose the really useful social functions of religion, and what is going
to come to take its place? The danger is that we may need this thing and what replaces it might be
worse than what we throw away.
In Doomed, you write, How could you ever bring yourself to love so deeply if you truly knew
how brief a lifetime can be? Its difficult not to read your past into that.
My favourite line in the first book was when Madison says something like, I think I miss my
parents more than they miss me. They only knew me for 13 years but I knew them my whole life. I
wrote that when my mother just died and there was this idea that Id known her my whole life, but
Id been just been a portion of her life. That was really troubling.
There are also some interesting likes about marriage: You never know the complicated deals
two people negotiate in order to stay married beyond the first ten minutes. and What two
people dont say to each other forges a stronger bond than honesty. Do they say something
about your own views on relationships?
Theyre fantastically weighty lines. I adore those lines. Those are the kinds of lines that people

show up and have tattooed on their chest. Ill see those lines tattooed on people for the rest of my
life. I thought about my grandparents, who were married for 70 years but had a very rocky
relationship, and I thought about the ongoing constant bargaining they had to do. I love those lines.
I like little truisms. Ever since I was a child and Id see them on guidance counsellor posters at
school, little quotes that just nailed something so eloquently with just five or six words. Ive always
been attracted to those slogan truths.
Is part of the writing process to get to those moments?
First to illustrate them, then to state them overtly. To unpack them over a scene and then state them
in a very clear way. Thats always my goal.
Did you think youd ever become a giver of wisdom?
I dont think of myself as a giver of anything. More as a conduit, who in a way harvests things that
people tell me. People tell me profound heartbreaking things and my way of dealing with them is to
kind of archive them and to put them in a pattern with similar things so they all kind of illustrate
something larger. Thats always the way I work. Its kind of journalistic.
Do you find the writing process lonely?
Most of my writing takes place in my overall life, in public, wherever I happen to be. Thats where
ideas occur, thats where people say bright things, thats where Ill hear an anecdote. Its a whole
mess of notes that I take to my computer. Thats the part I dread: sitting down and keying it all in
and cutting and pasting it so it comes in an acceptable order. Then I take it to workshop and present
it, seeing where it works, where it gets an emotional reaction and where people just look bored.
Then I rework it based on feedback from workshop. But the part in front of the computer, I hate
that. Nobody wants to spend their life alone. One other good thing about limiting the time at a
computer is that it makes that time more precious to you. If you say, I will only write for half an
hour this week, that half hour is a little more valuable. Also, only writing when you have a stack of
notes. Because staring at an empty screen is impossible. Its not where writing or good story telling
happens.
Haunted famously made people pass out at readings. Do you like getting that kind of
reaction?
Oh, I love it, that stories can still have that response. You remember when you were little, being told
stories around the campfire, they were so powerful and intense and filled you with horror and
stayed with you. Friends and peers my age are more and more bemoaning the fact that they dont
really have peak experiences anymore like they used to have as a child or a young person. Very
little reaches them any more. My goal is to try to locate those peak experiences as people tell them
to me and turn them into that peak experience and allow the audience to revisit that strong
emotional response theyd have had as a child.
Would the most shocking book you could write now be one that didnt have any violence, sex,
drugs or bodily fluids in it?
Boy. I always think of extremes, that one effect relies on another effect and that I couldnt achieve
any really profound epiphany unless I had a counterbalancing baseness. For transformation to occur,
it feels like a character has to be one way and then find some sort of enlightenment.
Beautiful You by Chuck Palahniuk is out now on Jonathan Cape (UK)/Doubleday (US). Doomed

and Damned are also available, with the third part of the Madison Spencer trilogy expected in 2016.
Photos of Chuck Palahniuk (in descending order) by Chris Saunders, Allan Amato and Rob W Hart.
Follow Curious Animal magazine on Twitter: @curious_animal and Facebook:
www.facebook.com/curiousanimal

Chuck Palahniuk: Im fascinated by low

fiction that disgusts the reader or makes them
sexually aroused'
The author, 52, on blue-collar jobs, pornography and his fathers murder

