This is a really good question. Saunders doesn’t purport to have an “explanashun,” but as anyone familiar with his body of work knows — from CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, his breathtaking first story collection way back in 1998, to this year’s chart-topping Tenth of December, plus all the stories, novellas and essays in between — Saunders has a powerful knack for exploring the contradictions that drive our era, with an ear for the American idiom that is downright musical.

Happily, for those inclined to take their literature in the oral-tradition-meets-digital-publishing medium of audiobooks, Saunders narrates the audio version himself, adding warmth and wit to the listening experience.

eMusic contributor Amanda Davidson talked with Saunders over email about playing music, writing fiction, and reading stories out loud.

You’ve been on an epic book tour for Tenth of December. Are there any songs or albums that you’re currently listening to in order to refresh your spirits?

I pretty much blew my ears out in the 1980s when I worked on an oil crew and the Walkman had just been invented, so I try to minimize my headphone time these days. But we live an hour and a half from the nearest airport, so I get some good music-in-the-car time in on those drives. I’ve been listening to a mix that someone gave me, and it has on there “Peggy Sang the Blues” by Frank Turner, and “Stop Cryin’ About the Rain,” by Graham Parker. I’ve also been listening to After the Gold Rush by Neil Young, and (repetitively) “One Sunday Morning” by Wilco. Also “God I’m Missing You” — a Rodney Crowell-Mary Karr song done by Lucinda Williams on the Crowell-Karr album Kin. A really beautiful song, and an astonishing performance of it. Other than that — total silence.

There’s a connection between language and music in your new story, as Fox 8 trots past a house and hears “the most amazing sound. Turns out, what that sound is, was: the Yuman voice, making werds. They sounded grate! They sounded like prety music!” Can you describe the genesis of Fox 8′s voice?

As far as I can remember, I’d written a humor piece where the narrator was a dog, and had some fun with that — he was kind of smart and also kind of dumb. And then I wrote another humor piece called “Coarse Evaluation” which was this course evaluation written by a high-school kid who was basically illiterate. It started like this:

At first this class was a pretty easy class to take. The readings were interesting but often tedious. The kids in class always seemed paranoid about being struck down by others. Unfortunately this factor led to an awkward vibe which both contributed and caused the demise of the teacher

And had soon descended to this, re. the class’s reading of “A Christmas Carol”:

When them ghosts came we did not find it scarry. Would have been scarier if one ghosts tongue had shot out and likked Mr Scrooge or Marley or whoever, that one guy who was such a tightass in terms of his money?

So I kind of combined the two: a fox who is only moderately literate.

I like to have some sort of self-imposed constraint when I’m writing. Somehow this has the paradoxical effect of freeing me up. So to be “constrained” to the bad spelling helped me — it seemed like it produced a possibility for a sort of extra level of poetry, if you see what I mean. If you say: “When the sun went down, the world went dark” — well, that’s one phrase. If you say, “When sun goes down, werld goes dark” — it’s got a different feeling. So I had a good time exploring what felt like a slightly new form of English — trying to find the hot spots and funny places and so on.

Fox 8 is full of sentences that are both funny and heated, critical and tender-hearted. Is there a way that your approach to language allows you layer these tones and feelings?

I think there is, yes, absolutely. That is the whole principle underlying the notion of style: that how we say something and what we say are not at all separate, and that there are untold levels of magic possible in the simple arrangement of words — that the human reading apparatus is deeply nuanced and perceptive, beyond our ability to explain or reduce.

But the pisser is, there are not any rules or guidance as to how or where or when to do this — I think you have to just wade in, phrase by phrase, and see what you’ve done and adjust accordingly. That is the fun part and the terrifying part, to me: it is all done (and can only be done) on the line-to-line level, by taste. And then you come back again and again, micro-adjusting each time — which will often introduce new possibilities, and so on and so on…

Was there any particular music, or musical style, that informed Fox 8?

It’s a funny thing. I love music, I play music, but I tend to keep music and writing very separate. Never (never) listen to music when I’m writing, and have learned to run away if a certain song is “inspiring” me too much. When it comes to writing, I am a purist. I think the prose has to do what it does all on its own — has to come forth out of complete silence and move the reader completely on its own, and so on.

All this by way of saying that when you asked that question, I drew a total blank. I mean, I could make something up, but honestly — nothing musical presents itself, related to that story. Or any of my stories.

Writing in silence makes a lot of sense, considering the relationship between silence and music, or silence and language. If you ever listen for dialogue, do you listen for the unsaid?

I think most dialogue is the unsaid. There’s a great comic energy in that move where two people talk around something, or talk past each other.

I’m interested in the way that Americans — well, probably people in general — tend to address their anxiety with yap. I know I do. This tendency to lack the self-confidence to simply not do anything — to refrain, to be silent, not react, not shoot, just stay out of the shit — that seems to be an American thing. It’s like we can’t tolerate being sidelined or inactive or inessential to any moment. We always have to be active and at the center of things. That’s a big generality, but I do sometimes wonder why it is that, if, say, a European gets pissed off, he gets drunk and falls asleep on the curb — takes himself out of the action. He can tolerate being abased, somewhat. But an American guy (again, generalizing like a big dog), especially your generic white guy, doesn’t like that. It’s as if he can’t say: “I am small/minor/temporarily losing.” If humiliated, he has to go out and do something. It’s like the worst thing that could happen is that, for a while, he might be…passive, or absent, or quiet, or inessential.

Except for me, of course. I am one of those virtuous, self-possessed white guys.

I read recently that you play guitar. How long have you been playing?

I started in seventh grade. One of our nuns was offering free lessons, so I went for it. They were basically teaching us to play for Mass, so we first learned “Kumbaya,” and then “We Are One in the Spirit,” with the iconic strumming pattern called, uh, “Down, Down, Up/Up, Down, Up.” And then I played in bands all through college and after.

Do you practice a lot? Does the repetition of that process connect with your writing?

I do practice a lot. When I was in college, for a certain period, I was playing an hour or so of scales a day. Now it’s more that technical approach called “just farting around.”

I think music has informed my writing in lots of (very complicated) ways. There’s an “ear” component in both — a way of training yourself in close listening. There’s also this idea that the real place of communication is sub-rational — just learning to trust that the real magic in a piece of art occurs in sub-conceptual places.

And then, as you suggest, there is no limit to the number of times one may have to play a piece of music before it’s satisfactory. Ditto with writing. Being involved with music taught me early on that, in art, you get no points for mere effort — the thing has to work at the end, or it’s back to the drawing board.

Are you currently working on any guitar pieces?

Lately I’ve been trying to write songs — I have this goal of writing, in my lifetime, one song that doesn’t revolt me. So far, no luck. But it is fun to work on them, and especially fun to work on the guitar parts. I have Logic Express on a dedicated computer in the basement, so I’ve been overdubbing and very slowly learning about recording — just as a hobby, or as a reminder of what “beginner mind” really feels like. (“Beginner mind” is a nice way of saying “How it feels to keep sucking even when you really want to be good.”)

Do the songs that you write and record have lyrics?

They do have lyrics. That is actually the part I’m most unhappy with. The lyrics I write tend to be kind of linear and logical and narrative — and not in a good way. I haven’t found any truths that I could only express via a lyric, I guess is how I’d put it. So that’s interesting to me — I know what a great song sounds like, I understand the qualities of allusiveness and so on, but just can’t seem to summon that up in this context. That’s what I mean by “beginner mind.” And that’s why I like to experience it. It’s good to be reminded that a lot of what I take for granted in prose writing might not be so obvious to, or easy for, a young student writer.  And it’s also interesting (and frustrating) to see that diagnosing or recognizing a problem does not necessarily lead to solution of same.

You recorded your own audiobooks for both Fox 8 and Tenth of December. Did you enjoy the process?

I loved it. I said I’d be willing to, and Random House was nice enough to let me do it. I had a great producer, Kelly Gildea, and we just had a lot of fun with it. I do a good number of college readings, and I’ve come to understand reading aloud as a performance that is quite separate from writing but offers another opportunity to engage with what you’ve written, and also to sort of teach yourself what the next thing is going to be. I think I might also be a bit of a frustrated actor.

It’s an interesting question, this one of writing versus reading aloud. I remember when I was on tour with my first book — those were hard stories to read. They read better on the page than they did out loud — they had lots of strange phrasings and so on. And something about having to read them repetitively and never really finding the right way to do it forced out the first story in the second book. That story was called “The Falls,” and it was much more playful and colloquial and readable than the stories in the first book. I think that, at some level, I was giving myself something to read on the road. It was as if whatever it is in us that forms voice, pre-writing, had taken note, and was trying to come up with something a little more verbally interesting.

Do you make discoveries about the stories you’ve already written by reading them out loud, whether in the studio or at readings?

Yes, absolutely. You find out where the laughs are, you find out how to pitch a given character via the voice you give her (too much in this direction and she becomes a caricature; go too far back the other way and you start losing humor). Sometimes you can feel when a moment is powerful by the quality of the silence. There is also, I think, a really beneficial effect in that you are getting very close to that ancient storyteller mode: there you are, there’s your crowd, you’ve got 30 minutes; how much of a deep connection can you make? I’ve done a lot of readings since this new book came out in January and I can feel that I am really learning something about connection with an audience — for example, that you can trust them to get the subtle and deep things; that they really are interested in the things I’m interested in; that you don’t have to have a joke a minute to interest them. I can feel that all of this is going to come into play with the next book.

The live audience connection you mention is a rare treat, since there are so few forums in which adults get to listen to stories, together. Children, though, have this experience more often — Fox 8 even learns English by eavesdropping on bedtime stories.

Yes — Fox 8 started out as a kids’ book. But then, it turns out, kids’ books can’t have so many misspellings. I’d sent it out to a few editors and they all said the same thing. That was an interesting moment: What I’d thought of as a kids’ book was…not. For sure. So then I felt a door opening: Well, if it’s not a kids’ book, what is it that separates a kids’ book from one for adults? And I’ve always thought that a kids’ book should serve the function of assuring this scared, new little person that sometimes things turn out well; that goodness has a place in the world. And maybe a story for adults — especially in a fortunate, possibly smug culture like ours — might serve a different function: telling a powerful, self-assured person that sometimes things don’t turn out well, that they aren’t turning out well for some people even as we speak. So when I realized it was not a kids’ book, it gave me permission to change the function of the story, essentially; it allowed (or maybe required) some darkness to come in. And I liked the way that dark event resonated with the peppy kids’ book language — it was kind of like I’d made this complete sweetheart and then lowered the boom on him. A little harsh, but then I thought: Does that ever happen in the real world? Does a real sweetheart ever get the boom lowered on him? And I answered myself: Duh.

Fox 8 is a sweetheart, but he’s not simply a foil for human cruelty — he justifies his own aggression toward chickens, for example. Still, one layer of meaning I took away is that it would benefit all creatures if we humans were more aware and thoughtful about habitat destruction.

For me, the way fiction works is that it always occurs to a specific person (or fox), at a specific time under specific circumstances. So, to the fox, habitat destruction is a big issue, especially at this time. But he’s pretty willing to destroy a chicken habitat, or even a chicken, and then rationalize that. I think fiction works best when it is basically saying, “Ah, see? Sometimes it is thus.” So we can understand why malls get built and how that can be a good thing, and, at the same time, we can see that, whenever a mall gets built, stuff gets destroyed, which is a bad thing — and we can leave the scenario not saying, “Fuck it! Build malls anyway! Capitalism must be served!” and also not saying, “Evil mall-builders! Cease and desist! Never build a mall, if you love animals,” but rather, “Ah, see? Sometimes it is thus.”

Although, on the other hand, who can argue with “more aware and thoughtful”?

My feeling about the moral intention in fiction is: show characters in action, try to be fair to them, and tell the story in the most lively and truthful language you can; admit to ambiguity, and, as you write, try to move closer and closer to the natural energy of the story, and  away from your conceptions/hopes about it — and good things will happen. To the reader and the writer.

Yet Fresh Off the Boat proves that what he has to say is just as compelling as the way he says it. In this surprisingly moving story of self-invention, Huang gives even the most familiar tropes of the American immigrant experience his own original flavor, spiced with equal dashes of ’90s hip-hop lyrics and postmodern literary references and finished with a huge dollop of swagu. While Huang admits that it’s all very “idiosyncratic and personal,” his singular voice is speaking to plenty of people: On the day he talked with eMusic contributor Elisa Ludwig, he’d just found out the book hit The New York Times extended bestseller list.

Huang also gave us a list of his top 5 hip-hop records of all time. Find out which ’90s album made him proud to be a Chinese hip-hop head here.

What were your inspirations for writing this book?

My main inspiration was that I didn’t think this story was getting told enough, and that includes the multiple parts of my identity. No. 1 was being Asian in America — there’s no [The Brief Wondrous Life of] Oscar Wao for Asian people, no coming-­of-age story that represented what I went through. No. 2 was the whole hip-hop story — there are plenty of books and bad movies about the hip-hop generation, but none that represented what the music meant to me, how it got me through the tougher times in my life. I also just wanted to talk about identity politics and culture. Writing this book was like Professor X putting on the Cerebro to find the mutants — I’m trying to speak to the other people like me out there.

You mention Junot Diaz. Is there a particular literary tradition you’d like it to fit into?

I never read his work until I finished this book and my editor was like, “Dude, you should really check out Junot.” My writing is influenced by lyrics, by hip-hop more than anything, but it’s also influenced by Shakespeare and Jonathan Swift. My audience tends to be people in their 20s, or at least those are the people that are coming out to events.

The cover of this book really sets it apart from just about anything out there. What’s the story behind it?

We worked on it for a long time. I brought in my boy Justin Thomas Kay to design it. I wanted it to be very ’90s hip-hop magazine-looking. We used the family photo to show the three generations of Chinese migration: my grandparents from China, my parents from Taiwan, and me and my brothers, American cats.

Your use of language is very fluid, mixing dialects and slang — is this true of your cooking, too?

If you’re a real artist, your personality permeates everything you do. If you come to my restaurant, it’s very loud and there’s always one of my playlists on. It’s rough around the edges, but everyone’s having a good time, telling jokes. Noise is important to me. I need fire trucks and cop cars and the TV in the background to sleep. My food is very soulful, in your face and full of flavor, and I think I write the same way — rhythmically, with a lot of flow and start and stop, a lot of movement in the words.

You can see that in the structure of the book; it’s not always linear.

For the most part we wanted it to be linear, but there are flashbacks, tangents and footnotes where I’m trying to connect the dots for readers. It’s a lot of vernacular that older people aren’t going to understand but I want them to be part of it, even if it’s not their language. My editor and I made the conscious decision not to clean up the slang or translate the Chinese or do anything that would disturb the flow. We wanted it to be unique and idiosyncratic; we didn’t want it to be about the “supposed-to’s.”

