Christopher Moore is in many ways the definition of a successful writer. Since his first book Practical Demonkeeping was released in 1992, his books have become more ambitious as his writing has gotten sharper and funnier. Oh yes, he’s also a funny writer, which is not to say that he’s an unserious... more

Christopher Moore is in many ways the definition of a successful writer. Since his first book Practical Demonkeeping was released in 1992, his books have become more ambitious as his writing has gotten sharper and funnier. Oh yes, he’s also a funny writer, which is not to say that he’s an unserious writer, but he’s one of only a handful of American novelists who want to make the reader laugh. Whether he’s taking on religion in “Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal” or writing a funny book about death in “A Dirty Job,” there’s no writer quite like Christopher Moore

Fresh off “Fool,” a book which took him back to Thirteenth century England and told the story of King Lear from the point of view of the court jester, Moore returns to present day San Francisco with a sequel to his earlier books “Bloodsucking Fiends: A Love Story” and “You Suck: A Love Story” in “Bite Me: A Love Story.” What follows is an edited conversation with Moore, which was just as entertaining as his readers might expect.


ALEX DUEBEN: I really enjoyed Bite Me and I was wondering, the ending of the previous book You Suck deliberately echoed the ending of the first book in the series, Bloodsucking Fiends. Were you planning the sequel when you did that?

CM: Yeah. You Suck was left open to have a sequel and I wanted the three of them to stand as piece of work. I had originally proposed four, but I think this does it for me.

AD: What would fourth have been?

CM: I don’t know. I didn’t have a plot. I just had a title, Foul Dead Things: A Love Story. (laughs) But I didn’t know what it was going to be about. And I’m not completely closed to it, but I’m done writing vampires for a little while.

AD: Each of the three books are very different

CM: I don’t want to write the same book over and over again. And even though there are some similar plot elements, as you might think there would be in the setting with the same characters. I just didn’t want to do structurally the same book over and over again. I’ve always tried to do something at least a little different.

AD: Do you enjoy writing Abby Normal?

CM: She still has the ability crack me up. She’s difficult to write because her stuff has to be very crafted. It’s not natural for me, a middle aged white guy, to write in the voice of a sixteen year old goth girl. It’s as hard as writing Shakespearean dialect in my last book Fool. Abby’s stuff is every bit as difficult to write as that.

AD: Her dialogue definitely has a sense of structure and its own internal narrative logic.

CM: When you do these kind of dialect books you have to invent something that approximates the speech of either a sixteen year old goth girl or a medieval fool. You can’t actually write the way they would speak, or it’s not accessible to the reader. It has to be a little more clear and a little less stylistic, so its really a hybrid of normal diction and this hyper diction that these characters use. That’s what’s going on with Abby. Me trying to make the way a kid like that speaks, which can be wildly irritating, accessible to people who have to spend three hundred pages with her.

AD: When she first appeared in A Dirty Job as a small character, did you know she would become such a big figure in later books?

CM: I didn’t actually. I knew that I was going to bring her back and A Dirty Job foresees that You Suck is going to be written because there’s a scene that is duplicated in both books but from different points of view. I knew that Abby was going to be in the book but I didn’t know until I started writing her voice how big she was going to be. When I went to write Bite Me she had taken over. She had become such a strong part of the second book that Bite Me became her book.

I don’t want to sound mystical and, oh the characters tell you what to do, but it’s very much like method acting. I can talk about how difficult it might be to craft the way she speaks, it’s also self-driven and you get into the character the way a method actor would. She just had so much energy that I kinda just gave the third book to her. At least voice-wise.

AD: I know you live in San Francisco and have written a few books set in the city. For you, what makes it a great setting?

CM: Geographically you can contain it fairly easily in a book. It’s smaller than most big cities. It’s a tenth the size of London or Paris or Los Angeles, so you can write about all the different neighborhoods, or many of the different neighborhoods in the city, and the characters never have to get in a car because everything’s so close. There’s this mystical gothic-y fog thing that goes on in the city. Architecturally it’s very pretty. It’s got a lot of things aesthetically going for it.

Most of the books take place in the North end of the city which is the Financial district, Chinatown, North Beach, which is an Italian neighborhood, and Russian Hill, which is right now young professionals and retired people. You have these clashes of culture. Chinatown is like a foreign country that’s four blocks by four blocks. Watching the interaction of all those different cultures is just interesting. I was a cultural anthro major so I get to do cultural anthro in my backyard more or less.

AD: My major complaint about Bite Me is that there wasn’t enough of the Animals.

CM: The story didn’t want to keep them engaged. I understand what you’re saying. I have the same feeling, but I couldn’t get them more engaged and develop their characters more in the context that I had because of turning so much of the book over to the new members of the cast, which were Abby and Fu Dog and Jared. In a three hundred page book the cast can only get so big and I found myself saying can I go down a road with this subplot or can’t I? I thought, I’ve got to have them show up. The Emperor, too. I would have loved to have had the Emperor more engaged in what was going on, but the book didn’t have enough room for them.

AD: I definitely understand and you didn’t want to just fulfill a checklist of things from the previous books included that people enjoyed.

CM: It was tough for me to write a third book in a series and not make it formulaic. There’s an arc to any book you write that is just the arc of the story. There’s the status quo, something happens, and then you return to status quo and consequently when the characters and the setting were the same, there was going to be a similarity to the books. I was trying to avoid that, but yet satisfy readers who want the same thing over and over again. I mean I get asked ten times a day when are you going to do a sequel to Lamb. My answer is, it’s the life of Jesus, you can’t do a sequel to it. (laughs) Pretty much everyone knows how that story ends.

AD: Is there the possibility of seeing more of Abby and Tommy and the Emperor?

CM: Probably the Emperor. I would at some point like to do a book with the characters and premise from A Dirty Job, the death merchants, that would probably be set in San Francisco. It had the Emperor and it wouldn’t be a difficult stretch to put Abby and Tommy in it. I don’t have a plan for that but I do want to do a book with that premise again and that would almost undoubtedly be set in San Francisco.

Of my San Francisco books, there’s no doubt that A Dirty Job is my best. It was also way more ambitious. It’s a comedy about death. When I did Bloodsucking Fiends I thought, it’s a vampire book it’s not a vehicle for big themes. It needs to be entertaining and funny and that is all I should shoot for. Hopefully it is. A Dirty Job I had big themes to deal with that were pulled from caring for my mother when she was dying and caring for my girlfriend’s mother when she was dying. There was experience to put in that I had to bring through the comedy.

AD: A Dirty Job is one of if not my favorite of your books and I think it’s one of the most successful because that’s where the sensibility and voice and the structure and complexity of the book all came together.

CM; When I teach it’s something that I try to tell students, but it’s a really big thing to hand someone, a project or a book is often defined by its ambition before you start it. That’s what I think for any artist is what makes a difference. Are you stretching to do this? Are you trying to do something that’s actually hard to do and might be beyond your abilities. I could really fuck the dog one of these days doing that. Continually putting those hurdles in front of myself. That’s why it’s kind of fun to do a book like Bite Me. The book I’m working on right now, I’m completely freaked out about being able to ever finish it.

AD: All your books have a comic sensibility in common. Is that you and your perspective on the world?

CM: I think so. That’s kind of my default setting. I really don’t think you can teach anybody to be funny and I know having taught a little bit that when someone comes in and says I want to write like you and you talk to them for ten minutes and go you’re just not funny. It’s just not how you think. It’s not something that I learned. My dad was a funny guy. It’s just how I react to the world. I actually tried to write quote serious stuff unquote and I haven’t been able to pull it off. I get about ten pages into something and I go, something funny has to happen, this is boring.

AD: How much of say, Fluke, is you wanting to write a science fiction story, but it just comes out in this fashion?

CM: Fluke is the perfect example. The reason I wrote Fluke is because I wanted to get in the water with humpback whales. Bottom line. A friend of mine had come back from this island called Rurutu--I call it the Scooby Island cause it’s called Rurutu. He had been in the water with singing humpback whales and he described it. I thought, that’s awesome, I need to do that. In US waters the only way you can do that is if you’re on a whale research permit and you have to get permission. I started writing letters and sending my books to scientists and these guys in Hawaii said sure come on over we’ll put you on the research permit. It started more with wanting to live a life. One of the things you find pretty early on when you write books for a living is you realize I could live my entire life within this room by myself making click-y noises on a keyboard if I don’t make some effort to go do stuff.

That book was completely motivated by wanting to experience what it was like being in the water with whales, and as I started doing the research, it turned out that the scientists were much more interesting than the whales. That’s what the book ended up really being about. The people who study whales much less than the whales themselves. But it all started with just wanting to experience what it was like being in the water with a humpback whale. Which was awesome by the way.

AD: Do you do a lot of research?

