Full transcript: Chuck Palahniuk on London Real
1:39 Brian Rose: This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Chuck Palahniuk, the novelist and author best known for writing Fight Club and Choke. Over the past 27 years, you published 24 best-selling fiction novels, three of which were made into movies, 15 short stories, and a personal memoir, making you one of the most prolific authors of our time. Your first novel, Fight Club, published in 1996, was adapted into the Hollywood blockbuster movie starring Brad Pitt and Edward Norton, with The New York Times describing it as the defining cult movie of our time.
2:22 Your work has been called nihilistic, transgressive, provocative, radical, adventurous, and graphic, and you continue to push the boundaries of storytelling. Your latest book, Not Forever But For Now, is a horror satire that explores the life of two brothers living in a privileged life in the Welsh countryside as they contemplate joining the family business. Chuck, welcome back to London Real.
2:48 Chuck Palahniuk: Brian, boy, you just said my entire life. Give my eulogy someday, okay? I want you to give my eulogy.
2:55 Brian Rose: I’m in. Can we write that, like, in the will? And I’ll just be there. I’ll wear a suit and everything.
3:01 Chuck Palahniuk: It’s yours.
3:02 Brian Rose: Stranger than fiction. Chuck, it’s great to have you. You were here about two and a half years ago during lockdown, and we did our video interview, and it was something I remember for a long time. I grew up with Fight Club on repeat on my DVD in New York City as I slowly tried to kill myself. I think we talked about that last time.
3:24 So you have a special place in my heart. Really enjoying this new book and the fact that it’s in Wales, which is, if people don’t know, a country next to England in the United Kingdom makes it all the more special, especially when there’s events happening right here in London in the book. So I can’t wait to ask you about it. I got so many questions as far as that, because not a lot of people know about Wales or Welsh culture. So I want to hear about why you chose that.
3:52 But before we get started, I wanted to get your take on the world a bit, Chuck. I mean, just today we had a former president publish his mugshot on Twitter and to the celebration of much of the world. Meanwhile, there’s a sitting president who necessarily can’t tell you his name. And it all sounds like either a good or bad Chuck Palahniuk book. I’m curious, do you ever look at the world and think it’s a bit stranger than fiction?
4:22 Does it ever turn out the way you think it is? Do you get inspired by world events? And how do you compare them to something that maybe you might write?
4:34 Chuck Palahniuk: I’m not at all troubled by it. I think it’s always been this way, and we’re just more aware of it right now.
4:42 When I pull up what I think is a hard news story, and they’re quoting unidentified people or palace insiders, it’s like the whole world has turned into a tabloid and there is no hard news. And so, yeah, the crazy has always been there, and we’re just more aware of the crazy because we have access to it now. And also, I think that another thing is newspapers have gone crazy. Media has gone crazy because they found themselves bankrupted by things like Craigslist.
5:18 And so they are going to kind of keep whipping the news cycles. Everything is going to become the New York Post. And everything is going to become the National Enquirer because they are so desperate to keep our eyeballs because we’re not buying their classified ads anymore. So this is just a sort of a toboggan ride to lunacy just to keep us watching. And if I accept that, I’m perfectly happy.
5:47 Brian Rose: Right. Okay. Yeah, it’s a pretty good breakdown. It’s funny you mentioned the National Enquirer and maybe we’re dating ourselves. But I remember as a kid at the grocery store, there was kind of like the National Enquirer near the checkout line.
6:02 It seemed like every week there was like UFOs who had impregnated the latest Hollywood star. It felt like that was a regular article, but it was the most lambastic, crazy headlines ever. And now you’re right. Maybe those seem to be showing up now everywhere, those things. And it was always attributed to a source, a scientific source in Russia or China, someplace that could never be verified.
6:26 And now you open up Time Magazine and the whole headline is attributed to some person with an avatar on social media who said this thing and we have no idea who they are or if they even exist. So again, the whole world has become that unattributed, that unverifiable source somewhere who said something. Right. And whereas, I mean, a lot of your work, you explore pockets of weirdness, especially some of your fiction stuff where you actually go and find these pockets of weirdness.
7:00 And you were just saying those have always existed, but now everyone can see them on Twitter immediately, globally. And so now it feels like there’s more weirdness, but you’re saying they’re not necessarily is. It’s just now we have all access to that.
7:16 Chuck Palahniuk: Right. One thing that I love right now is that the talk about cults are coming back.
7:21 And so right now it’s kind of a reverse anti-war hall instead of everyone getting 15 minutes of fame, everyone will get 15 minutes of privacy. And so I can’t wait to see these little sort of hole-in-the-wall cults that we have no idea are proliferating like crazy. And how are we going to find out they’re there? When they kill people.
7:46 Brian Rose: So Netflix has a new documentary on Waco, Texas, and I watched it last week because I was traveling.
7:54 And I mean, some people don’t remember Waco. I know you do, and I do. But it was just wild, Chuck, to watch that with the news footage. And you think you know the story, and then you hear it again. And I was just like, wow, wow, wow.
8:10 I was very impressed with their gun skills, being able to shoot that many ATF agents and hold off 51 days during that siege. But it was interesting. And then they had a bunch of the cult members and how earnestly they spoke. And of course, we’ve seen the documentary Wild, Wild, Wild Country, which has happened up near you in Oregon. And one thing I noticed, Chuck, is that these people, and they loved being in the cult.
8:38 It’s like the most connected they’ve ever felt. And they would probably never had that experience anywhere else in the world, not in the nuclear family, not in the Democratic Party, nowhere else. And a lot of your work touches on that need for connection, right?
8:55 Chuck Palahniuk: Well, especially after you leave your family, and most people have a good family experience, but you’re in structured education for so much of your life. And then when you pop out the end of that education with whatever degree, you pop out and suddenly you have nobody.
9:12 You have no structure. And that is a perfect time to pop into a cult. And for me, it was Landmark Education, which I am not calling a cult for reasons of not wanting to be sued. But I loved Landmark. I loved that sort of second, third generation of Est.
9:29 I loved going to my seminars. So much of Fight Club is based on homework that we got from seminars, these gestalt and existentialist sort of things in the world. And then beyond Landmark, I went straight into the cacophony society where we were pranking cities and altering billboards and just pulling all of these enormous stunts as a group. And again, it’s that kind of extended family after family and after school. So it’s a way to sort of tread water and to have adventures before you have a family of your own.
10:08 Brian Rose: Wow. So you mentioned Landmark. They have a big building right here in Camden, in London. You’re probably familiar with it. And it’s a wild looking building.
10:17 I don’t know if it’s theirs, but it’s got gargoyles outside and all sorts of stuff. But I know some people that have gone through it. And I didn’t know you had. That’s wild.
10:28 Chuck Palahniuk: It’s one of the reasons why Fight Club got made was a lot of people at Fox had gone through it.
10:34 And there were parts of Fight Club that really sort of resonated with these Fox people. They said, wow, this is so Landmark. And at the time, we were all still sort of reeling from our sort of Landmark high.
10:51 Brian Rose: And so do you think they greenlit the movie subconsciously somehow? Because they were a lot of people just completely threw in.
11:01 Chuck Palahniuk: And a lot of people lost their jobs. And you really have to have that kind of passion if you’re going to put your job on the line. They lost their job after the movie was made. And after the movie more or less tanked, David Fincher, the director, he tells this great story about how when they had the final cut, the head of publicity came to Fincher and said, congratulations. Thank you, David.
11:27 You have made a movie that has got so much male nudity in it that no man is ever going to want to see it and so much blood in it that no woman is ever going to want to see it. You have made a movie that is impossible to promote. You have made my job a living hell. Thank you. And it was downhill from there.
11:48 Brian Rose: I think I still remember Ed Norton coming out saying something like, you know, he was comparing it to movies in the past that were misunderstood at the time and became classics. I think I’m thinking of Raging Bull. I think he mentioned that specifically and a few others. But I was looking at the numbers preparing for now. And it didn’t do terrible. It didn’t do great, right?