It’s obvious that the question of authenticity — in food, identity, culture — is an important one for you. How do you know when another chef’s food is for real?

When I say “authentic,” I’m not judging someone’s food, like, asking whether it’s what real Chinese people eat or whatever. I’m wondering whether the experience is authentic to this chef and if what he’s doing is telling his own story. Lots of restaurants I go to, it’s not necessarily for the food. I like the experience of eating there, the energy of the room. There might be a cat walking on the counter, but you feel like you’re home.

Between your blog and the book and your Vice show, you’re selling yourself as the product as much as the food — how much of that is deliberate?

I’ll be honest: I don’t think I actually market myself well. I mean, it’s not much of a strategy, trying to sell Eddie Huang, the short fat Chinaman. But the thing I do market is my ideology and opinions. I’m a very unlikely TV host, but on Vice I just try to drop a few gems in every episode and make people think about culture and the world. My generation, it’s like this embarrassment of riches, all the stuff we have: Internet and organic markets and wine and cheese shops on every corner. We could be doing more, but having everything at our fingertips desensitizes us and we’re letting other people do our thinking for us. I want to wake people up from the midsummer night’s slumber situation.

So is this it for you, the writer/chef/TV host niche? Or do you think you’ll continue to reinvent yourself?

I was just emailing my parents to tell them that I found out today that my book hit the bestseller list. That’s very fulfilling — when I think of everything I went through and all the people that counted me out, it’s like Tupac “Picture Me Rollin’.” But I’m 33 years old, and I’m really excited. I’m teaching a winter class at my old college, making sweatsuits with my friend for fun. I’m interested in film, so maybe I’ll do some screenwriting. I remember how big it was for me to read coming-of-age stories when I was a kid so if I wasn’t a chef or writing or hosting Vice TV, I’d go teach high school. I have no idea. But either way, people are going to be surprised.

The author of this summer’s best-selling thriller Gone Girl has been mistaken for one of the seriously twisted offspring of her mind since the publication of her first novel, Sharp Objects, in 2006.

“I guess I should take it as a compliment that people assume all my books are true,” Flynn says from her home in Chicago. Sharp Objects includes a dysfunctional relationship between a Midwestern mother and daughter, and Flynn found that people were eager to read it as a thinly disguised memoir. “Everyone assumes that my mom is just this evil sociopath,” she says with a laugh. “And my mother is this tiny little blonde thing beloved by everyone. She loves it! She’ll come to my readings and give me the evil eye.”

That inclination to read into Flynn’s real life via the nasty sociopaths she gleefully conjures up has been taken to an extreme with Gone Girl, featuring married couple Amy and Nick, two of the screwiest, most unreliable narrators of recent memory. “Family and friends, the first question they get is, ‘Oh, how is she?’” Flynn says. “It’s always kind of whispered. ‘Is she OK? Are things OK with you?’ I get the sense that some people don’t believe me, that it’s, ‘She doth protest too much! She’s really messed up.’”

To set the record straight in time for the holidays, Flynn talks to eMusic about how a non-sociopath would handle the most stressful time of the year. Good news! She passed with flying colors. Here are the results:

She would never spit in your food, no matter how obnoxious you get during dinner.

Say a family member is getting poisonous at the table. What would Flynn do? “Well, Amy would definitely make quick work out of those people,” she says. “There’s that one great scene when she gets annoyed with Greta in the Ozarks and when Greta goes into the bathroom, she goes into her fridge and spits in everything. Gillian would not do that. Gillian would probably duck out quietly, talk behind the person’s back briefly, and return to dinner with a smile on her face.”

She goes full bore with Christmas gift prep, but won’t buy anything intended to make the recipient look like a murderer.

One of the treats of Gone Girl is watching seemingly innocuous occurrences slowly reveal themselves as the work of a master manipulator. The most elaborate of these is a treasure hunt for a series of anniversary gifts that have a blackly comic double purpose. So how does a non-sociopath shop for Christmas? “I actually do have a weird little Amy streak in the sense of my crazy preparation,” Flynn admits. “I’m one of those people who buys gifts throughout the year and hides them away with little cards. My family has weird collections. My mom collects heavy metal, anything made out of metal. It just has to have a weird shape and weigh a lot. My dad collects cereal stuff and comic books. My aunt collects Chessie, a mascot for a train company. So I have a drawer full of this hodgepodge of items.”

She is an inveterate list maker, like Amy, but her lists are never part of an intricate, sinister plot.

“I have these crazy to-do lists that just go on for pages and pages,” she admits. “For a while, when we were moving into our house, I had ‘Unpack,’ ‘Really unpack,’ ‘Final unpacks,’ ‘Final final unpacks.’ Sometimes I put something really simple on the list, like ‘Answer that email,’ just to feel accomplished.”

You never have to worry if you’ve been poisoned at her house.

Anyone is capable of anything in Gone Girl, but you never have to subject the food at Flynn’s house to a sniff test for the bitter almonds of cyanide. That’s because Flynn isn’t the cook of her family; she’s the eater – though she does stock the table’s lazy Susan. “There have to be olives,” she says. “But not the fancy kind. The cheap black olives from the grocery store.”

She most definitely did not write Gone Girl as a genius double bluff like the one pulled off by Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct. Probably.

When asked if she wrote the book just so she could turn around and tell the police no one would be so dumb as to write in a book what they planned to do in real life, Flynn laughs. “[My husband and I] are coming up on our five-year anniversary. So if you hear that my husband has gone missing…”

Somerville talked with eMusic’s Jami Attenberg about writing 454-page novels in long-hand, an inspiring reading by Ilya Kaminsky, and how to annoy co-workers by playing Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young too much.

This is the first time one of your books has been made into an audiobook. Have you heard it yet?

I haven’t heard the audiobook yet – just this little snippet of it – but I do want to hear it, as I love them and am fascinated by them. I always want to know what my writing sounds like in the heads of people who are reading; this is the next best thing.

When does it serve a purpose for you to listen to an audiobook versus reading it?
The last one I listened to for a specific purpose was A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. I had read it before and taught it before, but I was teaching it again and wanted to review the text for class. I thought it’d be a good way to get it into my brain and sort of refresh it for myself, you know?

What turned out to be totally fascinating to hear, though – beyond the incredible performance by Roxana Ortega, the voice actress who seemed to really love the text and perform it with gusto – was the Powerpoint section. You wouldn’t think something so visual and non-linear could be translated back into linear text, but it works really well. They used a slide projector sound effect and different actors for the different voices, which I found to be totally simple and successful. Hearing it read, start-to-finish, you could also sort of hear the audiobook people trying to figure out what order to read slides in. The way in which different readers choose those different orders is one of many brilliant things about that chapter, I think, and the audio version highlights it when you’d think it would obscure it.

Do you ever read your books out loud when you are writing them? You write in so many first-person voices I wonder how you keep them all straight. I guess what I’m trying to say is: Do you hear the voices in your head, Patrick?

I don’t ever read them out loud to myself, although I probably should, considering how firmly I believe that it’s a different psychological experience to hear a text than it is to quote-unquote see a text. We’re all oral storytellers, even literary novelists, right? I think I might be too embarrassed to do it, as I often write in coffee shops. I am unprincipled in this way.
I do hear the voices in my head, though, when I write. Especially for dialogue. To this end, I usually end up feeling like I’m having most of the conversations my characters are having.

You’re about to do some touring for your book. Do you enjoy giving readings? Have you ever witnessed some really inspiring readings? I know a lot of people find them boring, but a good one can really change your life, I think.

I once saw the poet Ilya Kaminsky give a reading in Vermont. It was at the Vermont Studio Center, in this little church, and it was one of the strangest, most captivating, incredible readings I have ever heard. He is almost entirely deaf, which impacts his reading, certainly, and what’s more, English is his second language. So he distributed the text of the poems before the reading itself, and I was sitting there thinking, “What the F is this?” And then he began to read in a big way, using his arms and his body, using volume like I’ve never heard anyone use volume before. At times he was up there screaming at us. It scared the shit out of me. By the end, I felt like a medieval peasant must have felt at the end of a long morning at the church.

I’d love to talk about music a bit, and how it plays into your work. Do you listen to it all when writing?

I definitely do not listen to music while I write, which seems crazy to me – I would never be able to concentrate, I don’t think. I can barely even deal with the sound of someone eating an apple within 30 feet of me while I’m trying to write. I can’t imagine what music would do. But I do listen to a lot of music before and after I’m writing, especially when I’m trying to find the right emotional balance and the right tone for a section or a voice. To me, music is the most immediately emotional of the arts. I think writers are wise to heed how good music handles emotionalism. I think literary writers are often so afraid of being schmaltzy that they won’t do big scenes, but music is almost never afraid to go big.

And what exactly is your relationship with CSNY? They pop up a few times in the book.

I have liked Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young for a long time, but at some point I made my protagonist, Ben, obsessed with them, and it just kept coming back up as I was writing. I listened to them every day in my car when I was writing this book; I once listened to “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” so many times on repeat, trying to get into a Bennish mood, that my co-worker eventually came over to my desk and asked me to move on to a new track. I do love their harmonies, and I love how Steve Stills writes.

I’m interested a bit more in your process because I remember you telling me once that you handwrote it on legal pads first, and when you were finished you had a stack of them waiting to be typed up. This is unfathomable to me because I’m so into knowing exactly how many words I’ve written at the end of the day, possibly in this OCD way. Do you do any original writing on the computer or is it all transcribing?

I wrote This Bright River by hand for one pretty simple reason: When I’m on a computer I have a habit of circling back and working on the opening, obsessively, and therefore not pushing forward. I wanted to just have to go, especially for this book. I usually like computers better and have always written on computers. This was a good exercise, but I don’t know if I’ll keep doing it. The transcription alone took me months, and while I did edit as I went, I’m not sure I liked all that added time.

It didn’t hurt that I had no browser open beside me as I was writing, although I also want to go on record as saying that the internet is fine and not a huge distraction and totally manageable. I don’t like the sound of an apple, but for whatever reason, I’m fine with the noise of surfing.

“It is sort of weird,” young Billy observes. “Being honored for the worst day of your life.”

All the meet-and-greets and photo ops that come with being an accidental spokesperson for a war you don’t understand have left the men both jaded and hyper sensitive. They’re jittery. They’re drunk whenever they can be. They’re tired of being thanked.

Their last big public appearance, at a Cowboys game in Dallas Stadium, is a total shitshow: open bar after open bar, followed by a bit part in the loud, flashy, pyro-enhanced Destiny’s Child halftime show. All the while, the Bravos’ agent is working the cell phone, trying to lock up a deal to turn their story a into Hollywood blockbuster that’ll make them all rich. On top of all that, Billy has just fallen hard for a Dallas Cheerleader and suddenly going back to war seems like the worst idea ever.

Ben Fountain’s debut novel is a sometimes humorous, and often heartbreaking look at the disconnect between the young men who fight our wars and the people whose freedom they’re allegedly protecting. It’s also an important book, one that examines the Bush administration’s selling of the war(s) and our eagerness to buy in, tune out or move on.

In her recent book, Drift, Rachel Maddow, wrote about how Americans have found a way to sort of tune out the war. Unlike it was with Vietnam, people seem to be able to go about their daily lives. I was wondering if you agree or disagree with that.

I haven’t read her book but I do very much agree that…Vietnam touched everybody in one way or another. I was too young for Vietnam but I have an older sister, she’s six years older than me and so all of her guy friends, they were looking the draft right in the face. And so it becomes, war becomes much more real when it affects you or your family or could potentially affect someone in your family. And I think that’s really, with certain exceptions, that’s the only time it does become real and even with all the technology we have now, all the ways that war and conflicts come to us via computers and TV, there’s still this disconnect or distancing that makes it not real. No matter how graphic and vivid the images, there’s still a gap between our experience and what’s going on out there.

After reading your book, I realized the gap, it goes both ways. Like when the people talk to Billy, he kind of tunes them out because he knows they’re not speaking the same language. Those passages are really striking, almost minimalist. Billy only hears the buzzwords: 9/11, War on Terror, etc.

When people say things to the soldiers like, “Thank you for your service, you’re a hero, thank you for your sacrifice,” they really mean it when they’re saying it. They’re trying to express something genuine that they feel or feel like they should feel but you know, how much can their words mean when they really don’t know what they’re talking about? And the war has been…The war was sold in this country as this virtuous and just crusade to bring democracy to Iraq, but what Billy knows and what citizens don’t know or won’t even try to acknowledge is that war is necrophilia. War is about who can produce the most death. I mean, that’s the most extreme human situation you can conceive of. Their words of praise and appreciation can only go so far because they don’t know what they’re talking about.

The body count is especially the kind of thing we tend to tune out.

Well and it’s the civilian deaths…Even the most conservative estimates at this point, they’re what, 100,000, 200,000? You know, the enormity of that. We just can’t comprehend that.

Did you speak to soldiers when working on this book?

Yeah, I talked to a lot of soldiers.

What were some things that they said that sort of opened your eye to the things that you didn’t know?

Several things. They tended to view civilians with a mixture of pity and condescension. Because the soldiers, when you start talking about war, they are the insiders. And like insiders anywhere, it’s only natural for an insider to feel superior, you know? In everything from jazz musicians to athletes to chess nerds, you’re going to view the outsider with a certain amount of patronizing. And also, they seem to have a profound sensitivity to the disconnect between their experience and most Americans’ conception of the war and what the war involves.

This has not been a collective effort. This has been a very selective effort on the part of the country. World War II was complete mobilization of the country. Vietnam, even though LBJ tried to soft-sell the war, his strategy was, well we’re going to fight an all out war but we’re going to sell it to the public as we aren’t really fighting an all out conflict. And yet there was the draft and…therefore it penetrated the public, the collective consciousness a great deal more. In this war, it’s a relatively small segment of the population that’s fought the war and been directly affected by the war, and so I got the sense that there’s a profound sense of alienation on the part of the soldiers towards mainstream society.

Everything is way more complicated than stand and shoot and follow orders.

My feeling is there’s no such thing as a simple human being. We all have complex inner lives. You know, it depends on the individual, some are more aware of these various levels of interiority than others and some are more able to articulate the complexity of their inner lives than others, but in one way or another I think we’re all registering everything that goes on in human experience. In any one experience there’s going to be levels of past and present and awareness and unconsciousness and drift and motive and desire and fear and so I think these soldiers, they’re as human and alive as anyone, and maybe more so. You know, the experience of combat, especially in Billy’s case, has made him…extremely alert and attentive to the world around him. He’s trying to figure things out.

And he’s so young.

Yeah, he’s 19 but his experiences of the past year, they’ve woken him up and he’s actively trying to figure out what’s going on and why things are the way they are.

One thing you think about is how, when Billy was still sort of a young punk, I bet being a war hero and getting with a Dallas Cowboys Cheerleader would have seemed like perfect simple dreams, and all he’d need in the world. But now everything is fraught with complication.

