TC Boyle definitely picked a hot topic this time. His new book, The Inner Circle, is a fictional story set around Dr. Alfred Kinsey, a pioneer in the area of human sexuality research, whose 1948 publication "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male" was one of the first recorded works that saw science address sexual behavior. The story is narrated by John Milk a virginal young man who accepts a job as an assistant to Dr. Alfred Kinsey. I hope that The Inner Circle and Bill Condons upcoming biopic film of Kinsey will help a new generation discover Kinsey and his work.
Boyle is the author of sixteen books of fiction and his stories appear regularly in The New Yorker, GQ, Esquire, and Playboy.
Check out the official website of TC Boyle
Daniel Robert Epstein: Hows the book tour going?
TC Boyle: Im worn down and tired out. They refuse to let me fly the airplanes myself and everything is overcrowded and crazy. Im about ready to kill myself.
DRE: Have you forgotten what city youre in yet?
TB: No I know exactly where I am, Dallas. I just got here from Chicago.
DRE: Did they make you take your shoes off at the security check in?
TB: I always wear sneakers to avoid that. But they say its random search but Id say 85 percent of the time they strip search me and beat me with rubber hoses in a back room.
DRE: Thats not so bad.
TB: Not if you like that sort of thing. But I dont have much patience for it.
DRE: I thought it was interesting that your book is coming out at the same time as Bill Condons movie.
TB: Yeah its one of those wonderful serendipitous things where two people are onto the same thing at the same time.
DRE: So its a good thing.
TB: Its a real good thing for my publishers, thats for sure. Hopefully Bills movie will be of the quality of Gods and Monsters, which was superb. I havent seen Kinsey yet but Ive been in touch with Bill and Ive been invited to screenings. I look forward to seeing it. Its good for my publishers because its rare that a book and a movie that deal with the same subject, even if in different ways, are out at the same time. On the other hand its bad for me because I cant sell movie rights and have a movie of my own story.
DRE: Maybe not right away.
TB: Yeah maybe somewhere down the line because my book would be a killer movie.
DRE: Gods and Monsters seems more like your book. Because Bill took a real person and made a fictional story out of one aspect of his life as you did with The Inner Circle.
TB: I hadnt thought of that. The Inner Circle is a fictional story around a historical character as I did with The Road to Wellville around Dr. Kellogg. Everything that Dr. Kellogg did in his sanitarium is true to fact and the same is with my Kinsey. But then I created fictional characters around them to find out what it all means.
DRE: I only became aware of your novels a few years ago but I still loved The Road to Wellville.
TB: I did too. I thought Alan Parker did a great job and I liked the rest of his career as well. He will take on anything. The movie he made right before The Road to Wellville was The Commitments which is a wonderful movie with a different kind of charming off the cuff humor while Wellville is a wild madcap Fellini type humor.
DRE: Was writing The Inner Circle similar to writing The Road to Wellville because it has those things in common?
TB: Yes very similar. I absorbed some material, read all four biographies, went to Bloomington Indiana and snooped around. I wasnt sure what I was going to do and then I let it happen. However The Road to Wellville was told in the third person and we have several different points of view. In The Inner Circle I limited it to the first person, which is the first time I did that in 20 years since Budding Prospects. That was a great discovery for me because it enables me to give you a limited view of whats happening. Meaning you dont know what other people are thinking unless John Milk tells you. Hes not your classic unreliable narrator but hes just telling you what he did in his life. He was attached to a very strong mentor and the reader can draw back from that and decide for himself whether what John Milk is doing is a good idea or not.
DRE: What hooked you into Kinsey?
TB: Kinsey has faded into the dimness of history. If you ask anyone on the street about him they probably wont know who he is although that wasnt true in 1950. Back then he was the second most recognizable man in the country aside from the President. Maybe Joe DiMaggio too. He was a phenomenon in his time. There were songs about him, he had two huge bestsellers and got people talking about sex. But all of that is way before my time. I discovered him through reading David Halberstam's The Fifties which was a history of the 1950s. There was capsule bio of Kinsey and I thought that it fit in with what I like to explore because Drop City was set in 1970 and deals with the hippie era and the notions of free love and going back to the earth. With Kinsey we go back 20 years and see where that kind of sexual awakening began.
DRE: When did you read David Halberstam's The Fifties?
