Chuck Palahniuk Interview

By Michael Houghton

This is the part of the story where Chuck Palahniuk is twenty-five and a volunteer escort for people who are dying. They’re dying of cancer or AIDS or leukemia or whatever, and Chuck Palahniuk drives them out to the beach or takes them to a baseball game or anything else they want to do before they die. He started doing this because he hates his job and he’s miserable and wants to find some sort of meaning, and because it’s making him feel like maybe his own life isn’t so fucked up.

This is where Chuck Palahniuk takes these dying people to their support group meetings every week, just to be their ride. Or maybe, a little, to feel better by comparison. This is where he doesn’t say anything and sits in the back. This is where everyone assumes that he probably has cancer or AIDS or leukemia or whatever, and they think it must be really bad if he’s not talking. And this is where he finds out how good it feels to be accepted by these people - totally unconditionally accepted - and how good it feels to let go and just say ‘I’m completely fucked up’ and then be okay with that.

This is where Chuck Palahniuk drives these dying people and their families around in his beat-to-shit old Mercury Bobcat so they can say goodbye, only they never do. They mostly just smoke a lot, and don’t know how to talk to each other. And then at the end of the night, when he drives the mothers or the sisters or the sons back to their hotels, when he’s pulling into all the parking lots at one in the morning, that’s when they always want to talk. That’s when they want to tell Chuck Palahniuk everything they couldn’t tell their sons or brothers or fathers. They talk about how they feel like they’ve failed the dying people. They talk about how they should have been better family to them. They talk like they think that if they’d been better parents or sisters or children, like that would have stopped the disease from happening. And even though Chuck Palahniuk is exhausted from doing this with other families, and even though he has to get up at seven to go to his miserable job, he listens to them and stays up all night.

***

The first rule of interviewing Chuck Palahniuk is you don’t talk about the movie.

This is the part of the story where Chuck Palahniuk has just turned forty and is sitting in the back of Copperfield’s Books in downtown Santa Rosa, California, during the reading tour late last year for the release of his last novel, Lullaby, his feet tucked up onto the chair, body new with sinewy-crisp muscle, jaw line square like Popeye, and so relaxed, balanced, and at-peace that you immediately feel like you’ve known him always. He holds up a Styrofoam cup of coffee in one hand, which he’s fascinated with because Styrofoam is illegal in Portland, where he lives, and his other arm drapes loosely over his crossed legs and then the front of the chair. He maintains eye contact with you the whole time, listens intently to everything you say, genuinely thinking about each question, always in-that-moment, caring about hearing your ideas, with a disarming and polite charm. His presence is a gravitational pull - less like celebrity than like a wise and profound guru. Never once in the hour you spend with him will he force a single opinion on you - he is not only so comfortable within his skin that he’s unthreatened by criticism, but he never seems so attached to his own ideas that he isn’t fluidly open to new ones - but afterwards you will feel electrified and converted and like there is nothing you want more than to be just like him.

The second rule of interviewing Chuck Palahniuk is that you don’t talk about the movie.

“I’m gonna have a string inserted in my side, so I can just pull it like Teddy Ruxpin…” He trails off and starts laughing - an unguarded and deep-bellied laugh. “No really - I loved the movie, you know. I was, at first, really secretly threatened by the movie. Because the movie was just so extraordinary, and it was going to tell that story so much better than the book told that story that I thought people would see nothing but the flaws in the book after that. That they would see the movie as by far the superior thing. But, I’ve sort of gotten over that, and I love the movie.”

Okay, so he doesn’t mind that much when you ask. He’s just tired of the answering part.

However, he’s also ready to admit that there were “only a handful of people who’d read the book before that,” and that much of his success and celebrity started with the movie. And a very odd sort of rock star celebrity it is - something an author, especially one who is usually a bit of a hermit, isn’t exactly used to.

“That’s the real schizophrenic part of it: that you spend so much of your time completely isolated with almost no human contact [while writing], and then you spend so much of your time completely public, with almost no solitude. It’s two extremes juxtaposed and you just go from day to night to day to night at this point. I’ve got to find some moderation…”

He takes a sip of his coffee. He’s been surviving on coffee and Red Bulls for the last month, floating in a constant buzz, from airport to book signing, to airport again - a different city every day - bewildered, shaking hands and writing things like “Michael, this is your life - chew every bite” in literally thousands of books. His publicist is making him drink more water today, and he’s feeling better.