CM: I actually do. For Fool I spent a month in England and France. For Lamb I went to Israel for almost a month. I didn’t go to the Himalayas or India and other places that take place in the book. I quite frankly ran out of time and money. I couldn’t go to those places and actually get the book done, so all that’s done from my imagination. I always try to go to the places I’m writing about. It adds dimensions to the book that I would never have been able to anticipate. If I hadn’t gone to Israel and seen how desolate Judea is, where the Dead Sea is and where a lot of the gospels take place and seen how rough the land is from Nazareth to Jerusalem and sort of gotten an idea of what the geography of the place is like, it would have been a completely different book. So yeah I always try to go to where I’m writing about. Even it’s harder with the historical stuff.

I’m writing a book now that takes place in nineteenth century Paris and the city is in many ways the same but the culture’s not. It’s weird because it’s closer to our culture than medieval england or first century Palestine were and that actually makes it more difficult because I can’t just make shit up. (laughs) There was this huge hole in the Jesus story. I could do anything I wanted. With Fool, which was set in the Thirteenth Century, it was kind of the same thing. There’s so much that people don’t know about what went on in those days that I was able to fill it in.

AD: How do you work. Do you outline your books, because in Bite Me, especially, there’s a lot going on.

CM: I do a sort of diagram that’s less a “category one subcategory a” outline and more of a circles and arrows thing. Because it’s a visual representation it’s hard to describe it. The short answer is I do a very rough outline and then I try to plug in scenes that I know are going to be there and stay about five scenes ahead of myself. I mean I obviously write in scenes. That’s how I learned to write, it’s what is effective, and it’s how drama happens. For instance I know that in the next scene we’re going to meet the old vampires and then I’ll get there and decide whose point of view I need to do that from. As far as the outline goes, all the outline will say is, meet old vampires. And then as I approach that I’ll figure out that they had to get somehow and I’ll research the ship.

As the years go by I outline more for a couple reasons. One, I’m on deadline all the time so I can’t afford to be stuck. With Lamb I was stuck for six months. I got up to Antioch and I remember the proposal to the publisher said, and then they’ll have adventures, or something like that. I figured I’ll figure it out when I get to it, and then when I got to it I went, fuck I have no idea what happens now. And I’m stuck in Antioch going I don’t know what’s I didn’t think it through, so I do that now. What I do is outline a little bit more and know where I’m going so that my writing time is more efficient. But then when I write, I write it page one, “once upon a time,” right to the end. I try to write a little bit every day. I have goals which I always fall short of. I try to write a thousand words a day and then I’ll do eight hundred. I try to write for four hours a day and I’ll write three. What happens is the story tightens up as you get to the end, by the time you get to what would be the third act of a book you don’t have a lot of flexibility in what you can do. You sort of set all this stuff in motion and you can’t go very afield to do any exploring. Any goofing around you have to do it in the first half of the book. It becomes necessary to outline as it tightens up. Like braiding a rope or something.

AD: Reading the books, you seem to enjoy the first two acts more than last part, it’s much looser and feels more relaxed in the beginning and the end is very much about wrapping up the plot.

CM: You mean actually doing the process? The first hundred pages are so fucking hard I can’t even tell you. I hate that part. This was the first time I ever said that out loud because it’s not a good thing to say things like that, but the first hundred pages of a book are miserable. You’re establishing the world and you don’t know what you’re doing and you don’t have the characters set and every day you’re making just a million decisions and I’m awful at making decisions. It takes me three hours to figure out where I’m going to have dinner if I’m going out to dinner. All those decisions have to be made and they set the path for the rest of the book in those first hundred pages. It typically will take me six months to write the first hundred pages and I may write the next two hundred pages in two months.

As far as what I enjoy writing the most, probably the middle third of a book is the most enjoyable you’ve got things running but you still have some room to move around in and you can make decisions that go a little farther afield a digress a bit. But the first part’s miserable and largely because even if you’ve done it a dozen times like I have you still go shit I have no idea what I’m doing. This is like the first book all over again.

AD: I don’t know if you want to say anything about the next book you’re working on. You mentioned it was set in 19th Century Paris.

CM: I can tell you about all I know about it. It’s about Nineteenth century French painters. Yes, it’s funny. Yes, it’s going to have weird supernatural stuff in it. It’s going to include a cast of characters that’s a laundry list of the most famous painters of their day, the impressionists and the post-impressionists. It turns out, that’s really hard to do, so don’t try that at home. (laughs)

Chuck Palahniuk needs little by way of introduction on SuicideGirls, our very name being an hommage to the author of Fight Club, Choke and Snuff. We caught up with him by phone to talk about his latest novel, Tell-All. It's a fictional gossip-laced memoir told in the voice of Hazie Coogan, the female... more

Chuck Palahniuk needs little by way of introduction on SuicideGirls, our very name being an hommage to the author of Fight Club, Choke and Snuff. We caught up with him by phone to talk about his latest novel, Tell-All. It's a fictional gossip-laced memoir told in the voice of Hazie Coogan, the female assistant to "the glorious film actress" Miss Katherine Kenton who resides in Hollywood's very real past - a glamorous world populated by the likes of Lillian Hellman, Darryl Zanuck, David O. Selznick, Clark Gable and Bette Davis, who are all names Tell-All's characters love to drop. During our conversation with Palahniuk, we spoke about society's need for the culture of celebrity, the nature of name-dropping, and the ultimate name to drop.

NP: I watched All About Eve last night to get some of the flavor of the era since Tell-All is described in the press release as "a dark re-imagining of All About Eve."

CP: It's also a re-imagining of Sunset Boulevard.

NP: I can see that.

CP: I always loved that story, that Max is the one who orchestrates so much of that story, and Max the butler, Erich von Stroheim, is the one that's left at the end, not dead and not insane. In a way, part of me always thought Max set all of this up so that it would happen. It could easily have been done.

NP: Ah, so Hazie Coogan is your version of Max.

CP: Exactly.

NP: Tell-All explores the concept of celebrity. Why do you think as a society we're so celebrity obsessed?

CP: My crackpot theory is that people are losing their skill to express themselves, and they're, in a way, farming that task out. If they want to express themselves they buy a song or they buy a greeting card that's already processed by someone who's kept that skill. We can't express our own feelings anymore so we have to hire someone to do that. To a large extent movies take that on, they're our therapy and our expression.

NP: I would concur with that. There's even a movie series called Cinematherapy on WE TV.

CP: Right, movie therapy and movie community, where we may not have friends but there's a show called Friends. It gives us that sense of having a community of people. It functions on every level.

NP: Also there's that line from All About Eve where they talk about how the theater is tantamount to religion, with actors and actresses being the gods and goddesses.

CP: When you think about polytheism, where you have any number of gods, each one kind of personified a different type of character. Then that went by the way and was replaced by the system of saints, where each saint typified a different person, a different archetype or a platonic ideal of what someone should be at this point in their life. In a way, actors have become those archetypes. There's always going to be one blonde Brad Pitt. He succeeded the blonde Robert Redford, who succeeded the blonde I can't remember. There's so often just one of these archetypes that really last until they're replaced by the next of that perfect archetype, that perfect saint that personifies that type of person.

NP: And Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are the golden idols people worship right now.

CP: And that they measure themselves against. They say, I'm not a Brad Pitt type, I'm more of a...George Clooney type. And so we look to George Clooney for how to behave. We looked at Cary Grant for what to wear, how to conduct ourselves in public. We find the type that we feel best represents us, and then we model our behavior on the behavior of that type, of that role model person, of that saint.

NP: And people model their relationships on those of their idols too.

CP: And that goes back to people not knowing how to express themselves. So-and-so bought this type of ring for so-and-so, so everyone will rush out to buy that ring that's suddenly mass marketed because it's what you do. It has to be dictated every year.

NP: Going back to Tell-All, obviously it's that golden era of Hollywood that fascinates you. Even in Snuff, your central character, porn queen Cassie Wright, was obsessed with movie stars from that era - you threw in those amazing Hollywood factoids as recalled by her.

CP: I'm always looking for something that books can do that movies cannot do. It's perfectly OK for me to write a book that depicts all of these famous people as characters. I can make them do whatever I want as long as they're dead. That way they can't sue me. In a movie you never could. You could not create a movie that would literally be a tell-all, because you couldn't get the rights to the images of all those famous people, much less doctor the film, to search vintage footage so those people were recreated. So that's something a book can do very easily, but a movie can't touch, and I love doing stuff like that.

And in Snuff, the factoids played a whole different role. They were a means of depicting Cassie's inner strivings. She didn't set out to be a porn star. She had set out to be an actual golden age movie star. Her body of knowledge, all these little things that she knew about those people, had really been [an indication of] her original aspirations without stating them overtly.

NP: Can you talk about some of the underlying themes that you were thinking about as you wrote Tell-All.