TB: I was trying to figure that out and I saw that The Fifties came out in 1993 but I think I read it a few years after that maybe even in 1998 or 99. I presume where Bill Condon is coming from is that of the four biographies, two were written by people who worked with him and they werent entirely sanitized but pretty much so. But in the 1990s there were two biographies that came out that showed Kinseys other side meaning what he did in private and in the backrooms. One is by James Jones called Alfred C. Kinsey: A Life and the other one, which is the one that Bill Condon bought the rights to, is called Alfred C. Kinsey by Jonathan Gathorne Hardy. Gathorne Hardy is a Brit who wanted to write the record on Kinsey. Kinsey is a great hero of the gay community as he should be and the heterosexual community as well because he normalized sexual relations between consenting adults. Gathorne Hardy didnt pull any punches and though I do think he tried to tone down some of the moral critique that Jones was laying on the legacy of Kinsey. Of course thats all illuminated with what I wrote in The Inner Circle.
DRE: As far as I know youre straight, married and have kids.
TB: Thats correct.
DRE: Did you wonder what was going on in your mind when you wanted to explore Kinsey? What did you discover about yourself?
TB: I discovered that I am a wonderful and entertaining artist. I further discovered that sex is fine but basically this was no different for me than writing any of my other books. Im just exploring a subject to see where it goes. I wouldnt want to make any pronouncements or judgments on what the book means because I think thats not fair to the readers. Each reader will come to a point where he or she says I wouldnt do that or Boy thats disgusting or Go for it! I think thats part of the beauty of doing a first person narrative in this book. I did write my first homosexual man on man scenes because thats part of what Kinsey was all about and part of what my fictional character had to go through. His initiation in sex is through Kinsey and then through Kinseys wife Clara.
DRE: Has anyone done a fictional story around Kinsey before?
TB: Not that Im aware of. Though the biographers did mention that in Kinseys time, because he was such a phenomenon, there were several novels that were about sex researchers. There was a comic strip that had Kinsey in it and Kinsey sued so they had to change the name to Hinsey or something. People have forgotten about certain parts of history which fascinate me and are kind of oddball and bizarre. All the odd stuff in Wellville and this book is true. I like to examine it as a writer living today to see what it all means and how we got here from there. For instance if you go in the back of some magazines there are ads for a new high colonic wash which sounds very important as a new health discovery but 100 years ago Kellogg was doing the same thing but he called it the enema machine. All this stuff is constantly getting recycled but as far as the openness of our society to sex that seems to go cyclically. We went through the 60s with the notions of throwing away marriage and free love and then that seemed to close up again. Now on the internet anything goes, on the other hand there is this brouhaha towards gay marriage with this reactionary administration. People in a free society seem to think it is ok to cast moral judgments on adults who have consensual sex. For instance the Republican Party trying to bring down a president for having consensual sex with an adult.
DRE: Have you heard any negative criticisms about The Inner Circle?
TB: There have been some. In this case its odd because I havent seen any of the reviews except for the ones from before the book came out. My editor quoted me a few things like Entertainment Weekly calling Kinsey the most consummately creepy character in literature since Poe or something. My wife tells me that People magazine gave it kind of a negative review but they said it was almost pornographic. The Times book review gave it the front cover with one criticism too much sex. If you combine those two phrases almost pornographic and too much sex I expect there to be riots at the bookstores. I think people will react strongly to this book as they do to all my books.
DRE: When did you finish The Inner Circle?
TB: The summer of 2003 around mid-July. I seem to always be on the cusp of whats happening. My new book Im working on right now is about identity theft and I hope to have that out in two years. I am as perplexed as to what human life is all about as anyone else. In 2000 I wrote A Friend of the Earth which is set in 2025 and is about the destruction of the environment. I am interested in issues but mainly as they relate to our biology. I dont even know how to think deeply about things unless I write fiction about them.
DRE: I found this great quote by Kinsey, "There are only three types of sexual abnormality: abstinence, celibacy and delayed marriage."
TB: Yes he put himself forward to the public as a disinterested scientist just giving us a full range of human sexual behavior without any judgment whatsoever. That was good but you can see that he felt that all sex was good. He couldnt help in some ways skewing what he was giving us to promote what he felt.
DRE: Was there humor in Kinsey as well?
TB: I think he was probably the most humorless man who ever lived. There was no humor in him at all. He didnt understand jokes and didnt ever make jokes. He was just straightforward. As lecturer he commanded huge audiences, one time in 1952 he spoke to 9000 students in the field house at Berkeley, but he still lectured in this monotone voice. There might be some humor in my telling but he wasnt noted for his wit.
In fact he spent 15 years of his life tracking down gall wasps and studying them in order to demonstrate how they evolve and move from one locale to another. Then he was going to do the same thing with human sexuality. In his way he was quite great. He did allow people to talk about sex in public.
DRE: Putting love and Kinsey in the same paragraph seems a bit odd.