“And yet, in a way,” he continues, “that’s why musicians are musicians and writers are writers, is that writers want to be able to do their thing, and send it off, and not have to be there for it. But, anymore, writing is really following the music industry by selling product with a personality.”

And being the personality behind a series of cult novels, especially the one made into a cult movie, tends to build you, not surprisingly, a bit of a - well - cult. People constantly tell him how his books have changed their lives. They all ask him where the local Fight Clubs are, including women. So far nobody at any of the book signings has actually taken a swing at him, though he does get quite a few polite offers, and he poses for an awful lot of pictures choking people (because of his 2001 novel Choke). One time he was on a tour of some natural caves near Portland, and the tour guide started out with “The first rule of So-and-so caves is you don’t talk about So-and-so caves,” and Chuck piped up with “Hey, I wrote that book,” and the tour guide turned to him, confused and annoyed, asking “What book?” And perhaps even more commonplace in the world of Chuck Palahniuk, is when waiters refuse to let him pay for meals (like Fight Club’s anti-hero Tyler Durden), though just as often, he is filled with a queasy, sneaking feeling of what he might have let loose.

“I’m really starting to freak out in restaurants because I don’t know when people do or don’t recognize my name. And when the waiter comes up and says ‘How is it?,’ my first thought is ‘What did you do to it? Oh god, what did you do to my damn food?’ Maybe it’s a function of being exhausted that this paranoia is just growing in the back of my mind…”

And that’s just the beginning.

“Yesterday was the weirdest - at a book event - I really thought I was having a psychotic break. It was at the Cody’s in Berkeley, on Telegraph street. Suddenly these people started forcing their way through the crowd of several hundred people packed into the reading area. And then I noticed that they were all dressed as waiters, and they all had black eyes and scars and they had big, bloody burns on their hands, and they had towels over their arms, and they had trays of rolls, and they started throwing these rolls haphazardly into the crowd and slamming people on the side of the head with these dinner rolls - and I really thought I was going nuts! I thought: ‘Did the book store arrange this? Are these people just crazy? Am I hallucinating this?’ And I was so tired, all I could do was just lean on the podium and hope somehow it would explain itself.”

He makes a mock expression of relief. “It was the Cacophony Society. It was their acknowledgment. They were doing this as a treat for me - the local Society - since I sing their praises so much in Portland, and they just came and disrupted the event, and gave me a big thing of clam chowder. And then during the reading, some man faked choking, and collapsed and had to be Heimliched. Oh my god, it was just this big, insane street theatre thing that I hadn’t seen at a book event. God, that collapsing of unreal and real is just too strange.”

his is the part of the story where Chuck Palahniuk learns how to pronounce his last name from his dad, who is pointing at two gravestones. One is for his grandmother Paula, and the other is for his grandfather Nick. You put them together and make “Paula Nick.”

This is where Grandpa Nick is working at a rail yard and gets hit in the head and it scrambles up the meat inside his skull and the meat starts making him swing from happy to sad and lots of the time to violent. This is where the meat makes him so angry about an argument that he’s having with Grandma Paula about what she paid for a sewing machine that the meat tells him the only way to win this argument is to go get the shotgun and kill Grandma Paula and then go looking for the children, though most of them have run off into the woods. This is the part where Chuck Palahniuk’s father, Fred, is really little and hiding under the bed while Grandpa Nick is walking through the house, dragging the nose of the shotgun on the floor and calling sweetly “Fred? Fred? Fred?”, and the big work boots walk past the bed and then out into the other room where the meat tells Grandpa Nick to put the shotgun in his mouth and pull the trigger.

***

Even with all of his celebrity, Chuck Palahniuk is quick to point out that a lot of the ideas he put out there in Fight Club are not necessarily new. However, he’s at least tentatively proud to have helped people to find that in themselves.

“I think I acknowledged something that people were feeling - because you can’t create a feeling in somebody… You can affirm to them that they’re not the only person feeling this way, and bring those people together so they can express that feeling. And in this case that feeling just happens to be a need for chaos or mayhem or violence. So - what the hell - yeah, I’m proud of that.