CP: One was just the nature of name-dropping. How names function in language by creating these instant networks of associations the moment the name is said - kind of bestowing or claiming part of the status of that famous person and adding it to the speaker's present. The moment you say, "Oh, Juliette Lewis said the funniest thing yesterday," you're kind of claiming an association with her that gives you a greater status in your current context. I love how name-dropping works that way - especially when people say God. I think that's the ultimate form of name-dropping. [People] are always citing God, and it's wonderful to listen [to]. We don't think of it as name-dropping, but it's the biggest form of name-dropping, and it instantly places them on the moral high ground. It places them in a position of greater status.

NP: And it makes it hard to challenge what that person says without also, by implication, challenging God, which is socially a very difficult thing to do.

CP: Exactly. You could always say, "Juliette Lewis, I don't like her," and lessen the impact of the name-drop. You really are not allowed to say that about God.

NP: That's one of things that Richard Dawkins gets very upset about in his writing - that it's hard to win an argument once people bring God into it because essentially society and politeness dictates that one has to respect God unreservedly.

CP: [laughs] Right, the freedom to worship as you desire.

NP: But the freedom not to worship doesn't really exist - in this country at least. In America, a political candidate is unelectable if they're not God-fearing. I often wonder how many politicians lie about their beliefs in order to attain office. Because, statistically speaking, there has to be more atheists in Congress than those that admit to it.

CP: I would agree.

NP: Getting back to Tell-All, were there any other themes and ideas that you were exploring?

CP: I was at Sundance when they were marketing the movie Choke, made from my fourth book, and I was really fascinated to see these incredible groomed and styled movie stars that would just wander freely, unencumbered through the snowy landscape. They wouldn't have a coat, they wouldn't have a purse, they wouldn't have anything in their hands. They would just be these beautiful things that were like animals that had wandered out of the forest. They'd be surrounded by people, flashlights, paparazzi, just this kind of nimbus, this halo of flashing beautiful light.

I was always fascinated because maybe twenty steps away would always be this dowdy woman who'd be carrying all their crap. Their tote bag, their coat, their purse, the make-up cases, thermoses, everything that went into making the beautiful woman beautiful was being lugged around by this dumpy woman who was always far enough away that she would never get caught in the photograph. I thought it was fascinating to have that kind of Jungian separation between the ideal perfect-seeming woman and then the other woman who had to carry the burden of that perfection.

And that when the beautiful woman had a moment to herself, the only kind of intimacy she had was to go to the imperfect woman, and they'd kind of put their heads together and whisper. That other woman seemed to be the only person that she was safe taking to. So that relationship between the woman who looks beautiful and the woman who creates that beauty I thought was absolutely fascinating. I just followed these people all around Park City.

NP: The assistants are cast as much as the stars are, because the assistant has to be non-threatening in appearance.

CP: And they have to be loyal, and they have to be organized, and they have to be aware - constantly watching for the effect, for that stray hair, constantly present.

NP: One of the things I find interesting about your writing is that conventional wisdom dictates that a writer should find a voice and a style, and then stick with it. But what you tend to do with each book is actually create a unique voice for that book, and also a unique way of telling the story, be it non-linear, or, in the case of Snuff, the way you told it through many different voices. It's not like you're just telling the story, you're creating a new style of writing specifically to tell that story. How do you set about that?

CP: I really am looking for a style of writing that will, in a way, work against the content. In Tell-All, I wanted to use the style of writing of the conventions based on gossip columns, those Walter Winchell or Louella Parsons / Hedda Hopper columns from the 1930s and '40s. Because they're a non-fiction form, and a non-fiction form will always lend greater credibility to a really outlandish, wild fictional story. My favorite examples of that are how in Citizen Kane, the story itself is pretty melodramatic, it really is a kind of a soap opera of a story, but they placed it within the context of newsreel photographers seeking out the true story for the production of a newsreel. They put this whole context of journalists in it, and that lent this melodramatic story a gravity, a profundity that it would not have had otherwise.

And then when the Coen brothers did Fargo, they'd just come off of Raising Arizona, which was this over-the-top, wild, outlandish comedy, and Fargo was going to be another one of those kind of violent, fast-paced comedies. But on the front end of Fargo they put that very black, single card opening that said: "This is a true story. The events depicted in this film took place in Minnesota in 1987. At the request of the survivors, the names have been changed. Out of respect for the dead, the rest has been told exactly as it occurred." That's shown against this very sad harp music, almost like angelic mournful music. It creates this sense of mournful, profound sadness at the beginning - and truth - that keeps that story from landing like too much of a Raising Arizona comedy. So I'm always looking for a non-fiction journalistic form that will allow me to tell an even crazier story without the story seeming too crazy.

NP: I would love to see Tell-All turned into a movie. And, given the era it's set in, I would love to see it made as a black & white movie. Have you thought in those terms?

CP: I was last told that Pedro Almodóvar had first look at it. He was between projects and looking for something, and this seemed really appropriate for him. Because it does deal with glamorous women of a certain age, and the male romantic lead is very young and good-looking. It just seems like a Pedro Almodóvar movie. But the biggest hurdle is going to be, how do you fill it with movie stars without having those movie stars? The movie has to make the story so literal that it's going to be a real challenge for this one.

NP: But I can see audiences suspending their disbelief and enjoying watching one celebrity take on the role of another.

CP: That might work. The only time I've ever seen it done was in Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle, a movie they made about Dorothy Parker. Even in that movie they had all of these really awkward lines when people would walk into a room and a character already present would say, "Oh, look! If it isn't Mr. and Mrs. Roger S. Hart." People had to be called out in this kind of pointless expository way because otherwise we would have had no idea who they were supposed to be...It makes it really awkward, the idea of trying to convince us that so-and-so walking in is going to be Cary Grant without saying, "Look! It's Cary Grant." There's place cards and all these cheats, but it would be difficult.

NP: So are you already working on your next novel?

CP: Yeah. I've got one for next year. It looks like it'll be for next fall, so it'll be a year from this fall. It's called Damned.

NP: Are you willing to reveal any of its themes, or details of the world it's set in?

CP: There is an existing form of story where an innocent party finds themselves placed in horrific circumstances and they're not quite sure how they got there. Examples include The Shawshank Redmption, where Tim Robbins' character finds himself in prison, and he's not entirely sure whether he deserves to be there but he has to make the best of it. And in Great Britain there was a very popular book called Cold Comfort Farm that was made into a movie. Again, the young woman's parents have died just before the movie begins and we're not sure of anything about them other than the fact that she's being sent off to live on this filthy farm. And in the U.S., another very popular version of that story is Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret, where a little girl comes back from camp and she finds her parents have moved from New York City to Long Island, and she has to start a new life out in the suburbs.

So Damned is about an eleven-year old girl who wakes up basically and finds that she is in hell and that she's dead, and that she's going to be eleven-years old and dead in hell for the rest of eternity. So she has to, number one, make friends and figure out how hell works and make the best of it. But she's also got to figure out why she's in hell and how she died, and then ultimately whether or not she wants to petition to go to heaven, to try and uncover some mistake that might have been made. So it's about an eleven-year old, a very optimistic, cheerful, pushy little girl who finds herself in hell.

NP: Hell is an interesting concept in itself, because everyone has a different definition and their own vision of hell. I think my idea of hell would be having to work in a grey photocopy center for all eternity. What would your idea of hell be?

CP: Hmnn. That's a tough one. I have had some just terrible jobs and I always find some way - even in the most horrific, boring, stressful job - to have fun, and to kind of make the situation fun for other people, so that is a tough one for me.

NP: So if you ended up in hell, you'd find a way of making it fun.

CP: Oh my gosh, yes, definitely.

NP: They always say that all the interesting people will go to hell.

CP: And that's part of the paradox in Margaret is her realizing that most-likely the parents she loves and misses most in the world, they will end up in hell. And so if she's successful in getting to heaven she will most likely lose them once again, but lose them for eternity. How many of us would choose heaven if we knew the people we loved would be in hell? That's the paradox.

NP: It must be hard, because you're immersed in the new book and yet you're currently doing a book tour to promote Tell-All, which means you have to revisit something that you turned the last page on when you finished writing it several months ago.

CP: That's why for tour I always write a short story that is not related to the next book or not related to the current book. It's a short story that I can read that's self-contained and fairly short and works well out loud and has a really strong effect - like the Guts story. It's that story that I really make the event around. Here it's a little story called Knock, Knock that's been getting a really strong reaction.

NP: Is that something that people can read on your website?

CP: It'll be in the December Playboy. In the meantime, Random House had the event in New York videotaped by a documentary company and they were going to cut that together and make that available.

NP: Can you talk a little about what it's about?

CP: It's about a man whose father is dying of late-stage cancer. This man is determined that he is going to heal his father in the hospice by telling his father every joke his father has ever taught him. So he goes into the hospice as his father is dying and starts to tell these jokes and then slowly realizes that these jokes are horrific and racist and sexist and anti-Semitic, and that really the legacy his father has left him is this mind full of completely despicable, disgusting jokes that he will never be able to forget. So it's got some laughs, but by the end people are crying.

