Chuck Palahniuk author, cult icon, anarchist and gardener? Who would have known that the mind behind such novels as Fight Club, Survivor and Choke also likes to put on those big gray gloves possibly a floppy hat and get into the dirt behind his home. Then it all makes sense when he says he likes the plants that can attack and destroy other plants.
Chuck has had the kind of life you only read about in books, his kind of books. During all the hype for David Fincher's movie adaptation of Fight Club his father was murdered by a girlfriend's jealous ex-husband and Chuck had to be on the witness stand to testify. He circumvents going on a killing spree by putting all his pain and anger into his work. But he still has time to wreck havoc with the Cacophony Society which is a network of individuals united in the pursuit of experiences beyond the pale of mainstream society through subversion, pranks, art, fringe explorations and meaningless madness.
Chuck's latest novel, Diary, takes the form of a "coma diary" kept by Misty Tracy Wilmot as her husband, Peter, lies senseless in a hospital after a suicide attempt. It's a different kind of novel for him. It's darker and somewhat bereft of the humor that pervaded his previous stories.
I've spoken to Chuck before and it's always a pleasure. The first time I met him I was expecting a 6'4 biker type with a penchant for swallowing live hamsters whole. But he answered his hotel door in his pajamas and looking barely awake. I think that publishers hand out that look to all their authors on extensive book tours.
This time I got a chance to speak to him on the phone about anarchist Santas at a book reading in Seattle, when the words suicide and girls first got put together and the latest twist endings.
Get Diary at Chuck's official website.
Daniel Robert Epstein: Hey Chuck I heard you were excited about doing this interview.
Chuck Palahniuk: Yeah definitely. It seems like I've met so many of the models from Suicide Girls at my book events. Every city I'm in I end up meeting a few.
DRE: When did you first meet a girl that told you she was a Suicide Girl?
CP: It was last year in Portland. But it was this year in Seattle that I was told that the term Suicide Girls came from my second book Survivor. I was surprised by that because I had no idea.
DRE: What did the girls look like in Survivor?
CP: The suicide girls calling with hair wet down in the rain in a public telephone booth was the phrase. Not too specific but they were young women in distress.
DRE: You created the ultimate Goth girl with Marla in Fight Club. Did you mean for her to come out like that?
CP: Oh entirely. The whole connection of sex and mortality is something The Doors did so beautifully in the 60's. But then AIDS came along so sex and death were a little too close together. Marla was a way for sex and death to come back together with the support groups and falling in love in the face of death.
DRE: Suicide Girls is huge. It's going to be around for a long time. What do you think of that?
CP: Thank god someone has benefited from the internet. Its not just ebay and Amazon. Somebody has made a name that's not just monetary but a cultural icon. There aren't a lot of them created from the internet.
DRE: That's what you are now, a cultural icon. You couldn't have expected anything like that when you started. I looked your name in our member search page and easily over 200 people had you as one of their favorite authors and that's just the people who spelled your name right.
CP: [laughs] That freaks me out. That's why I try to stay away from the internet.
DRE: They just like your books. I don't think they are going to hurt you or anything like that.
CP: It's great. I try to pretend that every book is my first book and that no one is going to see it but me. It's hard to stay in that mind frame when I'm getting a lot of attention.
DRE: You've done books with cult-like groups in them.
CP: I doubt even think of them as cults. I think of a book as a little laboratory to create a social model for people together. Creating a group, creating the rules, creating the terms by which people come together and share their experience. People call it a cult because it doesn't fit into any sort of existing model. But people love that. They love to see the different ways people get together.
DRE: So do a lot of Goths show up at the signings?
CP: A lot of Goths and anarchists.
DRE: How can you pick out the anarchists? Are they starting fires?
CP: Well they're more like the Cacophony Society anarchists. They may disrupt while in costume in some funny way or they may come and pelt the audience with some odd food product.
DRE: You're ok with that at a book signing?