Oh, yeah. And that’s the nature of experience. Romance novels — that’s when everything is pure and uncomplicated. I’m talking about the romance novels for women where, you know, the bodice-rippers. And I’m also talking about the kinds of romance novels that, say, Tom Clancy writes for men where they’re heroes and the bad guys are clear cut and there’s a clear course of action and you know what you’re supposed to do.

So you went on a publicity tour for the book, right, recently?

Yeah.

Did you feel any of what Billy felt on his “victory tour?”

No. Writers bitch and moan about book tours, “they’re so tough.” They aren’t work. I define work as digging ditches or putting in plumbing, but on book tours you get to go around and meet book people and talk about books. …And no, the level of attention I got, I’m just a little writer and it nowhere near approached the level that’s depicted with Billy and his comrades.

I guess I was thinking along the lines of everyone who came up to Billy thought they were saying the right thing but readers are bound to have their own interpretations. And you just have to nod and say, “Okay, that’s your opinion,” you know?

Yeah, that cuts both ways. Sometimes people will make a striking insight that reveals the book in a way that I’ve never thought of before. But yeah, people are going to make of it what they will and when you put a book out there, that’s just going to happen. But what really struck me, what’s really struck me through the whole reaction to the book is a lot of people feel like I exaggerated things, and I suppose I can see why they would feel that way. But to me it’s straight realism. All the excess, all the over the top stuff that goes on in the book, all you have to do is turn on the TV and it’s there.

There’s a blurb on the front that compares Billy Lynn to Catch-22 and I get the comparison because putting a war in a very sort of distinct light that makes people really think about all sides of it. But along the same lines, that was a satire and that was cartoonish and while your book’s a lot more subtle…

Heller was depicting the uncertainty of war by going at the bureaucracy of it, which I think is an absolutely valid way to approach it. And I was more interested, once I started writing the book, I realized what I was interested in was exploring the marketing of the war. You know, the corporatization of the war and how it becomes part of the media marketing vortex that all the rest of America has been sucked into.

Beyoncé makes an appearance in the halftime show, and becomes a symbol of American frivolity excess.

Well, she must have something going on, to do the things those kinds of things people do and to maintain — they must have pretty strong wills and must be pretty smart people. And so it’s not nothing what they do, and when Billy actually encounters her up close, even though it’s fleeting, he thinks well, she’s one of the top human beings on the planet. To do what she’s doing, carry the show in front of 40 million people, it’s not nothing. So I do have respect for those people.

Has Jay-Z had words with you yet?

I’m sure the book is on his bedside table, he just hasn’t gotten to it yet.

You grew up in North Carolina. And now you live in Texas. Are there like sort of 50 shades of red state?

I think in Texas, and especially in Dallas, you get the purist strain of certain aspects of you know, American culture. And here in Dallas, and especially in North Dallas where I live, the free market is, like, that’s the religion. Free market evangelism. That’s the answer to everything and you know, people really do believe in the rhetoric. Democracy, freedom, capitalism, the American way. I believe in all those things too [ he laughs] but I maybe approach those words with a bit more skepticism and wariness. …When somebody starts talking about these things I don’t accept them at face value, I always wonder, what is the agenda behind it? I just feel like in some ways Dallas is the most American city in terms of dedication and belief in certain mainstream aspects of American culture.

And how is it different than North Carolina?

Well, it’s a difference of degree, I feel like. I’ve been away from North Carolina for 29 years and it’s gotten more conservative over the years. But…in Dallas you just get a purer strain of it. It’s not so much that people believe in the stereotypical American way, it’s that there’s very little awareness that there could be a different way.

I’ve wondered, especially in recent years, what’s George Bush’s legacy in Texas? Are they defenders of Bush still?

Yeah, his house is less than a mile from mine.

Oh, wow.

And early 2009 when he was finishing up his time in Washington all these yard signs appeared in this part of town. They were like campaign yard signs except they said, “Welcome back, Mr. President and Laura.” And I think you know, he’s a much respected, much beloved figure in this immediate area. My wife was at a restaurant with some of her friends one night and he and Laura came in and people stood up and gave them a standing ovation.

Huh.

So I think he has a lot of good will in this area.

Seems like Dallas is an ideal place to set this book then.

When I first came here I thought it would be very similar to the place where I grew up. You know, kind of Southern, kind of conservative, but with progressive elements. And I started to realize pretty quickly that no, it’s a lot different. One example was when I got here people would ask me, “Who’s the richest man in North Carolina?” And it never occurred to me to wonder, number one, and number two, in those days anyway the richest man in North Carolina made damn sure to keep it a secret, whereas here it’s a point of pride and it’s uppermost in people’s minds, wealth, consumption, material status.

Billy and the rest of the Bravo Company want to get paid, they want their story to become movie deal.

My expectation, even though the book doesn’t go into this, is that that was the furthest thing from their minds when they embarked on their military service. And it wasn’t until it started being dangled in front of them that it even occurred to them that they could get a windfall from this. And who wouldn’t want a free $100,000? But Billy does approach the whole notion with a good deal of skepticism. You know, karmically, he thinks that $100,000 might be bad luck for one thing, and for another thing he is really skeptical about whether it’s going to happen.

And it just keeps changing. One cell phone call and a whole different picture can emerge and that’s just crazy to have like a fortune sort of hanging in the balance.

Yeah, well you know, it’s $100,000 which in one way is a lot of money but in our society in terms of what it takes to be actually rich it’s chump change.

That’s true. Have you had much experience with sort of the Hollywood machine?

A little bit [laughs]. Enough to really wonder about the mentality out there. Although we do have a movie deal for this book, and I have to say I was very lucky. I’ve fallen in with a group of, they seem like very solid, very fine people and they get the book and they’re serious about making the movie. So I always figured there were good people in the movie business and it just took me a while to find them.

When they read your book were they like, “We’re not like that”? Were they offended?

No, they weren’t offended. I think my sense was that they felt like it was an accurate depiction of the movie industry.

What about people from Dallas? What’s the reaction bee like there?

There’s been a thundering silence.

Oh yeah? Interesting.

I mean, the Dallas Morning News gave it a really fine, really positive review and they did a nice feature. And D Magazine, which is the city magazine, they gave it favorable coverage. And Texas Monthly. And Texas Observer. …Obviously there’s a segment of Texas that welcomes this kind of examination. [But] the group in Texas or the groups in Texas who wouldn’t welcome or appreciate this kind of examination, they just ignore it.

I would say the book is not mean-spirited towards Texas but it is frank about things.

I appreciate that. I didn’t want it to be a mean book or a cynical book, you know? I was hoping that there would be a soul in there, that it wouldn’t be taking cheap shots. …I do take shots, but hopefully they aren’t cheap.

Girl Walks into a Bar… is a stroll through Dratch’s life: the pleasantly uneventful childhood in Lexington, Massachusetts; the grim years at Dartmouth; the exhilarating start of her career at Second City in Chicago. Then the dream-come-true job at SNL, in all its boyfriend-preventing late-night hours, and ever-lasting platonic friendships, and finally her implausible pregnancy at the age of 44. Throughout these chapters — of both book and life — Dratch maintains the wry, chatty demeanor we’ve come to expect from the comedian who swapped funny girl glamour for a kind of gruesome verisimilitude, and carved her own niche in a sector of the entertainment industry historically overrun with men.

Your career really began in Chicago at the Second City, but originally you’re from Lexington. I wouldn’t expect you to have cogent theory about this, but why are so many comedians from the Boston area — Mindy Kaling, Louis CK, Mike Birbiglia, Amy Poehler, Steve Carell, Conan O’Brien, and that’s just off the top of my head.

I don’t know what that is. Sometimes I think it’s the large amount of Irish people there, even though a lot of the comedians themselves aren’t even Irish. There’s just that Irish, snappy story telling, you know, always having a quip. It’s a Boston thing that’s always kind of in the air.

In your book you talk about the SNL writing schedule being really good preparation for motherhood — that the late nights train you to not sleep regularly. Do you think improv was also good training?

Huh, that’s interesting. I’ve always been kind of a water sign — [laughs] you know, go with the flow. That’s improv: that you don’t have to be in control of every moment. You have to get used to not having control. Improv is not good for ridged, anal people because it’s not about having a plan for every moment. So I guess that sensibility might help, but that’s what brings people to improv in the first place. We all sort of have that trait going into it.

How did writing your book compare to writing sketches? Were there any unexpected challenges?

In a way it’s easier, in terms of sweating it. At SNL, we never wrote joke-jokes, we would write sketches and scenes, but there’s the pressure that it’s going to be read in front of people right there. You might have a great character, but if you don’t get it into the sketch in the right way or show the character in the funniest way, it might not get picked. The nice thing about writing a book is that it’s just you and yourself; there’s no judge sitting there, which is the necessary part of SNL, having someone there to pick which scenes get on the air. I like being my own judge though. Some days I’d write and on the next day be like, “Oh, no. I can’t use this at all. It’s not as funny as I thought it was yesterday.” I like being in charge of my own destiny. I like the individuality of it.

You’ve lived in NYC for years now. Do you consider yourself a “New York comedian”? Do you even think that’s still a type? Does the city influence your work?

I like living in New York [versus L.A.] because you see all sorts of people right there on the street. I like being on the subway with people of all walks of life, so maybe that helps when you’re trying to come up with characters, though I can’t really say I have any characters based on someone I saw on the subway. I think wherever you are, you see funny things. If you think like a comedian, you’ll find characters and situations no matter where you are.

There’s been so much relentless discussion of your non-Hollywood look, which you address in the book’s introduction. Was that a way of preempting negative critiques?

I don’t want to be a spokesperson. It’s like everything I say, I could also say the opposite. I just told my story of what happened to me. My own brain never would have gone to “Oh, I’m not getting parts because of this.” It was just that was what I kept reading, and those were the kinds of parts I kept getting offered. That’s just what happened to me, so I had to draw my own conclusions. But because I don’t want that to be true, I don’t like giving it voice. Every little thing I say gets picked up and stated as gospel. In the book, I write, “Hollywood sees me as a troll, a woodland creature, or a manly lesbian.” That got picked up and the rest of the sentence got cut off, so everywhere it’s like, “Hollywood sees me as a troll!” I’m not literally a troll or literally an elf! Stuff like that bums be out, so now I’m so reluctant to comment. I guess I just commented for five minutes, but I’m just trying to set the landscape for that part of my book.

Strayed, who many now know as the author of the Rumpus’s Dear Sugar advice column, spoke with eMusic’s Jess Sauer about solitude, music starvation and the familiar pain of writing.

Do you think the transformation you experienced through your journey was inevitable? If you had not hiked the PCT, do you think you’d have had a similar experience elsewhere? Or do you think, if you hadn’t done it, you might never have learned the lessons you learned?

In some ways, I think both things are true. But I would say the truest thing is, yeah, I do think that I would have grown in these ways, I would have had transformations. I think what it is, is that the PCT made that experience deeper, and maybe in some ways, faster. I stepped out of my life and did this thing that was challenging, that forced me to be alone, that forced me to accept things on a really ground level. I had to walk, even though my feet hurt. Things like that. I think it just sped up what I would have inevitably learned and experienced along the trail. But, you know, maybe not. That’s the mystery, isn’t it? You can’t rewind and say, “What would my life be like?” It wasn’t like before I hiked the trail I was an unwise person. I always was a seeker, you know? I would have sought that out, but I do think that the trail gave me a deeper sense of those things.

Have you made any similar trips since then?

Not like that, no. I’ve certainly gone backpacking for a week or two at a time, but nothing on this scale. It’s a pretty big undertaking. A lot of people want to do it, but they can’t quit their job, or they have kids. I have kids now; I couldn’t just do that, you know? But I did it at the right moment.

You wrote journals the entire time you were on this trek. How heavily did you borrow from them, and how much did your voice change between the journals and the memoir?

If you read my journals, you might be able to say, “Oh yeah, that’s Cheryl’s voice.” When I was keeping those journals, first of all, they’re different than the way you craft a story. The way I’d write in my journals, sometimes I’d actually write scenes. I’d meet people, and I’d put what they said as dialogue. But usually, you know, the journal voice is much more like reportage. “I met so-and-so today, we did this, I walked this many miles.” So I drew on the journals for information, but not for the voice. The voice of the book is my writer’s voice, the voice I write with always in everything I write. The journal was helpful for details, like the content of the hobo care package. I’d recorded that in my journal, all of the things that were in there. I would have remembered most of it, but not all of it. For example, that paragraph was probably right there in my journal, and I was able to use it for my book, but most of the time, it was like, “Okay, this is the day, I was here at this place,” and then I crafted the story around that for the book.

You know how some books are written like a journal? I knew I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want to do, like, “Day One…”

In the book, a lot of people ask what your mother would think of you hiking. As a mother, would you want your kids to have the same experience?

That’s always hard, because it’s like there’s this one impulse, as a mother, where I don’t want my kids to have to do anything that would be difficult. Like, they can’t ever fall in love, because their hearts will be broken, which is of course ridiculous. My real feeling about my kids is yeah, absolutely. I can’t think of anything that would be better for them to do than hike the Pacific Crest Trail. It’s really a wonderful growth experience at any time in any life. Absolutely I would want for them to do it. I would worry about them, but I would want them to do it.

Do you think you would make them take their cell phones?

Yeah, see, that’s the hard thing about technology. Once the world changes, it’s hard. I don’t know. For example, email is kind of the bane of my life, and I think a lot of people would agree. We’re overrun by too much email, we’re too connected. And yet we can’t disconnect ourselves somehow. To do that would be stepping out of the flow of the culture. Yeah, I would probably have them take their cell phones, but I would also advise them to maybe just turn them on occasionally, because I do think that silence and solitude — you’re not really alone if you’re walking along tweeting. I would be walking out there and I would think about friends, and they would be far away, and there was no contact.

It seems like the asceticism of being on the trail made you so appreciative, for instance when you hitchhiked and the people who picked you up played Stevie Ray Vaughan for you. It seemed like an almost holy experience that wouldn’t exist if you’d had an iPod you could just listen to.

No, it wouldn’t have. That was one of the surprises of the trail. Obviously, I knew I loved music, but I didn’t realize how starved I would be for music, how much it would really pain me. I was always singing songs in my head. It was like kind of getting to listen to the song, I could kind of play it in my head. Then, yeah, when I was in that car, it was on par with someone giving me a meal, you know?

It seems like that solitude was a huge part of what was so instructive about your experience.

Yeah, I think so. I think being alone was really important. It’s hard to hike the trail even with a companion, because you still have to carry your own pack and bear your own struggles. There isn’t anyone to sort of lean on, and that was important to me. I needed to be able to rely on myself, and not to have any other person I was physically bumping up against or being consoled by, or annoyed by, or whatever.

How has the book writing process changed for you since you wrote your first novel, Torch? I know in Dear Sugar, you describe the process of writing your first book as somewhat harrowing, almost like being in labor.

