A history of violence

"The kid looks around for something that might do the job. A ballpoint pen’s too big. A pencil’s too big and rough. But dripped down the side of the candle, there’s a thin, smooth ridge of wax that just might work. With just the tip of one finger, this kid snaps the long ridge of wax off the candle. He rolls it smooth between the palms of his hands. Long and smooth and thin.”
It’s the penultimate night of the Cúirt International Festival of Literature, and author Chuck Palahniuk is reading onstage in Galway’s Town Hall Theatre. Soberly attired in a crisp white shirt and neatly-pressed black trousers, and speaking in a distinctively American accent, he could be a middle-manager at Microsoft delivering an annual report. Except that ‘Guts’ – his infamous short story about masturbation gone wrong – is about as far removed from a Microsoft annual report as it’s possible to get.
“Stoned and horny, he slips it down inside, deeper and deeper into the piss slit of his boner. With a good hank of the wax still poking out the top, he gets to work.”
There’s a full house, and just about everybody in it collectively groans in disgust. Somebody in the balcony passes out (later, I’ll hear that the fall resulted in a cut forehead and a chipped tooth), and there’s a brief interruption as the fainter is helped out of the theatre. The number of people who’ve keeled over at public readings of ‘Guts’ is now officially in three figures.
A few moments later, Palahniuk continues, “Even now, he says those Arab guys are pretty damn smart. They’ve totally reinvented jacking off. Flat on his back in bed, things are getting so good, this kid can’t keep track of the wax. He’s one good squeeze from shooting his wad when the wax isn’t sticking out anymore.”
It’s all a very long way from Seamus Heaney (who was standing on the same stage two nights earlier). People are shifting uncomfortably in their seats, biting their fingers, holding in their nervous giggles and horrified moans. Literary events are rarely this discomforting. Palahniuk is less than half-way through ‘Guts’. Things can only get worse.
“The thin wax rod, it’s slipped inside. All the way inside. So deep inside he can’t even feel the lump of it inside his piss tube.”
More squeamish groans, more muffled shrieks of laughter. You could probably power the whole place for a week with the tension in the room.
“From downstairs, his mom shouts it’s supper time. She says to come down – right now!”
It suddenly proves too much for one rapidly purpling audience member, seated about two-thirds of the way back. Middle-aged, balding and undoubtedly a Walter Mosley fan – the LA crime novelist read first tonight – he certainly didn’t pay good money for this onanistic horror show.
“THIS IS PURE SHITE!” he roars, standing up from his seat. “YOU’RE NOTHING BUT AN AMERICAN CULTURAL IMPERIALIST! WE SHOULD BE HEARING IRISH WRITERS INSTEAD OF THIS SHITE!”
Annoyed audience members attempt to hush him, but the guy’s going anyway, banging past knees as he heads towards the aisle, dragging a backpack and a long coat with him, and continuing to angrily register his protest as he leaves. “PURE SHITE AMERICAN PORNOGRAPHY! YOU SHOULD BE ASHAMED!”
As the theatre staff hurriedly escort the enraged protestor to the nearest exit, an unperturbed Palahniuk leans into the mike and calls gently after him, “But... you’re going to miss the ending.” The crowd bursts into loud cheers and spontaneous applause.
Culturally Imperialistic American Pornographer: One. Disgruntled Balding Irish Crank: Nil.
Rewind about six hours. Hot Press is being introduced to the author in the lobby of the Galway Radisson. Palahniuk (pronounced Paul-Ah-Nick, his grandparents' first names, coincidentally enough) looks nothing at all like the man I’d expected to meet. All the dust-jacket photographs I’ve seen were of an intense, brooding, long-haired biker type. But he’s obviously had a haircut and left his leathers back home in Portland.
As Bob Flynn from the Guardian quietly comments, the 44-year-old looks a lot like David Byrne. Actually, he looks like a David Byrne stalker. Abnormally normal.
