Fight Club Author Chuck Palahniuk on Life, Death and Finding Meaning In Your Life
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In this conversation with Tom, author Chuck Palahniuk explores his philosophy on mental management and the necessity of confronting life's dark underbelly rather than avoiding it through superficial cheerfulness or "looking good." He argues that humans are both meaning-making machines and status-seeking machines who constantly try to dominate their environment while hiding from internal pain. To counteract this, Palahniuk employs a technique he calls an emotional striptease in his public reading of the story *Guts*, where he deliberately humiliates himself by sharing deeply shameful secrets. This act serves as a ritualized sacrifice that gives audiences permission to admit their own worst behaviors and unresolved issues, breaking down social pretenses and fostering genuine connection through shared vulnerability rather than filtered, homogenized media narratives. Palahniuk emphasizes the critical importance of committing one's life to a single pursuit after age thirty-one, noting that while it feels limiting at first, focusing on one thing actually creates a larger life by eliminating the paralysis of opportunity cost. He illustrates this with an analogy of standing in a room with a thousand doors; success comes from closing 999 of them rather than trying to do everything slightly. This commitment requires accepting mortality and rejecting the societal lie that the future will bring constant improvement, instead choosing to be present within one's current reality. By inventing his own massive problems—such as writing fiction—to obsess over, he renders daily trivialities like taxes or obligations insignificant, allowing him to live without suffering from them while remaining dedicated to a singular creative purpose. The discussion delves into the mechanics of storytelling and how Palahniuk uses "too far" moments to ensure his work is memorable rather than merely likable. He rejects characters who are paragons of virtue in favor of those making corrupt choices or facing tragic realities, arguing that only by going too far can a story resonate with the full spectrum of human experience. This approach challenges readers to integrate their own shadows and realize they possess capabilities for both heroism and villainy. Palahniuk also touches on his personal history regarding Ted Bundy and mental management, explaining how he views writing as a way to process unresolved issues rather than just reporting events. He believes that if one does not go too far in exploring difficult truths during their specific window of life—often fueled by anger or disillusionment—they will later regret never having taken the risk. Furthermore, Palahniuk shares profound insights into self-soothing narratives and neurochemistry as tools for emotional regulation. He describes his childhood habit of running scenarios where he lost fights to exhaust himself chemically so he could fall asleep, a practice mirrored by Olympic athletes who lower testosterone after losses to prevent premature re-engagement in conflict. This concept extends to dreaming, which strips emotion from memory during REM sleep, and the therapeutic potential of revisiting trauma with altered neurochemistry, such as through MDMA or creative writing workshops that turn emotional stories into crafted exercises. He cites author Chelsea Cain's work on serial killers as her own self-comforting story used for decades, illustrating how storytelling can be a functional mechanism to wear out anxiety until it loses its power over the teller. The interview concludes with Palahniuk recounting his father's death and the coincidental circumstances surrounding it, framing them through a narrative lens of fate rather than tragedy to help himself process grief. He reflects on an encounter in a dollar store where he gave a grieving man a giant stuffed penguin after the man lost his brother; this gesture shocked the man out of his despair by demonstrating that life could still offer surprises and delight beyond childhood conditioning. Palahniuk asserts that art should not aim to fix people or provide new solutions but rather to bust open their limited perceptions of what is possible, showing them a wider spectrum of existence than they decided upon in early childhood. His ultimate goal for his work is to shock audiences out of their dramas and make them excited about living again, proving that life continues with unpredictability even after profound loss.
Read the full video transcript
Everybody, welcome to another episode of
Conversations with Tom. I am here with
somebody that I've been dying to talk to
for a very long time, the
extraordinarily talented, best-selling
author many times over, Chuck Palahniuk.
Chuck, welcome to the show. Hey, Tom,
thank you for asking me.
Dude, I am really excited.
So glad that it lined up with your most
recent book, The Invention of Sound,
which was a very much has your
fingerprints all over it. There's
something very unique about the way that
you approach story and character that I
am deeply affected by and entranced by.
And
the first thing I want to talk to you
about and I feel like there are going to
be many directions that we will go in
the course of this conversation, not the
least of which you promised we're going
to talk about Ted Bundy,
but is mental management. So, in reading
your works, you take a a really raw look
at some seriously
hard to look at things, which then in my
research got me trying to answer the
question why.
And
you talk about cognitive reframing, you
talk about chewing on things that bother
you, are unchangeable, and yet you can't
live with them, and that's sort of where
your writing begins, and so I thought
that would be a pretty interesting place
to start.
You know, uh
people
I find make the mistake
of thinking that you have to write about
your issue
uh to be writing about your issue.
Uh they they kind of overlook the fact
that no matter what you're writing
about, you're writing about your issue.
So,
no matter what the shiny subject is,
you're eventually, if you do it right,
you're going to fool yourself into
exploring something fantastically dark,
because there's a reason why you are
attracted to the shiny subject. So, you
can never get away from writing about
yourself and writing about your
unresolveds.
So, you might as well just accept that
on the face of it.
How much of like the human psyche do you
think is is about dealing with the dark
stuff? Like are there people that just
sort of walk through life and they're
not bogged down by that and it's just a
particular kind of person that finds
themselves
with those unresolveds as you call them
or is is that darkness that unresolved
just a natural part of the human psyche
and everyone is going to deal with it?
Uh yeah, everybody's dealing with it,
but
I always uh
I always get really nervous around
people who are always cheerful and and
uh enthusiastic all the time
because they're the people who seem to
be the least effective at dealing with
it.
Um
and I find them just incredibly
exhausting, these people who are just
being clever
because I see clever as just this
ongoing way of sort of denying
uh the issue at hand rather than dealing
with it.
And so,
I feel like my my life is wasted when
I'm around people like that.
Um I would much rather
be around the people who want to talk or
you know
who want to risk looking bad
because when I'm around people who are
just looking good, just telling their
hero stories,
um
I feel
like I might as well be watching
mainstream uh television or or so much
so much media that is so heavily
marketed and filtered and sent through
test audiences
that it's like this fantastically
processed cheese.
There is nothing left to it.
Uh
yeah, there's nothing to be to be gained
from it. There's nothing raw about it
anymore. I'm really interested in
in that need to process that humans have
in finding
um that you're extraordinarily good at
finding the sort of dark underbelly
story that everybody has and I don't
know if you you are good at getting them
out of people or if um
if you help people let their guard down
or you just seek those people out who
are willing to talk about them. I'm not
sure but like guts uh which I didn't
faint when hearing you read it but dude
that like really that changed my blood
pressure. I was tingling. It was so
uncomfortable.
And the glee that you get when you have
a chance to read that to people I find
utterly fascinating. Um is there
something that you're revolving around
there in terms of your own unresolved?
Like what
give people like the quick glimpse into
what guts is and then tell me why that
one is so iconic for you.
In order to read guts publicly you have
to shed all human dignity.
No seriously we are
you know you talk about how we're we
human beings are meaning making
machines. We are also looking good
machines. And we're machines
that just spend all of our time
trying not to be dominated and trying to
look good. Oh [ __ ] dude. I've never
heard anybody say that before. Sorry to
interrupt you. Trying not to be
dominated? Trying not to be dominated by
everything around us.
And to a certain extent trying to
dominate
in a kind of proactive way.
But when you go up there in front of
people and you read guts
you are it's worse than taking your
clothes off.
You are completely humiliating yourself.
And
there's a fantastic power in that. It's
like doing this
complete emotional striptease
where
you are left with nothing.
No no shred of dignity.
And you have completely debased just I
have completely debased myself when I've
read that story.
And what's remarkable is when you read
it to young people,
young people's only access to power is
in literally looking good. Is in having
a great deal of vitality and energy and
in physically being as attractive as
they can be.
Because they don't have a lot of
education, they don't have a lot of
resources or connections yet. So their
their main access to power is looking
good. So when you go up there, when I go
up there, see I keep switching to second
person because I have to displace the
whole experience.
But when I go up there and I risk
looking really bad
and being humiliated,
I show them a kind of power that they've
never considered before.
And I give them a freedom to present
their worst self or the time that they
really messed up badly.
And so the magic of guts is afterwards
in that 14-hour signing line when people
come up and they tell me
the thing that they did
that was as bad as guts.
Because they've never told anybody this
and they've never felt safe telling
anybody this.
And so the magic of guts is that
I give up any pretense of looking good
and so I give other people just that
little window of of
doing the same.
That is so intriguing to me. So I I'm I
had in researching you the experience
that people are having now listening to
you that haven't heard guts yet. And I
just kept hearing you mention it,
mention it. Guts, guts this and and I
thought I just need to hit pause and go
find a version of you doing Guts. And so
I went and watched it and
honestly, Chuck, when I went into it, I
was like
I'm so impervious to that stuff. Like
one of the interview questions that I do
when people interview with me
is I ask them, when was the last time
you were offended?
And the reason I ask them that is it's a
barometer for me of like sort of
emotional resilience. And if you're easy
to offend, it just won't be a good
long-term fit with me. Mhm. Um because I
consider myself almost impossible to
offend.
And things like words just don't get
under my skin. Now, if seeing something
visually, that could definitely be
distressing, which is why I was so
curious to know if you'd seen Sick, um
the uh the life and death of Bob Bob
Flanagan Super Masochist, cuz that was
hard to watch. But I didn't think there
were going to be words that you could
have written down on a piece of paper
that would change my physiology and oh
boy, was I wrong.
And
feeling myself get that like sense of I
want to look away. I mean, obviously
there's nothing to see, but I wanted to
look away from the ideas that you were
presenting to me.
And I just thought, whoa, like how do
you how do you go there? What would
drive you to write that? To want to
spend that much time with it?
And
in researching you, you threw out a line
one time and I couldn't tell like if you
were just joking or if that's like
really the thing that makes Guts so
interesting to you. And you were like,
oh, I don't have self-esteem at all. And
I was like, that can't be true. Like he
has to be joking. But if Guts is you
dealing with that to to sort of lessen
the emotional response of like I'm just
going to go up and be sort of
emotionally bare naked in front of
people. I'm going to do it over and over
and over until
wanting to look good or please people is
no longer a thing. Is that why you keep
coming back to it?
