Chuck Palahniuk has been a major focal point of SuicideGirls and members since the beginning. Since his debut novel, Fight Club, was turned into a movie in 1999 Palahniuk has becomes a major literary force. His new book, Haunted, is a series of short stories connected by the idea of a writers retreat. My favorite story is Guts about a horny 13 year old, a swimming pools intake valve and the taste of calamari.
Check out the official site for Haunted
Daniel Robert Epstein: What are you up to?
Chuck Palahniuk: Not much. Im just coming back from picking up my days food.
DRE: Are you going on tour soon?
CP: I just finished a US tour and I start the Canadian tour this weekend.
DRE: So Haunted is a crazy book and I totally forgot that Guts was in it. Guts is a really gross story.
CP: Yeah but a funny one.
DRE: Its very funny because I can see that happening to me which is the sad thing.
CP: I think thats why people relate to it. Everybodys got sort of a horrific sex story like that.
DRE: Guts was the one that was making people pass out at readings. Would you read the whole story at the readings?
CP: Oh yeah but typically Id have to stop halfway through when the people were being lowered to the floor. Everyone was all upset about these people passing out. Then Id finish the story.
DRE: I was reading it in an airport and it made me kind of reel. It must have been a lot of fun to write that story.
CP: It was fun, but the whole time I thought I can never read this. I will never be able to read this thing out loud. People are going to be picturing me doing all this shit.
DRE: I didnt picture you actually. I pictured a short blonde kid for some reason. I dont know why.
CP: Oh good.
DRE: Because hes got a pool. I see everyone with a pool as a blonde. I dont know why. I never had a pool.
CP: Thats really weird, because the guy who told me the story, the guy that it happened to is blonde.
DRE: Oh really?
So that happened to somebody? Wait, of course it happened to somebody. Everything happens to somebody.
CP: Right but many of them are just stories that people have told me. Now people have told me stories that make those stories look like nothing.
DRE: But you love that!
CP: Oh my gosh, thats where I get my work, thats why I can do almost a book a year.
DRE: I also really liked the short, Swan Song. The one about the reporter who discovers an ex-child star who lives in his town. It is an upsetting story because once again I could see myself, not doing that exactly because I could never kill anybody, but I could see a reporter doing that. Did you hear that kind of story from someone too?
CP: Its also based on how many child celebrities do end up dead and how theyre even bigger news once theyre dead. Nobody would actually fess up about killing them.
DRE: A lot of people want to become famous by killing someone else thats famous.
CP: Thats a real way of establishing your power up front.
DRE: You also have the story, in Haunted, about the talk shows. I saw you on Conan OBrian.
CP: I just did the Craig Ferguson Show, which was a blast.
DRE: How was that?
CP: It was great and we were funny. He actually talked to me beforehand which Conan OBrien did not do. Suddenly Im confronted by this giant pink Conan OBrien covered in makeup. I have no idea what to say with this huge mannequin. Ferguson was way more relaxed and just a lot of fun to do.
DRE: Did you happen to watch those just to see how you did?
CP: No. This is the same reason why I dont want to be in the movies that are getting made from my books because that would just ruin them for me.
DRE: Did you write the short stories for anthologies or anything like that and then connect them for the book?
CP: I had two separate books I was going to do. I was going to do a novella that was about these people in this sort of fairy tale setting gradually destroying themselves. They were all going to be book and movie and music critics who were so sick of what they were being forced to review that they were going to get away from the world and were going to incubate their own sort of uber-culture. But once they got sort of squirreled away, they realized that they couldnt even produce stuff as good as what they were trashing and they didnt have a creative bone in their body. All they could do was tear stuff apart. So they started tearing themselves apart to make a story.
Then the stories themselves were going to be just a collection. Then the publishing house talked me into sort of putting them together and making a sort of bizarre novel out of it.
DRE: Was the process of taking two things and putting them together new for you?
CP: It was different but what the hell, Im not in this to be bored.
DRE: Did you ever do a writers retreat?
CP: I havent. I did things like that in a workshop. We would all go someplace for the weekend, layout 18 people, and just drink and present our work and have a great time. But it has never been a real sort of a retreat from life. I just never had the money or the time for something like that.
DRE: What about something like the Mary Shelley thing where people sit around and try to freak each other out?