His handshake is firm and formal, but not especially friendly, and his eyes are elsewhere. Maybe it’s just jetlag, but my first impressions are that he’d really rather be doing something else. He’s distant and disinterested, like the aloof older brother of the girl you brought to your Debs. But then, as I’m already aware, he has pretty good reasons to distrust journalists.
This is a shame, because I really want him to like me.
Although I was aware that the movie Fight Club had been based on his novel, I first discovered his work when I picked up a battered copy of Invisible Monsters in a Thai guesthouse last year. A wildly imaginative, sophisticatedly druggy and weirdly sexual story about a beautiful fashion model who gets her face blown off in a drive-by shooting, I was instantly hooked.
I’d just gone through an intense J.G. Ballard phase, and Palahniuk’s sparse, satirical prose was the perfect antidote – ‘same, same, but different’ (as they’re fond of saying in Southeast Asia). Having devoured Invisible Monsters in two sittings, I immediately went looking for more.
Fortunately, he’s very popular with young backpackers. Most second-hand bookstores in Thailand had at least a few of his books. Within a couple of weeks, I’d read almost all of his published novels – Choke, Diary, Lullaby, Survivor and Fight Club. I actually enjoyed Fight Club the least, but only because I’d already seen the movie.
When I tell him all this, he simply nods and smiles. I offer to buy him a drink, and he requests a bottle of mineral water. He’s obviously not the hard-partying type. Before I go to the bar, in mild desperation, I present him with the copy of Palace of Wisdom that I’d planned on giving him afterwards, in the hope that my book of collected interviews will impress him enough to open up to me. Excuse the shameless plug, but it’s what happens – and it seems to work. When I return from the bar, he’s reading through it and smiling. “Wow!” he says, “you’ve met Michel Houellebecq. What’s he like?”
We waste precious minutes of my interview time discussing the works of Houellebecq and DBC Pierre (both of whom he admires). Aware that Palahniuk spent much of his youth living in a Burbank, Washington, trailer park, I ask if he read much as a child and hit the record button.
“I did, yeah,” he nods. “But it took me forever to learn how to read. I was a really slow kid for reading and writing. And I think that’s why I attached to it so much – because when I finally got it, there was so much joy that I wasn’t the idiot of my family any more. So that’s why I got stuck on books.”
Were your sisters and brother academic?
“They were all bright. They were all the valedictorian of their class. I wasn’t, but they all were. But, in my family, it was very important to my folks that we all studied.”
His favourite childhood read was Jack London’s classic Call of the Wild, which he credits as being the novel that inspired him to want to become a journalist in later life.
“My younger brother and I both loved that book so much that I really thought that being an adult was just gonna be one adventure after another – just one glorious adventure. So I figured that if I became a journalist I could do that. Everyday would be something different. And it’d be meeting interesting people all the time. And I just didn’t anticipate how poorly journalism would pay. And I didn’t anticipate that it would require me to go to school board meetings or city council zoning meetings. So I only did it for around six months after college.”
Of course, not too many kids from Washington trailer parks go on to study anything at college (unless it’s at the McDonald’s-owned Hamburger University). He bristles slightly when I mention the words “poor white trash,” but acknowledges that the description is probably accurate.
“I definitely would [describe it as that]. My little brother’s done really well. He’s an engineer for Chevron and he lives in South Africa. Both my sisters have done really well. And one day, one of my sisters made a mistake talking to my mother of saying, ‘We haven’t done really bad for poor white trash’. And my mother was so hurt by hearing us referred to as ‘poor white trash’ that it’s been a sore point in our family ever since.
“It’s funny, but my grandparents got the first tombstone that anyone in my family’s ever had because of Fight Club money. It was the first time that someone in my family could afford a luxury like a tombstone. It was really nice.”
His parents, Carol and Fred Palahniuk, separated and divorced when he was 13, leaving Chuck and his three siblings to live, on and off, with their maternal grandparents at their cattle ranch in eastern Washington. Did the stigma of coming from a broken (mobile) home make you a weirdo or an outsider in high school?
“I was a little bit, but I was more of a working kid. I got out and I got a job when I was 14 and then I worked throughout the rest of high school. Sometimes we stayed with my grandparents, but mostly I lived with mom and visited dad. Because my father had a new marriage every two years – like clockwork.”