TB: Well he was in love with John Milk and in real life he was in love with one of his grad students and his wife. He said that the poets had 2000 years to tell us about love and romance now let a scientist tell us about the physiology of sex as completely divorced from emotion. Thats quite a proposition. I wondered how that would play out. What if you were a young nave guy going to college as an English major and you come under the sway of this charismatic figure then you become one of the first sexologists.
DRE: Im sure youve reached the point where your books are no longer fantasies for yourself.
TB: Its never been that way. Ive not ever been an autobiographical writer and I put myself in the work very rarely. Its just that I am meditating and dreaming on something. I convey that dream to you and everyone.
DRE: Would you have wanted to be around Kinsey?
TB: I wonder what it would have been like to give up your sex history to him. He presented it in a way that was very convincing. He would lecture an audience then get their sex histories and if you refused he would badger you. I probably wouldnt give him my sex history, not because I am prudish but because why should I participate in his project when I have my own projects.
DRE: Whats your schedule like? Do you write for a full day?
TB: No I dont think anyone can do that. The late John Gardiner told me that he worked from seven in the morning until 11 at night. I said that was the worst thing I ever heard in my life. I might actually work for an hour or two a day then be trying to work and focus for maybe three or four hours. When I get towards the end of a project and I see what it is I might work all day. But generally I work in the morning until two then go do something very different. That downtime helps me get through problems of structure, themes and plot.
DRE: Is The Tortilla Curtain going to happen as a movie?
TB: I dont know any more than what my fans tell me. We had it all set up on my website with who was directing and who was acting then not too long ago the fans read in Variety that its no longer Robin Williams and Helen Hunt but Kevin Costner and Meg Ryan. I hope they do a great job with it. I like the movies of my books so far because it attracts that marginal audience, the people who dont necessarily read much or even know who I am.
DRE: I read that you live in a Frank Lloyd Wright house. How did that happen?
TB: Its like any other historic house. It was built in 1909 and were the fourth owner of it. It needed a lot of work and weve tried to preserve it. A lot of people dont want houses like this because they cant really change them dramatically but my wife and I like that sort of thing.
DRE: Have you thought about writing something about Frank Lloyd Wright now?
TB: I certainly have because I love strong obsessive historical type figures but Im not sure if I ever will.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
Boyle is the author of sixteen books of fiction and his stories appear regularly in The New Yorker, GQ, Esquire, and Playboy.
Check out the official website of TC Boyle
Daniel Robert Epstein: Hows the book tour going?
TC Boyle: Im worn down and tired out. They refuse to let me fly the airplanes myself and everything is overcrowded and crazy. Im about ready to kill myself.
DRE: Have you forgotten what city youre in yet?
TB: No I know exactly where I am, Dallas. I just got here from Chicago.
DRE: Did they make you take your shoes off at the security check in?
TB: I always wear sneakers to avoid that. But they say its random search but Id say 85 percent of the time they strip search me and beat me with rubber hoses in a back room.
DRE: Thats not so bad.
TB: Not if you like that sort of thing. But I dont have much patience for it.
DRE: I thought it was interesting that your book is coming out at the same time as Bill Condons movie.
TB: Yeah its one of those wonderful serendipitous things where two people are onto the same thing at the same time.
DRE: So its a good thing.
TB: Its a real good thing for my publishers, thats for sure. Hopefully Bills movie will be of the quality of Gods and Monsters, which was superb. I havent seen Kinsey yet but Ive been in touch with Bill and Ive been invited to screenings. I look forward to seeing it. Its good for my publishers because its rare that a book and a movie that deal with the same subject, even if in different ways, are out at the same time. On the other hand its bad for me because I cant sell movie rights and have a movie of my own story.
DRE: Maybe not right away.
TB: Yeah maybe somewhere down the line because my book would be a killer movie.
DRE: Gods and Monsters seems more like your book. Because Bill took a real person and made a fictional story out of one aspect of his life as you did with The Inner Circle.
TB: I hadnt thought of that. The Inner Circle is a fictional story around a historical character as I did with The Road to Wellville around Dr. Kellogg. Everything that Dr. Kellogg did in his sanitarium is true to fact and the same is with my Kinsey. But then I created fictional characters around them to find out what it all means.
DRE: I only became aware of your novels a few years ago but I still loved The Road to Wellville.
TB: I did too. I thought Alan Parker did a great job and I liked the rest of his career as well. He will take on anything. The movie he made right before The Road to Wellville was The Commitments which is a wonderful movie with a different kind of charming off the cuff humor while Wellville is a wild madcap Fellini type humor.
DRE: Was writing The Inner Circle similar to writing The Road to Wellville because it has those things in common?