It’s hell. It’s still hell! It hasn’t changed. Writing is hard for me. Every Sugar column I’ve ever written is hard for me to write, and I resist it, and I don’t want to do it. Then I do it, and I think, “Why did I make such a big fuss?” That’s the same case with both Torch and Wild. Having said that, writing Wild was easier in that I had the experience of having done it before. It’s like anything. I have two children, and giving birth to my second child was like, “Okay, I’ve done this before.” Or when you get your heart broken for the second time, and you think, “I don’t think I’m going to survive, but I will, because I did one time before.” When I was writing Wild and I felt despair, I would tell myself, “This is just how it feels to write a book. This is what it is.” You feel lost, and riddled with doubts about whether this book is going to be any good or not, and I was able to say, “This is part of the process” and keep going. When I was writing my first book, it was “Maybe I just suck.” There was more doubt. So it still is every bit as hard, I just have a lot more wisdom and perspective about the experience.

So it doesn’t make it any less painful, but it makes the pain familiar enough that you know it’s not going to be eternal?

Exactly. It doesn’t make it less painful, but it’s a familiar pain. It’s like anything, right? It’s so funny how comparable this is to anything. If you’re a runner, you know it’s going to be hard to run a half marathon or whatever, but if you’ve done it before, you rely on experience to guide you through. Part of experience is just knowing that suffering is part of it, that discomfort is part of it, that doubt is part of it.

It reminds me of when you were on the trail and lost your boots. You made duct tape booties, but knowing that new boots would be in the mail at the next outpost helped you work through the pain. You dealt with the pain this time because there was an end in sight.

Yeah, knowing that those boots were there. Or, at least, assuming that they would be there. You never know, right? Until they’re in hand.

You just need hypothetical boots to goad you on.

Exactly.

eMusic’s Jess Sauer spoke with Julavits about the skeptic spectrum, what writers and mediums have in common, and what never to do when toting expensive vodka.

In another interview, you mentioned a book by Dion Fortune about defending oneself from psychic attacks. Did you decide to write about psychics and start doing research, or did reading books about psychics inspire you to write about them?

It was a totally accidental discovery. I’m pretty sure that I was researching Madame Helena Blavatsky, who was a famous medium. I wasn’t even interested in her mediumship; I was interested in theosophy, which is a spiritual movement. To be honest, I just wasn’t smart enough to quite get my head around what theosophy was. I kept reading and reading and reading. I think the problem was that I went to source texts. Madame Helena Blavatsky wrote this book called The Secret Doctrine, and I just couldn’t figure out what it was about. I was Googling around to figure out if somebody had written something like “Theosophy is this” in a very clarified paragraph, and somehow through doing that I landed on Dion Fortune. She sounded like an interesting person, so I clicked on her, and pretty soon discovered that she’d written this book, and the notion of psychic attacks sounded really interesting to me. I ordered it, and that was it. I was so taken with the idea. Not only that, but Dion Fortune writes in the beginning of the book that the reason she was interested in writing about psychic attacks was because she was psychically attacked by her mentor when she was an initiate at one of these occult lodges. So, I was not just attracted to the idea, but I felt like, “Oh my God, I was just given the beginning of my book.” I was given the entry point. So yeah, I owe a lot to Dion Fortune, and in fact I did go to a psychic after the book was done and asked her to contact Dion Fortune to find out if she approved of my use of her story, because you can be psychically attacked from beyond the grave. So I figured it’d probably be a good idea to get her approval.

What was the verdict?

I got it. She said that she thought the whole thing was very funny.

There are a number of novels about the power dynamics between teachers and students, but it seems like adding the psychic element gives you a really concrete way of examining them.

Right, there’s something literal about it. It’s a literal attack, instead of these stealthy manipulations that happen under the surface.

“Instead of just destroying your ego, I’m going to give you an actual rash.”

Yeah, exactly. I think I’m always interested in the prickly dynamics that are fostered by smaller communities, and academia is a well-trodden territory in literature. There are a lot of books about it. I think that’s why the psychic attack lens appealed to me. It gave me a skewed, more unusual entry point to a world that otherwise would be a challenge for me to write about in any original way. Other people are more crafty than I am, but I’m not crafty enough.

There’s a parallel between creative writing MFA programs and the Workshop, the psychic grad program in your book, because while these programs are going to learn technique and craft, giftedness is also essential. In your book, if you’re not psychically gifted, they call you a “mortgage payment,” because your tuition is basically all you’re bringing to the program.

Yeah, you’re a mortgage payment, which interestingly enough I stole. I don’t even know that I told him I stole it, but that is what a friend of mine when I was in grad school atColumbiaused to call the people he perceived as being hopelessly untalented. So yeah, I borrowed that. No, I just stole it. I stole it. I think there’s so much overlap with the creative writing process. I was really struck when I went to see that psychic who talked to Dion Fortune. It was really interesting for me to watch her make contact. When you write fiction, you’re also making contact with another being. In some ways, I don’t know how different those two activities are.

By the same token, obviously in the psychic community these things are meant very literally, but at the same time, the idea of someone else making you sick requires no leap of faith if you think of it metaphorically. Everyone you know, you have some version of in your mind, and your idea of that person can affect you regardless of whether the actual person is doing something.

It’s true. You hear their voices; you hear the things they say to you. I was writing to somebody about this the other day. We were talking about different kinds of laughs, and I was saying how, years ago, 2003, somebody interviewed me for The Believer, because The Believer had just been published. They described my laughter as “nervous,” and I can’t get that description out of my head. That person has permanently taken residence in my head.

It’s like a mini clone of them that exists inside you.

It’s really true. And, also, not to sound all hocus-pocusy, but I really do feel that people emanate different energies. There are people — and it’s not because I don’t like them or that I think there’s something bad or ill-intentioned about them — who just give off a certain energy that makes me feel endangered. I mean, sometimes these people are just sad or depressed, but they somehow make me feel at-risk when I’m around them, and I just have to get away. Again, psychic attack was a way to literalize that sensation that we talk about in our culture. In our language we refer to people’s personalities, or something about them, this ineffable thing that people give off, we’ll say that person is “toxic,” or “that guy makes me sick,” or something like that. I don’t think that it’s a huge leap to be talking about how people impact other people in these ways.

That leads nicely into something else I was wondering. Where do you fall on the skeptic spectrum with regard to parapsychology in general?

I guess I would either describe myself as a skeptical believer or a believing skeptic. I think there’s no denying we all have really uncanny things happen to us. I’m thinking about Freud’s essay “The Uncanny.” He admits that he’s not the person to be writing about this because he doesn’t feel trained or suitable or open to this kind of thing, not in a belief sense, but more of an intellectual sense. Even he says there are these experiences, such as walking down a street you’ve never been down before, and you just feel this sense of familiarity, that you’ve been here before. It’s something inside of you, not even a memory, but a part of you you can’t explain. He’s trying to get his head around that. What is it, how do you explain that. I think we’ve all had experiences like that, that I think would make most people exist between these two places of believing and not believing.

I have had a sense of superstition my whole life, which maybe comes from growing up in a thoroughly religious-less household. It wasn’t even agnostic, or like anything was being rejected. It didn’t exist. It hadn’t existed on either side of my family for a very long time. There was just no residue of any kind of belief system. So, as a kid — and I really think this persisted far longer into my adulthood than it should have — I was superstitious, even about really clichéd superstitions, like “See a penny, pick it up.” I had this really funny thing happen to me the other day, which I feel was beating me over the head, saying, “You have to stop thinking this way.” I saw a penny on the street, and I walked past it, and then I was like, “You know what? You gotta pick that penny up!” So I turned back around, and I leaned down into the middle of the street to pick this penny up, and this very expensive bottle of vodka that I’d just bought for my husband — he’d just come home a trip, and we were going to have greyhounds together — this expensive bottle swung over my shoulder and just smashed on the street. While I was picking up my lucky penny. So yeah, maybe that’s the universe telling me not to be superstitious…which is another form of superstition, but whatever. I’m just replacing one with another.

In addition to the psychic element of your novel, there’s also a plotline involving this very transgressive form of performance art. What or who inspired that idea?

The artist who was the most inspiring figure for me was Sophie Calle, who’s a French artist who does these transgressive things, though she’s hardly as sinister as the performance-artist character I fashioned from her baseline. I’m really interested in these acts that can be construed as meaning totally opposite things. So, for example, in some of the performance-art pieces in the book, there’s the notion of being a “surgical impersonator”: taking on somebody else’s face, going to the house of the family of this person who died whose face you now have, and trying to alleviate their grief by being this person, bringing this person back from the dead kind of. That’s both the most selfless act, like you’re literally sacrificing yourself in order to fill a gap that these loved ones are experiencing, and it’s also just the creepiest, most invasive, disrespectful thing you could ever do. So I’m fascinated by acts that can be both of those things at the same time, and you can’t really tease it out. I think a lot of times, with the whole performance-art thread in particular, I’m expressing a desire to be another form of artist that I know I’ll never be. This is the only place I get to be one, in my own novel.

At the same time, writers do have enormous potential to affect people literally. You can write a biography of a dead person that reanimates them in the same false way these surgical impersonators do. It’s probably one of the artistic genres in which people are hurt most often.

I never thought of that, but of course that’s so true. Even if you use fiction as a way to deactivate that potential hurt, that isn’t enough. I just received an essay by Francisco Goldman, who wrote a novel about the death of his wife. She was killed in a surfing accident in Mexico. He wrote a novel about her death, his grieving process, her childhood. It was sort of this eulogy or homage to her life, and critics kind of didn’t know what to do with this thing. Some people accused him of being cowardly for not just writing it as a memoir. People still got mad about the portrayal, even though the portrayal was supposedly fictional. It’s very interesting territory: Is writing about real people in a fictional context more respectful, or less brave?

The fictional context also gives you latitude to be libelous without being libelous.

It’s true. This is so in the air, too, with the whole John D’Agata kerfuffle. Creative nonfiction is another boundary that’s become increasingly porous. Culturally, I think we’re having a hard time getting our heads around this porousness, and for good reason. Sometimes it does seem to be violating some kind of contract you come to rely upon, and then other times it can seem so churlish to be patrolling that boundary. This is another one of those situations that is both really freeing and wonderful and potentially really dangerous and deceitful. So, I love that. Two sides, two very different sides.

So rest assured, you can be a writer and still mess with people like Sophie Calle.

Yes, someday us writers will get to be the artists we never thought we could be. You get to dress better, too! That’s kind of what the jealousy is. There’s not a long line of sartorially talented writers, although that’s changing. Maybe because writers are becoming more public, they’ve realized they’ve got to knock it up a notch in the fashion department. But, you know, artists have always looked really good. I guess I’m envious of that, too!

Days before her book launched, Groff talked with eMusic about her feelings on the legalization of marijuana, which musicians inspire her writing, and her go-to karaoke song.

The characters in Arcadia attempt to make a living off growing and selling marijuana. I am still amazed at how you have written this truly beautiful family drama that also makes a pretty logical case for the legalization of marijuana. So what exactly are your opinions that topic?

I think it’s somewhere between silly and stupid to criminalize marijuana. As far as I know, nobody has died from a pot overdose, and the medical benefits of the drug far outweigh the potential negatives. This is not to say that I want my sons to start up with the bongs in high school. I would hope they would wait until they’re adults to make their own decisions about marijuana, that they even get the chance to make their own decisions.

I loved those moments in the book where we got glimpses of the hippie music scene. Did you have any bands you were listening to when you were writing it?

Yes, yes, yes. The first part of the book is haunted by Pete Seeger, the second by Led Zeppelin, the third by Sigur Ros, and the fourth by Leonard Cohen. If you play their albums as you listen, you’ll catch the emotional tones I’m going for in each section.

Do you have any other eras you’d be interested in writing about? Any moments in history that particularly captivate you?

This is complex, but the short answer is: I don’t know. My greatest allegiance is to the story that surfaces in my brain, whether it ends up being situated in 16th-century France or Japan in the 22nd century, when we are all bionic and 12 feet tall. The time and setting of a story are, like characters, developed slowly and according to the story being told.

Have you heard your audiobook yet? Do you listen to audiobooks at all?

I love audiobooks when I’m traveling, but really only books that I’ve already read in tree-format first. I find a second audial reading changes and deepens any book because the actors are very smart and read toward their own interpretations, which are almost always different from mine.

That said, I’ve never listened to my own audiobooks. The voice in my head when I read my work is this incredibly skeptical Grace Paley-ish wise woman and I’m afraid of breaking her if I hear someone else read her words. I have nothing to do with the audiobook process, sadly. My audiobooks show up one day, and make me happy, and then I give them to my parents-in-law, and they listen to them.

There is such a musicality to your writing. Do you have any history with music or writing poetry?

I played the flute for 12 years. What a bizarro instrument to hand to a little girl — about as embarrassingly obvious as a unicorn fixation!

Nowadays, whenever I get the chance, I sing karaoke with extreme dedication. But I did think I was a poet for the first five years of my writing career, though my poetry obviously didn’t agree. That said, I have read and do read a wheelbarrow full of poetry every week and think that every fiction writer on the planet should, also. It teaches us rhythm, formal architecture, the perfection of a single well-placed word.

What’s your go-to karaoke song?

I like Dolly Parton’s “Jolene.”

Do you read your work out loud at all when you’re writing?

I do! I once read that Charles Dickens used to read out loud to a mirror and make faces corresponding to his characters, and I do that, mostly to make myself laugh. But I think at a certain point, at least with a semi-final draft, you have to hear your words out loud to make sure there aren’t unintentional repetitions or rhythms and that the dialogue seems plausible.

Do you enjoy giving readings, and engaging with audiences? Have you ever seen any other authors read that have really impressed you?

I love giving readings and engaging with audiences, primarily because the work I do is so solitary and I’m hungry for interactions with smart people who read a lot. I can count a hundred writers whose work astounds anew when they read it aloud, but I’m fascinated to watch the superstars of writing, the people who can fill an auditorium of two thousand attendees — who pay to be there! I’m thinking of people like Chuck Palahniuk or David Sedaris. You watch them perform and feel briefly glad that writers can be rock stars, and then it’s time to file out into the rainy streets and the dark little writing-hovel and the gaping blank page again.

You’re about to head out on a big book tour. What are you most looking forward to? Is there anything you dread?

I have two children under the age of four, so I’m most looking forward to clean white hotel sheets and room service. I dread, always, walking into a reading to find one kindly relative, one pained-looking bookseller, a snoozing homeless person, and a high-school couple who wanted to find a quiet place to make out.

eMusic’s Alice Gregory spoke with Black about regressive humor, writing about the people you love, and hecklers-as-editors.

You open one chapter with a confession: “We are four months into parenthood and I hate my baby.” Has being a father changed your sense of humor?