12:15 Chuck Palahniuk: Half the budget maybe on the opening. You know, it came in second to the story of Us Opening Weekend, which was a Michelle Pfeiffer movie that is completely forgotten. And the movie that ate up theaters that summer was a double indemnity. That was the number one movie all summer. Double Jeopardy. Double Jeopardy.
12:38 Brian Rose: Oh, yeah, okay. Okay, but I’ve watched Fight Club 100 or 200 times. And so when I was 30 years old in New York City and I had left, so I had a cult, which was my fraternity house during college. Talk about a cult. I mean, and that was amazing.
12:54 But I mean, a proper cult with the code words and the hazing rituals and it was an amazing thing. And then I get out and I’m in New York City and I got nothing. And what do I do? I end up going to drugs, probably natural. And then I’m there.
13:10 I’m 30 years old, 2001, and Fight Club’s on repeat in the background. And I was reading your analysis that there’s not many movies for men at that time. I think you said Dead Poets Society and Fight Club were like the only movies made for men looking, I don’t know, for answers when it comes to their own existential angst. But for me, it was therapy because those were the only guys I could see anywhere, this is pre-internet, that seemed to be experiencing anything that I was feeling.
13:42 Chuck Palahniuk: Well, the larger context is that Dead Poets and Fight Club were the only movies in which they presented a context for men to talk about their experience. And at the time, there were a million stories about women coming together in a task, typically, to discuss their experience. And those were Joy Luck Club, where they played mahjong, movies like How to Make an American Quilt, where they got together and they made a quilt, Divine Secrets of the Yaya Sisterhood, Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.
14:18 It was a whole slew of movies in which there was a context for women to just talk about what their lives were, different generations of women as well. And there just wasn’t that for men.
14:32 Brian Rose: Yeah, well, it really filled a need. Interesting, we were being pulled into Fight Club because I heard recently that last year there was kind of a big uproar because China had rewritten the ending of Fight Club. And I thought this fascinating.
14:50 What were your thoughts on that and what actually happened? And also, a lot of people don’t realize you wrote the book. I’ve read the book many times, and it’s very different than the movie, right?
15:03 Chuck Palahniuk: It is, and the book has a much more redemptive ending. And when the Chinese government put that big single card on the end of the movie that said Tyler had been arrested and Tyler had been sent to an insane asylum, that was kind of closer to the book than the movie was.
15:20 But the part that sort of irked me was when Ted Cruz tried to make hay out of it and he condemned China for censorship, when in fact, I don’t think there is a school or a prison in America where Fight Club as a book is allowed. It is censored probably more than any other book or movie in the United States. So, yeah, I think we need to sort of clean our own room.
15:46 Brian Rose: Is it really censored that much, that book?
15:50 Chuck Palahniuk: If you look at the lists of books that are censored in American prisons state by state, almost all of my books show up on almost all the lists.
16:00 So, yeah, Fight Club is pretty much on every list and almost all of my books are on pretty much every list.
16:10 Brian Rose: Why is that, Chuck?
16:12 Chuck Palahniuk: You know, they say it promotes gang activity. They say some of the books are too sexually arousing. There’s just kind of a whole spectrum of things that they disallow.
16:27 Brian Rose: And when you see someone like Ted Cruz pointing the finger at China, this probably happens a lot, is that when you actually dig deeper, you realize that, yeah, they’re censoring on their own as well. They’re just using this as an example to point the finger at someone else. Very human behavior. And China, first of all, are you surprised that they’re playing the movie in China? First of all, and second of all, why would they rewrite the ending?
16:55 Chuck Palahniuk: I’m not surprised they’re playing the movie in China. China loves Brad Pitt. China, you know…
17:02 Brian Rose: Don’t you love Brad Pitt?
17:04 Chuck Palahniuk: Everyone loves Brad Pitt, but in China, he is a god.
17:08 Brian Rose: Really?
17:09 Chuck Palahniuk: He is bigger than Stephen Seagal.
17:13 Brian Rose: And also, again, it goes back to there’s just so few movies that really talk about the male experience. And this goes on for the last 20 years. No, I can’t think of a movie that’s kind of followed up and done the same thing.
17:38 9-11 kind of made transgressive movies forbidden. So maybe that’s been a big part of it. Did you really notice that post 9-11, these things weren’t getting made, had no chance of getting made?
17:51 Chuck Palahniuk: Especially in books, because before 9-11, if you sold a book to a publisher, the publisher sent you a separate contract that said, if somebody does some cockamamie thing that’s in the book and they get hurt, then the publisher will protect you and take care of all of your legal hassles.
18:10 But after 9-11, they quit sending out those contracts. So after 9-11, if you put something kind of edgy into a book, you were on your own. And so it made a lot of writers self-censor. They just were not going to put things like that in books for fear of being sued. And writers don’t have the deep pockets that publishers have.
18:32 Brian Rose: Wow. All right. I didn’t realize that. And just real quickly, back to Fight Club. I mean, again, the male experience.
18:41 And so I haven’t watched that movie in probably a couple of years, but I could quote it, of course, which is quoting your writing. But it really was talking about how we’re a generation of men raised by women. I’m wondering if another one is really the thing we need. I actually thought about that quote a week ago. Thank you, Chuck.
18:59 And again, it was deep. It was going really deep into the young male psyche and trying to examine all the frustrations we had and what we were thinking and what we could do about them. And then you were watching these two guys that ended up being one guy trying to process that whole thing. And there hasn’t really been a movie like that since. And what did it give the world?
19:27 It became a cult classic probably because of that reason, Chuck?
19:32 Chuck Palahniuk: Yeah, because it just kind of stood there alone for so long. Nothing else was doing it in that kind of didactic way. It wasn’t just about a throughline plot. It wasn’t just about a romance.
19:45 It kind of had a soapbox as well. It had a lot of truisms built into it. And in retrospect, now that I see Jordan Peterson talk about things, a big part of me thinks that the rough play that Jordan Peterson talks about, that kind of play in which children learn their boundaries that they are allowed to inflict and to be sort of inflicted upon and they learn how much is too much. I think that for kids who did not get that rough play from their fathers, whether they’re male or female, Fight Club became the symbol for that rough play.
20:25 Fight Club became that sort of delayed developmental stage where you were told how much hitting is too much hitting, where you were able to sort of recognize how much pain you could endure and still consider it play. So I think that that rough play that Jordan Peterson talks about was just a really good way of framing what I was trying to depict in Fight Club.
20:54 Brian Rose: And when you wrote Fight Club, were you thinking about a lot of these things consciously? Did you know that you were producing something that would become that for men or not?
21:08 Chuck Palahniuk: I was taking a kind of giant field study. I was talking to all of my peers and saying, boy, what do you wish your father had taught you? How do you feel like you’ve never grown up? What do you think it would take to feel like an adult? And more specifically, to feel like a man, because everybody had gone to guy, dude.
21:32 I’m a guy, you’re a dude, but nobody ever said the word man. Man seemed just like really scary territory. And also, it seemed like a really forbidden territory. You might say man in that, the man, in terms of a kind of pejorative other. But my peers were not describing themselves as men.
21:57 And that seemed really indicative of a kind of a shortcoming, a kind of squeamishness. Because like language is everything. And if you’re not referring yourself as a man, it’s because you deep down don’t believe you are a man. Maybe your grandpa was a man, or maybe that guy is the man. But we all know we’re not the man.
22:20 We might not say it. We might not consciously know it. But you can tell we know it because we don’t use the word. Right. And one thing I was kind of proud with Fight Club was that it seemed to reintroduce the word sir.
22:35 Because when I was growing up, I was raised with a lot of Mormon peers. And I just loved how my Mormon friends always called their fathers sir. And I admired that. I wanted a father that I could call sir. And a lot of, well, my female relatives thought that that was disgusting.