CP: You know, thats sort of like every time I get together with my friends. We all really compete for best story, most attention, and most extreme place to take a story. We all do that.
DRE: You tell true stories or are you just making them up?
CP: No, we tell true stories.
DRE: You tell true stories.
CP: You cannot make up anything better than the truth.
DRE: Hows the response to this book been? Its little spurts of Chuck Palahniuk rather than one whole novel.
CP: Right but it also goes on over twice the length of Fight Club. I just figured that the only way I could have the kind of momentum ongoing that I wanted was to do it with short stories. If I was going to have 400, then we had to have some sort of horrific thing every seven to eight pages.
DRE: Had you ever written short stories before?
CP: I had but they always became chapters in books. The way I start every book is to write the key plot points as a short story so each one stands by itself.
DRE: Since some of the stories were stories that others had told you. How did they become personal to you?
CP: Over the course of 20 years, people would tell me different stories and I would start to notice commonalities. I had the carrot story, I got the wax story, and Ive got the swimming pool story. So I figured Ive got three stories, this could be a three act story. I just find ways of sort of quilting together things based on similar themes. I think my greatest skill is to find some way to put together these small things based on common elements and anxieties people have.
DRE: Which cities are you excited to hit for this book? Is it the bigger cities, is it the smaller places where people travel all over?
CP: Its sort of mixed. Berkeley is a fantastic place to read. People really get into it. Chicago is a great place to read. Austin, Texas is insane. They give people beer at the book events. So its interacting with 800 drunk Texans.
DRE: What about Europe?
CP: London is always a great city. Bologna, Italy is a college town with a lot of sort of overseas programs headquartered there, so theres a gigantic crowd there.
DRE: Recently youve been lending your name to help people like Craig Clevenger, how did Craigs book get to you?
CP: Actually, somebody on the Cult website recommended it to me so I went out and bought a copy. Its a great book. Its really easy to promote things that you like.
DRE: Are people sending you a lot more books now, for either a quote or just to get impressions?
CP: Boy, I get tons of books, mostly through publishing media people. For most of them I dont know why they send them to me because I have no interest whatsoever. The back of my toilet is just a mountain of books right now.
DRE: What did you think about the documentary that [ChuckPalahniuk.net creator] Dennis [Widmyer] put together?
CP: I havent watched it and I probably never will.
DRE: Too much about yourself, right?
CP: Yeah, can you imagine anything more painful?
DRE: You gave Dennis some notes on his screenplay as well.
CP: Yes and he better take them to heart.
DRE: You were kind of forced to come out of the closet.
CP: I was heavily coached too. I figured if anybodys going to make a story out of this I should.
DRE: So you werent planning on it beforehand?
CP: I dont even want my picture in the goddamn books. I would really like it to sort of fade away and just let the book present itself. But you cant really do that anymore, thats just not publishing. So I just make the best of it.
DRE: Has it changed anything?
CP: No nothings changed.
DRE: I guess you werent expecting anything in the tabloids.
CP: Writers that sick are such bottom feeders. They are so low on the celebrity food chain. Thats never going to be in the paper.
DRE: So whats going on with the movies? I heard Survivor might be back on track?
CP: The writer director team that made Constantine just bought Survivor. They bought it in February and theyve announced that its going to be one of if not their very next project. Its actually going to happen, maybe.
DRE: Have you met with the director, Francis Lawrence?
CP: I dont even know their names. This is how little attention I pay. I didnt meet with them. Their agents talked to my agents and they did the deal and I signed the papers and they signed the papers. Now its in their hands.
DRE: Did you go check out the Constantine movie just to see if they knew what they were doing?
CP: Its funny. Im waiting for the DVD because my friends went and they really liked it. They liked it better than Sin City. Once the DVD is out Ill see it.
DRE: What else is being made into movies?
CP: Diary is, theyre so happy with the screenplay that theyre now negotiating for Lullaby, which is the only one of my books that is not optioned. The screenplay for Choke is done so now theyre casting it; they want to be shooting no later than December this year.
DRE: Whos directing Choke?
CP: I think its going to be a man named Clark Gregg, whos been a very successful screenwriter up to this.
DRE: Hes the guy who works with David Mamet a lot.