NP: People get away with expressing terrible opinions by making jokes out of them.

CP: Also there's a wonderful energy when people say something that is supposed to be funny and no one laughs. There's this stress that builds when you say one thing after another that's supposed to be released with laughter, and no laughter happens. Eventually the room is just electric with unexpressed tension. That's just an incredible feeling.

NP: So this story is very much meant to be read out loud, and in reading it you're trying to create that energy.

CP: Yes. Because the man who taught me writing, Tom Spanbauer, came from a theater background as well as writing. In workshop he made everyone read their work out loud. So every week I still meet with friends and we have to read our work out loud to find out where the laughs land and where the energy lags, and so everything has to work out loud.

NP: And you did that with Tell-All too?

CP: Yeah, definitely. Every book. That's why I use so many timing devices like the "bark, squeal, bray, Sigourney Weaver," those odd choruses of animal sounds that come in. They're just a device to pace information, so that gestures and things don't butt together too closely. In a way, it's slowing down the reader for a moment so that the next thing that they land on, lands in a better place.


Tell-All is available from Amazon.com and all fine bookstores. For more information and for details of upcoming events go to ChuckPalahniuk.net/.

Christopher Moore is in many ways the definition of a successful writer. Since his first book Practical Demonkeeping was released in 1992, his books have become more ambitious as his writing has gotten sharper and funnier. Oh yes, he’s also a funny writer, which is not to say that he’s an unserious... more

Christopher Moore is in many ways the definition of a successful writer. Since his first book Practical Demonkeeping was released in 1992, his books have become more ambitious as his writing has gotten sharper and funnier. Oh yes, he’s also a funny writer, which is not to say that he’s an unserious writer, but he’s one of only a handful of American novelists who want to make the reader laugh. Whether he’s taking on religion in “Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal” or writing a funny book about death in “A Dirty Job,” there’s no writer quite like Christopher Moore

Fresh off “Fool,” a book which took him back to Thirteenth century England and told the story of King Lear from the point of view of the court jester, Moore returns to present day San Francisco with a sequel to his earlier books “Bloodsucking Fiends: A Love Story” and “You Suck: A Love Story” in “Bite Me: A Love Story.” What follows is an edited conversation with Moore, which was just as entertaining as his readers might expect.


ALEX DUEBEN: I really enjoyed Bite Me and I was wondering, the ending of the previous book You Suck deliberately echoed the ending of the first book in the series, Bloodsucking Fiends. Were you planning the sequel when you did that?

CM: Yeah. You Suck was left open to have a sequel and I wanted the three of them to stand as piece of work. I had originally proposed four, but I think this does it for me.

AD: What would fourth have been?

CM: I don’t know. I didn’t have a plot. I just had a title, Foul Dead Things: A Love Story. (laughs) But I didn’t know what it was going to be about. And I’m not completely closed to it, but I’m done writing vampires for a little while.

AD: Each of the three books are very different

CM: I don’t want to write the same book over and over again. And even though there are some similar plot elements, as you might think there would be in the setting with the same characters. I just didn’t want to do structurally the same book over and over again. I’ve always tried to do something at least a little different.

AD: Do you enjoy writing Abby Normal?

CM: She still has the ability crack me up. She’s difficult to write because her stuff has to be very crafted. It’s not natural for me, a middle aged white guy, to write in the voice of a sixteen year old goth girl. It’s as hard as writing Shakespearean dialect in my last book Fool. Abby’s stuff is every bit as difficult to write as that.

AD: Her dialogue definitely has a sense of structure and its own internal narrative logic.

CM: When you do these kind of dialect books you have to invent something that approximates the speech of either a sixteen year old goth girl or a medieval fool. You can’t actually write the way they would speak, or it’s not accessible to the reader. It has to be a little more clear and a little less stylistic, so its really a hybrid of normal diction and this hyper diction that these characters use. That’s what’s going on with Abby. Me trying to make the way a kid like that speaks, which can be wildly irritating, accessible to people who have to spend three hundred pages with her.

AD: When she first appeared in A Dirty Job as a small character, did you know she would become such a big figure in later books?

CM: I didn’t actually. I knew that I was going to bring her back and A Dirty Job foresees that You Suck is going to be written because there’s a scene that is duplicated in both books but from different points of view. I knew that Abby was going to be in the book but I didn’t know until I started writing her voice how big she was going to be. When I went to write Bite Me she had taken over. She had become such a strong part of the second book that Bite Me became her book.

I don’t want to sound mystical and, oh the characters tell you what to do, but it’s very much like method acting. I can talk about how difficult it might be to craft the way she speaks, it’s also self-driven and you get into the character the way a method actor would. She just had so much energy that I kinda just gave the third book to her. At least voice-wise.

AD: I know you live in San Francisco and have written a few books set in the city. For you, what makes it a great setting?

CM: Geographically you can contain it fairly easily in a book. It’s smaller than most big cities. It’s a tenth the size of London or Paris or Los Angeles, so you can write about all the different neighborhoods, or many of the different neighborhoods in the city, and the characters never have to get in a car because everything’s so close. There’s this mystical gothic-y fog thing that goes on in the city. Architecturally it’s very pretty. It’s got a lot of things aesthetically going for it.

Most of the books take place in the North end of the city which is the Financial district, Chinatown, North Beach, which is an Italian neighborhood, and Russian Hill, which is right now young professionals and retired people. You have these clashes of culture. Chinatown is like a foreign country that’s four blocks by four blocks. Watching the interaction of all those different cultures is just interesting. I was a cultural anthro major so I get to do cultural anthro in my backyard more or less.

AD: My major complaint about Bite Me is that there wasn’t enough of the Animals.

CM: The story didn’t want to keep them engaged. I understand what you’re saying. I have the same feeling, but I couldn’t get them more engaged and develop their characters more in the context that I had because of turning so much of the book over to the new members of the cast, which were Abby and Fu Dog and Jared. In a three hundred page book the cast can only get so big and I found myself saying can I go down a road with this subplot or can’t I? I thought, I’ve got to have them show up. The Emperor, too. I would have loved to have had the Emperor more engaged in what was going on, but the book didn’t have enough room for them.

AD: I definitely understand and you didn’t want to just fulfill a checklist of things from the previous books included that people enjoyed.

CM: It was tough for me to write a third book in a series and not make it formulaic. There’s an arc to any book you write that is just the arc of the story. There’s the status quo, something happens, and then you return to status quo and consequently when the characters and the setting were the same, there was going to be a similarity to the books. I was trying to avoid that, but yet satisfy readers who want the same thing over and over again. I mean I get asked ten times a day when are you going to do a sequel to Lamb. My answer is, it’s the life of Jesus, you can’t do a sequel to it. (laughs) Pretty much everyone knows how that story ends.

AD: Is there the possibility of seeing more of Abby and Tommy and the Emperor?

CM: Probably the Emperor. I would at some point like to do a book with the characters and premise from A Dirty Job, the death merchants, that would probably be set in San Francisco. It had the Emperor and it wouldn’t be a difficult stretch to put Abby and Tommy in it. I don’t have a plan for that but I do want to do a book with that premise again and that would almost undoubtedly be set in San Francisco.

Of my San Francisco books, there’s no doubt that A Dirty Job is my best. It was also way more ambitious. It’s a comedy about death. When I did Bloodsucking Fiends I thought, it’s a vampire book it’s not a vehicle for big themes. It needs to be entertaining and funny and that is all I should shoot for. Hopefully it is. A Dirty Job I had big themes to deal with that were pulled from caring for my mother when she was dying and caring for my girlfriend’s mother when she was dying. There was experience to put in that I had to bring through the comedy.

AD: A Dirty Job is one of if not my favorite of your books and I think it’s one of the most successful because that’s where the sensibility and voice and the structure and complexity of the book all came together.

CM; When I teach it’s something that I try to tell students, but it’s a really big thing to hand someone, a project or a book is often defined by its ambition before you start it. That’s what I think for any artist is what makes a difference. Are you stretching to do this? Are you trying to do something that’s actually hard to do and might be beyond your abilities. I could really fuck the dog one of these days doing that. Continually putting those hurdles in front of myself. That’s why it’s kind of fun to do a book like Bite Me. The book I’m working on right now, I’m completely freaked out about being able to ever finish it.

AD: All your books have a comic sensibility in common. Is that you and your perspective on the world?

CM: I think so. That’s kind of my default setting. I really don’t think you can teach anybody to be funny and I know having taught a little bit that when someone comes in and says I want to write like you and you talk to them for ten minutes and go you’re just not funny. It’s just not how you think. It’s not something that I learned. My dad was a funny guy. It’s just how I react to the world. I actually tried to write quote serious stuff unquote and I haven’t been able to pull it off. I get about ten pages into something and I go, something funny has to happen, this is boring.