“But I also get tons of letters from people who say ‘You did not invent this, because we did this when I was in the service, or we did this when I was in the WPA in the Depression. We used to do this all the time.’ So I think I just put a name on the thing. I can’t be too proud because of that.”

***

This is the part of the story where Chuck Palahniuk is in his late twenties or early thirties or whatever, and he’s directionless, depressed, with a life not worth living. He’s got all this pent up aggression from his a shit job at a diesel truck manufacturing plant, and laying on his back all day long installing drivelines - twenty-six every eight hour day - and going home at night to chronic insomnia and abject misery. It wasn’t supposed to have ended up this way. This is a guy who graduated from college with a journalism degree, but couldn’t support himself at the minimum wage job he had at the local paper, and now makes more working on trucks. Except he’s stuck here.

This is where Chuck Palahniuk goes on a camping trip with his friends out into the great outdoors to get away from all this and relax, except he can’t because the assholes in the next campsite over are playing their shitty music so damn loud, and both sides have been drinking too much, and so Chuck Palahniuk goes over to tell them to shut the fuck up, and gets punched in the face over and over and over, and absolutely gets his ass kicked. This is his first fight.

This is where he goes back to work the next Monday with bruises and cuts all over his face and a giant shiner that swells his eye half shut. Everybody is looking at him when they think he doesn’t know they’re looking at him, but when he looks over or talks to anyone, they won’t make eye contact. Everybody wants to ask, “what happened?” or “what the hell did you do on your vacation?” but nobody has the guts to. This is where Chuck Palahniuk learns that in this state, he has the power. In this state, he’s invisible and can get away with anything. In this state, he’s free.

***

This is the part of the story where Chuck Palahniuk started going to bars just to pick fights. He’d find someone else who was just as pent up with rage and wanted just as badly to mop the floor with someone else’s face, and they’d spill out into parking lots and slam fist into face until one of them couldn’t take any more. And then the weirdest thing would happen: these two guys who had hated each other enough to want to bludgeon each other just a little while ago, now they were the best of friends. Sometimes they’d even hug or at least shake hands and almost always buy each other a beer and talk, drunk and loud and baptized in the river of testosterone, until closing.

This is where Chuck Palahniuk started wishing there was somewhere you could go where you could walk up to someone and tap them for a fight “as easy as asking them to dance.” This is where he found out that sometimes just kicking the shit out of someone was so much more what he really needed than “talking about it”. This was being alive in the most primal way.

***

“And where do I get my ideas? The ideas come from everything I overhear. It’s just appalling how much I steal.”

This is the part of the story where Chuck Palahniuk is talking in front of the now-thick crowd of fans at the reading at Copperfields, his arms framed, half push-up on the podium, braided and ropy and thistled with veins under the stretched skin of his forearms. His banter is easy, self-mocking at times, animated, and much funnier than you might have expected.

“I’ll go to parties - I love doing this - I went to a party once and most of my friends are teachers and in the state of Oregon, and they were all talking about this new announcement they had to learn. When they announce that ‘Recess will be held in the library’, in the state of Oregon, you have to shut the lights off, close the blinds, lock the doors, and have all your kids lie on their stomachs, because it means that there’s a shooter in the hallway. Someone with a gun. So you have to have all your kids lay on the floor until they announce: ‘The lunch special is tuna noodle casserole.’ And it seems so ludicrous, the horrors that we hide beneath such banal announcements.

“So, I would literally go to parties and say: ‘Who here has worked in Food Service and monkeyed with food?’ Or ‘Who here has worked in public places and knows priority announcements?” I would just throw it out like it was a topic of conversation and people would literally write those parts of the book for me.

“That’s another thing: If you’re ever stuck at a party with someone you think is really boring and really ugly, get them talking about the thing that they really know well. They will shine and they will amaze you. Suddenly you will be talking to the most clever, attractive person at that party. You know, people really shine when they talk about what they know well.

“And you ask where I get my ideas… I steal. That’s where I get my ideas…

“And I had been a candy-striper - I had to. In order to be confirmed in the Catholic Church I had to be a candy-striper. I was fourteen years old and cleaning the delivery room. I’ve seen so many placentas - fourteen years old and carrying those things and finally getting them to go down the drain.