You know, this kind of bridges to
another topic that we had discussed
getting to and that is the idea that
I think
that you have to sacrifice your life for
something.
And I wrote a line in a story once where
a character
resolves to do something with the idea
that history can live without one human
being.
I don't matter.
Uh history can live without me.
And once you accept that
that you know that your life that my
life is going to be about this one thing
then
it's kind of an honor to go up there and
to ritualistically kill yourself
by reading a story that nobody in their
right mind would present in public.
Um
it's just a kind of a wonderful sort of
uh Harry Caray or the ritualized
sacrifice or suicide.
Um
and it all comes from deciding
at probably around the age of 30 or 31
that
whether or not it was the right or the
wrong decision I was going to throw away
the rest of my life
writing fiction.
Um
yeah, that history could live without
one person.
A, that's a powerful insight. Um
B, it's a it's a pretty interesting
story that you come to writing so late
in your life. Uh if I remember right,
around 32, 33, you're working uh in a
diesel shop if I'm if I have the sort of
timelines here correct. Um
this idea of committing yourself to one
thing, does that bother you at all that
that we can only essentially live one
life?
No, you know
it at first it looks like this
fantastically limiting thing.
I can't commit to one thing because
the opportunity cost would exclude
everything else.
But the irony is that by committing to
one thing
it's given me a life that is so much
larger than I ever could have imagined
when I was trying to be a kind of
generalist
a generalist who was going to kind of do
a little bit of everything.
But by focusing on one thing
I've got a bigger life than I ever ever
could have imagined for myself.
So if I'm being honest, I think the
there may not be anything in my life as
aggravating to me as
having to choose one life. And I I
really believe in the need for people to
recognize that. I believe that it's
super important that people embrace it
and I always give people from a a life
perspective of look, here's the perfect
analogy. You're standing in a room with
a thousand doors and your job is to
close 999 of them. And that's that's
where people get stuck is it isn't even
that they go through one and don't like
it. It's that the idea of the
opportunity cost of closing the doors is
so paralyzing. And I bring that idea up
because I am the guy standing in the
room having a hard time closing the
doors.
And there are precious few things in
life that irritate me as much as that.
And I'm not sure like what sort of open
wound that is that I'm trying to process
through. And I've been able to do it and
as a result um you know, I've got a lot
of worldly success, but I'd be lying if
I said that I'd gotten over the
irritation
of
like I really for a long time until this
year, I was obsessed obsessed with
living forever because it was the only
way I could come to grips with
that okay, if I have to do one thing at
a time at least in a sequence, I could
do these sort of infinite things that I
want to do.
May I ask how old you are?
You may. I'm I just turned 45.
Okay.
Boy, I I I just turned 59.
And I've kind of reached the cusp where
the idea of living forever like a
vampire
is one of the most unpleasant things I
can con- conceive of at this point.
Um
because we
we're kind of constantly fed this idea
as children. We're kind of fooled into
the future.
That the future is going to be this
fantastically unfolding happy thing.
And that's how we're kind of baited to
kind of move forward.
When in fact, at a certain point you
realize
that uh
that it's kind of a lie. That we are
kind of lured into
uh this this future we think is going to
be a constant improvement, progress.
When in fact, it's just more and more
levels of conflict.
Um
and so, in a way, this kind of choosing
of one thing to immerse myself in
uh
is a way of kind of escaping that, but
also being present to it in a kind of
very dedicated way.
That I can't escape it fully because I
live in it. It is the water in which
this fish swims.
But I can choose one aspect of it and
really unpack that and explore that with
the help of a lot of other people.
And maybe come up with
a really kind of breakthrough different
way of being.
Yeah, that I think as creative people
we're we're looking for to to model a
kind of social behavior
or a kind of social structure or just a
way of presenting ourselves and
perceiving the world
that if it's really effective, people
will adopt it.
And part of modeling it is to
uh depict it in a narrative in my my
so that
people can kind of see the benefits of
it and maybe begin to live their lives
according to this new kind of way of
being or at least to perceive the world
around them in this new way.
Uh and if we can do that really
effectively then
you know, that would be kind of the
wonderful miracle is to create the game
rather than kind of hoping that the game
goes on forever.
I want to play a thought experiment with
you that I do on myself a lot. So, I
have a hypothesis that um people's lives
are to an extraordinary
degree
dictated both emotionally in terms of
whether you're happy or unhappy and in
terms of what you actually do and
accomplish in your life. They it's
determined by your frame of reference.
I'll define your frame of reference
simply as the things you believe you're
capable of and are true about yourself
and the things you believe are true
about the world.
And
when that frame of reference is
self-defeating, people are pretty
unhappy, right? I'm stuck, the world's
against me, I'm stupid, I'm not going to
be able to accomplish.
Um
versus somebody who's maybe steeped just
completely in delusion. I can do
anything I want, the world is my oyster,
um and they're going to be much happier.
I mean, just looking at the
neurochemistry, you could probably take
a vial of blood and know, you know,
which one of them holds sort of what
worldview based on for guys anyway,
testosterone levels and things like
that.
And
when I think about, okay, you've got
this frame of reference and
I want to know, is my frame of reference
empirically true? Is it Is there um sort
of inherent usefulness because it is a
more accurate map of the real world? Or
is this frame of reference, if I could
merely change the frame of reference,
would it change how I feel? Would it
change my behavior? So, I play a game
called you're a brain in a vat.
And all of your memories are fake. And
so, whenever I'm tempted to spiral out
of control, to feel really negative
about something, I'll remind myself,
"No, no, no, you're just a brain in a
vat." Now, what that does, it so
radically shifts my perspective because
now I don't need to beat myself up over
things in the past. Those were just
memories implanted. I don't actually
believe this. This is just a thought
exercise. But, these are just memories
implanted in your brain to give you
enough context. You're like human AI.
You have to have context that will push
you in some direction. So, if you don't
like the direction that feeling badly
about your past is pushing you in, then
just change it cuz it was all fake
anyway. Now, I'm completely aware that
that is just a thought exercise.
But, as soon as I feel that little bit
of relief of what it would be like if
that thing were fake, then I'm like,
"The only Nothing about my physical
reality has changed. Nothing about the
external world has changed. It is only
my perception of who I am, where I come
from, that changes." And even though I'm
aware of just playing a game, I can feel
relief. So, I'm like, "Well, if I feel
relief, then I need to cognitively
reframe whatever it is that I'm thinking
about that now pushes me in a new
direction."
Now, I bring that up because if you were
to play that game,
and I said something like, "No, no, no,
you really are going to live forever."
Or all that stuff in your past isn't
real. You were born right now in this
moment. Would that change the way you
think about the future?"
It's funny, I don't think I really think
about the future.
Um
And I I've heard you say this before, a
kind of
a different version of
this, and it was it's something to the
effect of so what?
And that was Andy Warhol's mantra.
Whether he got good reviews or bad
reviews, he would think, "So what?
It doesn't change anything. So what?"
He just kind of lived in this
in this sort of ongoing uh minimizing or
negation of either praise or or or
damnation. It
How does that change anything? It
doesn't.
And so he was always sort of allowed
himself to be drawn toward the thing the
shiny idea, the the bright thing that
drew him rather than be a reaction to
his past or reaction to his present
circumstances of whether or not people
were praising him or not praising him.
This this constant philosophy of so
what.
Um
And a lot of people call that getting
back to zero or getting back in some
cases to empty and meaningless kind of
extracting all of the kind of value
judgments and meaning from from the
moment. So that you can
give yourself the permission to pursue
the thing that you want to pursue. Uh
that it's not based on living forever or
it's not based on escaping a terrible
childhood. You're just drawn toward the
thing that's attractive rather than uh
trying to earn something. My my best
writing teacher, Tom Spanbauer
whenever he he started a workshop, he
would say
if you are if your idea is to write this
book or write this story in order to
something thing in order to
make your dad happy or in order to make
some money or in order to win a prize
you should not be here.
You should only be in this workshop if
you're writing because you love to write
or you love the process of writing.
Uh if you're writing in order to be
published
and gain you know
celebrity you shouldn't be here.
You you should be here because you love
to do this thing.
And the outcome is almost beside the
point.
And so in a way that's where I'm always
trying to come from.
So that
I I I don't feel kind of uh
hobbled by someone else's agenda.
And my success isn't dependent on
somebody else's
uh
you know, decision of whether or not
they like my stuff.
Um
I hope that answered your question to
some extent.
It does. Um it leads me to a follow-up
which is so
do you
worry at all or or it's not even that.
So I want to better understand the frame
of reference that you have now, 59 years
old, you've dedicated yourself to one
thing. Um and it's helping you discover
and create something that might actually
change the way the people interact with
the world. Oh, no. No, that's a That's
kind of a byproduct.
That
That would be nice.
But really
in the here and now
it's about giving me
a kind of thing to be obsessed about
because I have to be obsessed about
something.
And as a creative person, you get to
invent your own major problems.
Uh
because if you don't invent your own
problems and then seek to arbitrarily
resolve them
then the world is going to give you
problems.
And so I'm always able to choose a
gigantic
gigantic problem
that allows everything else around
you know, organizing my taxes and
meeting all those day-to-day
obligations, it makes all those things
so not important. You know, I do them.
But I don't
I don't suffer over them.
Because I have bigger fish to fry even
those those bigger fish to fry are are
are of my own choosing.
And if I do it right, then I realize
that this seemingly arbitrary
huge problem I've chosen
is actually my most deepest kind of
secret neurosis that I would never share
with the world.
And by the time I'm done with this giant
thing, I've exhausted all of my
emotional reaction and attachment to
this
huge unresolved problem.
And the problem just disappears.
So, it may look like I'm just sort of
farting around with make-believe stuff,
but I'm I'm actually taking my big giant
thing out into the world
and
and and resolving it and making it
disappear.
And there's something so fas-
fascinating about that because so often
when people read my stuff,
they don't recognize that it's their
giant problem, too.
And if I do it right, then they suddenly
find this new freedom
and they're not even sure how it
happened.
Um
yeah.