AD: How much of say, Fluke, is you wanting to write a science fiction story, but it just comes out in this fashion?

CM: Fluke is the perfect example. The reason I wrote Fluke is because I wanted to get in the water with humpback whales. Bottom line. A friend of mine had come back from this island called Rurutu--I call it the Scooby Island cause it’s called Rurutu. He had been in the water with singing humpback whales and he described it. I thought, that’s awesome, I need to do that. In US waters the only way you can do that is if you’re on a whale research permit and you have to get permission. I started writing letters and sending my books to scientists and these guys in Hawaii said sure come on over we’ll put you on the research permit. It started more with wanting to live a life. One of the things you find pretty early on when you write books for a living is you realize I could live my entire life within this room by myself making click-y noises on a keyboard if I don’t make some effort to go do stuff.

That book was completely motivated by wanting to experience what it was like being in the water with whales, and as I started doing the research, it turned out that the scientists were much more interesting than the whales. That’s what the book ended up really being about. The people who study whales much less than the whales themselves. But it all started with just wanting to experience what it was like being in the water with a humpback whale. Which was awesome by the way.

AD: Do you do a lot of research?

CM: I actually do. For Fool I spent a month in England and France. For Lamb I went to Israel for almost a month. I didn’t go to the Himalayas or India and other places that take place in the book. I quite frankly ran out of time and money. I couldn’t go to those places and actually get the book done, so all that’s done from my imagination. I always try to go to the places I’m writing about. It adds dimensions to the book that I would never have been able to anticipate. If I hadn’t gone to Israel and seen how desolate Judea is, where the Dead Sea is and where a lot of the gospels take place and seen how rough the land is from Nazareth to Jerusalem and sort of gotten an idea of what the geography of the place is like, it would have been a completely different book. So yeah I always try to go to where I’m writing about. Even it’s harder with the historical stuff.

I’m writing a book now that takes place in nineteenth century Paris and the city is in many ways the same but the culture’s not. It’s weird because it’s closer to our culture than medieval england or first century Palestine were and that actually makes it more difficult because I can’t just make shit up. (laughs) There was this huge hole in the Jesus story. I could do anything I wanted. With Fool, which was set in the Thirteenth Century, it was kind of the same thing. There’s so much that people don’t know about what went on in those days that I was able to fill it in.

AD: How do you work. Do you outline your books, because in Bite Me, especially, there’s a lot going on.

CM: I do a sort of diagram that’s less a “category one subcategory a” outline and more of a circles and arrows thing. Because it’s a visual representation it’s hard to describe it. The short answer is I do a very rough outline and then I try to plug in scenes that I know are going to be there and stay about five scenes ahead of myself. I mean I obviously write in scenes. That’s how I learned to write, it’s what is effective, and it’s how drama happens. For instance I know that in the next scene we’re going to meet the old vampires and then I’ll get there and decide whose point of view I need to do that from. As far as the outline goes, all the outline will say is, meet old vampires. And then as I approach that I’ll figure out that they had to get somehow and I’ll research the ship.

As the years go by I outline more for a couple reasons. One, I’m on deadline all the time so I can’t afford to be stuck. With Lamb I was stuck for six months. I got up to Antioch and I remember the proposal to the publisher said, and then they’ll have adventures, or something like that. I figured I’ll figure it out when I get to it, and then when I got to it I went, fuck I have no idea what happens now. And I’m stuck in Antioch going I don’t know what’s I didn’t think it through, so I do that now. What I do is outline a little bit more and know where I’m going so that my writing time is more efficient. But then when I write, I write it page one, “once upon a time,” right to the end. I try to write a little bit every day. I have goals which I always fall short of. I try to write a thousand words a day and then I’ll do eight hundred. I try to write for four hours a day and I’ll write three. What happens is the story tightens up as you get to the end, by the time you get to what would be the third act of a book you don’t have a lot of flexibility in what you can do. You sort of set all this stuff in motion and you can’t go very afield to do any exploring. Any goofing around you have to do it in the first half of the book. It becomes necessary to outline as it tightens up. Like braiding a rope or something.

AD: Reading the books, you seem to enjoy the first two acts more than last part, it’s much looser and feels more relaxed in the beginning and the end is very much about wrapping up the plot.

CM: You mean actually doing the process? The first hundred pages are so fucking hard I can’t even tell you. I hate that part. This was the first time I ever said that out loud because it’s not a good thing to say things like that, but the first hundred pages of a book are miserable. You’re establishing the world and you don’t know what you’re doing and you don’t have the characters set and every day you’re making just a million decisions and I’m awful at making decisions. It takes me three hours to figure out where I’m going to have dinner if I’m going out to dinner. All those decisions have to be made and they set the path for the rest of the book in those first hundred pages. It typically will take me six months to write the first hundred pages and I may write the next two hundred pages in two months.

As far as what I enjoy writing the most, probably the middle third of a book is the most enjoyable you’ve got things running but you still have some room to move around in and you can make decisions that go a little farther afield a digress a bit. But the first part’s miserable and largely because even if you’ve done it a dozen times like I have you still go shit I have no idea what I’m doing. This is like the first book all over again.

AD: I don’t know if you want to say anything about the next book you’re working on. You mentioned it was set in 19th Century Paris.

CM: I can tell you about all I know about it. It’s about Nineteenth century French painters. Yes, it’s funny. Yes, it’s going to have weird supernatural stuff in it. It’s going to include a cast of characters that’s a laundry list of the most famous painters of their day, the impressionists and the post-impressionists. It turns out, that’s really hard to do, so don’t try that at home. (laughs)

Justin Halpern is an ordinary guy who curates an extraordinary Twitter page. In less than a year it's garnered over 1.3 million fans who follow Justin simply to keep track of the latest and greatest shit his dad says. Justin's talent lies in realizing the aforementioned shit was of a superior... more

Justin Halpern is an ordinary guy who curates an extraordinary Twitter page. In less than a year it's garnered over 1.3 million fans who follow Justin simply to keep track of the latest and greatest shit his dad says. Justin's talent lies in realizing the aforementioned shit was of a superior quality to that emitted from other dad's mouths. He also has a knack for conveying the underlying heart behind his father's seemingly harsh witticisms.

Raised on a farm in Kentucky, Justin's dad, Sam Halpern, is a man of few words - who knows how to make every syllable count. The exact opposite of passive-aggressive, Halpern, Sr. has never been backwards about coming forwards with his often-unsolicited opinions and words of advice. Growing up, this brutal honesty was difficult to deal with, but now Justin is reaping the rewards. His @ShitMyDadSays Twitter page has spawned a hilarious yet surprisingly touching book of longer vignettes -- brilliantly retold by Justin -- and a TV sitcom produced by Warner Brothers for CBS starring William Shatner, which was co-written by Halpern, Jr. in association with the team behind Will & Grace.

The @ShitMyDadSays phenomenon was precipitated by a very humbling experience for Justin. As the founder of the Holy Taco comedy site, a Maxim.com contributor and an aspiring screenwriter who was free to work wherever is laptop rested, he decided to move back from Los Angeles to his hometown of San Diego to share an apartment with his girlfriend who also happened to reside there. Things didn't go to plan however; Justin's love interest broke up with him the day they were supposed to start cohabiting. To add insult to injury, having already given up his LA apartment, at 28 Justin had little option but to move back in with his folks. Fortunately his story, or at least this chapter of it, has a happy ending.

SuicideGirls caught up with Justin, who now splits his time between Los Angeles and San Diego, to find out more about the upside of living in close proximity to your grumpy old dad (and the fun that can be had with irritable bowel syndrome).

Nicole Powers: Do you still live at your parents house when you're in San Diego?

Justin Halpern: Actually I don't. I've moved out since. I live with my girlfriend in San Diego but I'm at my parent's house quite a bit. When I'm in San Diego I work out of there because I have a shitty little apartment and I don't actually have enough room to work.

NP: And do you go home to do your laundry? (Sam Halpern: "I'd say I was gonna miss you, but you're moving ten minutes away, so instead I'll just say don't come over and do your fucking laundry here.")

JH: I do go home still to do my laundry. Even when I'm in LA, I'll save it up until I have to go down to San Diego and then I'll do it at my parent's house.

NP: So on that point you're defying your father? It's complete dissension on the laundry front.

JH: Yeah. I feel like that was one of those things where he said it to get it out into the cosmos knowing that it was never going to happen.

NP: Your dad seems like a wonderful man in doses of 140 characters or less, but I can imagine he might have been a little tough to live with.

JH: Yeah. Growing up it was tense, but I feel that everybody has times when they're growing up with their parents that they wish that their parents didn't live with them. You go through those kinds of things, the only difference I think was that my dad never sugar-coated anything.

NP: What was the most brutal thing he said to you that still stings to this day?