Someone wants to know specifically, where did Chuck Palahniuk get all the stuff in Survivor, his 1999 book, the one he wrote right after Fight Club, but before The Movie, the stuff in Chapter forty-five, about getting bloodstains off piano keys, the stuff about getting brains out of flocked wallpaper, the really twisted Home Economics stuff. Where did he get all that?

Chuck Palahniuk pauses and laughs, obviously glad he gets to answer this question. Hands clamped on podium. Eyes all sparkly. “I was able to buy a house with the money from Fight Club. It’s not a great house and when I got it, it had no bathroom, and it had big stains in the carpet. And [the real estate company] agreed to have Stanley Steamer come and clean the stains. And I was there when the two Stanley Steamer guys who just reeked of dope - uh, I shouldn’t say ‘Stanley Steamer,’ huh? - and um, I was thinking: ‘There’s no payoff being with these guys. These are just Bill and Ted idiots.’ And so I’m just there to make sure they don’t break the windows. And then I start listening to them and they’re like talking about this stain and one guy is like ‘No dude, I think that’s, like, pet menstrual blood’, and they knew! They knew their stains! They’d cleaned up murder sites! And so they’re like ‘No dude, the way to get brains out of flocked wallpaper is talcum powder. I’ve tried powdered sugar, but you know, that doesn’t work as well as talc.’ And I realized that these guys were like twisted Martha Stewarts. And it was just like ‘Hey you guys, just shut up until I get some paper.’ Everything they said, I just sat down and wrote it all out. It was such a glory to find out that even these guys, who I thought had no redeeming anything, that they were really, totally intelligent about this fascinating thing.”

***

And this is the part where the myth of Chuck Palahniuk and the real history diverge.

The myth of Chuck Palahniuk goes like this: After over a decade of sweating under trucks, fighting, and snaggle-toothed struggling for meaning, he decides to go back to his childhood dream of writing. He holes himself up in a Unabomber cabin in the woods - no TV, little contact with the outside world - and his revolutionary mind, self-taught and bristling with the genius of living hard, burns out a book that changes the course of modern literature.

Yeah. That’s not exactly how it happened.

Well, the childhood dream part is true. “Before [that time] the only writing I had done was in fifth grade with Mr. Olsen. I wrote poems, and that’s how I started really loving writing. And I had always thought that some day when I retired at sixty-five, if that’s still possible when I reach sixty-five, I would write.”

It’s also true that, at that point, he is still fighting sometimes, and he’s still struggling to figure out who the hell he is, but what really happens is he goes to this thing called The Landmark Forum - one of those inspirational “Human Potential” sort of workshops - and it actually works.

“Well, I hesitate to call it like the latest generation of E.S.T. But it sort of grew out of that whole E.S.T. Human Potential thing that, in a way, was sort of born down here in the Bay Area… It was my first introduction to existentialism, and to Kierkegaard, and to the four modern philosophies. And I was thinking ‘Well, why? Why can’t I do this thing?’ And that’s when I started writing again.”

The other myth-shattering bit is that Chuck Palahniuk immediately enrolls himself in a writers’ workshop in the then-newish Minimalist movement. And contrary to the myth, at first he sucks.

“I wrote some really horrible stuff. I wrote a seven hundred page, fake Steven King novel. It was awful. And finally Tom Spanbauer who lead the workshop where I was learning Minimalism said ‘Damn, you can tell a story really well when you’re drunk. Why don’t you just write the way you talk.’ You know, because the way people talk is they stir around the first, second, third person, they talk in present tense. ‘Okay, a man walks into a bar. He walks into a bar and you’re there and he says this,’ always switching between first, second, and third, and it’s conversational. So I just started writing the way I told stories.

“Minimalist writing just really resonated with me in a way that third person omniscient modernism never had. So, I really fell in love with this new style that told stories the way that I talked - the way that people talk. It was the closest I’ve ever seen to an oral storytelling tradition that I’ve ever seen in print. And so, that’s how I got started.”