22:58 They really thought that calling your father, your grandfather, your uncle, your teacher, sir, was demeaning, was just almost a profanity. And so I really, I love the word sir. I think it really establishes an immediate respect and an immediate relationship. And in Project Mayhem, they would call Tyler sir. Yeah.
23:27 Brian Rose: Right. I think it’s a sign of respect, man. Yeah, I’m glad to see it come back because it wasn’t around for most of my life and I love hearing it now. So I got two young boys, they’re six and seven. So this is front on my mind, Chuck.
23:48 I’m like literally watching two young boys become men and I’m very conscious and cognizant of what I’m teaching them, consciously, subconsciously, what they’re seeing in the world, what I want to have them do. Also, not trying to project all my insecurities and all this other nonsense on them as well. So I think about all this all the time and the way they look at people and shake their hand and look them in the eye and just these things. It’s an interesting world right now to try to negotiate that and then also be aware of the messages they’re getting at school and in the media, sometimes to the opposite of that effect and will be interesting to see what happens.
24:30 Chuck Palahniuk: Yeah, there’s going to be some point where they get out of school and they realize that that blueprint, that sort of obedience, that kind of good boy behavior is only going to take them so far and it’s usually around the age of 28 or 27 that they realize that they’re going to have to break a certain number of those rules to get anything more than what everybody else is getting.
24:58 Brian Rose: Can you expand on that a little bit?
25:01 Chuck Palahniuk: Well, I just notice it and it’s not just a gender thing.
25:05 It’s just not just men, but women as well, is they really want a blueprint. They really want a roadmap. People telling them how to get to what they want to get and if it actually worked, then everyone would get to be a best-selling author or everyone would get to be a movie star. Everyone would get these enormous goals and around a couple of years after college, you realize that if you sort of followed that same roadmap, you’re going to all end up in the same kind of dead end with everybody else and so it’s only by breaking that roadmap and doing the thing that you’re told not to do that you eventually get some small part of what you really wanted.
25:57 If I had stuck with modernist writing, if I’d stuck with writing the way that my professors had told me, then I’d never have gotten anywhere. I would be another sort of Stephen King wannabe. It’s only when I kind of threw that out the window and sort of tried to write more like a song, like music, trying to write more like all these different sort of flashy non-fiction sources that my writing really took off. Wow. And everybody has to find in their own way the rule to break and no one can teach them that.
26:33 That has to come from you. And sometimes it’s not a break. Sometimes it’s just a mistake. When I’m teaching, a beginning student will make a mistake that is so intuitive that I’m immediately in love with it and I immediately want to steal it, but it’s their mistake. And you can kind of launch a whole career off of one writing mistake that suddenly reinvents writing and makes it seem suddenly so fresh for people.
27:02 And you give people that joy of feeling like they’re learning to read for the first time. And with every book, it’s about not just telling a story, it’s about kind of destroying the language so that the reader feels like they’re having that joy, that second grade joy where suddenly these symbols are making sense and they’re subvocalizing them and they’re thinking in a way that they’ve never thought before because the language is so not the kind of cleaned up copy edited language that they’ve been taught is good language. And so in a way, every book and every short story for me is about first and foremost making language my bitch, using phrases that would never use, using phrases and structures that would drive the copy editor crazy.
27:54 It’s all about punishing the copy editor.
27:57 Brian Rose: And you got this inspiration from listening to song lyrics and I know in your head when you create sentences, it’s about how it sounds to you, it’s about how it makes the brain question what it’s actually seeing on the page. This is the kind of things you’re talking about.
28:18 Chuck Palahniuk: It’s about making mistakes that overhear people making on the bus. It’s about listening to people and listening to why they do the things they do, what is the function of what they say.
28:32 And most of the time when I meet someone, I know immediately how big their family was that they were raised in. Because people who were raised in big families, before they say what they’re going to say, they have to make an opening for it. They have to say, you know what’s interesting? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And only once they realize they’ve got your attention, then they can say the important part.
29:00 And at that point, depending on how long that sort of introductory clause was, I can say you were raised with four siblings or you were raised with two siblings or you were an only child. And they’re stunned. It’s almost like being psychic. People are really amazed that I can nail the size of their birth family. But so many of the ways that we talk sort of betray our circumstances.
29:31 And I just love studying language for that. I love that.
29:35 Brian Rose: And so when you, in the purest form, you want someone to read one of your books, is it blasphemy to have them listen to it on an audible? Because in that way, does it completely mess up what you’re trying to get into their brains?
29:53 Chuck Palahniuk: You know, I love audiobooks.
29:55 But for me, audiobooks are something that I listen to while I am doing something, while I’m doing a task, a physical task. And so I don’t think I’m nearly as immersed in the book with an audiobook. It may be driving. Maybe driving I would be a little more immersed. But my books are really meant to be read on airplanes or in hospital rooms.
30:25 Reading is kind of a last desperate thing we do in our lives because it takes so much effort. It takes a lot of time and a lot of effort to read a book. And so we tend to only do it during sort of the most dire parts of our lives where we are most alone and facing really horrible circumstances. And that’s when you want people to read your books. I think that’s a blessing because if your mom is there and she’s dying of cancer and she is in active dying and you’re there bedside in the hospice, if I can give somebody just a little bit of respite from that, then that is my greatest goal, that they can check out for just a few moments or afterwards after the loved one has died.
31:17 If I can give them a tiny bit of distance from this horror, then that is my greatest goal.
31:23 Brian Rose: Now, Chuck, I read somewhere that you said that’s the perfect time for you to write a novel is after someone important in your life has died. And you said one of the ways you started simulating it was to take a lot of Vicodin a couple of years ago that would give you that similar feeling of, I don’t know what that was, nothingness or no connection. I don’t know, can you speak on that and also your experience with some of those substances?
31:52 Chuck Palahniuk: Well, for me and a lot of my friends, there’s this constant awareness of opportunity cost. You’re thinking, oh my gosh, do I really want to sit down and see a whole day or two days or three days disappear as I write intensely? And after a big stint of writing, it’s frightening to see how fast time has passed because I’ve been so immersed in this incredible minutia and there’s also kind of a terror. And so when somebody dies, when some horrible thing happens, that so completely sets me back to a nihilistic zero that I can accept that whether I am writing or whether I am gardening or whether I am doing whatever, there is no innate value in any of those things that’s greater than any of the other things.
32:56 So tragedy or trauma kind of sets me back to that zero place where I’m really free to choose the thing that I choose. And it makes writing no greater or lesser a past time than any other. So I can freely choose writing. Vicodin was a while back, it was a way to kind of give myself courage to write stories like Guts. The Guts story was in my head for so long, it took years to assemble the three anecdotes that are in it.
33:35 The cake story, the candle story, the swimming pool story. But when it came down to actually writing that story, it was very confronting, not just the story itself, but knowing that someday I was going to be reading that story and that hundreds or thousands of people would be automatically thinking that I was all three of those characters. It’s a story where you really shed all of your dignity. And so, so much of writing that story was so confronting that it took two or three hefty Vicodin for me to get a first draft out.
34:11 Brian Rose: And then you wrote the whole thing?
34:14 Chuck Palahniuk: More or less in one setting.
34:16 Brian Rose: How long’s that sitting, like six days?
34:19 Chuck Palahniuk: You know, no, maybe six hours at the most. Because these things were in my head for years sometimes.
34:27 And it just takes one last piece of detail before the whole thing kind of crystallizes and kind of spills out on the page. And there’s such a sense of relief when that happens.
34:39 Brian Rose: I’ve heard you say, Chuck, that most people can’t write the novels they want to write because they fear confrontation and they fear conflict. And most people got out, maybe barely got out of their family situations and they never want to go back there. And I never thought that writing about that would simulate that, but of course it would, now that I think about it.