Sounds like one of the characters in your books!
“Or most of my peers!” he laughs. “You know, I still remember my friend Cindy at a toga party 20 or 25 years ago, when we were really drunk, and we were sitting in her basement. She was really drunk and she was leaning on me and she went, ‘My mom, let me tell you about my mom – my mom gets married a lot’. And it was such a perfect line for my entire generation. And it went into Invisible Monsters. It seemed like a par for my generation – our parents got married as a hobby.”
When Chuck turned 18, he was taken aside by his father and let in on a dark Palahniuk family secret. He wrote about it in ‘Consolation Prizes’, the final essay in his excellent 2004 journalism collection Non-Fiction: “My father was four in 1943 when he hid under the bed as his parents fought and his 12 brothers and sisters ran into the woods. Then his mother was dead, and his father stomped around the house looking for him, calling for him, still carrying the shotgun.”
To make matters just that little bit weirder, he and his siblings had often spent their summers sleeping in the actual ‘murder room’ of the old family house in Idaho. That disquieting realisation aside, his father’s revelation explained a lot to him.
“I think in one way it meant that my father didn’t really have any... sort of... parenting. My father pretty much had to make it up. I think that’s why he was such a poor father, he’d never been given any kind of effective model for what to do.”
He takes a sip of water and nervously twists the tarnished ring on his finger (which turns out to have been his late father’s wedding band). “But they did their best. For really poor people who had very little guidance of their own, I think they did really well. Like, most of the people I went to school with, my mom was always sending me obituaries. They’re all dead or in prison, you know.”
Hearing about the family history didn’t knock him off-course, career-wise. A solid student, Palahniuk graduated from the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism in 1986, and then relocated to Portland. He worked for a local newspaper for about six months, but finding the daily grind of hackwork was nothing like Jack London had led him to believe, he began working as a diesel mechanic instead.
“I wasn’t making good money in journalism. So to pay off my student loan and to get a new car – because my car was just a piece of shit – I started at Freightliner. I lied. I made a fake resume that said I’d been a teen mechanic, a diesel truck technician, and I got an apprenticeship on the assembly line. And I did that for several years. And then I became a service documentation specialist. I was still a mechanic, but I wrote about what I did as well. And I got shipped around the country to do recall procedures – to work on trucks that’d been recalled.”
Still, to go from being a trained journalist to a diesel mechanic must have seemed a bit of a step-down. Was there some subconscious reason for making the move?
“Just lack of funds, lack of money,” he shrugs. “You know, once I started drawing a journeyman’s wage, there was no way I was gonna leave that money behind and go back into a market where I was going to be five, six, ten years older than all of my entry-level peers.”
Hilariously, he wasn’t the only journalist getting his hands dirty at Freightliner. “The assembly line was filled with guys who had journalism degrees!” he laughs. “We used to joke about it. I remember one guy, Ken, once said that they should teach welding in journalism school, because if you know welding you get an extra $2 an hour – the welding differential. And there were a lot of guys who had just started to do that for a couple of years and then stayed until they were 65.”
Although he still occasionally did a little freelance journalism, he actually stayed at Freightliner until his writing career began to properly take off. This took well over a decade: he spent most of his 20s working on the line and reading nothing at all.
“I didn’t read anything between high school and turning 30," he admits. "You know, there was always something better to do than reading. I couldn’t find a single book that really interested me. I watched TV constantly. I didn’t start reading or writing until I was 30. Everything was better than books.”
He blames this intellectual apathy on his chronic marijuana and television habits (both of which he’s since kicked). “Oh my God – marijuana was my entire 20s,” he recalls. “Even in high school. But I didn’t really start writing until after I gave up dope. I could do journalism on marijuana; if I had to go to an event and cover it, I could do that. I couldn’t keyboard very well, though! But giving up television and giving up marijuana really happened at about the time I started writing.”