Another true part is that in his little, run-down house on the outskirts of Portland, he couldn’t get cable TV, and it’s true that he was writing in stolen little bits and becoming more and more obsessed with his new passion. But the myth falls apart at the isolationism. Because the next thing Chuck Palahniuk did was help to organize a writers’ group. And even after all these years and all of his success, he still meets with this same group every week.

“Every Tuesday night - we’ve been meeting for about ten years, and we read each other’s stuff out loud, and critique it and brainstorm it and really share resources in terms of editors and whatever else we’ve discovered about the whole writing game. So we, in a way, really pool our resources.

“That’s sort of one of the greatest gifts I got from writing, was it brings me together with people in a structured passion, once a week. There’s a group of friends that I still write with, so if nothing else I’ll always get the friendships.

“In a way, it’s that whole light in bushel basket thing too. [I looked this phrase up online and it was a reference to a New Testament passage that says ‘Hide not your light in a bushel basket, and it shall shineth unto all that are in the house.’]. You get your thing out into the world, and it starts to attract like-minded people, and the whole synchronicity thing starts, and that’s really exciting, and also a little frightening too, because then it’s so beyond you and it can really grow beyond yourself.”

***

Chuck Palahniuk is not the kind of writer who forces himself into a routine in order to make himself produce. “God. Sure, I sit down and write from nine to five. Like Steven King.” His face is crumpled up in a sarcastic approximation of news anchor seriousness. “Me, going to a computer, and spending that chunk of my day at a computer… I mean, I do it, but I want to do it while I’m doing things I love to do. So I’ll do it at the gym. Or I’ll do it - I’ve gotten so much work done on the road in the really sucky places like the airports, or when you’re stuck in the hotel room and there’s no time to go anywhere. Those are the totally dead places that are so important for me. Because, you know there are some theories that you can only really think for twenty minutes at a time… So if you’re going to sit at a computer for four hours, then that’s like three hours and forty minutes beyond your productive point.”

There’s also a few little personal rituals that he employs to get in the mood or break the plaguing block. “Whenever I’m stuck, I know that if I’m stuck on a plot element, I’ve gotten somebody to the point where I don’t know where to go, it’s time to take a shower. It is so weird! But, um, Katherine Dunn, who wrote Geek Love, almost that entire book she wrote swimming. She swam back and forth in this basement pool, in this dumpy school, and she would get out of the pool, and she would write and she’d get back in the pool and she’d swim. And it was such a mindless bliss. But when I’m taking a shower, I will be sitting there in the water and I will get the most extraordinary ideas. I don’t know what it is between taking a shower or something like lifting weights - something mindless and physical - or washing dishes even, with my hands in the water, or even drinking a glass of water. It’s just really evocative of good ideas. And it’s stupid, but that’s my ritual.

“And then between the first and the second draft of a book, I would shave my head. Because it was my very tangible way of saying ‘nothing is sacred.’ Just because I put it on the page and keyed it in, that doesn’t mean it’s not garbage. [I want to remind myself that] I can throw away any aspect of myself at any moment in order to get something back. So shaving my head and saying ‘I’m not sacred either’ [is] a really key part of that.

“There’s that moment [while shaving your head] when it’s like ‘I just can’t fix this.’ There’s that moment when you get enough off you realize… It’s like ‘I am so fucked, and it’s my fault. I can’t hide this, and I can’t fix it. I just have to tough it out.’ And then you see that, like so many of your fears, it’s just completely un-based. It really doesn’t amount to anything.”

***

This is the part of the story where Chuck Palahniuk, after The Movie comes out, after years of estrangement from his father, after growing up feeling almost like he didn’t have a father, finally through The Movie, reconnects with Fred Palahniuk. Fred sees himself in the movie, except he sees that he, Fred, grew up without a father, a father dead in the ground. And it’s only now that he realizes how bitterly he blamed his father for not being there for him growing up, only when he realizes how much he’s fucked up himself as a father. And finally after all these years, Fred and Chuck Palahniuk are able to find peace, father and son.

This is the part where about six months later, Fred Palahniuk, divorced, middle aged, and nervous, answers a personals ad and meets Donna Fontaine and they’re really, ridiculously happy for a little while. One night they go to the county fair on a date. When they get back to the little cabin in the Idaho woods, someone is waiting for them.