My moments of greatest joy come when Im alone: Chuck Palahniuk. Photograph: Allan Amato
for the Observer
My father was murdered 15 years ago. [He was shot by his partners ex-boyfriend]. I used to say
something profound and sensitive when asked about it, but its more muddy now. Today I feel a
huge amount of sympathy for my dad, because I am turning into him.
There hasnt been an edgy book, like American Psycho, for decades. People dont want to be
associated with something politically incorrect because the backlash is so immediate online. They
play safer because of that.
My parents divorce left me unable to be around conflict. They were so tense and unpleasant when
they were together that there was a sense of impending violence. With Fight Club I was
reacclimatising to the idea of violence, but even then I had to structure it with rules and consensual
agreements.
Pornography is the giant thing in the internet age that nobody will talk about. Its a big secret that
is generating so much traffic, at the leading edge of the new Wild West. It is a pure, nonverbal
example of a commodified experience; books are another example. Commodified formulae for a
fake sense of immediacy.
My siblings and I joke about how well weve turned out. Weve achieved remarkable things
considering the squalor of growing up [in a mobile home in Burbank, Washington]; how poor we
were. I needed to leave the chaos of my childhood and achieve a life where I was not subject to
other peoples upsets.
I try to achieve high-culture effects through low-culture methods. Im fascinated by low fiction
that generates a physical response: disgusts the reader, makes them hungry or sexually aroused.
When I left college I worked as a mechanic. Blue-collar jobs gave me a freedom to approach
writing as a pastime, as opposed to needing money or a career. For me it was a mistress: pure
pleasure.

Almost my entire circle of friends died of Aids during the 80s. I worked in a hospice watching
people die of opportunistic infections. I had a factory job, but the fact that I wasnt dying like these
people made me feel fantastic.
I feel guilty and creepy that my moments of greatest joy come when Im alone. When I am writing
something will be revealed to me that wasnt planned, and I experience these epiphanies.
Friends can be thrilled that their story was used in my fiction, but angry at being depicted in
nonfiction. They are afraid of losing their sense of privacy.
You could say its inertia that has kept me with my partner for 20 years. I pour all my chaos and
upset into my books so my home life can stay on an even kilter.
I have been called a nihilist, but I would describe myself as a romantic. Im always looking for
narratives that bring people together. I like my books to have a wedding at the end, rather than a
death.
Beautiful You by Chuck Palahniuk is published by Jonathan Cape on 6 November (16.99). To
order a copy for 13.59, click on the link above or call 0330 333 6846

Chuck Palahniuk: You cant just be a

spectator
November 5, 2014
Mr. Palahniuk, do you think that the world is getting better or worse?
Better. Ultimately, everyone is acting out of what they feel is the best choice. In a way, theyre all
trying to improve the world. And I think that those basic choices make the world a better place.
I wouldnt have necessarily guessed that from the guy who wrote Fight Club. Do you think
that attitude is reflected in your fiction?
To me, its a choice: whether to focus on the way things work out beautifully, or to focus on the way
things work out miserably. I always skew to life continuing beyond the end of a story people
demonstrating their own strength and potential and increasing that over the course of the story. Its
hopeful, positive. Also, my stories tend to bring people from isolation into community with at
least one other person, usually with a whole community of people so that they find themselves
accepted back by a world that they kind of fled from.
I can see that But your stories still usually involve lots of sex and death.
I think they define one another. A comedy ends with a wedding, and a tragedy ends with a funeral:
you always have to juxtapose sex and death. Like in Fight Club the boy meets the girl in a support
group for terminally ill people. Thats why abortion occurs so frequently in my stories. Abortion
sort of synthesizes both sex and death. To have sex and death placed as close to one another as
possible is always a goal of mine.
Is your life anywhere near as extreme as your fiction?

