Related articles and links |  1 of 3

Chuck Palahniuk found an audience for his writing and social commentary when Fight Club became a defining event for a generation. His books include Survivor, Invisible Monsters, Choke, and now Lullaby (Doubleday).

What made you want to be a writer?

Mr. Olsen in the fifth grade made me want to be a writer. He said, "Chuck, you do this really well. And this is much better than setting fires, so keep it up." That made me a writer.

How would you describe your writing?

On one level my stuff is about me going into the world and picking up what people are talking about and things that are common archetypal issues in the lives of all my friends. I then find some way to portray those and demonstrate them in a story.

On another level my stuff is really my stuff. Lullaby is me hashing out whether or not I recommended the death penalty for the man who was convicted of killing my father in 1999. Every one of the books is really me wrestling with [personal issues] but in a very fictional way. So in a way it's the world, and in a way it's me.

What impact have tragic events had in your life and your worldview?

There was a part in Fight Club where I talked about my grandmother. She had breast cancer. She went in for a partial mastectomy. Coming out of the hospital, my grandfather was carrying her suitcase and he said, "Darn, I feel lopsided." And she said, "You feel lopsided?"

It was such a wonderful, funny, dark joke about something so tragic as losing a breast to cancer. That is how my family deals with everything, by finding the really dark funny thing that is present in all tragedy.

When we were cleaning out my father's house, my siblings and I were alternately laughing and crying because there was always something very funny to remember. Personally, I felt very relieved I was not going to have to introduce my father to Winona Ryder, because he had been really pressuring me for an introduction.

How do you come to understand people's minds and the way they talk?

I am socially retarded in that when people talk about The Sopranos or Friends, or Seinfeld or Sex and the City, I have never seen these shows so I have nothing to add. But by the time something makes it to television, it has been through so many committees, so many processes, it is such a commodity, it has been so edited and produced and art directed, that I don't think there's really anything original there.

I want to be talking to people in the Laundromat and on the street and in the airport, and hearing their stories, the stories of the people next to me on the bus.

Everyone I talk to has got stories that are so much more compelling and entertaining and hilarious than anything I would ever see on television or almost any movie I could ever watch. And I'm always so much more entertained by real people, even total strangers, than I am by what's on that screen in front of me.

I would really like to see more people expressing themselves and bringing their views and their stories into the culture. You know, there's a million movies out there that are better than the movies that come out this week, but they're just not being made. People are just not making the effort to sell their stories.

What effects of the media have you seen on our culture?

So many of our enormous emotional crises are lived through the media. They're lived through movies, they're lived through what we watch on television, they're not actual events in our life. And in a way they don't really exhaust or fulfill anything for us because they're just things that we experience in this detached voyeuristic way. We don't have friends, so we watch Friends on TV.

next page... |  1 of 3

October (Web-only) 2002, Vol. 46