Oh, in the new book, The Invention of
Sound, what is the the big problem for
you? And I don't know if you're
comfortable talking about it, but what
was the big problem for you? Obviously,
I know the the straight narrative of the
book, but what was the big issue for you
that you were chewing on with that one?
Boy,
sometimes I don't even know it for two
or three years after the book is done.
And then I am absolutely mortified what
I put out in the into the world, and I
hope that nobody ever figures out what I
was actually talking about.
Uh Invention of Sound,
on
uh the most basic level, I'm always
fascinated with how um
human beings and our experience are
commodified and turned into something
that can be bought and sold
and even our most intimate lives
become kind of data mined and bought and
sold.
That something we've clicked on once
suddenly starts popping up on our screen
every time we log on.
And that the whole world is buying and
selling
these very private things, these things
that used to be so intimate.
Uh
and among those is
is the sort of the manner of our death.
Uh
it becomes a sort of a commodified form
of entertainment for other people.
Uh
sex certainly certainly has.
And so in invention of sound, I wanted
to kind of reinvent what I think of as
tableau horror
where
in typical tableau horror, you come
across crime scenes, you come across
butchered people
and
you don't actually witness the violence
but you see a kind of forensic
interpretation a narrative imposed on
the violence and then maybe at the end
of the whole thing, you see a little bit
of violence.
And so tableau horror would be a DaVinci
Code, The Alienist. In The Alienist,
you're always coming across a
ritualistically butchered child
prostitute.
But it's always after the fact.
And so
I wanted to do tableau horror but I
wanted to do it with sound.
The the most intimate sound that you
made at the moment that you met your
death.
Uh
I was at the end of my very long
driveway in 2012
and
I was waiting to turn right
onto the highway
and coming down the highway, this very
long twisting mountain highway was a
truck
and it suddenly went up on two wheels
and it was going to flip.
And it was going to land right on top of
me.
It was a truck full of broken concrete
and construction debris. A huge tractor
trailer coming down the hill at 70 miles
an hour.
And in that moment
as it toppled and onto my Prius, a
little white Prius.
I thought, I'm really glad I've got
a I got a a a good will in place.
And
all of my legal stuff is handled. I
really thought that. I actually thought
that. And I felt really good that I had
lived so many years doing the thing I
loved.
But the embarrassing thing is I made a
noise like a squeak toy, like your dog
would chew on. I made
a little shrill shriek like a mouse.
And
the truck crushed my car and knocked it
off the highway into the woods.
It slaughtered it. And the car was all
crushed around me. I couldn't get out
for a long time.
Uh
but I have never forgotten that sound I
made and I was so glad that nobody was
there to record it.
But I wanted to write about
the last sounds that people make before
they die.
And
in that commodified way
how those sounds would be bought and
sold and how they already were to some
extent because so much of the the
screams that you hear in movies are
these kind of clichéd recordings that
have been around since the 1930s and
40s.
And are are now used as a kind of
sort of a trope like an Easter egg to
hide in movies. Oh, the Wilhelm Wilhelm
scream.
That there are these institutionalized
screams
that are kind of an industry joke.
But I wanted these screams to be the
actual screams of people.
Uh
and it wasn't until after the fact that
I realized that that was kind of
something from the John Travolta film,
uh
Blow Out. Broken Arrow or Blow Out? In
the book I thought you said Broken
Arrow. Well, no. Because I didn't I'd
never seen Blow Out with John Travolta
and Nancy Allen.
Uh it was a Brian De Palma film.
And
it uses one of the devices I use in the
book and I was just mortified that I'd
used something that it was already in a
Brian De Palma film.
But I didn't know it until
two or three years after I'd written my
own book. Uh
yeah. Anyway,
I on the most basic level I'm always
writing about the commodification
of human experience. Um
Because that's something you find
unsettling.
I find it kind of heartbreaking and it's
something that that Martin Heidegger,
the German philosopher, always wrote
about. He said, "Once we start
commodifying trees and animals,
it's just a matter of time before we
commodify each other and we commodify
ourselves."
And I used to think that people went on
Johnny Carson because they were friends
with Johnny Carson.
And it it really wasn't until I was 35
that I realized, "No, you go on those
shows because you're booked
to go on those shows
and the producer knows the anecdotes
and will feed you the tosses so you tell
those anecdotes
and your job is to basically sell
yourself
and
in doing so sell your product."
That it suddenly made all of life seem
completely not special anymore. Uh just
all made everything seem like the
marketplace.
And I can't fix that, but I can explore
it and I can't exhaust my emotional
reaction to it,
and then find some peace around it
by writing books.
It's really interesting to me
um that that you have a big reaction
from that. I was the exact opposite.
When I discovered, oh, people go on
shows, they're booked, oh, they tell you
like what anecdotes, they rehearse that?
I felt like I just learned another piece
of how the world works.
And my youth was marked by a deep
misunderstanding of how the world
actually works.
And so for me it's always been
this
just thrill of oh my god, like I
understand another piece. Like, okay,
the you know, there is these secret
groups and they get together and there's
certain things that they control. Like,
that's so crazy and I can't believe
that's real, but I don't have uh
And I don't I don't say this as I think
it's a good thing, but I don't have this
sense of tragedy when I see something
that I don't like. I'm more I feel
empowered because now, whether I think
it's a good thing or a bad thing, I
understand it. And once I understand
something, I'm not going to fall prey to
it, or at least I'm going to fall prey
to it a lot less.
And that has been like my whole life has
been about cobbling together
I always say skills have utility.
Meaning like, if you get good at
something, you can actually do something
with it. And that's one of those
statements that's so self-evident that
it I can tell it never lands with
people. And I I I just want to like
stand up and scream, no, no, no. Like,
once you understand, you can get good at
something and literally shape the world
around you. Make more money, help more
people. Like, whatever your thing is,
like if you get good at the right thing,
you can you can really move things
around.
And so, because I've struggled with sort
of uh oh, wow, I totally misread that,
did not understand how that went. And
then as I get it, I'm Oh, okay, now I
can move around. Like, the biggest sort
of hilarious misunderstanding in my
whole life was with women. I was
terrible with women.
And
finally discovering what it meant to
embody confidence, and then therefore
was able to begin dating and actually
have
a functioning sex life, it was
so eye-opening.
And I don't know, that and many other
things just got me hooked on like, okay,
I just need to figure this game out.
You know,
and I understand figuring out the game,
but there are some kind of
I feel like this kind of precious
attachment to
uh
to something magical in the world
that
you know, as a kid from the middle of
nowhere, I really thought that the the
world was somehow much more magical
everywhere else.
Uh that there it was really smart people
making the decisions
instead of just really well-connected
people.
Uh a lot of times it's not the smartest
and the most sort of creative people who
get things out into the world, it is
the most connected people or the people
who make the thing that is mediocre
enough to sell to a gigantic gigantic
audience.
It it's not about the best thing, it's
about the thing that will appeal most
readily
uh to the largest, you know, market
share.
And it's really those are tough things
for me to be with.
Yeah.
I find that really, really interesting.
Um
So, let's go your childhood is very
interesting to me, and and I'm not
bringing up anything you haven't talked
openly about, but for sure, by all
means, if there's something you're not
interested in talking about, just let me
know, but um
hearing the stories about your dad
working on the railroad and you guys
going out in the middle of the night
when there would be a train wreck and
there would be, you know, loose goods
and
you guys would go collect those and he
got married on top of a train if I
remember right at one point. Uh
So, talk to me about the way you grew up
culminating cuz the the most profound
story I had about your youth and and I
can't help but wonder how much it colors
this desire for there to be sort of a
magical world somewhere else
um is that your parents used to fight
really bad and you and your um siblings
would diffuse that tension which I found
incredibly
interesting.
We called it playing Henry Kissinger. We
were really small kids. We were like 6,
7 years old. But Henry Kissinger was
such a cultural figure constantly sort
of hammering out a peace in the Middle
East during that time
that when my parents would fight really
violently
us kids, the four of us would hide in
the basement and we would decide whose
turn it was to play Henry Kissinger. And
to play Henry Kissinger typically you
injured yourself really badly. You cut
yourself or you stabbed a a needle or
something really deeply so that you bled
really bad and then you came upstairs
from the basement and you were you
created such a crisis
that
well, we created such a crisis that our
parents would stop fighting for the
moment and they would be forced to deal
with this sort of life-threatening
bloody mess.
So,
in a way it's kind of creating that
distractive narrative that I I continue
to live by.
Yeah, that when I heard that I was like,
"Whoa." A, it's
phenomenally interesting how cute and
kids can be. I mean, at that age to
recognize, "Oh, okay, wait, we could
create this crisis moment.
Um
go upstairs, end this feud." That you
wanted to end the feud
uh is already interesting. If you guys
were, you know, sort of safe in the
basement, that you had the impulse to,
"Okay, we really need to step in and and
stop this."
Um and that you could face the physical
pain.
You know, the physical pain was nothing
compared to the emotional pain of
listening to them go at each other.
It was just kind of an agony of seeing
the worst aspect of both of them.
Uh just battling each other in such
unkind ways. And so often their
arguments were about us.
So, it would be hearing our names uh
brought to bear as weapons against each
other.
Uh how each how each was accusing the
other of failing each of us.
And so, hearing ourselves weaponized in
this sort of ongoing battle
was a a lot more painful than, you know,
cutting ourselves with broken glass or
something.
Oh, my poor siblings.
I don't think they would ever talk about
this. They hate talking about this.
But, uh
it's something that we all sort of
shudder over.
Yeah, I can imagine. Is has it been the
writing that's allowed you to deal with
it or
um
you always seem so comfortable talking
about hard things.
You know, actually, there's an odd
sort of therapeutic quality in going on
the road and being sort of asked in a
kind of
therapy what like way by you
and other people and people in an
audience and people on National Public
Radio and
that you get used to telling these
stories so many times, they really lose
their sting.
And you get a distance from them.
And so, uh I got to thank you for that.
Is is it mere repetition or do you have
Is there something about you and the way
that you view the world you think that
causes that cathartic release?
This is another thing that Tom
Spanbauer, my my best teacher, always
did.
His very first class, his very first
meeting with the new class, he would
say,
"I want you
to write about something that you just
barely barely remember."
And people would think back
and they would put down one tiny memory.