CP: I think it's terrific. Oh my god. Books are so fucking pretentious and most authors are so fucking pretentious that I can't blame kids for not wanting to read. So anything that breaks down that pretentiousness I'm in favor of.
DRE: There wasn't a Goth culture exactly when you were growing up but you were an outsider. What were you into?
CP: My friends were overdramatic kids from other high schools and we worked in a movie theatre so I was really into films. That was my whole life. I worked fulltime from my sophomore year until I graduated.
DRE: What movies were your favorites?
CP: The 70's movies because I graduated in 1980. Any decent movie that came to the theatre we would watch. Or we would stay in the theater all night running movies for ourselves. We would lie in the theatre with our feet against the bottom of the screen, smoke grass and watch movies until dawn then we would go to school.
DRE: A lot of the films our members like are films like Requiem for a Dream, Fight Club. Movies made from anarchist type books. In the 70's a lot of movies were original and not taken from books or other sources.
CP: There is a school of film happening right now that people are calling 70's fatalism. I love those films. That's the new generation of films like They Shoot Horses, Don't They? [released in 1969] or Klute [released in 1971].where something is resolved but not with a happy ending. There is a very Marla sort of bitterness to it. I'm trying to get back to that but with a sense of humor.
DRE: Because people are bit more sarcastic these days?
CP: Yes and also because the pathos is stronger if you contrast it against humor. If you can make someone laugh then break their heart it breaks worse than just beating them down. That's a fact.
DRE: When we first spoke for davidfincher.net a couple of years ago we talked about why the twist ending was such an interesting idea to you. You're answer was that everything we ever knew has a twist to it. Things like Columbus was a horrible person, Thomas Jefferson slept with his slaves.
CP: Louis Armstrong had room after room filled with pornography, JFK wasn't a loving father. Everything.
DRE: Have you seen things like that recently?
CP: When George W. Bush declared war on Afghanistan and that he would not allow old men to send young men off to die. I was like, dude you're an old man sending young men off to die. Everything that came over the news after they declared the death of irony was entirely ironic. We always say it's for the children but we should say it's for OUR children. The world is filled with this myopic irony.
DRE: You've had a lot of insane things happen in your life and that all seems to come out in your books. Do you feel any hate anymore towards those that have wronged you and your family?
CP: No because I really exhaust that through the books. I don't see any point in carrying around those battles. I try to get of all that through the books.
DRE: So it must be tough to go back and look at your previous books.
CP: It is and I typically don't go back and reread any of my books. I can't tell you the last time I even opened a copy of Fight Club.
DRE: Is it really you in your books?
CP: It's me identifying the core themes and issues that I want to exhaust and develop. But then I take those things to other people and I get their take. I see whether or not people respond and if it resonates within my friends then I ask them to express what it means to them. That's how I develop each of these issues so it's not just about me.
DRE: Is Diary part of that horror trilogy you're doing?
CP: Yes the conspiracy horror that Ira Levin used to do so well in 70's The Stepford Wives, Rosemary's Baby. Where it's really funny in the first half but then gets horrible, trapped and fucked at the end.
DRE: Diary seems to be more personal than your other works. A smaller story.
CP: It's only smaller in that it's my first book that's set all in one place. So there is a sense of claustrophobia. There is no road trip or much moving around its all right on the island.
DRE: There has always seemed to be a joy in your other books. I don't know if I see that in Diary.
CP: Well there is kind of an ultimate bitter joy at the end. A joy of I've totally fucked up again. But I'll get another chance. But there isn't exactly that sense of humor; I wanted to play it a lot darker.
DRE: Why is that?
CP: Just for a change. To show that I don't have be funny or clever. Just be dark and use more pathos this time around.
DRE: How did people respond to your Portland guidebook [Fugitives and Refugees: A Walk in Portland, Oregon]?
CP: [laughs] Outside of Portland they loved it. But in Portland I'm fucked because everyone is an expert on their hometown. So everyone was telling me what I left out and their favorite thing so I get lots of shit like that.