It may have expanded my horizons a little bit in terms of finding comedy places, but it certainly hasn’t closed off things that I thought were funny before. If anything, it’s made me think more things are funny. My kids enjoy fart jokes much more than I do, and even just the word “butt.” Far, far more than I do. So when I’m with them, the only time they think I’m funny is when I’m making either butt or fart jokes.

So it’s a different audience that you’re catering towards.

Yes. Kids are idiots.

What does your wife Martha think of the book? You’ve dedicated it to her, and in a weird way, it’s a glowing portrait, but not an uncomplicated one.

She likes it. Everything that I say to her in the book, I certainly say to her face, but she was nervous about exposing herself in a public arena. She’s a private person, and she was reluctant.

Some of the reactions can be difficult to handle — not because people are so critical, but because it’s asking people to tell you what they think about your marriage, which nobody in their right mind would ever do. In a strange way, it’s made us closer. We have this thing between us — this marriage — that we hold and protect, so anything that feels like an assault on it brings together.

Did you reveal anything in writing that you hadn’t before in person?

I’ve never been very forthcoming about my past, with Martha or with anybody. All of those details were new to her. I don’t think she knew that I was a sperm donor, for one thing.

It’s less rare for married people to be open with their criticism of each other, which she and I certainly do all the time. I think it’s more rare for one partner to bare themselves as candidly as I do — in terms of my deep and abiding love for her. The last chapter was probably the hardest chapter to write, because it was the most naked chapter to write.

That last chapter is great, but it’s not as if it’s some sort of coda. In spite of all the insults, the reader knows the whole time that you’re besotted with her.

That’s nice to hear. I wanted to be as honest about our daily interactions as possible, and a lot of times it’s bickery and bitchy, but then a lot of the time it’s also tender and fun. I just didn’t put as much of that in there, because it’s not as compelling.

You’re Not Doing It Right is a memoir, and you were working during all the periods of your life it covers, yet you hardly even mention your job. How purposeful was that?

I feel like it would be very presumptuous of me to write a memoir about a middling comedy career. I think there’s probably a book there though — what it’s like to exist in the margins of show business, or what it’s like to go from one moderate success to another, but that’s just not this book.

How does writing a book compare to writing comedy?

I think any good writing — and here I’m presuming my writing is good — is the same. All good writing has beginning, middle, and end. That can be true in a 140-character tweet or it can be true for a full novel.

I’m a terrible anecdotalist. Is that a word? I’m terrible at relating stories to friends. I’m awful at recounting events. I’m not a particularly gifted speaker. It takes me a while in the telling of things to understand the point I’m trying to make, and that is a function of stand-up. You get on stage with a sense of the thing you want to do and the laughs you want to get, and then over time the audience sort of helps you figure out with the story actually is. Whether they’re telling you thematically what it is or where the laughs are at or all of the above. They’re really helping you.

Unfortunately with a book, it’s much harder, because you don’t have that audience there. You have an editor and some early readers, but it’s really not the same. With standup, your instincts are to listen for the laughs and as a writer of this book, I had to fight those instincts. It took a lot of time because the laugh was not the most important thing; it was more important to dig down and find a truth that I wasn’t even necessarily able to identify until I started writing it. My only audience was myself, and that was very challenging.

What’s next?

I have another book that’s coming out. I co-wrote it with Megan McCain. It’s a political book about a cross-country trip that we took together this summer. It’s called America You Sexy Bitch. We’re two people who didn’t really know each other or have much in common on the surface, but sort of represented opposing political viewpoints. We traveled the country with the premise that we probably have a lot more in common as Americans than what separates us. So we went from city to city talking to people trying to confirm or disprove that hypothesis.

And? Did the people of America confirm it or deny it? You’re going to tell me to read the book, aren’t you?

Yes! You have to read the book!

You narrated part of the audiobook along with many other readers. You chose to read “The Reader,” a story about an author on a book tour. Can you walk me through how involved you were in the process?

It was [the producer's] idea to bring me into read one of the stories, and I thought it was a lovely notion. It was just a choice of which story to read. She actually wanted me to read another story in the book, “Everything I Know About My Family on My Mother’s Side.”

“Everything I Know About My Family on My Mother’s Side” is actually the perfect pick for me to read, but I was resistant. It’s a very close story [to my life]. It sort of weaves in between fiction and reality…but I thought if I read it, it would literally shift the balance of the story. To hear me read it would make certain parts of it you’re supposed to be exploring as undeniably, oh this is reality.

So anyway, I wanted to read “The Reader.” It just felt close to me. And I’m honored to be asked to read, but a story like, say, “Sister Hills,” I’m happy to turn it over to the professionals.

I was going to say – it’s a little bit easier to read when you don’t have to do too many voices.

Yeah, it could be the voices, and even just to recognize I write to rhythm. Maybe this is the most important thing to say when you’re talking about audio. I mean, if somebody were to shove me into a room and say rewrite one of these stories again, I couldn’t. There’s no way in the world I could ever write one of those stories again. It’s just of a time and a place.

When I’m finished, the stories are so built to a rhythm in my head. I often get accused – people say this nicely, but it’s often embarrassingly true – I read as if I’m chanting half the time. It sounds like [I'm a] bar mitzvah boy. I go through the rhythms in my head. And that’s why you need an actor [to narrate]. It amazes me, just hearing someone interpret it and making it their own.

And so when you actually are in the process of writing a book, do you read it out loud to yourself?

If you want to hear a word out of place or a sentence that is wrong, there is nothing like reading out loud, absolutely.

I thought it was really interesting that you ending up narrating “The Reader,” which tells the story of an author giving readings to empty bookstores, save for one audience member who follows him from city to city. Are you at all disappointed in the state of readership in the U.S.? I suspect when you give readings they aren’t actually as empty as they are in the story.

I feel fortunate for the people that come out to support me. Electric Literature had asked me to do this story and they are this wonderful literary journal – but it’s mostly meant for iPads, computers or digital. It’s the first time I wrote a story for something like that. I guess I really started thinking about the changing times. And just looking at the fears of the writer, of coming out of hiding and doing your work.

But in terms of readers, I feel like I’m actually not threatened by that…I believe in books. For me, it’s just the ideal art form…I love the spine of it, the look of that book, I love the prose within it. I feel like a photograph does not make up for a painting, people still paint. Movies do not make the photograph obsolete. Do you know what I’m saying?

But if performance is going to die, let it die. Books, whatever form they will take, there are readers for it.

It’s a strange cultural popularity contest…people want to ask, “Have books been replaced by reality TV?” Books are not in competition with reality TV. If we want to have that competition, pornography and video games win every day. If we’re doing cultural popularity, I’d say it’s videogames and porn.

I just think that it’s weird to have apples and oranges comparisons between books and whatever else is taking over. Has Justin Bieber killed the book? Justin Bieber is not in competition with literature.

You’ve been published a lot internationally and I was wondering what the difference was between reading in the U.S. and giving readings somewhere else in the world, say in Europe or Israel.

I really believe in the universality of a story. If the story is functioning that’s the whole point. Literature translates.

Sometimes people want to bring in [that my work] is Jewish writing in some way, like you need a password or a conversion to read books where the characters are Jewish. It’s such a strange concept to me. I don’t have trouble reading James Baldwin. I’m not like, well I’m white and heterosexual, I can [still] understand what’s happening here.

I have to say, I take great comfort when I’m inOsloorItalyor wherever I’m doing a reading, and at the event, I’ll think, “Are these people here for the story?” And there is nary a Jew in the room…theOsloexperience is very different than the Jewish Long Island childhood that I had. That universality is really exciting to me.

I can remember sitting on stage inGermany– God bless German people, by the way. Here [in theU.S.], at a reading they’re like, “Come to our event. Please don’t read.” And that’s fine if people just want a discussion or whatever. But German audiences will be mad if it’s not 11 hours. Like if you stop after three hours, they’re like, “We can sit another hour.” Anyway, they’ll have an actor read for me sometimes in a place likeGermany, and that’s been really moving. A big lesson for me just about how story works. I can be sitting there on stage and listening to the guy tell my story and I can literally just know from the rhythm, the pauses, and the way he’s moving where I am in the story. That idea that I can hear this actor reading and the rhythm will be changing, and I’ll think to myself: I think a joke comes right about now. And then he’ll hit the sentence and the audience will laugh, and that’s amazing to me – that across languages I can feel the perfect pacing of the story, that I can literally feel what’s happening. You can hit a joke across all cultures, time, and space.

eMusic’s Jami Attenberg caught up with Avery fresh off her book tour and talked to her about hearing her characters speak, the difference between being a poet and a fiction writer, and why writing historical fiction is like being a DJ.

The Last Nude is really dialogue-intensive. Also, because it’s written in first person, you needed to ensure that it rings true from a conversational-sounding perspective. Do you read your work out loud when you’re writing it? What do you do in order to ensure that it sounds natural?

I do, in fact, read the book aloud as I work. I also hear the characters speak in my mind, especially when I write dialogue. And then for The Last Nude, I regularly consulted the OED online to see if the locution I was hearing in my mind was something people would actually say in the 1920s, or, as often happened, if it actually popped up in the 1950s. It’s not surprising that so many 1950s-isms would sound natural to me, since that’s when my parents were locking in their own adolescent patterns of speech in contrast to their parents, but that’s all the more reason to try to write more consciously.

I haven’t seen you give any readings yet for this book, but I recall seeing you on tour for your last book, The Teahouse Fire, and you performed a wonderful little tea ceremony during your reading. Are you doing anything like that for The Last Nude?

For The Last Nude, first I tell the story of my encounter with the Tamara de Lempicka painting – it was a painting from 1927 called Beautiful Rafaela – that inspired the novel. Then, I try to give the audience something special they wouldn’t get if they just stayed home and read the book. In this case, it’s the chance to experience firsthand one of the early stages of work on the novel. Once I decided this was the story I had to write, I bought a second-hand book of Tamara de Lempicka’s paintings, cut it up and spread out the images on my desk until words, rooms, and characters began to emerge. At my readings, I pass out laminated copies of de Lempicka’s paintings for people to look at and pass around, so that they can enter Tamara de Lempicka’s clear-edged and luminous world visually as well as aurally.

Have you ever seen any truly great readings that impressed you? How important is the performance aspect to you?

One of the best readings I ever attended was Emma Donoghue reading from Room. I loved that out of a 15-to-20-minute presentation, she only actually read for maybe five to seven minutes. Beforehand, she talked about the book and about various responses to it she’d encountered, afterward, during the Q&A period, she asked the first question. I hadn’t known you were allowed to take control of the room, the time and the audience in that way: Ever since attending that reading, I’ve tried to take a page out of her book.

Do you enjoy giving readings?

I do enjoy reading aloud, which perhaps is why it’s hard for me to listen to the audiobook, even though I’m sure professionals do it better. (In my teens, my mother and I were the lay readers at our Catholic church, so I came by it early.) I don’t memorize or act out the book, but I do try to use my voice to highlight the contrast between Rafaela’s young dialogue and older narration, give Tamara a little bit of an Eastern European accent, vary my speed to keep the audience awake, and let the audience in on Rafaela’s emotional experience of what she describes.

There’s a real musical quality to your work – I know you have another life as a poet. How does your poetic sensibility inform your fiction writing?

I’m flattered that you find my work musical; thanks! I don’t listen to music while working, unless there’s something I specifically need to look up or describe, such as the sound of shamisen music for The Teahouse Fire, or the sound of Josephine Baker’s singing voice for The Last Nude. But I do have, as you said, another life as a poet of sorts: For the past 13 years I’ve been writing a haiku a day. Certainly, the haiku-writer’s work of crystallization and compression, as well as that of using sensory impressions rather than explanations to convey emotion, is part of my novelist’s toolkit, too. And the practice of taking walks and seizing at phrases and images, and then locking them into sentences, is something that may be easy to do as a novelist because I do it every day as a haiku writer. And when I’m writing a sentence, I’ll often know how many more syllables and stresses it needs before I know what the words are that will fit into the metric pattern I hear in my mind.

When I started college I was a poetry major, and my freshman writing professor told me to switch to fiction. He said all fiction writers are failed poets.

But do you think fiction writers are failed poets? I think some fiction-writers are would-be film directors! I also think many poets spurn things that many fiction writers prize: character, causal relationship, the desire to make the reader care what happens to the characters next. Maybe the biggest difference between contemporary poets and fiction writers is that accessibility seems to be a dirty word for many poets and a less-dirty word for many fiction writers. I suspect neither fiction writers nor poets found themselves completely at ease in the world as children, whether it was the world of the family or television or high school, and writers of both stripes deal with that unease by making a world of their own out of words. I think many fiction writers use their skill with words to lure strangers into that world; many poets use the same skill to give strangers the pleasure of having found their way in.

This book is so remarkably research-intensive. I rarely have patience for such things, and would rather just make things up in my head all day. But you seem to revel in it, and there are just layers upon layers of fact and fiction interwoven together. Can you tell me about how research fulfills you, and how you know when to take off from fact?

Well, first of all, I’m a total nerd, and once something is interesting to me, I want to know all about it.

That said, my biggest source of inhibition as a writer is wondering if anyone will care what I have to say, and I so admire writers who deal with that affliction in better, perhaps less cumbersome and time-consuming ways than I do. Research – and writing historical fiction – helps me overcome that block. Obviously someone – the scholar or biographer I’m reading – thought it was worth writing down the first time, so it seems less crazy to think someone – the reader of my novel – will think it was worth writing down a second time. The historical facts I work with are the stepping stones that let me get across the river of the novel, or the vines that let me brachiate from branch to branch above it.

People often ask me, “How much of The Last Nude is true?” Anything that sounds like the product of an overheated imagination – Tamara picking up Rafaela in a public park, the sex with sailors in shacks by the Seine, Tamara eating oysters off the body of a young girl at a party, the cocaine, the absinthe, and so on – all that is true. It’s documented in Laura Claridge’s excellent biography of de Lempicka, or in de Lempicka’s daughter Kizette’s biography of her mother’s life. I see that as one kind of work that historical fiction writers do, a kind of DJ work, bringing together samples and laying them side by side.

eMusic’s Jess Sauer talked to Darst about the claustrophobia of an audiobook recording booth, the words you can’t say on This American Life, and what her mother has in common with Edith Piaf.

It’s pretty rare for writers to narrate their own audiobooks. Did your performance background help you?

It is really rare. People don’t do it much. What I know from doing my own audiobook is that it’s really hard, actually. Really hard. Often it’s just that your mouth won’t do what you need it to do. Unless you have training, I don’t know how people read their own audiobooks; I really don’t. I’ve been an actor for a long time, and I’ve done things for This American Life and recorded a lot of stuff, and I’ve memorized things and done them onstage, so there’s a certain preparedness.

So even though you have a performance background, it felt different to read the audiobook than, for instance, to do your one-woman show?