That someone was Donna’s ex-husband, Dale Shackelford - the man she met when he was in prison and she was there training convicts to be paralegals. The man who, when they divorced, she had to put out a restraining order on. But that didn’t work, because Dale tracked her down and attacked her, and did horrible things. For that, he was arrested. But now Dale Shackelford was out on bail, awaiting trial, and using those paralegal skills to somehow legally harass her, intimidate her, threaten to kill her, and try to keep her from testifying in the upcoming trial. When Fred Palahniuk and Donna were coming back from the county fair, Dale Shackelford was waiting outside.

Fred Palahniuk was standing at the top of the stairs when Dale Shackelford shot him in the abdomen. Either he crawled back inside before dying or Dale Shackelford dragged him inside after. Donna Fontaine was shot in the back of the head, execution style. Then Dale Shackelford tried to set fire to the cabin, only it didn’t work at first, and he had to keep coming back and trying to start it again several times before it finally burnt down.

When the second story collapsed onto the first, a mattress landed on Fred Palahniuk’s body, covering everything but his legs beneath the knees. The fire burnt so hot and so long that Fred Palahniuk’s legs were burnt down to stumps. When Chuck Palahniuk was looking over the crime scene pictures, as part of the court’s sentencing of Shackelford, his first reaction was how his dad “would hate the way they’d wasted a good sheet of plywood” to carry his burnt body. His second reaction was “how much it looks like barbequed chicken, crusted black with sauce under the crust.”1

Dale Shackelford was sentenced to death on October 25th, 2001.

Chuck Palahniuk had just finished his latest book, Lullaby - the first in his current trilogy of horror books - and sent it to his publisher on September 10th, 2001. Yeah, the day before September 11th.

***

This is the part of the story where Chuck Palahniuk has started writing horror novels. And this is why.

“Two things: One was I turned forty in February - how many months ago was that? - and you can’t be a forty year old, anarchist sort of angry young man. You know, it just gets sort of pathetic after a while. You have to reinvent yourself in some way. And in another way, since September 11th, transgressive novels have just died on the vine. A lot of books will never make it off the editor’s desk at this point. Because we’re not laughing at the Trainspotting, American Psycho anymore - civil disobedience books like that - and so, if you’re going to criticize a culture, you really have to do it in a metaphoric way… trashing the culture, and pretending that you’re not trashing the culture. And I love the horror genre, but I think it’s a little stuck.”

In fact, he did have a little trouble after September 11th, due especially to Fight Club’s skyscraper torching and Survivor’s plane hijacking.

“I wrote [Survivor] five years ago now, but yeah, the moment - September 11th - my phone was just ringing all day long. People from around the world saying ‘Were you responsible for this? And do you have anything to with this?’ Anymore, you’ve got a weird name in this country…” He stops and laughs to himself. “I know that I [finished Fight Club] about four months before the Okalahoma City bombing, and then by the time the bombing had occurred, the manuscript was sold, and my agent really freaked saying ‘Oh dear god! People are going to think we’re exploiting that situation.’ There are some things that just happen on a very regular basis in our society: cult suicides, and anymore, terrorist attacks, and so what I do is to look to these sort of archetypal, really horrible disaster-tragedies, and if you choose to write to these things, they happen on such a regular basis anymore, that no matter when you write them, it’s going to be timely by the time your book comes out.”

The government, surprisingly, instead of coming after him for being a terrorist, did a funny little about-face. “David Fincher [director of the movie Fight Club] was brought into the government’s Hollywood commission on anticipating terrorist acts. So, because of my book, Fincher was serving on this government commission trying to foresee what terrorists might do in terms of big, dramatic gestures. So in a way, it’s made him an authority on this stuff.” But despite the fact that these ideas were actually Chuck Palahniuk’s, he was never asked to join. “I wanted to be on that commission! That would be so cool!”