35:05 And so you said that for most of the time, and a lot of people don’t know, you do a lot of teaching, like workshoppings, like kind of in your blood. And I know you do a lot of that. And I’d love to hear more about it. But can you speak on that? Is that most people are not willing to go to that place of conflict, of pain.
35:23 And so they don’t even actually write these stories because I guess you have to be in it all the time as an author to create that.
35:31 Chuck Palahniuk: The place of tension. Most people just do not want to go to tension and then they do not want to escalate tension, which is what plotting is. They got out of whatever their tense situation was and they’re never going to go back and they just don’t want to live in that tension. And when you’re in it, even if you’re writing it, your body doesn’t know the difference.
35:55 So your body is sort of responding in that PTSD way as you’re writing the fiction. And so that’s another reason why I try to get the book written in six weeks because it’s a lot of tension to carry for any length of time.
36:10 Brian Rose: And so when you’re workshopping your students, is that something you’re constantly trying to push them to go into?
36:19 Chuck Palahniuk: Yeah. They will write a chapter in which really nothing happens or whatever tension that they create, they resolve at the end of the chapter rather than allowing that tension to sort of spill over into the next chapter and to accumulate to snowball chapter after chapter until it reaches that huge crescendo that you want at the end of a good story or a good novel.
36:44 Or the worst example is what I call tennis match dialogue where characters are constantly saying, how are you? I’m fine, how are you? Did you go anywhere today? No, I watched the kids. And tennis match dialogue is so boring or clever dialogue where the tension is constantly being negated by people being really clever.
37:08 Something will happen and people will just sort of fob off with a clever little comeback. And it’s funny because when I was writing this year’s book, not forever, but for now, boom, I sat down one snowy night with a whole pile of British cozy mysteries. And a cozy mystery is the largest sub-genre of mystery. It typically takes place in a Scottish or Irish or English village. And someone is murdered in a fantastically gruesome way.
37:44 And then the vicar comes in and solves the murder or a happy-talking dog solves the murder or a Miss Marple solves the murder. And there is absolutely no tension whatsoever. And it’s so kind of comic and ludicrous in that you find a member of your community disemboweled in front of the church or with her throat cut or put through with a pitchfork in her garden. And no one responds with a kind of emotional horror. There is no real tension.
38:23 Everyone immediately goes to the intellectual task of figuring out who the killer is. And they treat it like the game is afoot. It suddenly becomes this intellectual cognitive exercise in figuring out who the killer was. There is no mourning. There is no terror.
38:43 There is no visceral reaction to this butchered scene. And when I read those cozy mysteries, it’s almost as if all of England is these kind of severely autistic people who have no ability to respond emotionally to loss or grief. And so all of those cozies made me laugh because every response was this negating of drama, negating of tension. And so that’s what I just kind of wanted to the nth degree in this new book. I wanted to write the cozy of all cozies.
39:24 Brian Rose: Well, and so let’s jump into it. I mean, the book is not forever, but for now. Was this a genre then that had kind of been on your hit list for many years and you thought I need to go and get to pay back here and do it properly. And is that why this is based in Wales then to fit that genre breaking moment?
39:50 Chuck Palahniuk: To be honest, I thought maybe I could make some money if I wrote a cozy.
39:56 I don’t like cozies, but they sell a lot. They sell a ton. And I thought maybe I could launch a franchise. Rita Mae Brown, who wrote the biggest gay lesbian novel in the seventies, maybe of the 20th century, she wrote the Ruby Fruit Jungle, which is a landmark book. It is the gay version of Native Son or Invisible Man.
40:21 Rita Mae Brown wrote that landmark book. And then she kind of disappeared. And now she pays the bills by writing a series of books called the Sneaky Pie Brown Mysteries, in which her calf solves gruesome murders. And they’re cozies. It’s about Rita Mae Brown’s cat solving horrible murders.
40:43 And so I thought maybe if I could get a franchise going where maybe my Boston Terrier solves murder mysteries, that I could spend the rest of my life just cranking these things out. But I could barely stand to read one, much less write one. So after having read a dozen of them, I thought maybe I can take the whole Downton Abbey, upstairs, downstairs, Gosford Park world, and just turn it into the Fight Club world. It’s so much about architecture and about people talking and about lack of responding appropriately to violence, that this kind of almost celebration of violence, like, oh, goodness, the fishmonger got butchered.
41:35 We should all decide and wade in and solve this mystery. It’s kind of a happy days are here again. The Sweet Shops lady got killed. And she’s lying in a pool of her own blood. And now we’ve got something to do.
41:51 Brian Rose: It seemed very Fight Club, because everything, all these acts of violence were just embraced as a way to form community. The communities don’t really get together except to solve murders. And so what can you tell us about this book? And also, there is violence in this book. And maybe you can speak a little bit about how it’s such a crucial component in telling a story.
42:22 Wow.
42:22 Chuck Palahniuk: You got kids. And so as your little boys grow up, you are able to revisit all of your own developmental phases where you saw a thing and you were first troubled by it. And you had to come to terms with it. You had to go to your parent and ask for advice.
42:43 And you made decisions about certain aspects of life that were very troubling. And you have lived from those decisions since then. And with your little boys, you get to sort of revisit those decisions and maybe recalibrate them to a big extent, depending on their experience, right? Yes.
43:08 Chuck Palahniuk: And so I don’t have kids.
43:10 So often with my characters, it’s about going back to an experience that was very troubling as a little kid and really unpacking it and exploring it. And in this case, it’s about those nature films where you saw a baby animal that was completely vulnerable, a baby deer or a baby giraffe. And it was hidden by its mother, and the mother was trying to distract predators to keep the predators from finding this tiny, fragile baby and destroying it. And as a child watching those scenes, you identified so much with the baby animal, you did not want to see the baby animal destroyed.
44:02 But more often than not, the lions or the baboons or whatever would find the baby. And as a child, you would witness that baby screaming and being torn to pieces alive and being consumed alive. And as a child, that was really deeply upsetting. And your parent couldn’t say anything that would make that better. That was just a traumatizing thing to witness.
44:34 And so just starting with that as a jumping off place for the book. And in this case, it’s starting with watching the sort of fetal joy, the unborn kangaroo baby, which leaves the kangaroo’s vagina and has to climb the fur of the kangaroo to somehow get into the pouch. And the mother kangaroo can’t help it. This tiny, fetal, unformed, blind little thing has to, under its own power, climb the fur to get to where it needs to get to to finish its maturation. It was so troubling as a child to witness that and to know that some of those little kangaroo joys fall off and they just die in the dust.
45:27 And it seemed like such a great metaphor for young people who are struggling through that period of being completely on their own and trying to find that next place to be where they’ll be safe enough to finish their lives. It reminded me so much of all of this addiction and people in my life, these young people who are overdosing right now, people who are really climbing the fur trying to get to the pouch and falling off and dying. And so really the book becomes a huge, dark exploration of addiction, porn addiction, drug addiction, everything addiction.
46:14 Brian Rose: Yeah, because I think there’s a statement you said where at the end of the book you said this is a book about addiction and those that are addicted. And if you read it again, and I haven’t yet read it the second time yet, you said, I encourage you to read the book again, I think you said, and look at it in that frame. Because you kind of want people to understand that’s what you’re talking about here. Or they might not see that in the first pass because there’s so many different types of addiction as well, even though one of the characters has an addiction.
46:49 Chuck Palahniuk: I guess everybody has an addiction to a certain extent. And everyone is kind of ignoring the fact that an enormous amount of time has passed, which is what happens in addiction. You wake up 30 years later and you realize you’re not this young person experimenting with drugs. You’re an old middle-aged person and you have just flushed 30 years of your life down the toilet and you’re still in that emotional place where you were 30 years ago. You’re basically a grown-up child and that’s a big part of the book.