And they would find that by doing so,
they would remember another thing.
And they would put that down.
And eventually,
they could
genuinely
retrieve
entire massive events from their pasts
just by putting down the one little
thing that they did remember and then
giving them the freedom to remember the
next little thing.
And it was such always such a fantastic
exercise
uh
that in a way that's what happens
answering these questions is that is
that every time I remember a tiny bit
more or I allow myself to remember a
tiny bit more.
Uh
and to to be free of it by, you know,
expressing it.
And so, I want to zero in on that idea
of being free from it. So, if it was
something that you didn't really
remember, is this that so you've
delineated before between sort of
intellectual remembering and body
remembering. So, is it something that
you feel like, okay, I've stored this
somewhere. This is an issue. It's not
maybe consciously an issue. Um is that
what you mean by finally being able to
let it go?
No longer being reactive to it. That's
what I think of about being letting it
go.
Uh
One fantastic example that that occurred
recently is
up to about a year ago, I was leading a
workshop of writers.
And
we were just we were all talking. It was
a a group of about 20 people with ages
ranging between 18 and maybe 65.
And we were talking about a a big used
magazine store going out of business in
Portland, Oregon.
And
and how they would no longer be buying
National Geographics and people's
lifetime collections of Playboy magazine
because nobody ever throws away a
Playboy magazine.
And someone in the group said, "I wonder
if that's how the big box of porn in the
woods happens."
And the entire group got silent.
And then the room just exploded.
Because everyone in that room as a child
had found a box, a bag, a suitcase, a
duffel bag, but they had found a big
bunch of porn in a natural setting.
They found it on a beach or they found
it in the desert. They found it stuffed
up a tree in one case, but they found it
at a completely inappropriate age
and they had never talked about it.
Because in a lot of cases they had taken
it home to their parents and said, "Look
what I found, this treasure. Look at
this."
And they were just attacked and they
were so shamed. And in some cases they
were forced to carry it back miles and
miles to where they had found it. And in
other cases they were forced to kind of
ritualistically burn it.
But this thing that they had thought was
a huge treasure
was suddenly they were punished for
having discovered it. So they lost their
innocence in more in so many more ways
than just finding porn.
And so, none of them none of the people
at this workshop table had ever talked
about finding the big box of porn in the
woods
until someone talked about it.
And then we spent the next 6 weeks
everyone telling their story.
And for a long time we were going to put
together an anthology
of all of these people fictionalizing
their stories because it seemed to be
such a universal event in people's
lives.
And one student uh lobbied that we
should call it Children of the Porn,
which
is kind of the title that sank the whole
project because publishers wouldn't
touch it.
Um
but
it's about identifying these things
that are more or less universal. I'm not
the only person that had a really shitty
childhood.
But there probably a million people out
there who said,
"I played Henry Kissinger.
I would do that. I would cut myself or I
would burn myself in such a way that it
would distract my parents from their
drama.
That if I can tell the truth about my
thing
and I can do it in a kind of
um well depicted if I can execute it in
a well depicted way and and communicate
it so that other people can be with it,
then I give them at this permission to
realize they're not the only one and
they can come forward with their thing
and talk it out and digest it and
assimilate it as just an event and and
be with it and have have that freedom
that we're kind of talking about
where you're no longer so reactive to it
you can't remember it, you can't be with
it, you can't discuss it. Because I
think that's where 90% of the people are
already.
And you're you're trying to be the
person who
who says,
"Yeah, that happened to me." So that
everybody can say, "Yeah, that happened
to me."
Is that a big part of what drives you,
finding those areas where people feel
like, "Okay, I'm shamed around this. I
can't talk about it."
Um and helping them understand that it's
actually pretty universal?
Always.
Because those those are the stories that
I tend to take into parties or social
situations.
Because if I can tell my story about
workplace hazing and my first day at the
truck plant for Freightliner trucks and
how I was sent from workstation to
workstation to get the squeegee
sharpener
which doesn't exist
and how all these big, gruff
guys
swore and swore and just
just tore into me and called me an idiot
and sent me to another big, tough guy
who called me an idiot and humiliated
me.
If I can tell that story
I give people the freedom to tell me
stories that are so much worse.
And
and they all sort of come together to
illustrate these fantastic, big things
that are are what it really is to be a
human being.
Because the thing that really frustrates
me
is
when I turn on streaming and I see so
many platforms and I see such a
this vast amount of stuff to watch
it's all of it so filtered and so sort
of homogenized and pasteurized
by the production process and by the
kind of testing process and by the notes
process.
I've got notes on this.
Ah.
That by the time it's on something like
streaming
again, it's such a homogenized
sterile thing
that it doesn't do justice to what it is
to be a human being.
And so when I go out with this story
that makes me look like an idiot, and I
give other people permission to look
like an idiot,
then I'm getting an access to really
raw, really fantastic stories
that that really tell me what it is to
be a person in the world, not just, you
know,
a person on television.
I'm going to describe how I see you.
Tell me if you think that I go astray
with any of this. So,
you seem to be a keen observer of the
human condition.
You have found a niche in sort of
difficult, embarrassing, hard parts of
the human condition that your eyes
sparkle, you smile a little bit when it
comes on to that topic, and I can just
imagine you going around parties leading
with these like crazy guts-like stories
to see which ones trigger um other
people to join in. Um
and
it seems to be designed to help people
process something.
To help Good.
It's designed to help me process.
You know, if I ever said it was about
fixing other people, that would be a
huge lie.
It's about But isn't there an element
that it has to be related to other
people?
In a way, it's validated by other
people.
Uh but I have yet to to throw out any
aspect of my existence
that isn't automatically echoed
by endless numbers of people. Uh one one
reason why David Fincher, the director,
wanted to do Fight Club
was because
as a projectionist, as a teenage
projectionist in Ashland, Oregon,
he worked with another projectionist,
and they spliced
uh single frames of pornography into
family movies and he had never seen that
sort of acknowledged in the culture.
I didn't do it myself, but I knew people
other projectionists who did do that
when I was a teenager.
And so
there my life is not so special
that
every tiny bit of it isn't
won't resonate with a million other
people. Uh yeah, that's me. I think it
is the very thing that fascinates me
though about you in the writing is um
and maybe it's better just to explain
what I like about it instead of trying
to sort of read your mind. What I like
about it is I feel like the human
condition is one of trying to get mental
management. People are spinning out of
control, they have um confusion,
self-loathing, ambition, love, joy,
hatred. Like it's this weird mixture of
things. In fact, this might be a good
time to talk about um your idea of
self-soothing. How everybody has this
thing that they sort of put themselves
to bed with. Um and finding these
universals like is a big part of what
allows people to get a grip on the
things that haunt them cuz 99.99%
or whatever, they're not they're never
going to write to get catharsis. They
are going to hear that person went
through it too. It's no longer a secret.
You know, like the woman um and the
heating pad story where she was finally
able to say her most embarrassing story
to you and the the the
recontextualization,
that's like what I'm obsessed with. The
recontextualization for her in that
moment is quite possibly life-changing.
Right? She goes from dark secret, it's
ever-present with her, she doesn't know
how to shake it, she hears a totally
unrelated story, but it somehow fits a
genre of thing in her mind which is
like, "Oh my god, I have one of these
genres of things in my mind and I never
thought that they could be funny. I
never thought that I could see the humor
in this. And like, I have the chills now
retelling a very lame version of your
amazing story. It's like that the way
that
as human creatures, we are so social in
nature that we long to to if we have to
go through something bad to know other
people have gone through that same
thing, there is so much relief in
knowing that, oh my god, thank god, like
I'm not alone. I'm part of this thing.
I'm connected.
And when I read you, I'm just like
there and I I I would have a very hard
time defining the thing, the rail that
you grab onto, but like from page one of
The Invention of Sound, I'm like, you
wouldn't even had to tell me it was your
book. I'd be like, this is either Chuck
or somebody trying to write like Chuck.
It's It is so clearly
you. Like, you you have found this
thing that maybe we all wish wasn't true
about ourselves and yet we have to deal
with it because until we do, there is
some
unrealized is probably the right word.
It's the into ah, now I'm I am going off
into the deep end and feel free to say
that I'm out of my [ __ ] mind, but
like it feels like you have this unique
ability to help people integrate the
shadow into their life. That's what I
think about you.
I I would agree and also maybe even
sometimes to celebrate the shadow. Yes.
Um
and
the way I was taught, again, by Tom
Spanbauer, I'm always going to go back
and acknowledge Tom. And Tom was an
actor in New York as well. So, his
method was that you have to read your
work out loud in workshop.
Because when you read it out loud, you
find out instantly
that it does or does not work. Before
all the intellectualized
feedback afterwards, which I kind of
consider worthless, because it's kind of
obligatory that people will say, "I
really liked this. I didn't like this.
Would you add a dog?" You know,
they have to say something, but they
don't have to laugh, and they don't have
to gasp. And when you read it,
and you can make you can bring people to
tears,
or you can create a silence
where you can stop for seconds at a
time. And you've talked about this. It's
so often not the fact that we're filling
up every moment of silence.
It's so often the broken way in which
you
depict something that establishes your
authority.
You know who two of the most
flawed presenters on radio I've ever
heard?
Do you remember Paul Harvey?
Yes.
And now?
Is he The rest of the story. See? See,
our compulsion is to fill every moment.
That we don't want dead air.
You don't want to give people
that option of switching away. But Paul
Harvey would break his sentences in
really unusual places.
And in doing so, he brought you in
closer and more intimately because he
created a tension.
And Dr. Laura Schlessinger did the same
thing. It's like she studied at the knee
of of Paul Harvey.
And she would break her sentences, and
she would hold silences that were
unbearable.
And nowadays, see how ready we are to
jump in and fill those silences,
when in fact, it's the broken silences.
It's the kind of semi-inarticulate
things that Tom Spanbauer would call
burnt tongue, things that are stated
really awkwardly,
that that give a narrative so much more
power than if it were really polished.
I don't want to go back to this idea of
integrating and celebrating the shadow.
And ask the question of why it's
important.
Um
Do you think it's I think it's
important. Do you think it's important?
It's only important if you want to
not reach the end of your life and go
why the hell didn't I do those things?