DRE: What is it about Portland that all this cool stuff is there?
CP: The low cost of living overhead attracts a lot of creative young people. The fact that it rains all the time makes people come together and be inside a lot over the winter. It sort of develops these groups of people that start because they are tired of being home alone. That fosters workshops and people in discourse.
DRE: A culture develops around each of your books and around all the books. What does it feel like to know that you're creating something that will be around long after you are not?
CP: I don't know. Let's see if it's even around in three years.
DRE: What music do you listen to now?
CP: I listen to chill music like Daddy House mix music which I bought in Europe. When I was younger I listened to a lot of Pink Floyd, Flying Lizards. Then in the 80's Bauhaus, Depeche Mode and Nitzer Ebb. I'm mentally flipping through my CDs now, Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead.
DRE: Besides the books have you been able to cause any anarchy lately?
CP: Not really except for the Santas at the Seattle event. Right now I am rushing around putting together these packages of prizes to ship them to each book event so I will have all these weird ass things to give away to people. Again to destroy that pretentiousness of book events. The best thing about book tours is that you prove to people that stupid flesh and blood people write. That empowers them to do it. They can look at me and think if that jackass can write a book why can't I?
DRE: I think a lot of people are going to be surprised when they read Diary because you would think success would mellow you a bit.
CP: It would but there is always something to pick the scab off of. Some unhealed horrible thing to dig your fingernails into to open up and explore.
DRE: Is it always your past combining with the present?
CP: Always. There is always something to be pissed off about to generate the energy of a book.
DRE: What's the craziest thing anyone ever sent you in the mail?
CP: Lately a lot of doctors and medical students have been sending me pharmaceutical samples. I don't know what this means but most of it is Viagra and Flexoril muscle relaxants also a certain amount of Vicodins and some new migraine medications. I haven't taken that yet but I'm open to experiment.
DRE: You're taking this stuff?
CP: Some of it. Other stuff I send it on to other people. If I know I won't get busted I'll send someone a vacation pack of Viagra. Of course some of it I take.
DRE: You're very trusting.
CP: In a way I'm living on gravy right now. That's really the sense. I've peed my name in the snow and it's good. I've made my mark.
DRE: Have you seen David Fincher lately?
CP: I haven't seen Finch since last August [2002] when he turned 40. It was a great party. His partner asked everyone to put together pages for a big scrapbook. So I got a lot of autopsy pages and cut them together with some 8 x 10 photos of David and I. then I collaged them together. I think he was touched.
DRE: Are you good at gardening?
CP: I'm lousy at it but it's such a physical thing so I love that about it.
DRE: Do you raise anything specific?
CP: Anything that grows. If it says invasive on the label I'll buy it.
DRE: Did you read about the guy in Florida who went around pretending to choke [like the main character in Choke]?
CP: I did get a bunch of calls with people telling me about that. Some people are really hard up.
DRE: What's your favorite pornography?
CP: I wouldn't even know where to start. With the internet it seems like I burn through so much pornography that I no longer have a favorite. I think it always goes back to underwear pornography for me. Because it always reminds me of that first Sears catalog and the subsequent trip to the bathroom. My mother holding the Sears catalog and saying Why does it always drop open to the women's underwear section? and me going, duh.
DRE: What are your favorite girls punk, emo or Goth?
CP: Probably Goth. I think Goth is ultimately romantic. It is an acceptance of mortality and a celebration of that and the license that mortality gives us. The fact that we are going to be dead in a number of years, we are going to watching everyone that's alive and wherever we are we're going to be thinking Why the fuck didn't I do more? Why wasn't I crazier and achieve those things I was scared of? Goth embraces that idea.
DRE: Ever wonder what they have to be so unhappy about when they have such gorgeous women?