47:23 And you can’t really address those problems head-on because they’re so dark, they’re so painful, and nobody wants to spend their free time reading a book about pain. One thing that drove me to write this book was that on my last book tour, which is probably about eight years ago, a lot of times small groups would come up to me, four or six people, and they would have one of my books and they would ask me to inscribe it to someone who was not present. And I would say, so why is he not here? Who is this guy?
48:00 And subsequently they would say, he’s dead. He died. He died of a drug overdose. He loved your books. And we would like you to inscribe this book so that we can bury it in his coffin with him.
48:13 He was 23. He was 24 years old. And at that point I am so gutted, I’m so devastated that it’s all I can do to inscribe this book to this dead kid knowing that the book is going to be buried in the coffin. And I came across dozens of families and groups of friends like that on tour. And it just drove me back to the hotel room every night where I just drank and drank and drank.
48:45 And I had to do something with that burden. So writing this book was a big way of dealing with the fact that this enormously sad, painful thing is happening. But I cannot make it enormously sad and painful on the page or nobody is going to venture into it. So that’s why that reveal takes place in the author’s notes at the very end. Because I want people to enjoy the book and then to find out later what the book is actually about.
49:20 Brian Rose: Wow. So when I was watching Fight Club on repeat in the year 2001 in New York City, I overdosed twice. And I’m wondering if those types of people going through those types of situations are drawn to your work, Chuck. They must be. Because they must feel like nobody else understands them.
49:42 And there’s something resonating here that pulls me into this work. Do you think that’s true?
50:03 Chuck Palahniuk: I’m sorry. I’m a terrible guest because I take these long silences where I have to think,
50:23 Boy, I want to go back to the fact that my work tends to approach really terrible subjects in a kind of indirect way that maintains the tension but doesn’t surrender to it. That Fight Club can be about violence, but it’s a consensual violence and it’s a violence that is structured. So it’s a way of experiencing violence without being afraid of it and without avoiding it for your entire life. My books are a way of exploring very unappealing things. Oh, I know it.
51:37 I know it. I’ve been thinking about this all spring. My books are fairy tales for people who fucked up a lot when they were young because fairy tales, this is it, this is it, this is it. Fairy tales say, okay, if you do everything right and you don’t do drugs and you don’t fuck around and get herpes by the time you’re 17 and you don’t get vaginal warts by the time you’re 19 and if you don’t get married young and have a kid and then end up doing meth, if you don’t do all these things, then eventually at some point when you’re a virgin, you will be allowed intimacy.
52:18 You will be allowed to kiss and have intimacy with one person and that person will be a prince or a queen and the rest of your life will be golden. Okay, that’s a fairy tale. And I’m sorry, I missed that boat. I fucked up early. I fucked up early and I got the warts.
52:43 I fucked up early and I got the addiction. I fucked up early and had all the meaningless relationships and so I’m one of many people who are wondering, will I ever, ever have connection to another human being? Will I ever have that thing that fairy tales promised me because I didn’t do what fairy tales told me to do and so all of my books are fairy tales for people like myself who messed up early and messed up a lot and are wondering if they can ever redeem themselves and so my books are all about people like myself who find some redemption, however small, by the end of the book.
53:32 Yeah, the redemption’s not big at the end but it is proof of redemption. Yeah, that’s what all of my books are about.
53:39 Brian Rose: That makes a lot of sense now that you say it that way. I never thought of that way, but that’s true. And like you said before that, you find a way of approaching subjects and I mean, I’ve read so many of your books.
53:52 I mean like, you know, instant death on other people like dangerous cult type behavior, brain, all these really bad things but in some way, the way you tell it, it’s approachable without having that PTSD moment where you can’t even engage with it. So you find an angle to get people to be able to, I guess, put that type of a situation in their brain without having that emotional response that would not allow them to explore it deeper intellectually.
54:27 Chuck Palahniuk: Yeah, I love that because the socially inappropriate or the socially lacking response creates a little bit of humor.
54:36 And so people find themselves present and laughing at things that normally would completely shut them down and alienate them. And so they feel a little conflicted and that doesn’t stop them from going further.
54:49 Brian Rose: Yeah, yeah. I still remember having lunch. I used to eat lunch on my own in Notting Hill here in London and I’d be reading some of your books and sometimes I’d just be sitting there and I’d look around the restaurant because my mind would be so warped and twisted and kind of blown in a way I never felt before reading a book and because I think you were using a lot of these different methods that I had never experienced before in my brain to put me somewhere where I couldn’t normally get without having all those weird little barriers and reactions and here I was in this new strange world and now I was able to contemplate in a different emotional state something that I could never ever consider and then my brain would really feel weird and I’d be like, that goddamn poem, I could did it again and yeah, you do that regularly, regularly, regularly through all your work.
55:43 Brian Rose: And I guess that’s the craftsmanship of what you do, I guess.
55:48 Chuck Palahniuk: And there’s so much in, especially minimalist writing where you’re reliant upon verbs and you’re forbidden to use pejorative language. The idea is constantly to create the circumstances that make the emotion, make the judgment occur in the reader’s mind so that you’re not being dictated to, you’re not being told, this is the funny part, this person is an evil person, you’re being coached, being kind of subtly led to make those decisions yourself and so that’s what I love about minimalism.
56:26 Brian Rose: Yeah, I totally agree. I just had a flashback to the movie Taxi Driver, I don’t know why but there’s some point when you’re watching the movie Taxi Driver where Travis Bickle, at least for a young man in his 20s, he’s like the hero man, he’s like, yeah, F the system, I’m getting the guns, I’m getting all this stuff but there’s one point where Travis goes too far and you’re like, okay, all right, this guy, uh-oh, man, he’s bad actually. Wait a second, I remember I noticed one time and I was like, wait a second, the guy I thought was now a different guy and I made that choice in my mind.
57:01 The movie never told me, guess what, now he’s gone overboard and maybe it was just me thinking it but I remember thinking, wow, that was really nice and generous of the writer and the director to let me come up with that feeling and conclusion myself without the music coming in, without the dun dun dun, guess what, he’s not what you thought he was and I don’t know if that’s a good example of minimalism working but I think I see what you mean.
57:32 Chuck Palahniuk: Yeah, that’s entirely what I mean. You know, that’s one of the hardest things to break young writers off is that dictation of emotion, that dictation of the epiphany that just cannot be on the page.
57:46 Brian Rose: Back to this book and addiction, you said that you saw in America all these people dying of overdoses and we hear over here in Britain and in Wales where your book is based of the fentanyl and all these things happening and I’m curious, Chuck, do you find that addiction has gone up significantly or as humans, are we always addicted to something with digital media? Is that addiction even higher with the access? I mean, when you and I were kids, trying to get a porn magazine, you’d have to find it out in the woods somewhere.
58:23 It’s funny, everybody in our age has a, I literally did see my first porn magazine in the woods but you couldn’t get it, you couldn’t get it online. Now, for all I know, my seven year old has seen it on a mobile phone at school. So I’m just wondering, do you think people are more addictive now or not?
58:41 Chuck Palahniuk: So funny that you went there, that box of porn in the woods story, once in my workshop, somebody mentioned, a store was closing and somebody mentioned that I wonder what they’re gonna do with all the old playboys.
58:54 And somebody said, I wonder if that’s how the box of porn in the woods happens. And of the people at that table, 30 people, 29 of them had found boxes, bags, duffel bags, backpacks, suitcases full of pornographic magazines on golf courses, ocean beaches, deserts, stuffed in trees, next to dumpsters. And for almost every child, for generations, that is how you saw your first graphic images, the box of porn in the woods. It was really a heartwarming moment to realize because we had all thought in shame that we were the only one who had found that thing.
59:38 And we’d all kind of carried that shameful discovery that we could not understand in a very natural setting. And then to find out we all have the same experience, that was glorious. That table just went crazy because everyone had to make their confession. And it was a joyous confession because it wasn’t just their own shame. That’s another thing I try to do in my books, is connect people through the discovery that their experience is not just their own shameful experience, that it’s something shared by a vast number of people.