Uh because
there are truths that you can only tell
at certain points in your life. I could
only write Fight Club when I was 31
years old. It's not a book I could write
right now.
Why is that? Because I'm not that angry,
disillusioned
good boy
who was taught that if I did everything
if I went to school and I got good
grades and I went to college and I got
good grades and I got out and I just
tried to work my way up the property
ladder. If I did all the formulaic
things
then I'd be happy and and successful.
And you realize around the age of 31
that you've got to start breaking the
rules rather than following them.
And I had the energy and I had the kind
of
crazed friends that I needed to write
that book around.
And so every book
is only something you can do at a
certain point in your life.
And if you pass that point without
having done that thing
you always look back and think
why was I so gutless?
You know, there was that one line in
Fight Club where Marla has sex with
Tyler.
And I I thought what is the most
romantic thing she could say in this
moment and that is I want to have your
baby.
So Marla had to say the least romantic
thing in that moment which is
I want to have your abortion.
And everybody fought me on that line.
The editor fought me, 20th Century Fox
fought me, even Brad Pitt came to me and
said, "I hate that line. My mother's
going to see me say
see me in a scene with that line.
And she's going to be really offended."
But
I feel unless there is a kind of what I
call the too far, if you unless you go
too far,
you will beat yourself up years later
for not having gone too far.
Uh in Invention of Sound, there is
something
just one short sentence in one of the
first Foster Gates chapters while he's
watching all this horrendous porn on his
computer.
And everyone fought me on that one line.
And that but that was my too far.
And I had to fight back to keep that
line.
And people say they close the book at
that point. Especially people with kids.
They close the book. They have to put
the book away.
But they eventually take the book out.
And they get past that moment.
And so unless you go to the too far,
you're kind of wasting your life, in my
opinion.
Yeah. Um I agree sort of with the
intensity of the need for it.
It feels maybe slightly different from
my perspective in that
I think it is very hard for humans to
understand why they do what they do. And
the one of my favorite quotes is the
confused mind says no.
And when I meet people,
um
the number one question I get asked is
how to find clarity in their life. What
am I supposed to do? What's my meaning?
What's my purpose? How do I find a
passion? Like that whole loop of like I
know I could be doing something should
be doing something whatever, but I have
no idea how. And
for me it's always
this sense of self-awareness that
they're going to have to develop first,
even just to understand what do you
respond to? What do you like? Like, what
is it that gives you more energy than it
takes? And it won't seem like an obvious
thing. It's not like anybody, I don't
think, encounter something first time
they encounter it and goes, "Yep, this
is what I was meant to do with the rest
of my life." That certainly is not my
experience. But you find something
that's like, "Oh, that was a little bit
cooler than everything else around it
and maybe I'll spend a little bit more
time with that." And so you invest in
that.
But people that wall off parts of their
own psyche, uh
they end up not being able to and look,
I'm no Union, um
uh student, but
the idea of having to integrate the
shadow to fully find your own power, to
not be hiding from yourself. In fact,
one of the um the great insights of my
adult life came from Jordan Peterson
where he said, "All right, everybody in
World War II imagines that they're
hiding Anne Frank in their attic. But
the stats say that you're one of the
Nazi guards.
And when you start revisiting history
with you as the problematic perpetrator
instead of like the do-gooder, then then
you'll at least acknowledge that you
have the capability. Not that you you're
not heroic and sure, maybe in
in that moment you would risk your life
in 100%, but
that you need to run the thought
exercise of what if I was too weak to do
the right thing? And and that little bit
of distrust in myself has
propelled me forward in ways it makes me
make sure that I know why I'm making a
decision, it makes me ask why I feel a
certain way, but it's an ugly thing to
consider. Like, I don't want to think I
could ever do anything horrible.
And yet, accepting that, dude, humans
are flawed, man, like scary flawed. And
I am a human and in no way do I think
that I have transcended the trappings of
being a human. And so reading your books
and getting through the hard stuff
it's like recognizing the full spectrum
of the human animal and that feels
necessary.
And that's why I kind of argue against
people
when they say that that a character
should be likable and sympathetic.
That
I'm much more
compelled by a character who is
um
corrupt but is just trying to do
the right thing
uh even if it's kind of a despicable
thing
but it's the only right thing that the
character can think of doing.
Uh
yeah.
I think characters who are kind of
paragons or super likable, super
sympathetic, I really hate those
characters. Um
yeah. It's interesting cuz I love those
characters
and I totally get the advice and in fact
many of the things I find myself drawn
to as a writer are the very things that
you hate but like that's not that's not
confrontational to me. I love that you
you have gone in this totally different
direction and I would be mortified if
you were less Chuck Palahniuk, right?
Like I I love that there are these other
voices. Um so even though I get where
people are coming from and it is a
commercialization but remember I I see
that as like oh my god, that's how the
world works. I get it. I get what we're
trying to do the sort of
um emotional resonance we're trying to
create in the audience. So anyway,
that's that's maybe a difference in how
we react to the magic trick. Um
but yeah, I find I find those characters
compelling. I find that they get me
excited. I find that they make me want
to be like them.
But there's something so useful in
reading about characters that make the
bad choices. But what's interesting, I
hate downward spiral stories where
characters just continually make the
worst possible choice.
You avoid that. How do you avoid the
sort of just boring catastrophe of
knowing this person is going to make a
wrong decision at every step?
I accept the fact that uh
the reading is not everyone's first
choice. Reading is is something that
people tend to go to when there are no
other options. So, reading is something
you do when your friends can't get
together.
So, reading is something that happens
typically in isolation.
And it also happens a lot of times under
really poor circumstances. You're in the
hospital waiting for someone to die, so
you read a book. Or you're at the
airport
waiting for a flight and it's horrible,
so you read a book.
The the reading is something that people
kind of do under duress a lot of times.
So,
number one, I want my books to be about
people who find community.
They find community with a bunch of
people or they find community with one
person. So, Fight Club is essentially a
romance
where this person transcends his own
kind of
isolation
to bond with one person.
So, it's got a romantic ending.
So, in the books
the characters always find community
with at least one other person.
And
I've resolved that I I'm not going to
resolve a story by killing the main
character
because the reader has to live forward
in the future.
The
So, Romeo and Juliet are not going to
die in my books.
Because the reader has to move forward
uh his or herself.
Yeah, that's interesting. I never would
have thought that that was a a rule for
you.
Um what is ultimately the experience
that you want the audience to walk away
from these books that are challenging
and confrontational? Like after um
watching Fight Club, would you have
predicted or reading Fight Club, would
you have predicted that people would go
and start their own fight clubs?
Hell no. You know, that was the early
early '90s when I wrote that.
And as I was writing it, I was thinking,
"People will never take this seriously.
People will never accept this premise.
Because AIDS is everywhere. And there is
no way people are going to expose
themselves to the blood of other people.
That is completely ludicrous. People
will never do
or accept a narrative in which people do
this."
So, in a way,
I never thought it would sell because I
thought people would just see it as a
completely beyond the pale,
completely unrealistic thing. Because
blood-borne pathogens
were just everywhere in the culture at
the time.
But,
the other thing about you sort of
working the vein of the extreme
is that if you can
lodge yourself in people's memory,
whether or not they like you the first
time,
if they remember you,
people change and the culture changes.
And people forget everything about the
circumstances in which you wrote the
narrative.
And they will eventually come to accept
a narrative, either because the culture
has changed or they themselves have
changed. So, the idea isn't to be liked
right off the bat. The The idea is to be
remembered.
Because that way you stick around long
enough
for people to
you know,
sort of it
eventually accept you or accept the
story.
So, that is one benefit of the two far.
Is the two far is like a a hook in a
song and it kind of sinks into people
and it keeps the story in their memory.
Oh, one thing
we kind of texted about Alfred Hitchcock
versus Roman Polanski.
Yes, yes.
Okay, what do we remember most about
Alfred Hitchcock's
his whole oeuvre.
That's a French term.
What do we remember most?
From
Suspense.
Uh all the movies. The one sequence most
memorable. Uh the shower sequence in
Psycho. Exactly.
And it's in black and white.
She's not naked.
She's not getting stabbed.
And she's acting. She's fake screaming.
So, it's all phony. It's all phony.
But, you know
when we actually do see a woman stabbed
and we see her blood and she's not
acting and it's in color
going to venture a guess?
No. I think it's the only time we've
ever seen it in the history of
mainstream movies.
When Mia Farrow has a blood draw
in Rosemary's Baby when she's first
finds out she's pregnant.
The nurse has a huge hypodermic needle
sticks it into the inside of her elbow,
starts to extract her blood on screen
and Mia Farrow has to deliver her lines
with this fantastically tense, pained
expression because she knows if she
messes up this take it's another blood
draw and they're going to keep sucking
her blood out,
bright red blood right there on screen,
and it's going to keep coming out of her
until she until Roman Polanski gets a a
take,
something he can use.
It is one of the most tense scenes I've
ever seen in cinema,
and it does everything that Hitchcock
pretended to do in Psycho.
That is Mia Farrow's blood,
and that is a real nurse, and Mia Farrow
is a real person
saying a made-up line in that moment
about the seeing The Fantasticks on
Broadway.
And it's little true cringe-worthy
things like that
that make the whole devil-worshipping
phoniness
that sell it. Uh
And so it's these little visceral
moments of truth
that we may or may not recognize at the
time,
but they have this fantastic way of
getting under the radar
and keeping the narrative in the culture
for forever.
It's interesting you talk about
punctuating sort of this unbelievable
thing with something that's real. I had
that same I don't remember I've seen
Rosemary's Baby, but I don't remember it
the way that I remember The Exorcist.
But when she goes to have like the
spinal fluid removed, oh god, that scene
freaks me out to this day. Like the
sounds of the machine and like when they
pull the thing out and the thin, you
know, strand of blood comes squirting
out. It just felt so real, and it was so
bizarre to juxtapose sort of a cold,
hard, sterile science with, you know,
everything leading up to that, which was
iconography, Ouija boards, demons, you
know what I mean? It was like really
sort of old-world creepy, and now all of
a sudden like what would have been for
the time like very futuristic, very
sterile, very white, high-tech. Ah, man.