CP: [laughs] Unhappy about the fact that no one is going to be gorgeous forever or live forever. The difference between a plastic flower and a real flower.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
Chuck has had the kind of life you only read about in books, his kind of books. During all the hype for David Fincher's movie adaptation of Fight Club his father was murdered by a girlfriend's jealous ex-husband and Chuck had to be on the witness stand to testify. He circumvents going on a killing spree by putting all his pain and anger into his work. But he still has time to wreck havoc with the Cacophony Society which is a network of individuals united in the pursuit of experiences beyond the pale of mainstream society through subversion, pranks, art, fringe explorations and meaningless madness.
Chuck's latest novel, Diary, takes the form of a "coma diary" kept by Misty Tracy Wilmot as her husband, Peter, lies senseless in a hospital after a suicide attempt. It's a different kind of novel for him. It's darker and somewhat bereft of the humor that pervaded his previous stories.
I've spoken to Chuck before and it's always a pleasure. The first time I met him I was expecting a 6'4 biker type with a penchant for swallowing live hamsters whole. But he answered his hotel door in his pajamas and looking barely awake. I think that publishers hand out that look to all their authors on extensive book tours.
This time I got a chance to speak to him on the phone about anarchist Santas at a book reading in Seattle, when the words suicide and girls first got put together and the latest twist endings.
Get Diary at Chuck's official website.
Daniel Robert Epstein: Hey Chuck I heard you were excited about doing this interview.
Chuck Palahniuk: Yeah definitely. It seems like I've met so many of the models from Suicide Girls at my book events. Every city I'm in I end up meeting a few.
DRE: When did you first meet a girl that told you she was a Suicide Girl?
CP: It was last year in Portland. But it was this year in Seattle that I was told that the term Suicide Girls came from my second book Survivor. I was surprised by that because I had no idea.
DRE: What did the girls look like in Survivor?
CP: The suicide girls calling with hair wet down in the rain in a public telephone booth was the phrase. Not too specific but they were young women in distress.
DRE: You created the ultimate Goth girl with Marla in Fight Club. Did you mean for her to come out like that?
CP: Oh entirely. The whole connection of sex and mortality is something The Doors did so beautifully in the 60's. But then AIDS came along so sex and death were a little too close together. Marla was a way for sex and death to come back together with the support groups and falling in love in the face of death.
DRE: Suicide Girls is huge. It's going to be around for a long time. What do you think of that?
CP: Thank god someone has benefited from the internet. Its not just ebay and Amazon. Somebody has made a name that's not just monetary but a cultural icon. There aren't a lot of them created from the internet.
DRE: That's what you are now, a cultural icon. You couldn't have expected anything like that when you started. I looked your name in our member search page and easily over 200 people had you as one of their favorite authors and that's just the people who spelled your name right.
CP: [laughs] That freaks me out. That's why I try to stay away from the internet.
DRE: They just like your books. I don't think they are going to hurt you or anything like that.
CP: It's great. I try to pretend that every book is my first book and that no one is going to see it but me. It's hard to stay in that mind frame when I'm getting a lot of attention.
DRE: You've done books with cult-like groups in them.
CP: I doubt even think of them as cults. I think of a book as a little laboratory to create a social model for people together. Creating a group, creating the rules, creating the terms by which people come together and share their experience. People call it a cult because it doesn't fit into any sort of existing model. But people love that. They love to see the different ways people get together.
DRE: So do a lot of Goths show up at the signings?
CP: A lot of Goths and anarchists.
DRE: How can you pick out the anarchists? Are they starting fires?
CP: Well they're more like the Cacophony Society anarchists. They may disrupt while in costume in some funny way or they may come and pelt the audience with some odd food product.
DRE: You're ok with that at a book signing?
CP: I think it's terrific. Oh my god. Books are so fucking pretentious and most authors are so fucking pretentious that I can't blame kids for not wanting to read. So anything that breaks down that pretentiousness I'm in favor of.
DRE: There wasn't a Goth culture exactly when you were growing up but you were an outsider. What were you into?