JH: I think it's actually one quote in the book. Most people probably just glance over it, but I remember it being a formative moment in my life. I was really into Lego, but I was terrible at building things. I just was not good at it. He came by one time as I'm building some stuff with Lego. It just looked like a big mess on the ground. He's just come home from work and he goes, "Listen, I don't want to stifle your creativity but that thing you built there, it looks like a pile of shit." I remember when I was thinking of quotes to put in the book, when I saw that one I thought that one still stings a bit.

NP: So a promising career in construction ended before it began.

JH: Yes, but the thing is, I don't think I had a promising career in construction. The reason that stuck with me was because he was never afraid to tell me when I wasn't good at something. He always told me when I was, but he was like, "Hey, maybe this isn't your thing," and I definitely respect that now as an adult.

NP: I think that's what children need more of. I know that parents are often told by so-called experts to encourage their kids whatever. But if you say "good job" to your kids even when what they've done is a steaming pile of shit those words completely lose value. When you did get praise from your dad, it must have meant something.

JH: Totally. I grew up in a middle class community but right next to us was a really wealthy community. Everything they did their parents were, "Oh, it's fantastic. Everything you do is so great." My dad was never like that. Now, going back home, I see those kids a lot and a lot of them, they don't have jobs, they didn't graduate college. Basically, as soon as life gave them a kick in the nuts they just quit. And I never did because I was used to the realities of sucking at something and having to try harder, and try again or try something else.

NP: Your dad might have proverbially kicked you in the nuts but then he would also give you the flip side of that -- the genius of his comments is that they are very double-edged.

JH: Yeah. When I stopped playing baseball, my dad really wanted me to be a pro baseball player but I could kind of tell that that wasn't going to happen. I was good, but I wasn't good enough to be professional. So my junior year of college I quit the college team and focused on writing and filmmaking, and it was hard for him but he was like, "As long as you give one hundred percent at this and you're realistic with whether or not you have talent, then I'll be as supportive as you need me to be." And he was.

NP: You don't talk much in the book about when you actually decided to start writing. Are there any vignettes you can recall when you first showed him some of the early stuff you'd written?

JH: Yeah. In my first screenwriting class...you know, you're taking all these classes in college and every once in a while you'll get behind and you'll have something due the next day and you'll have to rush it. I remember I had to write the first act of the screenplay, and I had left it until the last, last minute. I read it and I'm like, "Oh god, this is not very good." I think I almost wanted to get shit on because I knew I had done such a bad job and I asked my dad if he could read it. He read it and he looks at me and goes, "You're not going to get a dime writing if this is how you're going to write. This is total shit and you should fail yourself. Don't even give it to your teacher, just give yourself an 'F' and take the class again."

I was so upset. I was like, "What are you talking about?" He said, "Can you honestly say that you tried with this piece of shit?" And I was like, "You know what? I didn't." And he's like, "Well I don't know what you're doing, because if you're not going try in the one class that you are supposedly studying then you should just give up and try something else." That was my wake-up call in terms of being a writer. It was like, I've got to take this seriously if I want to do it because I've got to see if I have any talent.

NP: What's the main thing that you know you should have learnt from your dad that you haven't quite got the hang of yet?

JH: I think the biggest thing is growing up with him I encountered a lot of awkward situations, because he says whatever he wants to say whenever he wants to say it. I felt like I was constantly giving a preamble before people would meet him or apologizing for something he said, even though it really didn't necessitate an apology. I'm still a little bit that way. I'm still a little bit too non-confrontational and I tend to err of the side of not hurting someone's feelings even if it's something that they need to hear. I tend to kind of wussy out and I wish I had a little bit more of his chutzpah.

NP: Although warning visiting friends that your dad might be wondering around the house naked is probably a good thing. People need to be prepared to see that.

JH: That's a necessary one.

NP: So where did your dad get his wisdom and humor from? Do you remember your dad's dad?

JH: Yes. My grandfather died when I was fifteen, so I did get to know him a little bit. My dad said he was the toughest human being he's ever met...The best story that sums up my grandfather is, my dad when he was ten, he was on a wagon at the farm and he fell off, and the wagon rolled over his arm. It mangled his arm and they took him to the emergency room in a small town in Kentucky, which was the closest hospital. The doctor said, "We're gong to have to amputate this arm or else your son might die." And my grandfather said, "Then let him die. There's no room in this world for a one-armed farmer." So they didn't amputate the arm, and they waited it out. My dad obviously survived, but that was the kind of guy my grandfather was.

NP: How does your mom cope with your dad's rather strong personality?

JH: Well she's the smartest person in the family by far.

NP: Which is saying something considering your dad a nuclear scientist.

JH: A doctor of nuclear medicine, yeah exactly, but she's smarter than he is. She's also quicker than he is -- and he's quick. If I try to verbally spar with my dad, it's pointless. He'll beat me into submission, but she can hang with him no problem. She runs circles around him. I mean part of the reason why she was attracted to him was because he's so honest and so truthful. She knew she was marrying a really honest and fair guy.

NP: Obviously your mom's good at the instant comeback, but are there lines you wished you'd said that just came to you too late?

JH: I would spend the next ten hours thinking of what I could say. He would saying something when I was growing up and it would just cut right to the bone, and I'd be just so pissed off. I would literally be sitting in my room or playing outside by myself just trying to think of what I could say if he ever said something like that to me again. It was so frustrating because he just does it so effortlessly and I'm sitting there, essentially in my own writer's room, by myself trying to figure out how to one-up a guy who just says stuff off the top of his head.

NP: How old were you when you started to see the wisdom in your dad's words?

JH: I think it wasn't until I had graduated from college. I started to see some kind of wisdom in what he was saying a little earlier than that but it didn't make me feel any better. I wasn't able to really process what he was saying until probably 24 or 25. I moved to LA and got a job as a waiter...That was right around the time I started to kind of enjoy the things he said, and was able to process the information and not have it be clouded by hurt feelings.

NP: At what point did you start writing down the shit that your dad said?

JH: I was probably about eleven or twelve. I mean, I wrote everything down. I was a really angsty kid who wrote a lot in journals. I wrote everything down and some of what was in there was things that my dad had said to me that made me upset. I didn't think they were funny at the time. Looking back, some of them were really funny, but at the time I didn't [see it]. I lost most of [the journals] but some of them I still have and they're just sort of like the kick and scratch and drawings of a kid that was a little awkward and upset quite a bit.

NP: Some of your dad's advice I love best is his dating advice. For a fuddy-duddy, he was really hip when it came to getting the girl.

JH: Yeah, it's weird, even now, he's like 74 and he'll admit it himself, he says he was never really a good-looking guy. He said he always looked a little older than he was, and he was never really that cool looking. But even now when women talk to him that are 30 years younger than him, he's pretty charming. He just has this supreme confidence. My brother says dad always acts like he could give a fuck if you would want to screw him or not. That's one of the reasons why I think women love him. I think when he was younger and he was single, he was never hitting on women, he was just being himself. He never acted like someone was out of his league. He would just ask whomever he wanted out.

I mean there's this story in the book about when he set my brother up with this woman who was a brain surgeon and used to be Miss Oklahoma or something. My brother was terrified and so upset that my dad had set him up with her, because my brother was 29 and living at home and washing dishes at Hooters. My dad was like, "Who gives a shit? You're a man, she's a woman."

NP: Your dad had natural game.

JH: Yeah, which was not passed down to any of his sons.

NP: But you've got a girlfriend now.

JH: I do, I do. It's the same girlfriend that I split up with in the book. Well when I say "I spilt up," I mean "she split up with me." We've been dating four years. We've had a couple of break ups here and there, but, yeah, I've had the same one for a long time.

NP: At what point did she take you back?

JH: Everybody asks that -- is she after your book money? No. We broke up right when I moved down [to San Diego], like the day that I moved down. Then we were probably apart for two months, and we got back together before any of the Shit My Dad Says stuff had hit. But I didn't want to move back in right away, because it's like you're on shaky ground when you get back together -- you want to make sure everything's cool. So I took it really, really slowly and I stayed at my parent's house, and we kind of slowly got back together. So we started before any of this happened.

NP: The whole Twitter to book thing happened so fast, 'cause you only started doing the Twitter page in August 2009.

JH: It's crazy yes. I can't believe [it]. I mean actually a year ago, pretty much, I moved back home with my dad. I had my tail between my legs and things were not going that well for me. I had a good job, but I had pretty much nothing else.

NP: The book came out May 4th. I love your account of how you didn't really know what to do at your first book signing.

JH: [laughs] Oh, you read the blog. I didn't know if anyone actually reads it. Yes, I just did one last night too. I did my second one last night and that was equally as awkward. I got yelled at by the person who was running the bookstore because they were like, "You're writing too much when you're signing for people. Just sign your name." And I was like, "But they're coming out to see me. It's like so nice I want to at least write something personal." And they're like, "You're taking too long, the line's taking too long."