CP: I dont know anything about these people. I just know their names. I know he wrote What Lies Beneath. Hes in a TV series this summer and I cant even tell you the name of the series.
DRE: Is Jim Uhls involved with any of these movies?
CP: No, I havent touched base with Jim in, boy at least a year.
DRE: I remember you guys were trying to develop something for HBO.
CP: Yeah but it wasnt going in any direction I wanted to go in. So what the hell, we stuck a pin in it.
DRE: I read on the IMDB about a new version of Fight Club to be directed by Vikram Chopra.
CP: I have no idea what youre talking about. So far Ive negotiated about doing a Fight Club ballet, which was to be produced in London. Thats not on track anymore. Then there was the Fight Club Broadway musical.
DRE: Hows that going?
CP: I havent heard anything in a year on that, so thats not a good sign.
DRE: I bet you dont play video games, but did you see anything from the Fight Club game?
CP: No, but hundreds, maybe thousands of people have told me that it sucks.
DRE: I never heard much about it, so I assumed it did.
CP: Fox gets the merchandizing royalties on it so I can bad mouth it all I want.
DRE: Whats the next book youre working on?
CP: It is sort of a dysfunctional science fiction novel based on American car culture. There hasnt been a great car novel since maybe Christine and that was a long time ago. So I think that we just really need a good car culture novel.
DRE: Did you ever write the screenplay you talked about a few years ago?
CP: I wrote one based on the short story Ambition about the artist who sticks his paintings up in museums and then ends up getting hired to kill famous artists and becomes famous himself. I finally gave up and wrote a short story out of it and put it in Haunted. I wrote a play and we did a reading in Los Angeles that was just horrifically dark and it needs a whole bunch of work before its ever going to be seen by people. It just needs more work on the second half before I can show it to anybody.
DRE: What do you think about the rise of SuicideGirls?
CP: I see a lot of SuicideGirls at my events. It just seems like you can always pick them out in the crowd. Theyre always so extreme and then they come up and say Hey were SuicideGirls.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
Check out the official site for Haunted
Daniel Robert Epstein: What are you up to?
Chuck Palahniuk: Not much. Im just coming back from picking up my days food.
DRE: Are you going on tour soon?
CP: I just finished a US tour and I start the Canadian tour this weekend.
DRE: So Haunted is a crazy book and I totally forgot that Guts was in it. Guts is a really gross story.
CP: Yeah but a funny one.
DRE: Its very funny because I can see that happening to me which is the sad thing.
CP: I think thats why people relate to it. Everybodys got sort of a horrific sex story like that.
DRE: Guts was the one that was making people pass out at readings. Would you read the whole story at the readings?
CP: Oh yeah but typically Id have to stop halfway through when the people were being lowered to the floor. Everyone was all upset about these people passing out. Then Id finish the story.
DRE: I was reading it in an airport and it made me kind of reel. It must have been a lot of fun to write that story.
CP: It was fun, but the whole time I thought I can never read this. I will never be able to read this thing out loud. People are going to be picturing me doing all this shit.
DRE: I didnt picture you actually. I pictured a short blonde kid for some reason. I dont know why.
CP: Oh good.
DRE: Because hes got a pool. I see everyone with a pool as a blonde. I dont know why. I never had a pool.
CP: Thats really weird, because the guy who told me the story, the guy that it happened to is blonde.
DRE: Oh really?
So that happened to somebody? Wait, of course it happened to somebody. Everything happens to somebody.
CP: Right but many of them are just stories that people have told me. Now people have told me stories that make those stories look like nothing.
DRE: But you love that!
CP: Oh my gosh, thats where I get my work, thats why I can do almost a book a year.
DRE: I also really liked the short, Swan Song. The one about the reporter who discovers an ex-child star who lives in his town. It is an upsetting story because once again I could see myself, not doing that exactly because I could never kill anybody, but I could see a reporter doing that. Did you hear that kind of story from someone too?
CP: Its also based on how many child celebrities do end up dead and how theyre even bigger news once theyre dead. Nobody would actually fess up about killing them.
DRE: A lot of people want to become famous by killing someone else thats famous.
CP: Thats a real way of establishing your power up front.
DRE: You also have the story, in Haunted, about the talk shows. I saw you on Conan OBrian.
CP: I just did the Craig Ferguson Show, which was a blast.