CP: My friends were overdramatic kids from other high schools and we worked in a movie theatre so I was really into films. That was my whole life. I worked fulltime from my sophomore year until I graduated.
DRE: What movies were your favorites?
CP: The 70's movies because I graduated in 1980. Any decent movie that came to the theatre we would watch. Or we would stay in the theater all night running movies for ourselves. We would lie in the theatre with our feet against the bottom of the screen, smoke grass and watch movies until dawn then we would go to school.
DRE: A lot of the films our members like are films like Requiem for a Dream, Fight Club. Movies made from anarchist type books. In the 70's a lot of movies were original and not taken from books or other sources.
CP: There is a school of film happening right now that people are calling 70's fatalism. I love those films. That's the new generation of films like They Shoot Horses, Don't They? [released in 1969] or Klute [released in 1971].where something is resolved but not with a happy ending. There is a very Marla sort of bitterness to it. I'm trying to get back to that but with a sense of humor.
DRE: Because people are bit more sarcastic these days?
CP: Yes and also because the pathos is stronger if you contrast it against humor. If you can make someone laugh then break their heart it breaks worse than just beating them down. That's a fact.
DRE: When we first spoke for davidfincher.net a couple of years ago we talked about why the twist ending was such an interesting idea to you. You're answer was that everything we ever knew has a twist to it. Things like Columbus was a horrible person, Thomas Jefferson slept with his slaves.
CP: Louis Armstrong had room after room filled with pornography, JFK wasn't a loving father. Everything.
DRE: Have you seen things like that recently?
CP: When George W. Bush declared war on Afghanistan and that he would not allow old men to send young men off to die. I was like, dude you're an old man sending young men off to die. Everything that came over the news after they declared the death of irony was entirely ironic. We always say it's for the children but we should say it's for OUR children. The world is filled with this myopic irony.
DRE: You've had a lot of insane things happen in your life and that all seems to come out in your books. Do you feel any hate anymore towards those that have wronged you and your family?
CP: No because I really exhaust that through the books. I don't see any point in carrying around those battles. I try to get of all that through the books.
DRE: So it must be tough to go back and look at your previous books.
CP: It is and I typically don't go back and reread any of my books. I can't tell you the last time I even opened a copy of Fight Club.
DRE: Is it really you in your books?
CP: It's me identifying the core themes and issues that I want to exhaust and develop. But then I take those things to other people and I get their take. I see whether or not people respond and if it resonates within my friends then I ask them to express what it means to them. That's how I develop each of these issues so it's not just about me.
DRE: Is Diary part of that horror trilogy you're doing?
CP: Yes the conspiracy horror that Ira Levin used to do so well in 70's The Stepford Wives, Rosemary's Baby. Where it's really funny in the first half but then gets horrible, trapped and fucked at the end.
DRE: Diary seems to be more personal than your other works. A smaller story.
CP: It's only smaller in that it's my first book that's set all in one place. So there is a sense of claustrophobia. There is no road trip or much moving around its all right on the island.
DRE: There has always seemed to be a joy in your other books. I don't know if I see that in Diary.
CP: Well there is kind of an ultimate bitter joy at the end. A joy of I've totally fucked up again. But I'll get another chance. But there isn't exactly that sense of humor; I wanted to play it a lot darker.
DRE: Why is that?
CP: Just for a change. To show that I don't have be funny or clever. Just be dark and use more pathos this time around.
DRE: How did people respond to your Portland guidebook [Fugitives and Refugees: A Walk in Portland, Oregon]?
CP: [laughs] Outside of Portland they loved it. But in Portland I'm fucked because everyone is an expert on their hometown. So everyone was telling me what I left out and their favorite thing so I get lots of shit like that.
DRE: What is it about Portland that all this cool stuff is there?
CP: The low cost of living overhead attracts a lot of creative young people. The fact that it rains all the time makes people come together and be inside a lot over the winter. It sort of develops these groups of people that start because they are tired of being home alone. That fosters workshops and people in discourse.