TB: Yes very similar. I absorbed some material, read all four biographies, went to Bloomington Indiana and snooped around. I wasnt sure what I was going to do and then I let it happen. However The Road to Wellville was told in the third person and we have several different points of view. In The Inner Circle I limited it to the first person, which is the first time I did that in 20 years since Budding Prospects. That was a great discovery for me because it enables me to give you a limited view of whats happening. Meaning you dont know what other people are thinking unless John Milk tells you. Hes not your classic unreliable narrator but hes just telling you what he did in his life. He was attached to a very strong mentor and the reader can draw back from that and decide for himself whether what John Milk is doing is a good idea or not.
DRE: What hooked you into Kinsey?
TB: Kinsey has faded into the dimness of history. If you ask anyone on the street about him they probably wont know who he is although that wasnt true in 1950. Back then he was the second most recognizable man in the country aside from the President. Maybe Joe DiMaggio too. He was a phenomenon in his time. There were songs about him, he had two huge bestsellers and got people talking about sex. But all of that is way before my time. I discovered him through reading David Halberstam's The Fifties which was a history of the 1950s. There was capsule bio of Kinsey and I thought that it fit in with what I like to explore because Drop City was set in 1970 and deals with the hippie era and the notions of free love and going back to the earth. With Kinsey we go back 20 years and see where that kind of sexual awakening began.
DRE: When did you read David Halberstam's The Fifties?
TB: I was trying to figure that out and I saw that The Fifties came out in 1993 but I think I read it a few years after that maybe even in 1998 or 99. I presume where Bill Condon is coming from is that of the four biographies, two were written by people who worked with him and they werent entirely sanitized but pretty much so. But in the 1990s there were two biographies that came out that showed Kinseys other side meaning what he did in private and in the backrooms. One is by James Jones called Alfred C. Kinsey: A Life and the other one, which is the one that Bill Condon bought the rights to, is called Alfred C. Kinsey by Jonathan Gathorne Hardy. Gathorne Hardy is a Brit who wanted to write the record on Kinsey. Kinsey is a great hero of the gay community as he should be and the heterosexual community as well because he normalized sexual relations between consenting adults. Gathorne Hardy didnt pull any punches and though I do think he tried to tone down some of the moral critique that Jones was laying on the legacy of Kinsey. Of course thats all illuminated with what I wrote in The Inner Circle.
DRE: As far as I know youre straight, married and have kids.
TB: Thats correct.
DRE: Did you wonder what was going on in your mind when you wanted to explore Kinsey? What did you discover about yourself?
TB: I discovered that I am a wonderful and entertaining artist. I further discovered that sex is fine but basically this was no different for me than writing any of my other books. Im just exploring a subject to see where it goes. I wouldnt want to make any pronouncements or judgments on what the book means because I think thats not fair to the readers. Each reader will come to a point where he or she says I wouldnt do that or Boy thats disgusting or Go for it! I think thats part of the beauty of doing a first person narrative in this book. I did write my first homosexual man on man scenes because thats part of what Kinsey was all about and part of what my fictional character had to go through. His initiation in sex is through Kinsey and then through Kinseys wife Clara.
DRE: Has anyone done a fictional story around Kinsey before?
TB: Not that Im aware of. Though the biographers did mention that in Kinseys time, because he was such a phenomenon, there were several novels that were about sex researchers. There was a comic strip that had Kinsey in it and Kinsey sued so they had to change the name to Hinsey or something. People have forgotten about certain parts of history which fascinate me and are kind of oddball and bizarre. All the odd stuff in Wellville and this book is true. I like to examine it as a writer living today to see what it all means and how we got here from there. For instance if you go in the back of some magazines there are ads for a new high colonic wash which sounds very important as a new health discovery but 100 years ago Kellogg was doing the same thing but he called it the enema machine. All this stuff is constantly getting recycled but as far as the openness of our society to sex that seems to go cyclically. We went through the 60s with the notions of throwing away marriage and free love and then that seemed to close up again. Now on the internet anything goes, on the other hand there is this brouhaha towards gay marriage with this reactionary administration. People in a free society seem to think it is ok to cast moral judgments on adults who have consensual sex. For instance the Republican Party trying to bring down a president for having consensual sex with an adult.
DRE: Have you heard any negative criticisms about The Inner Circle?
TB: There have been some. In this case its odd because I havent seen any of the reviews except for the ones from before the book came out. My editor quoted me a few things like Entertainment Weekly calling Kinsey the most consummately creepy character in literature since Poe or something. My wife tells me that People magazine gave it kind of a negative review but they said it was almost pornographic. The Times book review gave it the front cover with one criticism too much sex. If you combine those two phrases almost pornographic and too much sex I expect there to be riots at the bookstores. I think people will react strongly to this book as they do to all my books.