***

And somehow, even in the midst of all of this decadence and decay, this literary grotesquerie that Chuck Palahniuk populates with all manner of miscreants and social pariahs, there is a searching for something greater - a wide-eyed, child-mind, hopeful, romantic, fairytale-ending need to find meaning even in filth. His books may be angry, disturbing, and tooth-grindingly tense, but there is a moral to the story that he feels very strongly, and that is the true root of his connection with his readership. That moral is this: in order to break out of the stultifying existence of each of these characters, from the trap of nice-job-nic-car-nice-house “Ikea nesting instinct”, there must first be an AA bottom-plummet and self-destroying inferno, and that this must occur before the true self may perform it’s phoenix crescendo. In the words of Fight Club’s Tyler Durden, “It is only after you have lost everything that you’re free to do anything.” So even as Chuck Palahniuk’s characters destroy themselves and fuck up, they are fucking up heroically.

“They’re like idiot heroes, or fool heroes, in that if somebody steps forward and plays the fool they create a place where everybody can just relax and not have to worry about looking good. Which is what support groups are really about: they’re a place where you can go and not have to worry about looking good - you can look like an asshole and they still accept you. That kind of martyrdom, you know - where people just walk in and say ‘screw it, I’m going to do what I want to do’ - allows other people to do what they want to do. And I really fall in love with these sort of idiot geniuses who decide that their whole life is going to be about collecting bottle caps or something. I love those people. Because they, in a way, by doing their thing, they role model for me to do my thing. That’s how I see my heroes.”

***

Chuck Palahniuk’s newest book, coming out July 8th, is something different for him: a collection of non-fiction character studies and embarrassing stories from his real life entitled Fugitives and Refugees. He’s written plenty of essays before, but never a whole damned book of them.

“Instead of presenting Portland, Oregon like a collection of buildings or sights to see, I wanted to present short profiles of odd people doing interesting things. This includes the man who’s spent forty-three years digging out the opium tunnels under downtown. And the woman who built a self-cleaning house. And the woman who runs an international sex-worker organization. According to Katherine Dunn [author of Geek Love], Portland attracts the misfits of the nation. I wanted to introduce readers to a few of them. Some people tell local ghost stories. Other people give their secret recipes. It’s all just folks talking.”

However, he hadn’t really intended for it to let the readers into his own life. “This still irks me. My plan was to hide behind this crowd of loonies, but the publisher insisted I had to tell my own personal adventures. So... between each chapter I’ve inserted a very short ‘postcard’ from one of the twenty years I’ve lived here. This works out to thirteen short glimpses of me during terrible moments of my life (naked in a blood-soaked bed for an MTV music video... eating a fur coat on acid... getting my teeth punched out in a “wilding” incident... heart-warming stuff)”

He insists however, that this is not a sign of a new, less hermitic Chuck. “Fuck that. This hermit is headed for the deepest, darkest hole he can find.”

For the record, his next book in the horror series, due in August, is finished and in typesetting. And yes, he did shave his head after the first draft of that one, though he didn’t shave for Fugitives and Refugees. “I thought it would just be a quickie non-fiction handjob. I didn’t realize it would turn into ‘that fucking travel book’ and reveal my every stupid moment.

“Diary is ‘conspiracy fiction’ very much like Rosemary’s Baby. A woman gives up her artistic dreams in exchange for a future of comfort and security then finds out she’s been groomed for a terrible mission. Really, it’s a big metaphorical rant about the paradox of immigration and isolationism.”

***

This is the part of the story where Chuck Palahniuk, tired from the constant tour, finally getting to go home to Portland that night, is glad to be a little more settled down and a lot less angry than he used to be. “You know, it’s funny, because for the longest time I thought I had to wake people up. I literally went out and was SO beating up members of my family, like: ‘Oh my god, look! I’ve done this thing I’ve dreamed of doing. Why don’t you do what you’ve dreamed of doing? Why don’t you go back to school and become an artist? Or why don’t you…’ Whatever they had dreams of doing, I was really, really pushing. I was saying: ‘I will even provide the funding. You need money? I will provide what you need.’ And finally my mom sat me down and said ‘Will you stop! You’re making everybody wrong for what they’re not doing, okay? So would you just stop?’ And so I really learned that you have to do by example. You can’t force people to live their dreams. You know? So I’m just going to do my thing, and I will support other people - I try to support my friends and my family, but I quit making them wrong for not doing what they’re not doing.”

***

Editor’s Notes:

You can find craploads of trivia, interviews, essays by Chuck, news on upcoming books and events, and the source of almost all of my research material for this article at www.chuckpalahniuk.net.