Especially cuz they're doing it in the
neck. Ah.
You know, that
That freaked me out. I think that's
real, isn't it? I I don't think I don't
think they faked those scenes because
now that you mentioned it, I remember
that, but I typically don't remember it
because I usually leave the room or fast
forward to that that horrible moment.
Seeing a child tormented in that way.
I think that that blood spurt is is a
real blood spurt.
I wouldn't be surprised, but oh god,
maybe the shot is such that they're not
using they're not really using her. I
can't remember, but I can't fault them.
She was so young when they filmed that.
Um But really again, it's those visceral
moments that sell the whole rest of the
phoniness that without those visceral
fantastically physical what my teacher
Tom Spanbauer would say on the body
moments
then everything else would seem so much
more easily dismissible.
Yeah, who. That that is uh body horror
is like a whole thing.
Um I don't know if we have the same sort
of genre here in the US, but in Japan
it's like a whole category of manga is
body horror. Things happening to almost
always teenagers. Makes sense because of
what they're going through.
Um but almost always
uh a teenager their body is going weird,
crazy, things under the skin. Ugh.
That stuff I find super freaky. I
actually want to go back to what you
were saying about the AIDS epidemic. Um
that was
something that I was just young enough
where I saw it only on the news. It
wasn't like a super real thing. Um
definitely on my radar at the very
beginning of my sex life. Um but by then
it was already starting to sort of lose
steam. Um
how did that inform you? What was that
sort of like up close?
Oh.
When I was in my early 20s
I
I was suddenly aware of death. I'm not
sure why.
I don't think anybody in my life had had
died up to that point.
But I became obsessed with the idea
that someday I was going to have to die.
And I was terrified that somehow I was
going to do it wrong.
I was not going to die correctly.
And so, I had to explore every aspect of
what it was to die.
So, I think at the age of 23 or 24, I
started volunteering in a hospice
for indigent people who had been brought
in from the street in order to die in a
kind of home-like setting.
And a lot of them, if not most of them,
were dying of AIDS.
And I didn't have any kind of skills, so
my job was to to talk to them and to
take them to do fun things for the last
time.
So,
it was about getting them into my
Mercury Bobcat, which was kind of a
fancy version of the Ford Pinto,
that I had had since high school.
It was about taking them to the ocean
for the last time. It was about picking
up their parent at the airport and
bringing their parent to be with them
for the last time.
And so, I basically the only people I
knew
were dying people.
And I got to see and I got to get really
complete with what it was to die.
Uh this is the process.
I won't mess it up.
I'll be able to do this when the time
comes.
But when they took them to their support
groups,
I would find the support group always
thought that I was dying of what they
were dying of.
And I would have I'd start to tell
myself the narrative that became the
support group narrative in Fight Club.
That someone was doing this to feel a
greater sense of aliveness.
And to tell the truth,
when I went back to Freightliner, to the
plant, my terrible job that I was
working with my degree in journalism,
because you couldn't get work in
journalism. So, I was working on the
assembly line at Freightliner.
I felt great.
Just the fact that I was not dying made
me feel so good.
And uh
And there was such a a rush
that all of that that sort of initial
inquiry into death
really brought to life and ultimately
gave me the kind of emotional through
line of Fight Club.
And I can't remember what your your your
your entry into that was, your question.
I forgive me. Uh No, no problem at all.
Um
Forget it.
about body horror? Yeah, talking about
um
body horror, but then I think that we
moved on from there. I forget too as
well. I was so engrossed in in what you
were saying, but the AIDS epidemic up
close I think was the thing that that
really got us there. Yeah.
And the stories that people would tell
me and also
there was at least one case where the
dying patient would give me keys and
say, "You've got to go to my apartment.
You've got to go to my rooming house.
You've got to throw away these things
that I don't want my parents to find."
So, I would
more or less kind of break into where
they lived. And I would have to take out
the really tawdry
filthy
uh whether it was pornography or whether
it was sex toys, it was my job to bag it
up and to get rid of it.
And in a way it broke my heart because
it was the most intimate
aspect of themselves that was in these
spaces.
And so often and I was burgling
this kind of profane sacred sense of who
they were
and that they would never come back to
these things.
I wrote a book called Snuff
which is about
a woman who is attempting to shoot the
world's largest gang bang movie in which
she plans to commit suicide so that it
will be the last gang bang movie ever
made and that she holds the record.
And
in it there is a tiny little flashback
scene which is from the first book I
ever wrote that never got published
in which a guy gets a blow-up doll
and as he's having sex with it he
realizes it's losing air
and it's actually dying beneath him and
he's desperately trying to get his rocks
off before it goes totally flat.
And the moment before he's able to
ejaculate
his mother walks into the room and he
stands up with his pink limp
basically cadaver hanging off of his
erect penis like a big surrender flag.
And that's where the scene cuts.
But it's one of very few things I was
able to salvage from that first book
and again it goes back to these kind of
search and destroy missions I was sent
on by dying people
because once I bagged up all of their
secrets
I would be leaving their home and I
would realize
this home
could belong to anyone at this point.
This is really the only thing
what I've got bagged here is this is the
only thing that made this really
intimately this person's space. Now
anybody could live here and now somebody
else will live here.
And so
that was another aspect of of AIDS
that I found
that this has really stayed with me is
this
this being sent out to recover and to
destroy and to keep secret
the secrets of so many people who were
dying at the time. And and again, I was
23 years old.
Is it a more beautiful world to you if
they let the family discover those
secrets? Or is it just about hanging on
as long as you can to your presence in
that space?
I I think it goes back to again to uh
uh integrating the shadow.
And kind of accepting the shadow.
Um
Yeah, and allowing other people to sort
of you people who love you and know the
shadow is there.
And to some extent, you know, allowing
them to sort of be with the shadow
themselves. Um
In the spring of 1999, my father was uh
was was murdered. And the man who
murdered him was sent to prison years
later.
But when my siblings went up to resolve
his household,
we found half-filled prescription
bottles of Viagra
tucked all over in the house.
And they were like between
sofa cushions.
They were basically wherever the magic
might happen, Dad had stashed Viagra.
And we would be weeping
as we resolved his possessions.
And then we'd find one of these bottles
of Viagra and we'd all start laughing.
Uh because they so humanized him in that
moment. They so presented a really
vital, alive aspect of him.
That
he was 59. I'm 59.
So he died at my age.
And the idea that we would find these
very sort of sexualized hints of his of
his love life
was really touching. It really It gave
us a a fantastic sense of comfort.
Um we really felt like we discovered
something about dad that we never would
have known.
It's interesting. Sex is one of those
things that it's it's so strange. It is
so out of space and time.
This is an idea I've never talked about
out loud. I don't even know if I've
discussed this aspect of it with with my
wife. See, this is my job.
Dude, I No, and one of the questions I
want to ask you is why people open up to
you. Obviously, I have my theory because
of how you make me feel. Uh I'm very
curious to know what your take is.
Um
but there's an aspect to sex that is so
out of time and place where when you're
with somebody, all the noises, sounds,
the way that you act, all of it is is
perfectly contextualized and makes
sense.
But when you see it from the outside,
out of context, it is so weird. And
that's the
Go ahead.
Or or when it's over, so often after
people
have sex, they start laughing.
Because suddenly they're present to this
fantastic absurdity
of this thing that they just were a
moment before that no longer is who they
are.
That fantastic uh transition is so
always so funny. And we I don't know
whether it's funny, but we just kind of
laugh out of relief. Mhm. Oh, go ahead,
please.
No, I mean that that's it. So,
you know, I get the person who is asking
you to go into their home to get rid of
things
because
if you're dying, there might not be time
to recontextualize yourself in the eyes
of whoever finds that. So, while some
people may find it and think it's
endearing,
if the context with which they've
approached that person is radically
different, I could see them thinking,
"Ah, you know, this is jarring and I
don't have sort of time to
to deal with it." I don't know. It's
It's interesting. I get the impulse to
hide it. I'm I'm maybe more fascinated
by
the sort of aching beauty that you see
in it.
Um
Why do people tell you
like the the most the story they never
tell anybody else? Why you? What is it
about you?
It really goes back to
recognizing that our
primary drive is to to is to look good
and to be right and to avoid being
dominated and if possible to dominate
the situation.
To kind of impose
our reality
on reality.
And if I can step back, but once you
recognize it, you realize you have a
choice. You don't have to do it anymore.
That you can risk really looking like
the idiot. You can really be the goat.
You don't have to be the hero all the
time.
And when you risk looking like the goat,
you give everybody else the permission
to risk looking like the goat.
Uh
yeah.
I know a story from your life
um that I think ties into this, but I'm
so curious. So, you will go to parties
and intentionally make a mistake that
makes you look stupid. And you know you
do it because you love letting them feel
smart and you know how that moment will
sort of create neurochemistry in them.
Why are you doing that though? Like you
don't correct them later and say, "No, I
really knew that." You really let them
think you're dumb and that they're
smart.
Well, it's funny uh
it gives them such a rush. It's like
giving them a present. They're so happy
because they're so right.
People want to be right.
And so,
if you can allow them to figure out the
mystery and be smarter like in guts
when I say
it's a snake it's a sea serpent that's
come out of our pool drain the entire
audience knows it's not a snake
and so at that moment the audience is
smarter than the narrator what is the
first thing that Scarlett O'Hara says in
Gone with the Wind?
war war war it's ruining all the
barbecues there's never going to be a
war or something like that
there's never going to be a war
and so in that moment regardless of how
beautiful and rich and charming she is
and young she is
we are smarter than her
and we suddenly embrace her like she's
our child because we see that she's dumb
and she doesn't know what's about to hit
her
and so
you give people a gift when you allow
them to be right
and among my my lefty Portland friends
my favorite thing
is
if somebody brings up writing or poetry
I'll I'll sort of go off on Sylvia Plath
uh about you know what a a bigoted
racist person she was
and it gets everybody sort of it hooks
them and they're instantly Sylvia Plath
wasn't a bigoted racist person
what's your proof?
and I say well
she wrote The Bell Jar
and there's a moment of silence when
people realize
that I'm saying bell curve instead of
bell jar
and suddenly they're all instantly right
at the same moment and they all get to
attack me
and it's wonderful to watch uh you know
it's kind of trolling people
but it's you know all of entertainment
is kind of is kind of trolling people
it's bringing them to an epiphany or on
an emotional state in a very deliberate
calculated way
and so that's just one of the kind of
most basic ways. It's like telling a
joke people don't know you're telling.