1:00:19 And now I’ve forgotten your question. It was about addiction.
1:00:23 Brian Rose: Yeah, because like you said, this book is ultimately about addiction, all sorts of different types of addiction. Obviously we see this fentanyl crisis in America and we’re seeing more people dying of overdoses, I guess, to barbiturates. My drug of choice was heroin, funny enough, back in New York City in 01.
1:00:44 And if I was there now with the amount of fentanyl in the world, I am sure I would be dead. And so I’m wondering, in your mind, are people getting addicted more because of access to stronger chemicals, access to stronger digital images? Is it becoming more of an issue in the human experience or was it always there?
1:01:10 Chuck Palahniuk: I think it’s part of a larger trend, which is the commodification of very personal, intimate things, whether it’s vibrators that do what no lover can possibly ever do to you, vibrators or pornography or drugs or greeting cards.
1:01:28 We’re losing the ability to say, I love you and this is what I love about you. We’re losing our ability to kind of articulately express our emotions to one another. We kind of form that out to diamond jewelry. Just at Christmas time, look at all the advertisements for all the things that we are unable to express to one another that have been turned into steps and cologne or diamond jewelry or some chocolate or some alcohol. That is the thing that you give, that is the thing that you have lost the ability to express.
1:02:07 And so it kind of moves from this failure to be able to express our feelings to a kind of commodification of the feelings themselves. So why make the effort to do something that will give you joy and euphoria when you can get that by taking a pill, that everything becomes this commodified thing at the end of your life, you realize that all you’ve done is buy things and take things, take pills. You’ve never really created a thing or expressed a thing. Yeah, and that’s kind of the joy in getting young writers together is that you are really working with a generation of kids who have always been able to buy their expression.
1:02:57 They have never learned how to create their expression. And the joy is when they finally sort of make headway and they’re able to do this thing that might have been always beyond them.
1:03:11 Brian Rose: And so there’s two things there. I want to get to the workshopping, but this theme that you’re talking about of throughout all of your work, right? This disconnection, this mass consumerism, and then leading to addiction in some ways.
1:03:28 I mean, this is all part, I guess, of the same picture and themes that have always been on your mind that your books have always talked about. And this is continuing to progress and probably continuing to be dialed up in your mind as every year progresses. Is it getting bigger and bigger? Are we getting more and more disconnected? Is there more consumerism?
1:03:50 Is there more addiction? Is there less connection overall in your mind?
1:04:01 Chuck Palahniuk: It’s hard to argue with less connection when there is such an enormous social media connection, but it’s such a superficial connection that it’s almost like people who essentially starve to death while they’re eating non-nutritive food. They’re eating Olestra and eating Olestra and eating Olestra, and they always feel full, but in fact, they’re starving to death. And so that’s what I think of so much social media. They think that they’ve got 65,000 friends and it’s all an illusion.
1:04:42 It’s all crazy. So, yeah, there is more connection, but it’s more worthless connection. And again, it’s commodified connection. They’ve found a way to commodify our need to have friendships and cohorts. And so somebody’s making money from the fact that we can’t do it ourselves anymore, and they’re making it easier for us, but it’s not the real thing.
1:05:11 Brian Rose: And like you said, it’s commodified, so every friend is the same. And it’s all kind of… The terms for that relationship are already dictated. There’s no dislike button. There’s immediate severance over the relationship if you just want to hit a button and block someone.
1:05:31 So again, there’s no tension. We’ve worked into a world where nobody wants tension, nobody wants suspense, because it’s just too hard to be with. And so maybe drugs are a big part of that as well. I can’t even be with the small tension of what it is to walk around in the world. What more can you say about the book without giving too much away?
1:05:58 We danced around a few things, talked about a few issues, but what more can you say to people who are curious without giving up too much?
1:06:07 Chuck Palahniuk: Oh, you know, years ago, when I worked on the Freightliner assembly line, when I got out of college, I had a journalism degree in a generation of kids who had watched Woodward and Bernstein and all wanted to be all the president’s man and all wanted to be investigative journalists. And so there were no jobs for any of us, and I had huge student loans.
1:06:29 So I got a job on the Freightliner assembly line building trucks, and I ended up there for 13 years. And I worked with a guy named Jimmy, and every Friday, Jimmy, who looked like General Custer, he had this long, blonde, curly hair, he would say, do you want to come out and ruin a car this weekend? Because he had this inside connection to a guy who did insurance fraud, and every weekend he could pick up the keys for a Maserati or a Lamborghini or some gorgeous sports car, and he would just drive it all over and just trash the crap out of it.
1:07:14 He would sideswipe buildings, he would just thrash the car. And at the end of Sunday night, at the end of this whole weekend of destroying this beautiful car, he would send it down a boat ramp in a certain park here in Portland. And I never went with Jimmy. I never went on these missions, which were all insurance fraud because then the owner of the car would get the insurance money. And I kind of didn’t believe Jimmy until years and years and years later, somebody discovered 45, 50, 60 beautiful cars all smashed in the middle of the Willamette River at the deepest point, and they were all being towed out, and they were all Maseratis and Lamborghinis and Mercedes.
1:08:07 And I thought Jimmy was actually doing it. So a big part of that became one of the ongoing plot threads in this new book, this ability, this place to finally put Jimmy, put Jimmy to rest.
1:08:20 Brian Rose: And that’s true about so many of your books, right? Where you have all these, these like so many modular, different ideas. It’s kind of how you started with Fight Club, I think.
1:08:33 You’re like, I wanted to express this idea, this idea, this idea, this idea. And then you found there was a thorough line, and then you found ways to weave them together.
1:08:44 Chuck Palahniuk: And I invent very, very little that goes into my books. Almost everything that goes into my books are things that people tell me that are actual things in the world that people, I won’t say confess, but confide in me. And part of being able to go up there and to read a story like Guts, where I look like the world’s filthiest, most corrupt, perverted idiot, is that it gives people permission to express that aspect of their own lives to me.
1:09:14 And so they can tell me their darkest, most humiliating moment. And I’m able to take those moments and find a pattern between them and to make something bigger out of them. And again, to kind of demonstrate to even more people that we have all found that big box of porn in the woods. And it’s not just our burden to carry along.
1:09:37 Brian Rose: And so when you write these pieces and then read them out, it’s actually also a funnel for new ideas that you get from people that confess.
1:09:47 Chuck Palahniuk: Exactly, please.
1:09:48 Brian Rose: Are you ever, are you never surprised by the unique story that someone can tell you? I mean, I would think if anybody has heard it all, it’s Chuck Palahniuk. But are you, does it make you laugh sometimes when someone tells you something and you’re like, wow, I never ever would have thought of that?
1:10:10 Chuck Palahniuk: More often than you would imagine.
1:10:12 I’m always delighted. I’m just delighted that human experience is so much more than what I see on Netflix, so much more than what I see in the mass media. And that’s what depresses me, is that so much of what we see as, what we’re presented with as human experience kind of leaves out the extreme and leaves out the magic as well. These fantastic coincidences that people don’t want to face. It’s not just the kind of corrupt or questionable, the untoward things that get edited out.
1:10:51 It’s also the amazing unexplainable things that get edited out because somehow they’re beyond believability. And so in mass media, we’re not seeing the worst, but we’re also not seeing the best. The best is also being systematically taken out of our stories, and that’s what I miss the most.
1:11:15 Brian Rose: But you don’t get the best unless you get the worst. Well, we talked about censorship in the beginning.
1:11:23 We were talking, I guess, a little bit of how Fight Club was either censored in Texas or rewritten in China. But talk about freedom of speech and censorship and certain platforms will allow this. They won’t allow this. When I go on Netflix, I mean, I like the Waco documentary, don’t get me wrong, but a lot of stuff I see there, it just seems like so commodified, and it feels like you just plug this in, and it feels like this has been washed and rewashed and rewashed, and I’m like, is there people that actually watch this?