It does, because you’re in a booth and it’s really small, so there’s a claustrophobia element. You’re in there alone, and you start to feel like, “They’re not gonna let me out of here.” You feel like a circus animal, like, “I have to balance this ball on my nose, or I’m not gonna eat for the next week.”

One difference between a one-woman show and reading a book is that the book has been published, so you can’t ad-lib or change something you don’t like while you’re reading it. Did you have any weird editorial moments while you were reading it aloud, like things you didn’t notice before?

You do have weird editorial moments, yeah. I actually found a couple fragments of sentences. I’ve done a couple of readings since my book has been out, a couple bookstore readings, and I have to really edit myself. I sort of “performancize” the book. I’ll sort of abbreviate, make things more performance-ready.

Do you have any performances in the works?

I am working on something to perform, because after having written this book, I want to get out of my house. It doesn’t have anything to do with the book. It’s more of a dance piece. It’s actually a crazy, weird, sort of funny dance piece, because I’m not a dancer. It could be like a play with dancing, if that makes sense.

Speaking of This American Life, I saw on your website that for one of your This American Life stories, Sarah Koenig said that she needed to have a professional discussion with you about “the fart.” You’re pretty comfortable with scatological material. Do your pieces test the show’s boundaries often?

Yes! Basically, most of my discussions with This American Life are like Sarah calling and saying, “We need to talk about the fart. It’s really funny, but we have to get rid of it,” or Ira [Glass] calling and saying, you know, “Jeanne, it’s Ira, um, I talked to our lawyers. Can we use another word instead of ‘cock’?” I’m listening to my voicemail as I’m picking up my kid at school, and it’s like, “How about dick, schlong, hotrod” — he gave me five or six choices for “cock.” And it’s like, “Call me back!”

When you were writing the book, did your editor have any of these sorts of edits for you? Were there any scenes where your editor said, “This is too much?”

Yes, totally. I actually consider the book to be extremely toned down. Extremely. I plan on fully letting loose in my next book!

Do you think your next book is going to be nonfiction as well?

I’m really planning on blending the best of both worlds, definitely, which is more what my weird plays are like. I had this play, Je Regret Tout, which means “I regret everything,” and in it my mom and Edith Piaf save New York from all the people who want to make it happy, mostly this evil pharmaceutical company. They plead for their way of life, which is to drink and smoke and eat steak at midnight. So, it’s using the character of my mom, in the same way that my mom was in my memoir, and putting her in a crazy, fictional setting. I think my next book might be a little bit of a blend.

Toward the end of your book, you worry about how your father might react to it. How did he — and the rest of your family — react to the book? Did you have to put their feelings out of your mind while you were writing it?

I put it out of my mind when I was writing the book, and then once the book was done and they all read it, it became the thing to deal with, their reactions. I couldn’t worry about people’s reactions while I was writing the book, and I think a lot of people probably do worry about that and edit themselves. I can’t do that, but when the book was done, there was a fair amount of trying to make sure that everybody was okay with everything. There was a lot of back and forth with my dad, and it’s not an easy thing, but I think he’s really proud, and he thinks the book is really funny, so it’s exciting. It’s an exciting time.

eMusic’s Jess Sauer spoke with Klosterman about the appeal of writing about jerks, whether God wants you to listen to Rush, and what he’d do if he were invisible.

You’ve spoken a lot about how The Invisible Man inspired The Visible Man, because upon reading it, you were interested in how jerky the main character was. What’s the appeal for you in writing about a jerk? What kind of liberties can you take when writing from the perspective of a jerk? Or, more than a jerk, a psychopath?

That probably has more to do with the fact that when I read books, or I watch movies or television shows, I tend to find unlikable characters the most comedic. I always think that when you see a character do something that’s appalling, but also somewhat predictable when you look at their character, that’s always somewhat funny to me. Also, it’s a little bit like a video game, I feel. Say you play a video game like Grand Theft Auto. Everybody’s first experiment, typically, with a new video game, is to try to have the character break the game. Go places that you can’t go, try to hit random people, see what the parameters are on how much damage you can do. Can you crash the car, et cetera. Then, after that period, you play the game. The first thing you want to do is test the limits of the game. I think when you make up a character in a novel, one thing that I kind of enjoy to do is first seeing what the creative limits to this reality are. People who tend to break the limits of reality tend to be bad people, or Evel Knievel.

You’ve said you can’t really imagine readers relating to either Vicky or Y, the characters in Visible Man. I saw Jonathan Franzen give a talk a couple of weeks ago, and he was talking about the importance of loving your characters, and I asked whether that was distinct from liking them, and whether liking them was less important than loving them. For you, is relating to your characters important?

First of all, my relationship to books as a reader might be slightly different than the typical novelist’s reaction to books. What I mean by that is I never disappear into a story. If I read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, I never think to myself, “I’m in Narnia now!” There’s always an intellectual distance, because when I read things, I’m interested in ideas. If somebody said, “There are two novels you can read: One has these rich characters and amazing plot mechanics, and you’ll really enjoy the experience of reading it, or you can read this book where it’s really about going after this one idea, the dissection of one meaningful idea,” I would probably take the second book.

So I don’t feel like loving my characters. Sure, it’s nice to say that. That’s what a writer’s supposed to say — that they love these characters. There’s just no way that I’m ever going to feel like an imaginary person is a lovable reality. I’m just not like that. I just want my characters to be interesting. I want to be interested in them, and what they’re doing, and what they’re thinking. If I write a book and at the end of it, one of the characters dies, I’m not gonna cry. I’ve heard authors say that, that they have cried about things that have happened to the characters that they’ve created, which to me seems a little weird, and actually very egocentric, that they could somehow feel that this person they made up is so real to them that it taps into the emotions you feel toward actual beings.

That points to the fact that The Visible Man is in many ways a thought experiment. It reminded me of the “Flight versus Invisibility” episode of This American Life. One interesting outcome of that question was that everyone who wanted invisibility as their super power had nefarious purposes in mind, and that it didn’t occur to anybody to use it for heroic or even beneficial purpose. Vicky asks Y if it ever occurs to him to use his invisibility to be heroic, and he says it would never occur to him to be a hero in that way. I’m interested in the idea of invisibility as removing the responsibility of being a bystander.

Yeah. That This American Life [episode] was done by John Hodgman, and one thing about the way people answer that question, is just sort of the nature of dealing with the hypothetical. If someone says to you, “Hey, I’m going to give you this interesting power: You no longer have to sleep. You’ll never have to sleep again, and you’ll feel fine,” it’s very rare that a person would hear that and go, “Great! I can now do more volunteering!” The first thing they think about is, “How can this benefit me?” in a very direct way.

In this book, the character is trying to convince his therapist that he’s not doing that; that he has this power, and he actually is using it for an altruistic, scientific purpose to help people understand human nature, but he is confused about life. If I really had the ability to be invisible — people always want to know when you write a book like this — I guess I would be a little interested in, well, my wife and I have a lot of friends in couples, and it would be interesting to watch their fights. It’d be interesting to see if their fights are unique or normative, or if all fights are the same. It would be ultimately to understand my own life, rather than the voyeuristic nature of the experience.

The Visible Man is a lot about what people do when alone. Y actually develops cloaking technology in order to be invisible with other people, but another theme in the book is that the only time you are really yourself is when you’re invisible to the extent that other people aren’t witnessing you, and the idea that most people need to be witnessed by others in order to feel real. It’s kind of a buzzy word right now, spectatoring, the idea that social media has created this “pics or it didn’t happen” idea that if you have an experience that is unwitnessed by others, it no longer has value.

Yeah, that’s definitely half of it. The other half, I would say, the word I would use is self-editing. How much of someone’s personality is actually the manifestation of them thinking about themselves and then performing as the character they believe that they are, or that they want other people to see. On the one hand, you have the need to have everything validated by other people seeing it happen, and then the other side of that is trying to create who you are, as opposed to being the person that your nature suggests.

There’s also the fact that, despite Y feeling most authentic when he’s by himself, it doesn’t really matter whether there’s actually another person there to witness your behavior, because people have the hypothetical witness. Even in solitude, some people behave with regard to what other people would be thinking if they could see them when they were by themselves. For instance, what people read when they’re alone. There are people who really would never allow themselves to read a guilty pleasure, or to listen to Rush, even when alone, because the idea of what other people would think is so powerful to them.

Well, yeah. Okay, I can’t totally relate to that, but I suppose that’s true. There are some people who even act differently alone because they can’t stop themselves from imagining being seen. I would say, to me, somebody who has that quality, somebody who reads this and is like, “I relate to this. I will not do things I want to do by myself because I don’t like the idea of how it would be perceived if somebody was there,” I would actually say that’s a mild form of psychosis. I would say that that’s an extension of mental illness, because that would mean that that person no longer would have the ability to have free will, even in their moments of freedom. Which, you know, I suppose philosophically you could argue is the case for everyone, if you believe free will doesn’t exist. I’m using free will in the sense of being able to do what you want.

When you think about it, though, the idea of an omniscient or omnipresent deity does actually inspire the private behavior of religious people, or implies that even in solitude, people are supposed to behave as though they’re being watched at all times.

That’s true. You know, there are many different ways to think about a higher power, but to me it’s hard to imagine a God who doesn’t want people listening to Rush. Like, I can’t imagine what kind of jerk God would have to be to look at a guy listening to Rush and be like, “That dude is not cool.”

I know that Y doesn’t like explaining the science behind his suit to Vicky because he doesn’t believe she’ll understand it. I’ve done some cursory Googling into cloaking, and I know metamaterials are a real thing. I’m not even going to try paraphrasing, because my knowledge of it is very basic. How important was it to you that this cloaking device be at least hypothetically scientifically possible?

Good question. You know, the closest model I had in my mind for the explanation of invisibility was actually Being John Malkovich. Because, in Being John Malkovich, the premise is insane: There’s a doorway into John Malkovich’s mind. What happens in that film is that they sort of comedically and very superficially describe what’s going on, and then immediately move on to what it represents, the larger idea. That’s what I was thinking: I’m not a scientist, and true invisibility is impossible, so what I need to do here is use enough language and abstraction to get to a point where the character is like, “It’s stupid that we’re still talking about this. Let’s talk about what it means.”

It’s interesting that you bring up Being John Malkovich, because for instance, in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or Synecdoche, New York, Charlie Kaufman springboards off of something that is kind of real, scientifically. Like, they actually can erase specific memories, like they do in Eternal Sunshine, and Cotard delusion is a real thing.

Yeah, what he does, basically, or what he seems to do, is that he’ll hear something about the ability to erase memory, and he will place it in the most extreme, and also the most day-to-day context. So he’s like, “What if you could erase memory with a pill? How would that application be?” It’s kind of like that in this book, too. I was sort of like, “OK, cloaking seems like something that would have the possibility to exist, so let’s just say it does exist. Let’s say that just this one guy has it. What would happen then?”

So I’m interested in what I guess would be called the anthropology of solitude, and what your interest is in that, especially with reference to the consumption of media.

Yeah, it’s all connected. I mean, if someone were to ask me, “What is the central question of the time period we’re living in right now?” I would say it’s the question of what is reality, which in some ways is a question that people stop thinking about when they reach the age of 20, or whatever. It seems sort of a like a high school stoner problem, but I’ve never stopped thinking about it, and it’s important to everything I write, because there are two things an acceleration of media does: It increases the amount of information, and it widens the gap between reality and constructed reality. It’s that second part of the equation that I find really intriguing. A lot of the books and movies I like to read and watch deal with this question.

So one of the consequences of that is that, while people have always maybe viewed themselves as the main character in a novel about themselves — natural human nature is to see our life like that, from a fixed perspective — I think that the acceleration of media has totally pushed that to an absurd extreme. You talked earlier about people who think about themselves as being watched, even when they’re alone. That partially could be because the way we think about ourselves now has more to do with how we’ve seen other lives depicted through media. That’s part of it. In this book, sometimes the Y character and the therapist will make allusions to whether or not their interaction is like reality television, and obviously this is something I’ve been thinking about for 10 years, because I’ve written about it a ton.

Jim Morrison has become such an overblown pop culture signifier that Marcus’s interlocutions can snap him back to life. Most of what he introduces into the discussion predates the Doors, and it’s a kind of inventory of the music’s real-world backdrop. Marcus also gets at the dark romantic heart — maybe that should be Romantic — that formed the core of the band’s allure.

eMusic’s Michaelangelo Matos spoke with Marcus at his office at the New School in New York, where Marcus was teaching for the Fall 2011 semester.

I think of the Doors as a really collegiate band; in terms of their origins, but also in terms of their fans. In The Doors, you talk about how, in 1991, a lot of young people were kind of living ’60s nostalgia, Deadheads and the like. You’ve been teaching a lot more over the last decade or so. Do you notice that still on campuses?

I don’t think of it as nostalgia, necessarily. Probably the best definition of nostalgia is a yearning to recapture something you’ve never experienced in the first place, rather than, “Things were so great then — I remember.” It’s a condition of false memory. That wasn’t my sense. It was more that people wanted to touch something that was exciting to them; that was inspiring to them. They wanted to make some connection. They knew they didn’t experience it. That was a source of dislocation and even pain and confusion.

But I see what you mean. What I’ve found teaching is that knowledge of and connection with music from that period is really widespread. But it’s idiosyncratic. I remember in 2006, I was teaching at Princeton and when I teach a seminar, I always ask people to fill out a questionnaire — where are you from, what are you studying, what are your favorite books and movies and music — just so I can get some sense of who the people are. And that time I had three students out of 14 who listed Astral Weeks as their favorite album. This was recorded not only before they were born but conceivably before their parents were born. This was pretty remarkable. And it certainly wasn’t because it represented nostalgia for the time it was made. They heard it in whatever situation: Maybe their parents played it, maybe they heard something on the radio, maybe they heard “Madame George” in Breakfast on Pluto. But one way or another, they got a hold of it and listened to it and fell in love with it. It didn’t have anything to do with the time period from which it emerged.

But students know so much — I’m talking about people 19, 20, 21. Some students know nothing and care nothing about music from the past decades; no reason they necessarily should. But some people are just so familiar. They’ve created their own frame of reference out of music from the ’50s or the ’60s or the ’20s or whatever it might be.

You talk about Pop Art in the chapter on “20th Century Fox,” about how the stuff nobody thought was going to last forever is the stuff that has lasted as long as it has. I’m curious if you see the Web changing that or altering that, or if it’s maybe a culmination of that? I look at a lot of things online and it seems like with younger people, everything is thrown open so much that they have no choice but to create their own frames of reference.

I don’t know about that. There are still any number of powerful media sources that are presenting frames of reference; saying whether it’s cultural or political, whether it’s time-bound, whether it’s grounded in ethnicity — those things are all present.