DRE: A culture develops around each of your books and around all the books. What does it feel like to know that you're creating something that will be around long after you are not?
CP: I don't know. Let's see if it's even around in three years.
DRE: What music do you listen to now?
CP: I listen to chill music like Daddy House mix music which I bought in Europe. When I was younger I listened to a lot of Pink Floyd, Flying Lizards. Then in the 80's Bauhaus, Depeche Mode and Nitzer Ebb. I'm mentally flipping through my CDs now, Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead.
DRE: Besides the books have you been able to cause any anarchy lately?
CP: Not really except for the Santas at the Seattle event. Right now I am rushing around putting together these packages of prizes to ship them to each book event so I will have all these weird ass things to give away to people. Again to destroy that pretentiousness of book events. The best thing about book tours is that you prove to people that stupid flesh and blood people write. That empowers them to do it. They can look at me and think if that jackass can write a book why can't I?
DRE: I think a lot of people are going to be surprised when they read Diary because you would think success would mellow you a bit.
CP: It would but there is always something to pick the scab off of. Some unhealed horrible thing to dig your fingernails into to open up and explore.
DRE: Is it always your past combining with the present?
CP: Always. There is always something to be pissed off about to generate the energy of a book.
DRE: What's the craziest thing anyone ever sent you in the mail?
CP: Lately a lot of doctors and medical students have been sending me pharmaceutical samples. I don't know what this means but most of it is Viagra and Flexoril muscle relaxants also a certain amount of Vicodins and some new migraine medications. I haven't taken that yet but I'm open to experiment.
DRE: You're taking this stuff?
CP: Some of it. Other stuff I send it on to other people. If I know I won't get busted I'll send someone a vacation pack of Viagra. Of course some of it I take.
DRE: You're very trusting.
CP: In a way I'm living on gravy right now. That's really the sense. I've peed my name in the snow and it's good. I've made my mark.
DRE: Have you seen David Fincher lately?
CP: I haven't seen Finch since last August [2002] when he turned 40. It was a great party. His partner asked everyone to put together pages for a big scrapbook. So I got a lot of autopsy pages and cut them together with some 8 x 10 photos of David and I. then I collaged them together. I think he was touched.
DRE: Are you good at gardening?
CP: I'm lousy at it but it's such a physical thing so I love that about it.
DRE: Do you raise anything specific?
CP: Anything that grows. If it says invasive on the label I'll buy it.
DRE: Did you read about the guy in Florida who went around pretending to choke [like the main character in Choke]?
CP: I did get a bunch of calls with people telling me about that. Some people are really hard up.
DRE: What's your favorite pornography?
CP: I wouldn't even know where to start. With the internet it seems like I burn through so much pornography that I no longer have a favorite. I think it always goes back to underwear pornography for me. Because it always reminds me of that first Sears catalog and the subsequent trip to the bathroom. My mother holding the Sears catalog and saying Why does it always drop open to the women's underwear section? and me going, duh.
DRE: What are your favorite girls punk, emo or Goth?
CP: Probably Goth. I think Goth is ultimately romantic. It is an acceptance of mortality and a celebration of that and the license that mortality gives us. The fact that we are going to be dead in a number of years, we are going to watching everyone that's alive and wherever we are we're going to be thinking Why the fuck didn't I do more? Why wasn't I crazier and achieve those things I was scared of? Goth embraces that idea.
DRE: Ever wonder what they have to be so unhappy about when they have such gorgeous women?
CP: [laughs] Unhappy about the fact that no one is going to be gorgeous forever or live forever. The difference between a plastic flower and a real flower.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
VIEW 25 of 38 COMMENTS
"Because nothing is ever as perfect as you imagine it"
Chuck is so insightful. He is without question the best author I have evere come across, his work is so influencial in my life. Everyone should read him - and really read it, underline interesting quotes and notice patterns.
thank you all, havent even read it yet but the anticipation makes me happy