1:11:52 And I guess they do. And then I got censored on YouTube for a while, Chuck, and I meet people on the streets, and they’ll be like, they don’t even know. And I’ll be like, you know, a lot of my content isn’t even there, and you’re getting the Mr. Rogers channel from me. Otherwise, they’re going to throw me off entirely.
1:12:06 People are just like, nope, I had no idea, because I just, that’s whatever comes up on my feed. And so they really do have a different human experience, because they really don’t experience all these things, and therefore live a life without all these weird challenges. How do you feel about that?
1:12:27 Chuck Palahniuk: In a way, I’m kind of happy about it, because so often when you find out about those really amazing, connective things, it should be in person. It should be when you’re with a group of people around a campfire or in a bar, and somebody makes an admission that suddenly allows everyone else to make the same admission.
1:12:49 And there is something so much like a religious service that happens in that moment, where everyone suddenly feels so incredibly bonded that I don’t think that that can really happen with commercial selling things stuck in between, that maybe that’s just not the place for that kind of magic to happen.
1:13:13 Brian Rose: Yeah, so please. And that happens a lot in your workshops. And so I’m curious, like why do you have such a passion for workshops? You mentioned the different age groups.
1:13:26 And so I’m sure you workshop people in their 60s and maybe even 70s and maybe now in their 20s and maybe teens. And first of all, did you ever think you would do that? It’s quite a paternal move on your part, Chuck. And then second of all, what do you learn in this younger generation? Like you said, maybe they’re lacking this ability to engage with this conflict.
1:13:48 But then also once you get them to, maybe they respond differently and maybe more so. What do you, here’s what you see about this new generation.
1:14:08 Chuck Palahniuk: It’s hard to answer it because I wouldn’t even say new generation because what I’m seeing is a kind of process that happened when I was their age in writing workshops. That it was just a glorious time to be with people my own age and to have the validation of everyone sitting there together, pursuing the same impossible thing that the whole world made fun of us for.
1:15:00 Everywhere else in the world, my friends would kind of jive me and belittle me by saying, how’s that little writing thing going? How’s that little writing? Are you still writing those little stories? How’s that going? Those little stories thing.
1:15:16 But in workshop, I didn’t get that. Everybody in workshop loved what we were doing. And so to have that validation, to have that support, even just one night a week was fantastic. And those friends were friends that I still have 30, 40 years later. And so what I’m seeing in the workshops that I conduct is very much still exactly that same thing.
1:15:44 People finding community in this passion that nobody else in their life kind of validates. And for young people, it’s kind of double bind in that they can become technically very good writers. They can pick up the really great tricks of minimalism, but they have very little experience. And so the stories that they write tend to be kind of of a mold. There are stories about parties they’ve been to.
1:16:17 There are stories about their college years. They can be really well written, but they’re just not very interesting because they don’t have very much variation. And it isn’t until they have a fuller life, late 20s, 30s, that they start to have the skill as well as the experience so that they can create books or stories that are really amazing. So young writers are great at picking up skills, but they have so little experience. And older writers have a lot of experience, but it is much harder to kind of break their bad habits.
1:17:00 It’s much, much harder to get them not to write like Stephen King. There’s already a Stephen King, and they’re writing like a bad Stephen King, and they’ve been doing that for decades. And so it is really hard to get them to not do it. Yeah, that didn’t make a lot of sense, but I’d rather have a young writer who’s going to build experience. And my cheat was that I had a journalism background so that as I acquired the skills of writing, I didn’t have to have the experience myself.
1:17:36 I could go to people around me, and I could kind of question and interview people, and I could incorporate their experience. And use it in addition to my own, because my own experience is so little. Yeah, I’ll leave it at that.
1:17:56 Brian Rose: You mentioned Jordan Peterson earlier. What do you make of Andrew Tate and what seems to be a need for someone to speak on masculinity, a bit like Jordan does?
1:18:10 What do you mention of the phenomenon of him and the demand for him from young men?
1:18:16 Chuck Palahniuk: Everything old is new again. It just seemed like Latin culture is sort of coming back. It’s never really went away. In the 90s, Latin culture with Maxim magazine and soccer hooligans, it was everywhere.
1:18:32 And I think the fight club kind of rose out of that. It was, in a way, the literary sort of high point of Latin culture. And so there’s always going to be that kind of extreme that rises. And so I think it’s completely organic and natural. Yeah.
1:18:52 Brian Rose: Is that what it is or is it more than that? Is it that the guys or the guy in fight club that feels disenfranchised, that doesn’t feel able to express his masculinity, that feels disconnected where someone’s saying, no, your feelings are valid. Is it that or is it not?
1:19:17 Chuck Palahniuk: I think it’s a fantasy and people recognize it as a fantasy. Nobody really wants to be Andrew Tate and have all the cars. But there have to be these extremes. And so he is an extreme and nobody’s going to go that far. They might dream of being the next Andrew Tate, but in a way, Andrew Tate is kind of a Tyler Durden extreme stereotype.
1:19:48 And nobody really realistically wants to go that far. They’ll eat a lot of raw eggs. They’ll maybe get some suntan on their testicles. But, you know, yeah, that’s the extent of it.
1:20:03 Brian Rose: Chuck, what do you make of artificial intelligence?
1:20:07 And you’re in workshop. What kind of some of your students ever play with it? Have you messed with chat GPT for, by the way, what do you think of its fiction? And in a long enough timeline to quote one of your books, you know, does it write consumable, maybe curious, maybe innovative fiction?
1:20:28 Chuck Palahniuk: I think it’s probably always going to just write very mediocre stuff.
1:20:33 I am not at all threatened by it. In a way, I see AI fiction as the equivalent of what what photography did to figurative painting, that there was a lot of painting. There was a lot of kind of mediocre figurative painting. There were a lot of Sunday painters. And then the camera came in and kind of took over that job.
1:20:56 And so artificial intelligence is going to kind of take over that, that writing of bad writing, that writing of really subpar mediocre writing. But it’s never going to really do the job of great writing. So it doesn’t scare me in the slightest.
1:21:15 Brian Rose: Well, it definitely shouldn’t scare you. I don’t know how I could ever come up with the stuff you do, including your latest book.
1:21:25 But yeah, I understand what you’re saying. I’m going to contemplate that some more for sure. Chuck, what next for you? And do you still get excited about writing? Does workshoping your students help you stay excited?
1:21:40 Do you kind of go up from like a two to a nine when you get excited about writing? Or is this something that’s just a part of who you are and you’ll always be writing and creating?
1:21:54 Chuck Palahniuk: It is really an always thing. It is the way I cope in the world. I’ve always kind of an anecdote.
1:22:02 I was in Texas once. I was taken to a Barnes and Noble in Dallas. And I was just supposed to sign a bunch of books, a stock signing. And I’m signing this pile of books. And there is a very quiet clerk helping me.
1:22:15 And she hasn’t said a word. And she’s just watching me in this kind of unsettling way. And finally, she says, what sign of the Zodiac are you? And I said, I’m a Pisces. And she kind of nods herself, nods her head in this very knowing way.
1:22:34 And she goes, the only water sign without a shell. And I felt so naked in that moment that for me, having a story, having something I’m working on is the shell I live inside of. It is the armor that separates me from the world and makes it bearable to be with the fact that one morning I have a flat tire, or the next morning I get a letter from the IRS. Having a huge problem that I have created in the fictive world, having this huge, invented circumstance that I have to fight my way out of, gives me such a comfort in the face of all the little everyday bullshit things that happen that writing is really my chief coping mechanism.
1:23:29 And I will always be doing that.
1:23:32 Brian Rose: Have you ever tried to live without it, just to test yourself?
1:23:36 Chuck Palahniuk: That’s called drinking and drugs.
1:23:39 Brian Rose: Yeah, OK, good. I feel you.