Uh
and it lets them be right. It lets them
have the the epiphany. It lets them
dominate me.
Uh
and there's just so much that works
about that.
And is the layer of that that is for you
that you recognize you are sort of the
master storyteller who understands your
audience and watch I can elicit this
emotion right on cue? Or is it actually
I'm Santa Claus, I don't want anyone to
know, and I just want you to feel good
about yourself, even if it's at my
expense?
It's kind of both.
Yeah.
You know,
it is it's a sense that you have uh
you've mastered a skill,
but it's also a sense that you're
serving an audience, that you are
bringing them
you were uh
rewarding their attention.
Uh
yeah.
I hate to go on tour with a story that
doesn't work. I've done it one year.
It was a story that it might have worked
because people keep asking for it,
but I came home and I threw it away, and
people are still asking for it decades
later.
Uh
They heard it and they want to hear it
again? They want to hear it again. It's
kind of the the lost story.
But it wasn't a funny story, and so
because there was such tension and
people did not laugh.
I interpreted it as a story that failed.
And
the idea that you can go up there and
fail people on stage feels like such a
disservice to them that I just never
really want to do that. I want to have a
story that
that elicits a whole range of emotions
and engages people physically
and leaves them kind of freer in their
own skin.
Like that. You threw it away?
Well, I threw it away because
because since it was so tense through
the whole story
and it had such a quiet epiphany
I never got
kind of a sense that people
were hooked by it.
Uh
yeah, recently people have been asking
for it. I've tried to find it and it's
it's gone. It's lost. So, if people are
looking for Love Nest still, Love Nest
does not exist.
That's so interesting. Like you and I
have very different reactions to bad
work. Like to me, I I not only do I save
everything whether I think it's good or
not. I'll save like infinite versions
and make like save them in different
places to make sure that they can't get
lost. I'm so paranoid. Like you never
know a sentence later might be useful.
Uh and I want or I may never look at it
again, but it maybe it's just like a
hoarder personality problem, but uh
that's so interesting to me that you
would throw something away. I mean,
especially because somebody like me who
reveres your work, it's like even bad
Palahniuk would be fascinating. So, in
fact, do you see yourself Can you see
yourself as Chuck Palahniuk or do you
see yourself as just a guy?
I see myself as um
as a kind of disposable conduit and I
don't mean that in a kind of
self-effacing or kind of martyred way
as a Catholic
but I see myself as
as a thing
through which things pass
that in a way I am this constant uh sort
of gathering
this harvesting
of human experience and then organizing
organizing that experience and
presenting it in a narrative so that the
experience
has a context.
Um
and so in a way I'm I'm still the
journalist that I was kind of hoping to
be
but I don't keep my notes and part of my
ritual is to burn everything like once a
year.
So, if there's a university that thinks
that there's a big bunch of papers
somewhere, there's not.
There's the stories that go out and get
published, and then there's a a stove
full of ashes.
I I threw everything away. Nothing.
What? What? Recycling?
Because
uh you know,
I think Kafka got a raw deal.
Kafka wanted everything that wasn't
published burned.
And his best friend
brought it all to the light of day.
And I think in a way, if somebody can
ask me to throw away their dildos,
I want to throw away all of my rough
drafts, all of my didn't work stories,
all of my sort of failed experiments. I
think it's my right to to throw them
away. No question. No question, it is
your right. Uh
Man, that's interesting. Do you feel is
it just like
hey,
part of the writing process is
rewriting, you polish it, you get
better, and I would never want somebody
to mistake, you know, an early draft for
thinking that I thought that that was
good enough, or is there like a sense of
release and letting go of getting rid of
it? What is the like what's the end game
to burning it all?
I think it's more the latter.
That you have to sort of for me, I have
to
get back to what we talked about that
getting back to zero, getting back to
sort of empty and meaningless, so that
you can start the next project without
being too attached to the previous
project.
And
God bless my dad, but my dad always said
the only sex advice he gave my brother
and I, he said, "Don't dump the one
you're with until you're dating the next
one."
Which is probably why he had Viagra all
over his house.
And so part of
completing a previous
book, story, whatever
is starting the next one, falling in
love with the next idea.
So that no matter how the previous ideas
is received
I'm no longer emotionally attached to
it.
I'm dating the next one.
And so part of
losing that attachment is destroying all
the notes, destroying all the drafts
uh everything so that there's no trace
of, you know, that thing in my life
anymore. Wow. Do you have any anxiety
when you go to do it?
No, none whatsoever. That's so
interesting.
Wow. Super fascinating. I could
literally just keep bugging you about
that one until the end of time, but we
will move on. Uh
why did your dad get killed?
Uh
you know
if I want to be really metaphysical
about it
my dad get killed got killed
because it was fate.
When my dad was a small child
his father
um and there's a lot of theory, his
father supposedly had a head injury
but also his father was always a little
unstable.
His father went nuts
and
killed
his wife, my my grandmother
and tried to kill my father and his one
brother who were home at the time. They
were both small children.
What's that? I was just going to ask
what age.
Oh, I think my father was
I want to say he was four four years
old. He wasn't in school yet.
And he and his younger brother were both
home.
And the rest of their siblings, I think
there were 11 siblings were off at
school.
But he spent the day trying to find my
father to kill him.
And my father hid under a bed watching
his his father walk around with the
barrel of the rifle
looking for him and calling for him
until he eventually killed himself. Wow.
So, my father
In the house, yeah. The house that we
used to spend summers visiting.
My mother never told us.
And when she finally told us about the
murder-suicide, we asked what room it
had happened in.
And she said, "Do you know that yellow
bedroom off the kitchen?"
And that was the room that us kids
always had to sleep in every summer.
And she said
"I always hated turning the lights off
and leaving you kids in that room
because it had no windows. It was just a
almost like a a large closet in this
very
uh up in the mountains sort of uh very
more or less it was like a log cabin. It
was a very small very rough house.
Anyway,
my father
was married many many times and he was
kind of always trying to find the right
woman.
Until he answered a personals ad in 1999
and the headline of that ad was Kismet
which is the Arabic word for fate.
And it was a woman looking for a man.
And he started dating this woman
and she had been a lawyer in the prison
system in the Midwest and she had
married a prisoner that she had helped
uh get parole.
And the prisoner had subsequently, I
believe he had molested her daughter
from a previous marriage.
So, she was
pressing charges to send him back to
prison.
But until he was back in prison
she more or less needed to date a really
big guy who could be her bodyguard.
And I only know this motivation because
her daughter came to me during the trial
and said, "You know, I'm really sorry.
My mom chose your father because he was
the biggest guy who answered her
personals ad." Wow. She was just looking
for a bodyguard.
And
on what was more or less their first
date, they took a a road trip together.
He was leaving his house in the
mountains, which he had cleaned up
meticulously because he was eventually
going to bring her back there. So,
everything was completely clean and
neat.
But, as he was leaving, a huge boulder
dislodged from the hillside, rolled
down, and blocked his driveway. He
almost missed his train to pick her up.
But, he was able to leverage this
boulder off the driveway,
and he even made a little sign
uh uh proclaiming it Kismet Rock. He was
going to be the the landmark to their
new budding relationship. And he put
this sign on the boulder.
And then he went, he picked her up,
and when he took her back to her house
at the end of this this road trip, her
ex-husband
was waiting for them. And he shot them
both. Oh.
And as they were dying in her house, he
set fire to the house. Oh, [ __ ]
And their bodies were only preserved
because they were on the first floor of
the house
and a large bed on the second floor fell
through and the
unburning mattress
covered their bodies. So, my father, who
had spent that horrible afternoon of his
childhood hiding under a bed
from a man with a gun who'd killed his
mother,
ends up shot by a man with a gun
under a bed
with the woman he's found at the end of
his life
who ran a personal ad called fate.
And then not even a boulder blocking his
driveway could stop him
from having this rendezvous that ended
with his death.
So the whole
perfection of it
made it
had an odd comfort to it.
And and maybe I'm just a kind of
imposing a kind of inevitability on it
because you know, I'm a writer and
writers do that. They they create a
narrative that allows them to
you know,
continue living.
But there
is a kind of level of coincidence there
that would shame even E.M. Forster who
was a writer who
just you know, exploited coincidence
enormously.
And whether it's something I'm inventing
or not,
uh
it can't kind of it always
makes dad's death
seem like an inevitability rather than a
horrible tragic you know, accident or
crime.
Whoa, that is a very crazy story.
You talked about narrative and how we
make narratives that I think the words
you just said were to go on living.
Um
talk about soothing narratives.
Mhm. You collect people's soothing
narrative stories.
Um as you related to me in text, it was
so foreign to my experience. I want to
know more.
What are these stories that people put
together that soothe them? What is it
with the repetition and the sense of
trying to exhaust themselves?
I thought I was the only one that did
this,
but ever since I was a small child,
in order to fall asleep, I would run
I typically the same scenario through my
mind.
And
and it was usually about some sort of
being in a huge fight and more often
than not I would lose the fight.
And that scenario would exhaust me so
much that I would fall asleep.
And there are studies with uh Olympic
wrestlers and martial artists that show
that if they lose a match, their
testosterone levels plummet.
But if they win a match, their
testosterone levels rocket up.
And the theory is that if you lose
your testosterone levels fall so that if
you're injured, you will not get into
another fight too soon.
You will give yourself time to recover.
And so, if possible, the narrative that
I was running in my head was always to
end up being beaten in some competition
so that my my body chemistry
would sort of collapse and I would fall
asleep.
I never told anybody that story. I never
told anybody that.
And then one day another writer in in
the workshop I was in at the time, the
the thriller writer Chelsea Cain,
she started talking about
self-comforting stories that children
well into adulthood tell themselves
basically the same scenarios as a way of
self-comforting
so that they basically lull themselves
to sleep through a mental process.
And for a lot of people, they're very
sexualized stories. That's how they
exhaust themselves.