Unsurprisingly, at some point in his stoner late-20s, Chuck began to feel that there was something missing from his life. Raised a Catholic, and wanting to do something more spiritually satisfying than fixing diesel engines, he volunteered to work for a homeless shelter.
“I was doing that because I hated my life so much,” he explains. “I was just so miserable. And I started going to a church, I was that miserable. I thought, ‘I’ll go to church and see if it makes me happy’. And they had a ‘giving tree’ in my church at Christmas, and you had to pull an ornament off, and it was a kindness you would do for somebody else.
“And my kindness was to take a hospice patient on a ‘date’ – quote unquote – and it ended up being this hospice where really young charity cases go to die of hepatitis or HIV or whatever. But the only thing I could do was drive them – I didn’t have any nursing skills or cooking skills or anything like that. And so I would drive them to whatever they wanted to do before they died. And I would end up taking them to their support groups. And I would end up sitting in on all of these support groups full of people dying. And they all assumed that I had what they had. And it was always so awkward. I felt so inauthentic sitting there.”
Kind of, ‘Ha, ha, you’re dying – and I’m not!’
“Exactly!” he guffaws. “Ha, ha! But you can’t really say that. I’m just watching, you know. You really can’t say: ‘Just go on with your dying, I’m just here for the free coffee!'”
The experience of holidaying in other people’s misery totally cured his spiritual malaise and lifted him out of the funk of depression he’d been wallowing in.
“I felt sooo good after those groups. I came out of those groups thinking, ‘I’m $17,000 in debt, I’ve got a shitty car, I’ve got a job I hate – but, goddammit, I’m not dying. I am not one of those dying people’. And then I started sort of fictionalising it in my head, making up a story about somebody who just goes to those groups to feel better. And that became a short story that eventually became part of Fight Club.”
He also became a member of an anarchic group called the Cacophony Society in his 20s, and is still a regular participant in their mischievous activities. These include the annual ‘Santa Rampage’ in Portland (a prank/alcohol-fuelled public Christmas party where everyone descends on the town wearing a Santa costume). Such antics would later form the inspiration for Fight Club’s ‘Project Mayhem’.
“It was one of those things where somebody brought me a flyer for an underground party back when I worked at Freightliner. It was called ‘Voodoo Wedding’ and it was just this big tropical–themed rave. And at one point they started throwing raw chicken entrails out over the dancefloor and people just freaked and screamed and slipped and fell down and fought to get away from these chicken entrails. And I just had a blast. It was the most fun I’d ever had at a party. And after that I became part of the Cacophony Society.”
Still bored, in his early 30s he began attending a creative writing workshop, run by author Tom Spanbauer. He actually went there simply to meet new people, but wound up discovering a hitherto hidden talent.
“Every Thursday night I’d get to go to Tom’s house and have red wine with a bunch of people I liked, and we all read our work. And it kept me working because every week I had to bring something. And it became sort of a competition. My friend Monica is a really great writer, so I had to bring something better than Monica.”
Were you the class star from the beginning?
“No, Monica was really good too. Sometimes Suzy would bring in something absolutely incredible or Rick would.”
Have Monica, Suzy or Rick been published?
“No, they haven’t published. Monica has got a book coming out next year. I’m taking her on my tour next year, because I really like her work and I hope she gets a good reception.”
He tours a lot these days – reading in bookstores, theatres, libraries, nightclubs or wherever. He says it’s important to him to go out meet his readers.
“I’d never been to a reading until I started doing them. And part of it is that it’s really important for me to demonstrate to young people that they can do this. That our culture is something that we generate ourselves, that human beings do this. Because, with my upbringing, I just thought that everything was decided in New York and sent out to the world. I didn’t really realise that people decided. I never knew I had that kind of power. And so, in a way, I wanna just physically be there to prove that human beings do this.”
So are you an altruist?
“No, I’m basically just a bored person who wants to have that life full of ongoing adventures that I wanted to have as a little kid.”
You’ve written in Non-Fiction about the loneliness of the novelist’s life – spending your entire life jerking off in front of a computer screen in a darkened room.