You know, I did a lot of my research for Lipstick Traces in the stacks of the University of California at Berkeley library. I spent probably three years doing nothing but wandering around looking for books I’d found in the card catalog, then stumbling on other things that were filed next to them a couple stalls down. You just get fascinated; you forget what you’re there for and you make these remarkable discoveries. Some of them were crucial to what I ended up with. They were things nobody would have ever told me about; I would never have been able to find out through conventional research. I just happened upon some book that looked vaguely interesting. I opened it, I started reading it, I’d come across a mention — “What?! He did that? Now I have to find out about this.”

That was a privileged position. In other words, most people weren’t allowed in the stacks. I was wandering around there. I would spend all day there. I would rarely see another person.

Now, you go on the Internet and one thing leads you to another. You go on YouTube looking for something specific — it will lead you to five, six, maybe dozens, or even hundreds of similarly linked pieces of information. And you’re off. You’re wandering around in the stacks, except the stacks are so much bigger. They’re so much more expansive. They include so much more. And it’s faster. It’s so much faster.

All the time, people are sending me things they’ve found on YouTube that they’ve just stumbled on. They weren’t looking for them, and here they are. Somebody the other day sent me a Bo Diddley performance from Shindig! in the mid ’60s. Jack Goode comes on, and here’s Bo Diddley with his whole band and a white horn section that looks like the Swingin’ Medallions. You know, a frat-house horn section of four or five guys. It’s one of the most exciting performances I’ve ever seen on TV. I remember Squeeze on Saturday Night Live when they did “Annie Get Your Gun” [in 1982]. I mean, my heart was in my mouth. I’d never seen anything so exciting. The shout that goes up from the audience when the song is over is not like a normal Saturday Night Live response to a performance. People can’t believe what they just saw. This was like that.

It made me think of these films that Scorsese used in his [PBS] history of the blues. They were made of American blues performers in Europe in the late ’50s, or maybe early ’60s, and they set up these phony rural backgrounds. You have Big Joe Williams wandering in, sitting down, starting to play “Baby Please Don’t Go,” whatever it was. You can tell that these people — Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, Lightnin’ Hopkins — were giving 5 percent, 10 percent, of what they’d have to give to get over in a Chicago blues club or a juke joint. They just know that the people they’re playing to couldn’t tell the real thing from the false. They know that just being there is all these people want, so they’re shucking. And here’s Bo Diddley on Shindig!, and as the person who sent this to me said, “If he gave anymore my head would explode.”

That stuff is out there. We’re finding it. I think that’s just fabulous. People will create their own frames of reference out of that, or they will find a frame they’ve gotten secondhand.

When you talk about the Doors or Van Morrison, there’s a little bit of the myth in there. Certainly the Doors are a mythical band, and you have to deal with that. You talk about the Oliver Stone movie, which uses the myth as its fuel.

Sure. I talk about the movie mainly in terms of the way it is able, within that legendary mythical context that it builds, to recreate performances, either that happened or didn’t happen, with such incredible immediacy, and a kind of use of symbolism that doesn’t feel that way.

Probably because of that, they’re a band your approach really works with. They’re asking to be interpreted, in a sense. They were self-conscious.

There’s no question. When you said “collegiate” — speaking of the Internet — there’s this thing floating around, a Florida State University video produced in 1960, 1961. Florida State made this video trying to get the state legislature to give it more money. Their budget is being cut. They’re showing what the consequences of this are. And they’re showing a kid going out to his mailbox and opening the mailbox and taking out a letter: “Sorry, we can’t admit you. Your qualifications are great and you’re completely admissible, but we don’t have enough room, because we’re forced to turn away so many students who are qualified.” The student who’s opening this letter is Jim Morrison — he was a student there, and somebody said, “Will you be in this video and be the heartbroken kid who doesn’t get in?” That’s pretty remarkable.

But yeah: These people had gone to college. They had taken classes in modernist literature, were exposed to the 20th-century tradition of art maudit. That’s deeply attractive: It’s basically the tradition of European nihilism. When Ray Manzarek’s wife suggested they do “Alabama Song,” that’s just second nature to them. This is a world they already know and love. So they’re not dumb people. They’ve read and they’ve thought, and they see themselves as part of that tradition, and part of the Elvis tradition, and part of lots of different traditions.

But what I tried to do in this book was just write about the songs. What happens in the songs? When does the music work? When doesn’t it? What’s happening? Why does a song fail? A song that is interesting to me — I don’t want it to fail. I don’t care about 90 percent of the songs on The Soft Parade and Waiting for the Sun, whether they fail or not.

My favorite line in the book is when you call “Five to One” “the band’s own youth-revolt exploitation number.” It doesn’t seem to come from a place of deep-seated disappointment. There’s a real sense of betrayal in what you’ve written about Rod Stewart, for example, when he went Hollywood. Whereas with the Doors, it’s almost like you expect them to fail a certain amount because they’re reaching for certain things.

Well, I guess the difference is that I made a more emotional connection with Rod Stewart’s songs, or they made a connection with me. It’s just different from the connections I’ve made with the Doors’ music. I love their music in different ways. With “Maggie May” and particularly “Every Picture Tells a Story,” “Reason to Believe,” so many other songs, my chest is open, my heart is beating. Everything is exposed. That’s the way I want to live. It just seems like this incredible vision of a good life, a life of complete fulfillment. That’s what I hear in Rod Stewart, in the stuff that I love the best. There’s no question that what’s going on in the Doors is chillier. It’s more thought-out, more formally experimental — it’s different. I love them both, but in a real different way.

What Rod Stewart gave up, if that’s what happened, if he gave up or lost the ability to create the emotional dramas that I was so swept up in, will be swept up in anytime I hear those songs — it seemed to me that he just turned his back on that. I remember talking about this with [music critic] Simon Frith once, and he said, “As far as Rod Stewart knows, when he was coming up, the only reason to get into pop music was to make a million dollars and fuck movie stars. That’s just what it was for.” I thought about that. And that’s OK. If [in order] to make a million dollars and find movie stars to fuck, he had to become a great artist, that’s the price you pay. That’s really how I saw it.

You can’t quite extrapolate that onto the Doors. This is a corny thing to say, but they seemed to be in it for the art.

Well, there’s Ray Manzarek saying in the origin story on the beach — Jim Morrison is singing “Moonlight Drive,” and Manzarek is saying, “Let’s form a band and make a million dollars.” And certainly Robby Krieger, in telling how he wrote “Light My Fire,” wrote this sketch of it, he was trying to write a song like “Hey Joe” by the Leaves. In other words, he was trying to write a hit. He couldn’t think of any other legitimate reason for writing a song. You have to have that. That’s great. There’s nothing wrong with it.

But they certainly thought of themselves as artists. Part of that is the jazz background of John Densmore and Ray Manzarek, and part of it is Jim Morrison wanting to be a poet, and part of it is Robby Krieger’s roots in the folk revival. His idols were Koerner, Ray & Glover. That was art. Obviously, Koerner, Ray & Glover weren’t making a million dollars. It was an incredible thrill for them when they played Minneapolis and they got to invite Tony Glover onstage and play harmonica with them.

Schappell, the co-founder of acclaimed literary magazine Tin House and contributing editor to Vanity Fair, spoke with eMusic’s Jami Attenberg about the process of writing linked collections, songs that empower women, and her visions of life as a rodeo clown.

First, let’s talk audiobooks. The narrator, Julia Whelan, is a former child actress, which seems fitting for Blueprints for Building Better Girls. So many of your characters seem to be faking it till they make it, or at least trying to pass for something normal. Have you listened to your audiobook yet? Are you a fan of audiobooks?

I’ve only listened to a little bit. In all honesty it freaked me out. I believe I’m not quite there yet, though I’m certain Julia has done a swell job.

I really got turned on to them when my kids were small. We listened to Roald Dahl, all of the Harry Potter books, plus Peter and the Stargazers, just about anything Jim Dale reads, Bill Moyers’s Hero With a Thousand Faces, and, of course, David Sedaris. I confess I have Anna Karenina but, as with the book, I’ve yet to listen to it all the way through. I guess the next one I’ll buy will be War and Peace and not to listen to that one either.

Your characters tend to be extremely quick-witted, and dialogue plays a big part in this book. Do you read your work out loud at all when you’re writing it?

I do read my dialogue — actually all my work — out loud. I’ve discovered that when I read my work aloud I will balk in certain places, not wanting to read a section because I know it’s poorly written, or just plain wrong.

Do you enjoy giving readings?

I enjoy doing readings, and think I have yet to do one where, as I’m reading, I’m not changing a word here and there, or skipping a line. I edit as I’m reading; it’s a compulsion. I don’t know if Julia has done that while reading my book. I suppose once I steel myself I’ll have to listen to more of it and see.

What are some great readings you’ve seen other authors give?

I’ve been very fortunate to hear some amazing readings. Toni Morrison was extraordinary.

And every year Tin House has a literary writing workshop out in Portland, Oregon. Every night, there is a reading by one of the authors who are teaching for us, which has afforded me the opportunity to hear some incredible reading too, like Joy Williams, Denis Johnson and Dorothy Allison, who is positively riveting. The best readers really embody their work.

Luis Urrea is another one, I’ve seen him drop his book in the middle of a reading, and start to recite the story from memory. He records his own books. I find that very moving, profound — to record your own work so future generations could hear your stories in your own voice.

In one of the stories from Blueprints, “Out of the Blue and Into the Black,” one of your characters, Bender, talks about making a playlist for her funeral. What was the inspiration behind that?

I once had a boyfriend who used to do this, he’d call me up at midnight and be like, “Okay, so when I die — subtext here: After I commit suicide — I want you to play, Rush’s “Red Barchetta.” It seems like a classically narcissistic thing to do.

Did you make any playlists while you were writing this book?

I made two playlists for this book. One that is the music the characters listen to, the music that is of the time I’m writing about — Springsteen, Crosby Stills Nash and Young, Led Zepplin, Rush, Joan Jett, Neil Young, The Go-Go’s, the English Beat, Miles Davis. Listening to that helped me access my memories of that time.

The other was my “Bad Girls” playlist, which included a wide range of female artists from ’60s to present time. A lot of the songs are about female empowerment, or power, from Leslie Gore’s “You Don’t Own Me” to L7′s “Shit List” and MEN’s “Who Am I to Feel So Free.” And, of course, sex: The Runaways, “Cherry Bomb” and the Donnas’ “It’s Too Bad About Your Girl.” Girl-on-girl aggression, and some of them are just fun, like Bow Wow Wow’s “I Want Candy” and Le Tigre’s “Hot Topic” which salutes all these badass feminists.

What kind of music are you listening to right now?

Right now I’m listening to a lot of different things, but every season I make a playlist of what I’m listening to and so far what I’ve got is the Like, who sound like a ’60s girl group, they have a great song called, “Wishing He Was Dead,” and the Sneaker Pimps’ “Tesko Suicide,” the new Peter Bjorn and John, and the Arctic Monkeys. Also, X, they were just in town and I couldn’t see them, so I’m trying to convince myself that cranking up “Wild Gift” and “Los Angeles” is like being at a show. Though, of course, it’s not at all.

Did you set out to write a linked short story collection, or did your characters find a way to each other in the writing of it?

Good question. I didn’t really have a set structure in mind when I started writing the stories. In fact, because my first book, Use Me, was linked stories I had this idea I must do something completely different. So, despite the fact that the linked stories form really speaks to me, I spent a long time working on a novel that was lousy, but that I felt I ought to write. I realize that everything you make is part of the process, nothing is wasted, but I would be a flat-out liar if I didn’t tell how piteously I’d cried about the time I felt I’d wasted on that book.

At the same time, though, I was also writing stories, some of which are in Blueprints for Building Better Girls. I didn’t really think too much about how connected the women were at first, I would just find myself, while writing, discovering that a character in one story was also the protagonist of an entirely different story. It made sense — they are from the same town in New Jersey — they have similar backgrounds, each feels like an outsider, each feels alienated, each relies on a persona to function in the world.

When I had it all put together, yes, there were definitely connections that I’d made that I took out. So much stuff I took out of these stories. I didn’t want the stories to feel too connected, because it’s not about one place, or one group of friends, or a family, it’s about the connections they make with each other, and the missed connections, the spaces between people, the judgments we make about people we barely know. We overlap more than we know with others; we share landscapes and sometimes friends, without knowing it. I like that idea.

You’ve worked extensively as an editor as well as a writer. Do you feel any sort of push and pull between those two universes, especially when you’re creating your own work?

When I’m creating work, I try to make sure that my interior editor — a true tear-you-down harridan — is locked up in chains in a steel box at the bottom of Lake Michigan. Or that’s my intention. Of course invariably she has hidden a key under her tongue and will, after a time, free herself.

I do find when I’m revising my work that I use this strategy that Allen Ginsberg, when he was teaching at NYU, used to talk about. Which was to look at your work through the eyes of your most trusted readers, friends, teachers. I do that. One of my old professors from grad school used to mark sections of my stories. OTT? Which meant “Over the top?” When I’m editing, I often ask myself, “OTT?”

It’s nearly a 10-year gap between this and your first collection, Use Me. Do you think we’ll have to wait that long for another book? What are you working on now?

As long as I’m upright, and enough people buy the new book so I can afford to pay my electric bills, feed my kidlets and occasionally buy a new hat, then yes, I’m hopeful. I do have to admit that a job as a rodeo clown or a poo-smith in the big cats’ exhibit at the Bronx Zoo, is very intriguing. Especially when you figure that the pain-of-death to success ratio heavily favors rodeo clowns and poo-smiths.

Right now I’m working on two books; one I can tell you about. It deals with this kind of crazy epilepsy I have, called TLE and was inspired by an essay I just published in the Fall issue of Tin House, and the second one, well…you’ll just have to wait and see.

eMusic’s Jess Sauer spoke with Grossman about the benefits of youthful aimlessness, the psychology of fantasy, and the worst fistfight he never got into.

Compared to realist fiction, fantasy gives you a lot of latitude to let your imagination run riot. Have there ever been scenes or creatures that you’ve created and then realized they’re too over-the-top even for fantasy?

Oh man, you can go pretty far! I had a dragon in the first book that I cut out — it was just too Dungeons & Dragons — but then I went ahead and put it in the second book. You have to wait till the time is right for a dragon.

It’s funny about fantasy: Fantasy worlds are governed by very sharp rules. They’re not necessarily the rules of reality, or thermodynamics, or whatever, but fantasy worlds tend to play by psychological rules, which are very real. Your subconscious has its own laws. Fantasy worlds play by those rules, so it’s not like just anything can happen, though definitely different sorts of things happen. There are some things that you wouldn’t do in fantasy. For example — at least in my world, and in most fantasy novels — magic can’t raise someone from the dead. There are certain calamities, certain problems that it can’t solve. At the very least, there have to be dire consequences for using it to solve those problems.

That makes sense. In The Magician King, there are bargains and sacrifices that have to be made, but that’s also just true in life. That seems to be one the benefits of fantasy, that it allows you to explore everyday psychological issues in a more concrete way.