And a a big faction of people
it's stories where they drive themselves
to tears.
They think of
the most increasingly sad things they
can imagine
until the point on purpose until they
cry themselves to sleep.
And Chelsea told me she writes about
serial killers.
And basically all of her books are her
presenting her self-comforting stories
in a kind of, you know, packaged
commodified way. And that's the thing
that brings her back to writing them.
It's not the fact that this is her
profession or people love these books.
It's the fact that these books are all
Chelsea Cain's self-comforting story
that she will be attached to for the
rest of her life because it serves her
in this really basic functional way.
And so
that's another kind of universal thing.
It's harder to introduce in a party
setting because people don't want to
talk about something so intimate.
Um
but when I can get people to talk about
it,
it's amazing how people have learned to
put themselves to sleep since they were
really itty-bitty children.
That's really interesting. I did not
know that people were doing that. Um
when I was little, I the only thing I
would do is think about the universe.
And that was sort of the one recurring
thing cuz I was so freaked out by this
notion of an expanding universe and my
little head just could not get around
that idea. And so I guess I would
think about that till I was tired enough
and fell asleep. But I never thought of
it as like something I was doing to
comfort myself or anything like that.
Um
that's really interesting. They're just
called self-comforting stories but in
fact they're they're kind of an an
emotionally exhausting story. Mhm. Uh
it's about kind of exhausting anxiety uh
in a consistent way.
Neurochemical management like that to me
is is such a fascinating part of the
human experience. The things that people
do to
um
deal with trauma, to deal with uh
repeating ideas I can't get out of their
head. I had a sleep expert on. I'm so
surprised this came from a sleep expert.
But I had a sleep expert on and he was
talking about how they're just now
really beginning to discover why we
dream and that there's a hypothesis now
that has some pretty profound data to
back it up that a huge part of the
reason that we dream, obviously memory
consolidation, but the more interesting
part is that what the phase of rapid eye
movement does is strip the memory from
the emotion. And
what you find and and it's um
Nora norepinephrine is the chemical that
you can track. So most people when they
go to sleep, norepinephrine plummets.
They dream in this very low
norepinephrine state, which is like the
fight or flight chemical. And so they're
repeating, you know, going back to your
idea of repeating over things and that
it loses its power.
You do that in your dream. So you're
going over and over and over this very
traumatic event. And when you do it with
your um norepinephrine levels low, you
come out and over, you know, 6 months or
a year, all of the sudden that you've
worked through it, you've as he says,
you've taken the sharp edges off. And so
now you have the memory without the
emotional intensity.
But if you take somebody with PTSD, for
whatever reason when they're in REM
sleep, they can't lower the
norepinephrine levels. So now they're
revisiting it over and over and over at
the same heightened emotional level. And
so it's just baking in and baking in and
baking in at that super intense level.
And I thought, well, that's so
interesting because the new research
that they're showing is you take
somebody, you put them on MDMA,
have them revisit a traumatic event. And
now because you've got the
neurochemistry essentially of love, you
love yourself, you're accepting, you're
positive, you feel connected, and you
have somebody revisit a traumatic event.
They're able to do that cognitive
reframing that you talk about. And I
just thought, man, this is a game of
neurochemistry. Like this is to me, all
of life is a game of neurochemistry. And
I'm constantly reminding myself, you're
having a biological experience. And when
I attack it, Go ahead. Well, I've always
thought that um
the storyteller storytelling was the
same kind of digestive assimilative
process that dreaming was.
Because
people quit telling a story once it
loses its juice for them.
You know,
if you're not a professional,
like a comedian who knows the joke
always works,
you tell a story because it works for
you. It gives you uh
there's still kind of a unresolved bite
to it.
But once that is gone, once the story is
sort of stale,
you quit telling it. You completely
digested it and assimilated it as part
of your identity, this thing that you
could not accept previously.
And so I always said that dreaming and
and storytelling
was more or less the same process.
And there is a writer, Steve Almond, who
said that teaching writing
is basically the talk therapy of our
time.
Because people used to in talk therapy,
they would tell their story over and
over until they completely wore it out.
And at that point they could move beyond
it.
But talk therapy was so expensive
that drug companies
chose uh
pharmaceuticals instead. It was just
cheaper than paying for a lot of talk
therapy.
And writing teachers had since found
that when you put people into a workshop
and you force them to tell their story
as a craft exercise, it's kind of you're
removing the emotion from it. You're
turning into a very empirical, very
calculated, crafted thing.
Then a thing that has to serve the
audience instead of serving the teller.
A thing that has to have a replicated
uh
you know,
response.
Then you are turning it into that sort
of unemotional thing that you're talking
about in in your dream state.
And you you allow people to sort of
very rapidly
get through their their their [ __ ]
by turning it into a craft exercise, a
writing exercise.
So I totally agree with that dream
hypothesis.
Mhm.
Yeah, it's uh it's interesting how deft
the mental mechanisms are, but also
terrifying how often they break.
When I think about childhood trauma,
man.
Um do you know who Gabor Maté is?
No.
I think you'd find him interesting. So
he works a lot with childhood trauma,
addiction, and um I was asking him,
what's more important, the first 3 years
of life, like would you rather have
somebody who was loved in the first 3
years of their life, taken great care
of, touched, hugged, read to, just all
the expressions of love that a human
being can give another one, but then the
rest of their life is difficult, or
would you rather the first 3 years are
an absolute atrocity, they're not
touched enough, they're not nurtured,
they're not taken care of, but the rest
of their life they are?
And he said that it was a really
terrible question and he hated me asking
it, but uh if he had to answer, that he
thought it was better to get the first 3
years right, because then at least the
person will be resilient enough to
handle it, but that you can actually
cause brain damage just by not showing a
child enough affection. Mhm. And that is
so scary, the way that things will
hardwire, and then somebody's life is
entirely dictated by that. This this is
coming back to why I find your writing
so powerful. Is dude, the number of
people that I meet that are trapped in
their own mind by something that
happened to them, something that they
did, whatever, that they're not able to
get any sort of cathartic resolution on,
it's really scary. It's a It's a
terrifying percent. I I won't guess what
it is, but it's enough to to
really be stressful.
Like just to think that it exists in the
world is so
hard.
And
this kind of bridges to
when when we talk about art as a kind of
or creative process as a as a way of
fixing people,
I always bridle at that
because
on a really basic level, who am I
to recognize your problem and then to
try to fix your problem. You know, that
would be that seems really arrogant.
Uh
but what I I can buy into, what I can
accept
is that you can
shock people or you can show them
something so fresh and new
that it pops them out of their drama for
a moment.
And it shows them that the world
can be fantastically
unpredictable and not what they think
it's going to be.
Uh years ago,
I was in the dollar store
and I've written about this. There was a
guy who was on the short side, but he
was wearing a really great coat, a
really snazzy coat.
And I saw that coat and I was just so
taken with it
and that's why I noticed that no matter
where I went in the dollar store, he was
kind of shadowing me. He was
in my line of sight.
And finally, he approached me
and I thought, oh, he's going to be a
reader.
And he said,
before I could say anything, before I
could do the whole gracious, oh, thank
you for reading my work. It's always
wonderful to hear
[ __ ]
He said,
a few years ago you did an event, one of
your adult bedtime stories event,
and everyone was supposed to come in
pajamas,
and I bought a ticket,
and my brother died that day. Ooh.
And I wasn't close to anybody like I was
close to my brother,
and I was just devastated,
and I was in shock.
But I still had this ticket, and I was
just sleepwalking.
You know, I left my father my my
brother's funeral,
and I came to your event,
and I was standing in a line on the
sidewalk waiting to come in,
and you came down the sidewalk in a
bathrobe and pajamas,
with your arms full of these huge
carnival stuffed animals.
And you gave me a giant 5-ft stuffed
penguin.
And he said, "In that moment,
when you gave me this penguin,
it shocked me out of all of my sadness,
and I realized that life was worth
living, that life would offer me
surprises that I could not conceive of,
that there would still be things
that would surprise and dazzle and
delight me.
My life wasn't over.
Just by the gesture of being given this
huge penguin."
And I was I was left speechless in the
dollar store. I was just so shocked and
and moved, really deeply moved.
And I think that
ideally, that's that's really what I
want to do is just not fix someone, not
sort of show them a a new improved way
of being,
but to just to show them the whole
spectrum of what's what's possible in
existence,
that it's not just screwed down to these
these small options that you've decided
on when you were 3 years old.
Because when you were 3 years old,
something happened, and you decided that
that's how the world was, and that's how
you were going to be in relation to the
world.
I want to show them something that sort
of busts open
you know,
what they think the world is going to
be.
And the first time I saw Harold and
Maude,
that was the feeling.
I was dumbfounded. I'd never seen a
movie like that.
It was so dark and so funny and left me
so jazzed at the end.
And there've been certain performance
pieces I've seen that did the same thing
for me.
Um
so in lieu of fixing somebody,
I always kind of strive to kind of
present them
with something that is going to make
them excited about living.
Blah, blah, blah.
I love that you cap off like this
extraordinarily deep with blah, blah,
blah.
Dude, that is a great place to end. That
is uh
[ __ ] I love that. What a great uh thing
to endeavor to do. I think you do it in
spades.
Uh where can people connect with you?
Your book tours are a sight to behold. I
hope that we get back to those ASAP. Um
but where in the meantime can people
follow you, engage with you?
You know, there's uh chuckpalahniuk.net
uh
is uh
the biggest fan site uh run by Dennis.
God bless Dennis.
And uh
uh I think all of the the usual social
media. Um
I'm not much of a social media person,
but I do like to sort of plug the things
I believe in.
Uh so,
you know, I think Insta- I think I'm on
Instagram and Facebook.
So,
but chuckpalahniuk.net is the the main
place.
Amazing. Well, brother, thank you so
much for taking the time. I can say with
all sincerity in the world, I am so glad
you exist. I'm so glad that you put your
work out into the world. It is amazing.
Uh, so again, just grateful to get to
spend some time with you. And speaking
of things to be grateful for, if you
haven't already, be sure to subscribe.
And until next time, my friends, be
legendary. Take care.
Thank you very much.