“Yeah. Wow! I managed to successfully sidestep having an entire life. Yeah, great, good for me! But I don’t want that. I’d much rather be out at parties listening to people. Because this – this – part of my job is really, really draining.”
He says that much of his raw material comes directly from the mouths of strangers he encounters at signings or readings. “It’s typically at events that people will come up and tell me incredible stories – stories that will become the next book or whatever. A lot of it is research, a lot of it is socialising and a lot of it is... testing. Like, I’ll take something like ‘Guts’ on the road and I’ll read it slightly differently in every market to find out where the laugh comes, what I can change to heighten the tension. It’s same as doing vaudeville, where you sort of perfect a little act.”
So do you see yourself as a performance artist as well as a writer?
“Only a performance artist because Tom Spanbauer insisted that we read our work out loud. And Tom’s idea was that it’s gotta do its job in 7 to 10 minutes, and it’s gotta do its job out loud, and when you read out loud, you instantly find out where it fails and where it succeeds. So it was just a practise that we all got into.”
But we’re getting a little ahead of ourselves here. Backtrack to the early 1990s, before he was even dreaming about going on book tours. Although Palahniuk discovered that he had a gift for fiction writing, success didn’t happen overnight. His first book If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home Already remains unpublished.
“It was just awful – awful,” he says, shaking his head. “The only part that survived, that I used in Fight Club, is Marla’s speech about the condom being the glass slipper of our generation. You put it on, you dance all night with a stranger, you throw it away – the condom, not the stranger. That’s the only tiny part of that whole 700-page novel that survived.”
His next attempt was Invisible Monsters, which was rejected by numerous publishers for being too disturbing. It was a dispiriting experience. “It was rejected after being almost accepted by a dozen different houses. It was such a long sort of flirtation, with no fuck at the end. It was just so irritating.”
He says he wrote Fight Club as a form of revenge – wanting to disturb one particular publisher even more than he had with Invisible Monsters. In the book, an unnamed narrator addicted to therapy groups meets a mysterious and charismatic stranger, and together they set up an underground network of bare-knuckle fight clubs, before getting further organised and waging war on corporate America.
Actually a revised and expanded version of a short story he’d first published in the compilation Pursuit of Happiness (the story became Chapter 6 of the novel), to his great surprise, it was instantly accepted. “In 1995 I sent the manuscript in and an agent accepted it. It sold right away. I was really surprised.”
And presumably delighted?
“You know, I was so high, I wish I could’ve bottled or somehow preserved that high. Because I was just so complete for two or three days – so incredibly happy and high for two or three days. And I then realised that the advance was incredibly low.”
How much was it?
“It was $6,000. It’s the kind of advance that they call ‘kiss-off money’. Because most of the people at the publishing house don’t want to acquire this book, but they don’t wanna piss off the editor who does wanna acquire it, so they offer money so low that they’re hoping the writer walks away. But my agent had sent a manuscript copy to a movie scout named Raymond Bongiovanni in New York, and Raymond really, really liked it. And at the same time, I didn’t realise that David Fincher had seen it in galley and had taken it to Brad Pitt. And by that point, by the time they were reading it, Raymond had already gotten Twentieth Century Fox to option it by the winter of 1995 going into ’96.”
Strangely enough, it was actually Bongiovanni’s untimely death that gave birth to the movie. “And then Raymond died – he died of AIDS – and at his funeral it was all of these very influential people. And his obituary in Variety said at the very end, ‘The last wish of Raymond Bongiovanni was that the gritty Chuck Palahniuk novel Fight Club become a movie’. And it was just incredible. They even talked about Fight Club in his eulogy. And my agent called me from the funeral and said, ‘You could not get better publicity than this’. And the whole thing was so gruesome and so sad – but also sort of funny. But that’s what got it started.”
In the autumn of 1999, David Fincher’s controversial film version of Fight Club – starring Brad Pitt, Edward Norton and Helena Bonham Carter – was released. While it was critically acclaimed, media mogul Rupert Murdoch (the man whose $30 million paid for it) apparently wasn’t very happy.
“No, Murdoch didn’t like it, but his son apparently really loved it. That’s what I was told by some people.”