DRE: How was that?
CP: It was great and we were funny. He actually talked to me beforehand which Conan OBrien did not do. Suddenly Im confronted by this giant pink Conan OBrien covered in makeup. I have no idea what to say with this huge mannequin. Ferguson was way more relaxed and just a lot of fun to do.
DRE: Did you happen to watch those just to see how you did?
CP: No. This is the same reason why I dont want to be in the movies that are getting made from my books because that would just ruin them for me.
DRE: Did you write the short stories for anthologies or anything like that and then connect them for the book?
CP: I had two separate books I was going to do. I was going to do a novella that was about these people in this sort of fairy tale setting gradually destroying themselves. They were all going to be book and movie and music critics who were so sick of what they were being forced to review that they were going to get away from the world and were going to incubate their own sort of uber-culture. But once they got sort of squirreled away, they realized that they couldnt even produce stuff as good as what they were trashing and they didnt have a creative bone in their body. All they could do was tear stuff apart. So they started tearing themselves apart to make a story.
Then the stories themselves were going to be just a collection. Then the publishing house talked me into sort of putting them together and making a sort of bizarre novel out of it.
DRE: Was the process of taking two things and putting them together new for you?
CP: It was different but what the hell, Im not in this to be bored.
DRE: Did you ever do a writers retreat?
CP: I havent. I did things like that in a workshop. We would all go someplace for the weekend, layout 18 people, and just drink and present our work and have a great time. But it has never been a real sort of a retreat from life. I just never had the money or the time for something like that.
DRE: What about something like the Mary Shelley thing where people sit around and try to freak each other out?
CP: You know, thats sort of like every time I get together with my friends. We all really compete for best story, most attention, and most extreme place to take a story. We all do that.
DRE: You tell true stories or are you just making them up?
CP: No, we tell true stories.
DRE: You tell true stories.
CP: You cannot make up anything better than the truth.
DRE: Hows the response to this book been? Its little spurts of Chuck Palahniuk rather than one whole novel.
CP: Right but it also goes on over twice the length of Fight Club. I just figured that the only way I could have the kind of momentum ongoing that I wanted was to do it with short stories. If I was going to have 400, then we had to have some sort of horrific thing every seven to eight pages.
DRE: Had you ever written short stories before?
CP: I had but they always became chapters in books. The way I start every book is to write the key plot points as a short story so each one stands by itself.
DRE: Since some of the stories were stories that others had told you. How did they become personal to you?
CP: Over the course of 20 years, people would tell me different stories and I would start to notice commonalities. I had the carrot story, I got the wax story, and Ive got the swimming pool story. So I figured Ive got three stories, this could be a three act story. I just find ways of sort of quilting together things based on similar themes. I think my greatest skill is to find some way to put together these small things based on common elements and anxieties people have.
DRE: Which cities are you excited to hit for this book? Is it the bigger cities, is it the smaller places where people travel all over?
CP: Its sort of mixed. Berkeley is a fantastic place to read. People really get into it. Chicago is a great place to read. Austin, Texas is insane. They give people beer at the book events. So its interacting with 800 drunk Texans.
DRE: What about Europe?
CP: London is always a great city. Bologna, Italy is a college town with a lot of sort of overseas programs headquartered there, so theres a gigantic crowd there.
DRE: Recently youve been lending your name to help people like Craig Clevenger, how did Craigs book get to you?
CP: Actually, somebody on the Cult website recommended it to me so I went out and bought a copy. Its a great book. Its really easy to promote things that you like.
DRE: Are people sending you a lot more books now, for either a quote or just to get impressions?
CP: Boy, I get tons of books, mostly through publishing media people. For most of them I dont know why they send them to me because I have no interest whatsoever. The back of my toilet is just a mountain of books right now.
DRE: What did you think about the documentary that [ChuckPalahniuk.net creator] Dennis [Widmyer] put together?
CP: I havent watched it and I probably never will.
DRE: Too much about yourself, right?
CP: Yeah, can you imagine anything more painful?
DRE: You gave Dennis some notes on his screenplay as well.
CP: Yes and he better take them to heart.
DRE: You were kind of forced to come out of the closet.
CP: I was heavily coached too. I figured if anybodys going to make a story out of this I should.
DRE: So you werent planning on it beforehand?