DRE: When did you finish The Inner Circle?
TB: The summer of 2003 around mid-July. I seem to always be on the cusp of whats happening. My new book Im working on right now is about identity theft and I hope to have that out in two years. I am as perplexed as to what human life is all about as anyone else. In 2000 I wrote A Friend of the Earth which is set in 2025 and is about the destruction of the environment. I am interested in issues but mainly as they relate to our biology. I dont even know how to think deeply about things unless I write fiction about them.
DRE: I found this great quote by Kinsey, "There are only three types of sexual abnormality: abstinence, celibacy and delayed marriage."
TB: Yes he put himself forward to the public as a disinterested scientist just giving us a full range of human sexual behavior without any judgment whatsoever. That was good but you can see that he felt that all sex was good. He couldnt help in some ways skewing what he was giving us to promote what he felt.
DRE: Was there humor in Kinsey as well?
TB: I think he was probably the most humorless man who ever lived. There was no humor in him at all. He didnt understand jokes and didnt ever make jokes. He was just straightforward. As lecturer he commanded huge audiences, one time in 1952 he spoke to 9000 students in the field house at Berkeley, but he still lectured in this monotone voice. There might be some humor in my telling but he wasnt noted for his wit.
In fact he spent 15 years of his life tracking down gall wasps and studying them in order to demonstrate how they evolve and move from one locale to another. Then he was going to do the same thing with human sexuality. In his way he was quite great. He did allow people to talk about sex in public.
DRE: Putting love and Kinsey in the same paragraph seems a bit odd.
TB: Well he was in love with John Milk and in real life he was in love with one of his grad students and his wife. He said that the poets had 2000 years to tell us about love and romance now let a scientist tell us about the physiology of sex as completely divorced from emotion. Thats quite a proposition. I wondered how that would play out. What if you were a young nave guy going to college as an English major and you come under the sway of this charismatic figure then you become one of the first sexologists.
DRE: Im sure youve reached the point where your books are no longer fantasies for yourself.
TB: Its never been that way. Ive not ever been an autobiographical writer and I put myself in the work very rarely. Its just that I am meditating and dreaming on something. I convey that dream to you and everyone.
DRE: Would you have wanted to be around Kinsey?
TB: I wonder what it would have been like to give up your sex history to him. He presented it in a way that was very convincing. He would lecture an audience then get their sex histories and if you refused he would badger you. I probably wouldnt give him my sex history, not because I am prudish but because why should I participate in his project when I have my own projects.
DRE: Whats your schedule like? Do you write for a full day?
TB: No I dont think anyone can do that. The late John Gardiner told me that he worked from seven in the morning until 11 at night. I said that was the worst thing I ever heard in my life. I might actually work for an hour or two a day then be trying to work and focus for maybe three or four hours. When I get towards the end of a project and I see what it is I might work all day. But generally I work in the morning until two then go do something very different. That downtime helps me get through problems of structure, themes and plot.
DRE: Is The Tortilla Curtain going to happen as a movie?
TB: I dont know any more than what my fans tell me. We had it all set up on my website with who was directing and who was acting then not too long ago the fans read in Variety that its no longer Robin Williams and Helen Hunt but Kevin Costner and Meg Ryan. I hope they do a great job with it. I like the movies of my books so far because it attracts that marginal audience, the people who dont necessarily read much or even know who I am.
DRE: I read that you live in a Frank Lloyd Wright house. How did that happen?
TB: Its like any other historic house. It was built in 1909 and were the fourth owner of it. It needed a lot of work and weve tried to preserve it. A lot of people dont want houses like this because they cant really change them dramatically but my wife and I like that sort of thing.
DRE: Have you thought about writing something about Frank Lloyd Wright now?
TB: I certainly have because I love strong obsessive historical type figures but Im not sure if I ever will.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
VIEW 9 of 9 COMMENTS
normstandard:
I've only read "World's End" which is an older work of his. It was dense "historical fiction" set in the Hudson River Valley in three different time periods. Cool stuff. Complex stories with history built in. I just hope the historical part is accurate, because I wouldn't really know the difference. It was set in the present, the labor movement years and the time of the Dutch settlers. Each period had as its principle character one member of a long family tree and each character went against the grain in his own time. Anyway, cool, dense, intellectual. It would seem to recommend the Kinsey book.
walkswithbears:
haha, great interview! he's a funny guy, something i wouldn't have guessed from reading a couple of his books, though the tortilla curtain is a modern american great.