Undoubtedly because of Pitt’s presence, the movie shot straight to No.1 in the US box office in its first week of release, but it died soon afterwards.
“It tanked!” he laughs. “I still remember one of the producers calling me the very first weekend, and he was hysterical, just going, ‘It’s tanking! It’s TANKING!’ I was going, ‘Shut the fuck up – I don’t need to hear that!’ But, luckily, it wound up being a huge DVD hit.”
Sadly, though, for all his writing success, 1999 was also the year in which terrible personal tragedy struck. Several months before Fight Club’s release, Chuck’s father, Fred Palahniuk, had answered a lonely hearts ad (under the title ‘Kismet’) and started to date a woman named Donna Fontaine. She had recently put her ex-husband, Dale Shackelford, in prison for sexual abuse, and Shackelford had vowed to kill her as soon as he was released.
He made good (or rather bad) on his threat. Late one night at the end of May, Fred and Donna were returning to her home in Kendrick, Idaho, when Shackelford ambushed them. He shot them both, then dragged their bodies into the house, before setting it alight. Chuck went to the coroner’s office alone to identify his father’s burnt corpse. “None of my siblings would come with me, which was really irritating,” he recalls, twisting the wedding ring. “I took his hand and moved it, and it was definitely him.”
In the spring of 2001, Shackelford was found guilty on two counts of first degree murder and sentenced to death. Chuck had personally requested that his father’s killer receive the ultimate penalty.
“They asked me what I would prefer. They asked all of the nearest relatives what they’d prefer – and at the time I said I would prefer the death penalty.”
Did your brother and sisters agree?
“They didn’t even respond, they were so torn-up. I think my little sister went to the trial with me, but I can’t remember if she stated her preference.”
Is Shackelford still in prison?
“He will be forever and ever. The appeals process is gonna take at least 25 or 30 years, so it’s almost a moot point.”
Were you a supporter of capital punishment before that?
“I’d never given it a thought until I sat down with the medical examiner for that jurisdiction. And he brought out a thick folder and he said, ‘I’m not supposed to show you this, but these are all the crimes this man has committed since he was seven years old. These are all of the people he’s put in hospital, these are all the lives he’s destroyed’. And after I’d seen this enormous amount of misery that this man had generated – since he was seven – I thought that, yeah, maybe in this case we should resolve this man’s life.”
Had you met your father’s new girlfriend?
“I’d talked to her over the phone. Just a couple of times. But that was the extent of it.”
In the wake of his father’s murder, Chuck Palahniuk began working on a new novel called Lullaby (in which an investigative journalist discovers an ancient African culling poem that kills anybody who hears it spoken aloud). First, though, he released Choke (a satire about sex-addiction and how to make money from the Heimlich Manoeuvre), which in 2001 became his first major New York Times best seller. Choke also performed well internationally. He’d now moved from being a cult figure to a mainstream literary celebrity.
Fame can have its drawbacks, though, as he discovered when he was interviewed by Entertainment Weekly journalist Karen Valby in 2003. During the course of the interview, Chuck admitted off-the-record that he was living with his long-term boyfriend (it had previously been assumed by many newspapers that he was married to a woman).
As he tells it, Valby began taunting him with a series of telephone calls, telling him she was going to ‘out’ him in her article. In response, Chuck put an angry audio recording on his website, not only revealing that he’s gay, but also making negative comments about Valby. When her interview finally appeared, though, it made no mention of his sexuality, aside from describing him as unmarried. The recording was swiftly removed from the site, but the whole incident still rankles.
“You know, even reading the article I thought that she had been very coy about her anger. And the article didn’t mention the fact that she had called me repeatedly through the tour that year sort of taunting me about what she was going to write. And there was so much left unsaid that, in my frustration, I just wanted people to somehow understand the enormous game that was being played.”
Although some people accused him of being embarrassed about his homosexuality, he says he has no real regrets about outing himself.
“It was just as well,” he sighs. “She wasn’t the only person playing this game and I was getting this kind of passive-aggressive bullshit from so many people that I wanted to resolve this thing. Just so people can’t be calling me about it all the time. My sexuality is not a big deal to me, you know.”