CP: I dont even want my picture in the goddamn books. I would really like it to sort of fade away and just let the book present itself. But you cant really do that anymore, thats just not publishing. So I just make the best of it.
DRE: Has it changed anything?
CP: No nothings changed.
DRE: I guess you werent expecting anything in the tabloids.
CP: Writers that sick are such bottom feeders. They are so low on the celebrity food chain. Thats never going to be in the paper.
DRE: So whats going on with the movies? I heard Survivor might be back on track?
CP: The writer director team that made Constantine just bought Survivor. They bought it in February and theyve announced that its going to be one of if not their very next project. Its actually going to happen, maybe.
DRE: Have you met with the director, Francis Lawrence?
CP: I dont even know their names. This is how little attention I pay. I didnt meet with them. Their agents talked to my agents and they did the deal and I signed the papers and they signed the papers. Now its in their hands.
DRE: Did you go check out the Constantine movie just to see if they knew what they were doing?
CP: Its funny. Im waiting for the DVD because my friends went and they really liked it. They liked it better than Sin City. Once the DVD is out Ill see it.
DRE: What else is being made into movies?
CP: Diary is, theyre so happy with the screenplay that theyre now negotiating for Lullaby, which is the only one of my books that is not optioned. The screenplay for Choke is done so now theyre casting it; they want to be shooting no later than December this year.
DRE: Whos directing Choke?
CP: I think its going to be a man named Clark Gregg, whos been a very successful screenwriter up to this.
DRE: Hes the guy who works with David Mamet a lot.
CP: I dont know anything about these people. I just know their names. I know he wrote What Lies Beneath. Hes in a TV series this summer and I cant even tell you the name of the series.
DRE: Is Jim Uhls involved with any of these movies?
CP: No, I havent touched base with Jim in, boy at least a year.
DRE: I remember you guys were trying to develop something for HBO.
CP: Yeah but it wasnt going in any direction I wanted to go in. So what the hell, we stuck a pin in it.
DRE: I read on the IMDB about a new version of Fight Club to be directed by Vikram Chopra.
CP: I have no idea what youre talking about. So far Ive negotiated about doing a Fight Club ballet, which was to be produced in London. Thats not on track anymore. Then there was the Fight Club Broadway musical.
DRE: Hows that going?
CP: I havent heard anything in a year on that, so thats not a good sign.
DRE: I bet you dont play video games, but did you see anything from the Fight Club game?
CP: No, but hundreds, maybe thousands of people have told me that it sucks.
DRE: I never heard much about it, so I assumed it did.
CP: Fox gets the merchandizing royalties on it so I can bad mouth it all I want.
DRE: Whats the next book youre working on?
CP: It is sort of a dysfunctional science fiction novel based on American car culture. There hasnt been a great car novel since maybe Christine and that was a long time ago. So I think that we just really need a good car culture novel.
DRE: Did you ever write the screenplay you talked about a few years ago?
CP: I wrote one based on the short story Ambition about the artist who sticks his paintings up in museums and then ends up getting hired to kill famous artists and becomes famous himself. I finally gave up and wrote a short story out of it and put it in Haunted. I wrote a play and we did a reading in Los Angeles that was just horrifically dark and it needs a whole bunch of work before its ever going to be seen by people. It just needs more work on the second half before I can show it to anybody.
DRE: What do you think about the rise of SuicideGirls?
CP: I see a lot of SuicideGirls at my events. It just seems like you can always pick them out in the crowd. Theyre always so extreme and then they come up and say Hey were SuicideGirls.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
VIEW 19 of 19 COMMENTS
Big ol' gradual worse, rather then bigger, greater, omfg.
Blow my mind Chuck, don't appeal to my sensibilities.
You've got the ability to go all Doestovesky on me, fucking do it damn it.
Also: he won't personalize library books. I tried, and it didn't look like he appreciated it..
I was never a hey sign this.. proof that i've encountered someone important to me kinda guy.
Just a nice signature and a couple of stamps.. sitting in the local book hole.
I just joined up with www.chuckpalahniuk.net for his instructional essays and I'm finding them helpful.
Anyway, what's this "coming out of the closet" business? Was he exposed as gay? I missed something. If somebody wrote a piece on that and it wasn't Chuck, that's a real assholish thing to do.