No, my life has been about living like a lump and looking like a priest so that people will come up
to me and tell me their most appalling stories. They have to make their confession to somebody, and
it might as well be me. I like it when youre not getting stories from a publication or broadcast
those are stories that everyone will know but youre getting the secret stories that you can only get
from individuals. In settings where people make confessions, like support groups, or I used to love
telephone or sex chatlines, you can listen for hours to people discuss their fantasies or whatever
private, horrible thing they needed to process by talking it through.
How do you get people to tell you their darkest stories?
I call it using a little fish to get a big fish. I find one story, one anecdote that I find really fascinating
and I will introduce that into conversation. And each time I tell that one small anecdote, there will
be someone who has a similar experience from their life, but much more extreme. People compete
when they have conversation, they want their input to build on the previous contribution. So, the
strange anecdote that I throw out, which is sometimes something from my own life, is instantly
eclipsed by an almost identical but more extreme version from someone elses life. Then a third
person will jump in and eclipse that anecdote. Im recognizing these common events that link
people in pretty much everyones lives, and Im looking for the most extreme versions of those.
Why the most extreme?
To illustrate that these things happen to everyone. You want to start with something that establishes
a comfortable precedent that people can relate to, and then you want to move towards a version that
is the ultimate version of that common experience. Also, my writing teacher told me to always take
your reward up front, that the writing itself should be so extreme, so wild, and so much fun that it
doesnt matter whether or not you ever sell the book.
You once said that Fight Club was just The Great Gatsby updated a little. If Gatsby was about
the Lost Generation of the 20s, Fight Club about male disillusionment in the 90s, what would
it be in the current culture?
I wouldnt even venture what the current culture is. I hate the idea of writing or trying to address
current events. By the time the writing is finished, those current events will be outdated. Years ago,
the first time I ever visited my literary agent, he sheepishly brought out this rolling cart filled with
dozens of manuscripts about priests molesting children, because that week thats what was in the
news. Everyone had the same idea and they were all a complete waste of time. So, rather than try to
follow current events, my goal is to try and write something new enough that it might possibly lead
the culture rather than follow the culture.
Then why does your new book Beautiful You refer directly to Fifty Shades of Grey?
Its true, the working title of the book was Fifty Shades of the Twilight Cave Bear Wears Prada. Im
fascinated by the whole issue of arousal addiction, which seems to be mostly a problem for young
men videogames, pornography The idea was to try and explore arousal addiction, but to do it in
a comic, off-hand way, by depicting it with women, the population least likely to be subjected by it.
I also wanted to borrow from all of those kind of chick lit books and use all of those tropes that
are viewed so seriously.
Like what?

The lead character is a beautiful white girl and shes got a pretty black girl for her best friend, the
black girl is always really sassy These tropes are thrown at us over and over, so I thought, Lets
use these tropes as a joke and see if people recognize them.
I think they will. Thats why I would say you are definitely writing about our current moment.
I wanted to write about how so many of us, when we look back at the major events in our lives,
theyre not actually things that happened to us. Theyre our favorite movie, our favorite book,
things that werent full experiences; they were facilitated by a product that we bought. And so, I
wanted to write about that. That breaks my heart a lot.
Because people are just living by proxy?
Exactly. That they find an identity in a series of products, and the experiences provided by those
products, rather than by going out and having strong, unique experiences of their own. Years ago I
had to buy a tombstone for my grandparents and the cemetery was showing me the new trend,
which was to get the logos of different products engraved on your tombstone and that defined who
you were in world. She was showing me the tombstone of a teenage girl who had died in a car
accident. She had been a very good volleyball player, so her parents had had a Voit volleyball
engraved on her tombstone.
I find that extremely depressing.
My grandfather had been a farmer, so the same salesperson was showing me tractors John Deere
tractors or International Harvester tractors that I could have engraved on my grandfathers
tombstone that would, you know, define him for the ages. There were pages and pages of these
corporate logos that you could put on your tombstone, right by your name, right by your birth and
death dates. It kind of broke my heart. This idea of people living their lives through a series of
experiences provided by products was a big part of the new book. I think that the Millennials are
struggling with coming up with goals and ideals of their own.
I feel like gay rights is a big issue at the moment.
Thats one of the issues, but I would venture that thats just another manifestation of an equal rights
issue, almost like a third wave feminism, where you take womens rights out into the larger world,
and fight for them. Beyond rights, we still need a new vision to drive us.
What might that be?
Im still waiting for that to pop up in somebodys head. Thats why we have things like Burning
Man. Events like Burning Man are the laboratories where people go and experiment with social
structure and with identity. Its out of these little laboratories that our new culture will grow. And
thats why so many of my books are about these little liminoid human experiments that are shortlived and are kind of fun and exciting, like party crashing in Rant, or Fight Club. Its these
liminoid laboratories that will give us that vision, that new thing to quest for that isnt just
capitalism or Marxism. Youre outside of it, and in a way, youre outside of yourself. Everyone is
equal and everyone is forced to participate; you cant just be a spectator.