NP: And you've also been doing TV, Carson Daly?

JH: Yeah, that's been really weird, because I'm very comfortable when I'm writing. I'm even somewhat comfortable with small groups -- I like people so I'm pretty comfortable when I'm talking to people at book signings and stuff like that. But I'm not comfortable in front of a camera. I'm very self-conscious. I was very nerdy growing up, and I'm not comfortable being in front of a camera. That's taken me some getting used to and I still haven't gotten it. I watched that Carson Daily interview when I got home and it was like horrible because I was saying the word "like" every four words. I sound like some kind of like 13-year old girl from San Fernando Valley.

NP: I think that's just an affliction that comes with living in California.

JH: I know, it's not one of our finer [qualities].

NP: At least we've stopped saying "rad" -- look on the bright side.

JH: That's true.

NP: So did Carson Daly know that you'd farted in his ex-girlfriend's face? [Justin wrote a blog about his penchant for relieving the boredom of his old job as a waiter by farting on celebrity customers, a questionable skill he can perform more or less at will thanks to his IBS issues.]

JH: [laughs] You know what? I talked to the producer, and I was like, "I really want to tell this story." It's the only story in my whole entire life that I've ever wanted to tell on TV. I told the producer, and the producer was like, "That's hilarious, but I don't know if we can could tell that story on the air." Carson was really nice and I never really talked to him about it. I was just told by the producer beforehand, "We want to stay on track, we don't want to tell that story." I was bummed.

NP: How can anyone object to a decent fart story?

JH: That's what I thought. It had a beginning, middle and end. It had tension and conflict, there were characters involved, it was a very well rounded fart story.

NP: And fart stories are the bread and butter of comedy.

JH: Yeah, and who better to fart on than Jennifer Love Hewitt.

NP: So what had you been eating prior to the incident? Was there some Brussels sprouts or black beans involved?

JH: Yeah, I had had Mexican food. It was a hot one. I gave her everything that I had. I could feel it coming out of my collar because my shirt was tucked in -- that was how hot it was!

NP: Have you been back to the scene of the crime to see your former employers since you let that story out on Holy Taco?

JH: Well the Crocodile Café, the one I worked at, no longer exists. But I went back to [the place where it used to be] yesterday for the first time since I had left there because my book signing was a couple of blocks away. It was a kind of surreal feeling. I actually did sit at the table that I farted on Jennifer Love Hewitt at.

NP: There should be a plaque there really shouldn't there?

JH: [laughs] I like your style. I wish you ran that restaurant.

NP: I'd put a nice brass memorial plaque there. It'd be a premium table.

JH: Exactly, exactly. History happened there.

NP: We'd have a velvet rope in front of it.

JH: [laughs] That'd be awesome.

NP: So do you still take pride in farting on celebrities?

JH: Yes. I do. I've farted on quite a few. That was the best one, but I've farted on quite a few celebrities to the point where there's kind of a small contingent of my friends that if we're out and we see celebrities, that's all that they're focused on.

NP: So what was the last celeb you got?

JH: Well, I don't know if this counts, it's a little gross, but I was in the Warner Brothers' building because that's where I have my offices now, and I went to the bathroom and Scott Bakula, the guy from Quantum Leap, was in the bathroom next to me. We took a shit next to each other and during the shit I farted. I don't know if that counts. I think that counts as half, I'm not sure.

NP: I think that counts. It's like double points if you also got to dump side by side.

JH: Exactly. There's these moments you know when you've made it and that was mine.

NP: Yeah. I was proud of taking a piss next to Diana Ross but you've seriously trumped that one.

JH: That's pretty awesome though.

NP: I thought so too. It was on the Paramount lot, so it was a premium location and she was in full Diana Ross mode with the big hair.

JH: [laughs] I knew a SuicideGirls interview would be interesting.

NP: So if you're working out of the Warner Bros building, is that connected to the TV series?

JH: Yes. We actually shot the pilot already.

NP: Oh my god, with William Shatner?

JH: Yes. It was great. He was fantastic. He reminds me a lot of my dad in the sense that, he's not profane, he's very much a gentleman, but he doesn't want to engage in any unnecessary conversation or anything like that. He comes in, he does his work and he leaves, but -- I'm going to throw this word out there -- he's brilliant. You think he's not in on the joke, but he's in on every joke. He knows exactly what he's doing. He knows the best way to deliver everything. He is really something.

NP: I know your dad hasn't wanted to get involved in any interviews or promotion, but presumably William Shatner wanted to meet your dad for research -- did that happen?

JH: They actually did meet, but he didn't ever ask to meet my dad. My dad came to the pilot taping and at the end of the show the executives were like, "Bring your dad down. Have him meet Mr. Shatner." I could tell that neither my dad nor Mr. Shatner were that interested in meeting one another. Everyone wanted them to take a picture together, so my dad walks down and Mr. Shatner says, "Hello sir." And my dad says, "Hello." They take a picture and then they turn in opposite directions and walk away from each other. That was it.

NP: I guess that was all that was required.

JH: Yes. It was the most perfect meeting. I was so happy. I was like, man, they both delivered.

NP: I'm surprised you even got your dad down to the taping.

JH: He wasn't going to go. He's like, "Can I show up late and stand in the back?" And I'm like, "It's not my fucking sixth grade play. You've got to come and sit for the whole thing." My mom talked him into it so that's why he came, but other than that he hasn't done anything.

NP: What was his reaction afterwards?

JH: It was funny, he ruined one of the takes of the show. It's a live audience and we're all sitting there and there's this moment where Shatner says he's going to think about something while he takes a shit, and all of a sudden I hear my dad in the audience go, "I do do that." He ruined the take.

NP: Bless. I think you should have kept that in personally.

JH: I know. If this show ends up getting picked up by CBS and we get on the air I will lobby for that take to go in there just for the ten people that read my blog and know that that happened.

NP: How's the TV show different from the book?

JH: Instead of the main character, who is basically me, coming back because his girlfriend has split up with him, he's coming back for economic reasons. He worked at a magazine and the magazine folded, and he's going under, he needs money, he needs a place to live. That's kind of the impetuous for the show whereas in my situation it was a breakup that instigated it.

NP: Whose choice was that to change it?

JH: That was mine. I co-wrote the show with my writing partner Patrick Schumacker, and then the two gentlemen that created Will & Grace, very talented guys, Max Mutchnick and David Kohan. When we were pitching it we really wanted to touch upon [the current economic situation] because so many of my friends are out of work. They have college educations, and some of them have master's degrees, and they just can't find any work. We're having this generation of people who aren't lazy bums who don't want to get a job, these people did everything right and once they get out of school society just gives them the finger right now because of the times were in.

NP: I know, there's a whole generation of thirty and forty-somethings that are having to move back in with their parents so you're definitely capturing a moment.

JH: That's what we were hoping to do.

NP: But not everyone has parents like yours.

JH: That's true. I've been very lucky.

NP: Well I'm very much looking forward to seeing the TV show. I'm such a huge fan of William Shatner and love your Twitter page -- it's two of my favorite things in the universe colliding.

JH: Awesome. That's great to hear. You will love him in this. This is him. He has absolutely nailed it. It's crazy. The audience is going apeshit for him in this role. When we were doing it, I was with all these TV veterans, these guys that have done Will & Grace, and they're like, "You don't see this at a pilot taping very often. Soak it up."

NP: I would ask that your refrain from farting on William Shatner, unless you have a Denny Crane/Alan Shore moment over a cigar and he's OK with it.

JH: I will never, ever fart on Mr. Shatner. You can put that down. I would never do that.

NP: Well, I would say never say never, there may just be the right moment on the right balcony.

JH: [laughs]

NP: I just wouldn't want you to fart bomb him without his permission. I think he deserves a bit more.

JH: He does. He definitely does.

NP: Well, thank you very much for taking the time to chat, and for sharing your fart stories.

JH: No, thank you. This is by far the most fun I've had in an interview.


Shit My Dad Says is available at Amazon.com and all fine bookstores. For further info go to: ShitMyDadSays.com.

George Romero is an icon among horror movie fans. His iconic 1968 film Night of the Living Dead created a new genre in the form of the apocalyptic zombie movie, spawning five sequels and an almost uncountable number of imitators. His 1973 movie The Crazies (which was recently remade pretty well by Breck... more

George Romero is an icon among horror movie fans. His iconic 1968 film Night of the Living Dead created a new genre in the form of the apocalyptic zombie movie, spawning five sequels and an almost uncountable number of imitators. His 1973 movie The Crazies (which was recently remade pretty well by Breck Eisner) unleashed a kind of government-caused-outbreak paranoia that was the antecedent of what Stephen King would later exploit in The Stand. Romero and King would collaborate on a celebration of 1950s EC comics horror publications in Creepshow. He totally rewrote the vampire myth as a young man's psychosis in Martin. Outside of horror, Romero made the intensely personal Arthurian parable Knightriders. SG talked to Romero in Boston, while he was promoting his latest zombie movie Survival of the Dead. Survival of the Dead, available now on Video on Demand and opening theatrically on May 28, concerns a rag-tag band of survivors of the zombie holocaust who find themselves on an island off the coast of Delaware, embroiled in an intergenerational feud between two clans of Irish settlers.