What do you think of books like The Da Vinci Code?
“You know, if they get people to read, they get people to read. So I can’t really slam them. Harry Potter gets people to read.”
Have you read any of the Harry Potter books?
“No, I haven’t,” he admits. “I tend to read shorter things like short stories. I have a real limited attention span. But I still think it’s great that so many kids are reading because of things like Harry Potter.”
He puts his money where his mouth is when it comes to encouraging young people to read and write. Palahniuk is famous for diligently responding to every single fan letter he receives – often sending small joke-shop gifts (like plastic severed fingers or fake vomit) with his replies. Is that not becoming a burden at this point?
“You know, it was until I moved to a system of windows. When I know I’m gonna have like a year or a block of time, I can announce that as a mailing window so that I know that I can answer all of the mail that I receive during that designated time. Because if the mail is just sort of trickling in, a few letters a day, it can take over. This way it all comes in at once, and I can be really good about responding to everything.”
Do you have time to critique every story that someone sends to you?
“Not really. And also legally I’ve been warned not to – liability wise. But I always try and at least write back.”
Of course, while fake plastic vomit is pretty cheap, it can still get expensive to send out one per reply. The Observer’s Sean O’Hagan, who visited Palahniuk in Portland in 2005, reported witnessing the writer spending $25,000 on replying to 1,000 fan letters (enclosing boxed furry toys with each letter). Chuck isn’t worried, though. After all, it’s only money – and he’s got plenty of it these days.
Cúirt organiser Siobhán Calpin comes over to our table, and asks me to wrap it up. So, with just a couple of minutes of Chucktime left, I ask are there any other movie versions of his novels on the cards. It turns out that almost all of them are currently in development.
“Choke has been cast – well, they’re casting it. It was supposed to have started production by now, but there were some problems. Susan Sarandon’s playing the mother and they had Ryan Gosling playing the male lead, but he dropped out, and so they’re trying to replace the male lead now. Lullaby just got optioned by a German director. Diary – they have a screenplay and an Icelandic director.
“What else is there? Oh – Invisible Monsters is optioned. The writer/director team that made Constantine last year have Survivor. My agent tells me that their screenplay is brilliant, but I haven’t seen it.”
His most recent novel (actually, more a series of interconnected short stories – including ‘Guts’) was Haunted, published last year to less than ecstatic reviews. But what’s coming next?
“Just before I left to come over here, I turned in next year’s book,” he tells me. “And it’s a book called Rant. And it’s a big biography – written in the style of an oral biography, where you interview hundreds of people and then you parse the interviews together topically. And so it’s borrowing that non-fiction form to tell a biography of a fake person. It’s probably the closest thing to Fight Club that I’ve ever done.”
Would you ever consider doing a memoir?
“No, because it would be so boring,” he smiles. “When you read the stories that I write, you’re really seeing maybe the best anecdotes of a thousand people crammed together. You’re seeing the best of the best that I could find in the world to present. And a memoir would just be sort of one fairly banal poor white thing after another. Who wants to read anecdotes about me watching Gilligan’s Island every afternoon of my childhood?”
Calpin returns to say that time’s definitely up. As I gather my stuff, Chuck asks me to sign his copy of Palace of Wisdom, while he signs my copy of Non-Fiction. As we each inscribe the other’s book, I ask will he be reading ‘Guts’ in the Town Hall later tonight.
“I’m not sure,” he says, stroking his chin. “‘Guts’ is a joy to read – it is a joy. You know, I can go up there completely wasted and tired and angry, but reading that story is just so much fun. At the same time, I’m reading with Walter Mosley later so it kind of depends on what the audience looks like. I don’t wanna offend Mosley’s audience with something that’s too much. I’ll probably do something else. What do you think?”
“I think you should definitely read ‘Guts,” I tell him. “I’d say they’ll love it.”

Rant will be published by Jonathan Cape in 2007. ‘Guts’ can be read online at www.chuckpalahniuk.net