Yeah. I often get touchy and defensive when people refer to fantasy as escapist, because I don’t really think it is escapist. In fantasy, you leave reality, but only to reencounter it in transmographied form.

What I really like about this book, and The Magicians before it, is the idea of magic as a form of privilege that can be kind of oppressive in the same way that it’s helpful. For instance, Alice’s parents in the first book are kind of these bored people who just use magic to redecorate their house, and there are these loops Quentin goes into constantly, where despite having everything he wants, he’s still miserable.

I’m very influenced by Evelyn Waugh. He’s mostly a comic novelist, but he has one full-fledged masterpiece, Brideshead Revisited. In his time, he was much criticized for writing about the upper classes. Everyone said, “Well, they don’t have real problems. You should be writing socially conscious fiction about the proletariat or something like that.” The fantasy writer’s predicament is in some ways a little bit similar. Why write about Harry Potter? Why not write about Dudley Dursley, who’s got some real problems coming to him down the line? It’s all in what you choose to use to talk about problems. You can use stories about magicians to talk about real problems. It’s just that magicians are sexier.

There’s an idea expressed in The Magician King that you really can’t go out and knock on trees looking for a quest. If you really overdo the striving, you’re probably going to mess things up. It seems like beyond getting educated and trained and preparing to deal with the future, the best you can do to find your purpose is to wander around in the forest a little bit. That idea seems to apply not just to the perils of being a 20-something magician, but of being a 20-something anything.

I definitely think so. You know that an author has sunk low when he starts quoting conversations with his shrink, but I’m going to go ahead and do that. I remember whining to my shrink about all these years that I wasted. In my 20s, I temped a lot, I just mooched around, not — to the naked eye — actually doing anything. I remember talking to him, like, “God, I can’t believe I wasted all those years, I’ll never get them back.” And my shrink said, “What makes you think that you wasted them? You were spending all this time getting ready and solving stuff away.” It’s a bit like Quentin, you know, you’re on the quest but you don’t know it yet. You’ll only figure that out after you’ve been on it for a few years.

When you’re engaged in world-building, how do you organize it? Do you outline the details of the world in the same way you’d outline the plot of a book, or do you let it unfold and create it as you write?

Those are the two options, right? I always think of Tolkien and Lewis, who wrote at the same time and were friends. Tolkien, before he started Lord of the Rings, he wrote himself entire Elvish dictionaries and things like that, getting everything planned out. Ridiculous amounts of stuff he’d never even use. Lewis just made up everything as he went along, and it drove Tolkien crazy. At one point, Lewis borrowed a place name from Middle Earth, but he misspelled it, and Tolkien was like, “How can you do that? That’s awful!” Lewis was the sloppiest world-builder imaginable. I think I’m somewhere in between. You make the world that the story needs, and then you’ve got these rules, and then in a funny way it starts feeding back into the story. You may have the story, and then you’re like, “Okay, here’s the world. But wait, if this is true, then the story has to go this way.” So you sort of push and pull from both directions. Or, I do, anyway.

Speaking of the friendship between Tolkien and Lewis, has writing these books put you in touch with any other fantasy writers you’d really admired before you started writing it yourself?

Yeah, actually. It’s sort of great, because I move both in fantasy-writer circles and then also in the kind of more literary circle, and I know some people on both sides. It’s very strange to meet people who you’ve spent literally dozens, if not hundreds, of hours reading their stuff. It’s a little bit of an out-of-body experience, standing there and talking to Jonathan Franzen or George R.R. Martin. It’s hard not to panic, but if everybody panicked when they talked to Jonathan Franzen, no one would ever talk to him, so you just have to kind of pull yourself together. Pull yourself together, man, and talk to George R.R. Martin, who is an incredibly kind, friendly, warm person.

Martin is enjoying wider mainstream success due to the HBO adaptation Game of Thrones. Not that he wasn’t wildly successful in the fantasy world to begin with, but he’s gaining more fans among people who previously had not really read much fantasy.

Yeah, I think it’s fantastic. I have been tracking and trying to promote George R.R. Martin’s work for years — that whole business of him being the American Tolkien was me, writing in Time. I think people still don’t give him enough credit for how incredibly radical his interpretation of the Tolkien tradition is. He is an interesting writer, and I think, ultimately, as important as any literary writer working today. He’s a radical and complicated guy. What he does is really not simple. So I’m still happy that people outside of fantasy are finding him. He should be read. Everyone should read George!

I’m interested in the role that science and religion play in your books. In this book, especially on Julia’s part, there’s a very strong desire to reconcile religion and science with magic. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Sure. I didn’t grow up in a household that was religious at all, so I have to tread carefully. I don’t have any religious heritage that was passed down to me, and I don’t particularly identify with any of religion. My father’s Jewish and my mom was Anglican, but they both didn’t have much to do with their religions. I have to tangle with religion because, basically, when you’re dealing with a magical universe, eventually you’re going to run into some people who are powerful enough that the only word for them is gods. If I’m saying something important about religion, that’s for somebody else to decide. As far as science, I’m just extremely interested in science. I cover technology for Time. I don’t like to leave my magic vague and mystical; I like to violate as few laws of physics as possible. So, if someone is, I don’t know, freezing some water using magic, well, I kind of want to know where the heat goes. It’s got to go somewhere else, so let’s save as many laws of thermodynamics as we possibly can. To me, that makes the magic feel more real.

Are you planning a followup? I’m not going to give away the end of The Magician King, obviously, but there’s ambiguity as to whether it’s over or not.

It doesn’t seem really over, does it, at the end of The Magician King? Yeah, I’ll write one more. I know a medium amount about what happens in it. But I’ve got to finish this tour first!

Did you know there’d be a second book while you were writing the first?

I can honestly say — and this says something about my ability to plan for the future — that it never once occurred to me that there would be another book after the first one. The Magicians took me five years, and I did it all on spec. There wasn’t any contract, and I hadn’t talked to publishers about it. It was so hard for me, every time I sat down to work on it, to convince myself that there was some chance that this would actually be published. I had to get past that. I would spend like half an hour just trying to buck up the nerve to go work on this thing. I never even thought about what would happen after it. I barely believed that it would be published in the first place.

I’m hoping you’re convinced now.

Yeah, it’s starting to sink in!

One last question: there are some pretty epic fight scenes in your books. Have you ever been in a real fight?

Ha, I can honestly say I’ve never been in an actual fight. I should probably go out and get beaten up for research. When I was in high school — I guess most people do their fighting in high school — I wasn’t a fighter. I wasn’t a lover, either. Whatever you are if you’re not a lover or a fighter, that was me.

You were the third option.

Yeah, I was door No. 3.

Cast aside your wireless controllers and mint-condition first-edition whatevers; put a bookmark in your guidebooks, dungeon masters and galactic hitchhikers. Behold, a new chosen one, the lord high supreme master nerd Ernest Cline.

If pop culture heads don’t already know that name — and they might; Cline wrote the screenplay for Fanboys, the 2008 cult comedy about Star Wars dorks desperately seeking George Lucas — they soon will. His debut novel, Ready Player One, is one long love letter to the ’80s, paying tribute to the movies, music, TV shows, video games and just about everything else that made the era so tough for us to leave behind. The book is also a wild dystopian adventure set in 2044 wherein poor-as-dirt underdog misfits battle evil forces in a massive virtual universe for fame, fortune and righteousness.

Before he died, reclusive tech tycoon James Halliday set up a giant treasure hunt full of ’80s-themed puzzles and willed his colossal empire to the first person who could solve it. In this corner we’ve got Wade, a pale, chubby, awkward gamer/hacker/street urchin. In that corner, we’ve got a massive hive-minded corporation willing to cheat and kill to get its hands on Halliday’s fortune. It’s an epic battle of good vs. evil, and positively riddled with subtle and not-so-subtle references to Ghostbusters, Rush, Family Ties, Joust, War Games, Voltron, Blade Runner and seemingly thousands of other touchstones of the Nintendo decade.

Cline was at home in Austin when eMusic’s Patrick Rapa caught up with him to chat about the lifetime of nerdiness that made Ready Player One possible (and why putting it on the big screen will not be easy).

Your nerd pedigree obviously goes back quite a bit. It couldn’t have always been fun.

Yeah. Definitely grade school was not fun; junior high was not fun. But in high school I started to discover the other huge geeks in my town, and we were all playing Dungeons and Dragons and reading comic books and hanging out. Once I found my crowd, it was a lot easier to be a geek. When you’re just a geek all by yourself it’s not nearly as much fun.

Seems like that’s one of the themes in Ready Player One: All these geeks are basically loners who are lucky to have found one another. And they’ve never met face to face.

A theme of the book is coming to grips with your geekiness and also how living your life online is not the best way to live, or the healthiest. I try not to preach. I want the story to be fun, but there are underlying observations about the human condition.

Did you feel isolated in your nerdiness growing up?

Maybe when I was a young kid. I mean, all teenagers feel isolated and full of angst but things never got quite as bad for me as they do for Wade. I tried to make Wade kind of like a Roald Dahl protagonist like in James and the Giant Peach or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Roald Dahl would always have these great young protagonists who have really horrible circumstances and then something happens to kick them off on this thrilling adventure that lifts them out of their circumstances. That’s what I tried to do with that character. So yeah, Wade’s a little more geeky than me and I also tried to write him as smarter than me, at least as far as book-smart intelligence. Which is tricky — writing a character that you want to seem smarter than you are.

You know, in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, he wasn’t just poor; he was insanely, inventively poor. All four of his grandparents had to share one bed…

Right.

And in Ready Player One you have the Stacks — giant trailer parks where all the mobile homes are stacked in towers a dozen high. It’s nuts. You’ve managed to come up with…

A new way for things to suck. Yeah, I wanted a white trash/Blade Runner kind of environment, you know? And I know my way around a trailer park. So in my mind, how could the future get worse? What could be worse than living in a trailer park? How about a vertically stacked, grossly overcrowded trailer park? So I think that’s where that came from. Also as a screenwriter I tend to think really visually and it seemed like a really cool image for a dystopian future.

I think I read somewhere that you grew up in a trailer park?

Oh yeah, when I was very little my family lived in a trailer park in Ohio and there was a tornado. What are the odds of a tornado hitting a trailer park? And I was lifted, you know, I was ripped out of my mom’s arms and separated from my family. I was a lost kid for a few days until they found me and identified me with my footprints.

Wow.

So yeah, I grew up hearing that story and seeing the newspaper clippings, so I’m certifiably tornado-bait white trash, or was. [Laughs]

I’ve never heard that before, “tornado bait.”

Yeah, I think I picked that up from Silence of the Lambs. I think Hannibal Lector calls Clarice tornado-bait white trash.

When you were writing this, were you thinking cinematically?

I think I’ve written nine or 10 screenplays. Only a few of them have been bought but I’ve written a lot of them and so the three-act structure and screenplay cinematic formatting was really pounded into me. I think that definitely influenced the way that I wrote my first novel.

I was trying to write a book that felt like you were watching a movie but I never in a million years thought it would become a movie. I actually was writing something consciously that I thought would never, could never become a movie. Like: ‘I’m going to write something that could never be a movie.’ And then I sold the movie rights the day after I sold the book. And since I was a screenwriter, then I had to be the one who figured out how to make it into a movie.

To make Ready Player One into a movie would there be all kinds of crazy copyright issues? So many movies, and characters and…

I know, and so many references to songs. You can mention somebody listened to a song in a book and it’s no problem, but if you want to have that song play in your movie then you’re reproducing the song and you have to pay the artist. Same with showing a painting or a TV show clip or anything. In a movie you’re reproducing it, whereas in a book you’re just mentioning it and the reader draws the picture in their head. So it’s a lot easier to make pop references in a book.

I’m lucky that Warner Brothers bought the movie rights and Warner Brothers is the biggest movie studio in the world. They have a huge catalog and they own some of the stuff that I talk about — like Blade Runner. But even so, you really can’t have people acting out another movie in your movie, stuff like that. A lot of it had to be reworked.

People think you can do anything in a movie that you can do in a book but in my experience, in this case anyway, there’s still a lot of stuff you can do in a book that’s impossible to do in a movie.

I know Albert Brooks recently wrote his debut novel after years and years of filmmaking, and it’s a futuristic dystopian thing, very different from yours. His is about healthcare and debt going out of control. It’s not the wackiest thing in the world but…

Sounds good; I love Albert Brooks.

Yeah, it’s a good book. And the reason he said he wrote it was he’d never get the movie version made. As a book, he was suddenly free of all budget constraints.

Yeah.

And you’re someone who’s worked on films so was there an I-can-do-anything freedom?

Yeah, Fanboys was a very geeky referential movie full of pop culture stuff but it was nowhere near as nerdy as I originally envisioned and it got watered down a lot by the studio. Because when you make a movie you’re making a product for mass consumption that they want to appeal to as many people as possible. That’s just effective business, but that seemed really frustrating to me. So when I was working on my book I’m like, “Well, I don’t have to answer to a studio. I don’t have to worry about budget or casting or financing or any of that, I can just do whatever I want and let my imagination run wild.”

Did you have to do a lot of research? Did you know a lot of this stuff already?

I did know all of it or almost all of it. Often when I threw in something, I would Google it real quick just to make sure I was remembering something correctly. But part of the fun of the book was just throwing in references to all of the pop culture stuff that I love. I’m a huge movie nerd and I love science fiction and fantasy novels and all kinds of video games, so that was just stuff from my life that I threw in.

How excited were you to get Wil Wheaton to narrate the audiobook?

Terribly excited. They actually made a deal for me to do the audiobook myself, because I’ve done some spoken word and live performance. But I’m not an actor by any stretch and all of my favorite audiobooks are ones that are read by actors. Oftentimes the ones that are read by authors I don’t like so much because authors aren’t usually the best performers. So I wanted somebody else to do it and he was my first choice.

I needed somebody who is about my age and who would be able to pronounce all of the different references and understand them in context so they wouldn’t be speaking gibberish. That narrows the list down big time. [Laughs] And Wil Wheaton’s birthday is two months from mine and he grew up playing role playing games and video games and he’s a writer, too. He wrote a column about classic Atari video games and all of that stuff, so I knew he would totally understand the characters because he’s a huge geek too.

When I heard his first recordings, I had to be by myself a little bit and squeal like a little girl because I was so excited.

I won’t spoil it with specifics, but Wil Wheaton gets a shout out in the book.

I wanted to keep it a secret. Wil didn’t read the book ahead of time because it’s part of his process, so he reads the book for the first time as he’s recording the audiobook usually because it helps his performance. And so he didn’t know that he was mentioned in the book until he actually got to his name, which was awesome.

Let’s talk about Rush 2112. What was it back then that drew you to that album and what sticks with you now?

Rush is like the band for the nerdy outcast kids of the ’70s and ’80s. Their lyrics are all about being an outcast. Really smart lyrics, too — stuff aimed at more literate people.