Michael Marano: You used zombies as a critique of consumer culture in Dawn of the Dead. In the years since then, zombies have themselves become commercial commodities. There are scores of video games, movies, and Simon and Schuster has a line devoted specifically to apocalyptic zombie novels. Any thoughts on the ways that zombies have become the very kinds of consumerist products that you used zombies that you poked fun at thirty years ago?

George Romero: Well, it's surprising. First of all, I do think it was video games that popularized the creature. I guess they [zombies] are perfect targets for first-person shooters. And I really think it was the video games, and after that the graphic novels, that have made them popular. I don't think it was so much the movies, because if you think about it, Zombieland is the only one that really was a blockbuster, or any kind of huge hit. As far as this question about them becoming a consumer item, I don't know how popular it [the zombie genre] is. I guess they're popular enough! (Laughs.) It's hard for me to even get a sense of that. I'm sort of still doing my own thing. My zombies are still sort of shuffling around slowly and they're almost just a minor annoyance. My stories have always been about people, and how they deal with the problem, how they fail to deal with the problem, and how stupidly they deal with it. To me, it has been a perfect vehicle for socio-political criticism. It's just been fun that way! So, that's the way I think of them (zombies). And people say, 'Jeeze! You created all of this!' And maybe I did, somehow! I didn't even call them 'zombies' in the first film. They were 'flesh eaters' or 'ghouls.' I never thought of them as 'zombies,' because when we made that film (1968's Night of the Living Dead), 'zombies' to me were still the guys in the Caribbean doing wetwork for Lugosi (in White Zombie). I just wanted some sort of strange phenomenon that would be a game changer so that people, my characters, would fail observe that and hoist themselves on their own petard.


MM: I want to talk about "game changers" and sort of "society changers." You started out cutting news footage, back in the Medium Cool days when they still used motorcycle couriers and actual--what that stuff they used to use?

GR: Film?

MM: Yeah! That's the stuff! Film! It was like YouTube with sprockets.

GR: It had little holes in it! They never let me actually cut it. I was a courier. I was Haskell Wexler!

MM: You were?

GR: Yeah, I just ran the stuff around. I learned how to edit at one of those labs. But they never actually let me work on the news footage. It was too precious!

MM: That sort of news-based reality behind how you cut your teeth learning how to cut film, did that news paradigm affect the way that you chose to depict societies falling apart?

GR: I think it more affected stylistically the original film [Night of the Living Dead] than anything else. And even though it's only in the last 20 minutes of the film, people always write about that film and how it's got this 'vérité style' when really it doesn't. I mean we were shooting with a sound blimp. It's just very static. Until I can finally get the camera out of the blimp in the last twenty minutes of the film and the camera, once out of the blimp, was really portable, and I intentionally tried to make that stuff look like news footage and tried to cut it with that same sort of chop that the guys used to use back in the lab. From Dawn of the Dead on, I guess, I've had this conceit that if there's something I wanna talk about, or whatever, I can bring zombies out of the closet and get to make a film, and get it financed.

MM: Now, with using zombies as social commentary and always having them on hand for that, I couldn't help but notice that with Survival of the Dead you seem to be reapplying your satire not just to society, but you seem to be taking on other genres. Like, a little bit of western...

GR: Oh, yeah! [Laughs]

MM: ... and little bit of the "Irish land dramas," like The Field. I kept thinking of Ryan's Daughter.

GR: Really?!

MM: Yeah. I wanted Sarah Miles to be eaten. I wanted that. And I know from Creepshow that you're an old school EC Comics fan. Did old Mad Magazine (originally an EC comic book) approaches to critiquing films and film genres inform how you approached satirizing other movies in Survival of the Dead?

GR: I think it probably does! It's waaaay in the background, somewhere in here (gesturing to his medulla) in the bottom part of my brain. I wanted to do something stylistically different with (Survival of the Dead). I knew I was going to do some Looney Tunes kind of moments with it, and that comes from old comics I guess. I'll go to see horror film with a friend, I'll go to see a horror film with Steve King, and we're sittin' there, the only ones giggling and everyone else is hiding their eyes or running to gag. And we chuckle! And for anybody who grew up on the old EC comics, they were just filled with bad puns and terrible jokes. And it was humor all the way, and it just made you chuckle. So, I just can't resist that! And then I just wanted to completely change (my approach to zombies in Survival). It's a lot more fun to me, for me, to say, 'Hey, man! Let's just do something completely different!' And once I had the idea of the feud, I remembered the old William Wyler film called The Big Country, and I said, 'Let's model it after that! And let's have fun! And let's sort of make a quasi-western out of this.' We went with 2.35 [aspect ratio]. We didn't mute the colors. It was just a choice. All of a sudden, all the department heads got together and said, 'Wow! That would be really fun, to do that!' So that was just, 'Hey! Let's have a picnic, here!'

MM: To me, a lot of the headshots in Survival of the Dead really reminded me of (EC Comics artists known for their ghoulish humor) Jolly Jack Davis and Ghastly Graham Ingles.

GR: Yeah! Those boys!

MM: Now, I don't want to ruin anything for people who haven't seen Survival of the Dead yet, so I'll just speak a

MM: I want to jump back to what you were talking about earlier about using zombies as a template to create character-based drama. You tend to create apocalypses, not just in your zombie movies, that are very small scale. A farmhouse (in Night of the Living Dead). A TV Station where order is breaking down (in the opening of Dawn of the Dead). A bunker (Day of the Dead). In your 1973 movie The Crazies the enemy seemed to be Ma Bell, the phone company. Even Martin, Bruiser and Knightriders, seem to be about intensely personal apocalypses. Do you want to comment on that? Maybe in comparison to large scale apocalypses, like Michael Bay's and Roland Emmerich's?

GR: Well, first of all, I would never tackle one of those! I wouldn't know how! And I don't quite know what's the purpose. Because... it's much more likely that we'll face these little more minor apocalypses, be it family, or school or a job or whatever. And that's always just connected to me, somehow. Just was my characters don't deal with the looming threat of the zombies, they continue to just deal with each other on a superficial and a ridiculous level. And they create their own problems.

MM: In the Cold War days, your zombie apocalypses were total and complete breakdowns of world order. There's no TV, no communication. It's all just done. In your post-9/11 zombie movies, the end of the world seems like a chore. Just another goddam thing to deal with. Was this conscious on your part?

GR: With these last two (Diary of the Dead and Survival of the Dead) I sort of went back to the beginning of (the zombie plague). I didn't know where to go after Land of the Dead. I didn't want to go Beyond Thunderdome. But that was a pretty apocalyptic world. I didn't want to go further than that. I just didn't know where to go. Do the zombies take over? I'm not interested in that. There was another reason for us starting over [bringing the narrative back to the start of the zombie apocalypse]. I always wanted to sort of do what Steve King does with the town of Castle Rock. You know, create this sort of collage. This is happening here, while this is happening here, and this character recurs. I've never been able to do that, because the copyrights on the first four films are all owned by different people, and I can't get 'em to come together on a deal, here! So, that was another reason why my current partner and I wanted to start over with this, and start fresh. These two (recent zombie movies) actually connect; Survival uses a minor character from Diary. I actually have two more ideas (for further zombie movies). This movie wouldn't exist if Diary hadn't made a lot of dough. I mean, it cost so little that, even with a limited theatrical release it made a lot of money for the producers. If the same thing happens with this film, I'm standing by! I got two more minor characters from Diary, and I would love it to have this little set of movies that go together.

MM: Do you have any non-zombie movies planned?

GR: I'm working on one! I don't know if it will happen. At my age, man, I don't want to go out and do the pitch again. Peter Grunwald (my business partner) and I--we were out there for almost six and a half years almost and never made a movie. We got all these huge development deals. And I made more money than I've ever made in my life, but I never made a movie. For one reason or another, all the deals blew up. And I just don't want to do that anymore. And I found a lovely place to work, in Canada. And I work with now, again, the same family of people. The guy that shot my first movie up there shot this movie. The same wardrobe people and everything. I love the collaborative process of making films. And I hate the deal making. We have an idea that we would love to do. If it gets too nuts, the development aspect of it, then I don't know. I do have another horror movie idea, which is non-zombie. Which I'm sure we can finance. But if this film does well, I think I'll do another one of these (zombie movies). Hey, I'd be happy if did two more of these that that was it. I love doing them!