1:23:41 I feel you. I’ve had people that say, Brian, you need to relax. You need to take a holiday. You need to be comfortable not having something to do all the time. And I always tell them, yep, then I’m going to start drinking again.
1:23:52 Do you want to see that?
1:23:54 Chuck Palahniuk: Yeah, and people say, Chuck, you ought to take a vacation and walk on the beach in Mexico and drink a lot. And I’m like, that’s a vacation? I could sit here and drink a lot in front of my TV.
1:24:08 Brian Rose: Yeah, it was like when people used to get shocked when I drank alone, I’d be like, yeah, of course I would drink alone. Why would I want to drink with you? But that’s a whole other story. Final couple questions here, Chuck. Aspiring writers who want to grow up one day and be like you, just advice to them as far as if you want to become a writer, what do they need to do?
1:24:29 Is it about daily disciplines? Is it about becoming part of a workshop, getting an in real life peer group where you can express ideas in a kind of a safe environment? What are the things that people should do? I’m curious for myself as well.
1:24:44 Chuck Palahniuk: You know, I’m not going to say that every path is the right path for everybody.
1:24:49 But for me, until I established a social setting of like-minded friends, especially with a teacher, somebody who can kind of call everyone to order and establish a structure, that’s what worked for me. This idea of having a place to go once a week where there would be a party, and the party would be about storytelling. And I could test my stories. And I could find myself rising among other writers who were also rising. And I could root for them for their success rather than be entirely invested in my own success.
1:25:27 And to see that among young writers is just so incredibly fulfilling that one week, one writer breaks out and he brings something and the quiet guy is suddenly brilliant. And then the next week, another writer brings something and the quiet girl is suddenly brilliant. To see them popping in that way is something that I never get from Netflix. I never get that kind of fantastic joy from these kind of what you said, these washed and pre-washed and notes and noted and revised and completely homogenized storylines.
1:26:14 But I get that in workshop. And until people need that expectation that you will produce work every week and you will bring work every week, that’s what keeps you working. And also, my best teacher, Tom Spanbauer, had a distinction he called dangerous writing. And that is the idea that you should be writing about some unresolvable, unresolved, very deep personal part of your life. And you should be doing it through a metaphor.
1:26:49 And that will keep you coming back to work on the project, even though you have no guarantee of income or a readership or any kind of external reward. That if you’re writing about something really personal, unresolved, that you more or less keep hidden within the project, then you’ll get a fulfillment from exploring it and putting it on the page as well. But keeping it hidden is also very important because in that way, you are exhausting it as opposed to sort of reinforcing it.
1:27:24 So doing it in a social setting with like-minded people and also regardless of what you’re writing, writing about something that you may or may not recognize is a huge unresolved issue for you.
1:27:37 Brian Rose: Do the people in the social setting in the workshop know what the issue is? Like obviously the reader doesn’t, but do they know what it is or they shouldn’t know what it really is to me either?
1:27:51 Chuck Palahniuk: Ideally, the author shouldn’t even know what it is.
1:27:55 Brian Rose: Really?
1:27:55 Chuck Palahniuk: Because if you know what it is, you will ultimately never go as far as you should go.
1:28:01 Brian Rose: Yeah. Okay, all right. And so this is why everybody should write in your opinion because it’s how we explore our character and it’s how we try to resolve things or pull up other things. But that’s for you, writing is living or truly living your life.
1:28:19 And I would say everyone should write, but everyone should have a form of self-expression where that aspect of self is put out into the world where you get rid of it, where you can process your experience in that kind of ruminative way and make something else of it and get it outside of yourself, whether it’s music or painting or whatever it is.
1:28:42 Brian Rose: Yeah, it’s funny when you were talking about your workshop, I thought of a line from Fight Club where you’re like, that guy at the mall who was serving me my Diet Coke but on Saturday night, he was a rock star inside the Fight Club. And yeah, just reminds me of that workshop where someone will come alive, but I guess they have to come up, they have to show up every week and be there, put themselves out there to have those moments.
1:29:11 Chuck Palahniuk: And in workshop, I see the people who I know are gonna be the big people in five or 10 years who are gonna be the big, big writers and they are not really the people you would choose, that you would guess, they’re the quietest people. But who they are in their stories is outrageous. And I love to see that, I love to see these very quiet, still water people just turn into demons when they start to read their work.
1:29:40 Brian Rose: The other thing I had earlier when you were talking about those mistakes that people make that turn in to their IP basically, I started breakdancing about five or six years ago, it’s a long story, it was in my late 40s, not exactly the best time to pick up a very athletic endeavor, but I started doing it and I now do it all the time and I got a pretty good head spin.
1:30:05 But in that form of expression, your mistakes turn into innovative moves. And if you allow yourself or force yourself to go in there and dance and practice and get out of your head and you’ll find that that mistake turns into something innovative. And also you’ll find that you can break the rules to create a new form to where people don’t even know what you just did. It’s like, well, is that breakdancing? Well, yeah, it is.
1:30:31 But no one ever saw it that way and you bring some brand new style to it. I saw some kid the other day who brought a weird storytelling style to a dance that was created in the Bronx and this guy’s from China. And you’re like, wow, what did he just do? Man, he just kind of broke the rules, but it’s still breakdance. So you’re like, it still is that.
1:30:50 He’s not pole vaulting, he’s not singing opera, like, and yet it’s still, and so it’s extremely inspiring and hugely creative because I guess it has constraints like writing does, but there’s so much innovation there. When you see it, it’s a work of art. So it sounds a little similar to what you see and encourage in your workshops. And AI can’t do that.
1:31:18 Chuck Palahniuk: Well, we’ll see about that in a long enough timeline.
1:31:22 Brian Rose: Look, the book is not forever, but for now, I loved it, my team loved it. It doesn’t disappoint. And a lot of things happen in here in Wales, we get to London, the Queen’s involved. There’s a lot of interesting people throughout history and it’s very you Chuck. So thank you for creating this.
1:31:38 Brian Rose: What is the best way for people to get ahold of this book?
1:31:42 Chuck Palahniuk: Well, you know, I would say through their independent bookseller in London, I love foils, if you can get to foils, mention my name, or if you get to, what is the big Crystal Palace on Piccadilly? Is that chapters?
1:31:57 Brian Rose: Oh, the big bookstore, the Waterstones on Piccadilly?
1:32:01 Chuck Palahniuk: Waterstones, yes, that’s a great bookstore.
1:32:04 Otherwise where mediocre books are sold.
1:32:07 Brian Rose: Congrats, do you have a couple other projects in the hopper? I’m sure you do. We’re expecting more things in the future.
1:32:18 Chuck Palahniuk: Yeah, I am running a very mediocre sub-stack right now because getting ready for tour, I have spent $31,000 on stuff to throw at people on this tour.
1:32:30 I have got so much stuff shipped to so many venues where I’m gonna be throwing it at so many young people. Yeah, I’ve got that to do for the next 30 days. Beyond that, I have a paperback coming out next spring and I’m working on a science fiction novel. So life goes on.
1:32:48 Brian Rose: Wow, and you’re saying throwing at people like you’re gonna be shooting t-shirts into the audience or something?
1:32:56 Chuck Palahniuk: No, the publisher next to that. There’s a lot of liability there. But no, I love throwing huge bags of candy and I love throwing, in this case, it’s stuffed animals, stuffed kangaroos. And there’s such a metaphor in that you’re throwing the thing and just one person’s gonna catch it and that is the essence of storytelling. You just wanna throw one thing out there and you don’t know who’s gonna catch it.
1:33:22 It’s just important that somebody catches it and that one person is gonna be really happy. Even if you never meet the person, just knowing that there’s somebody out there. It’s better that you never meet the person.
1:33:35 Brian Rose: Why, because you never wanna meet your heroes or your fans?
1:33:39 Chuck Palahniuk: Exactly, there is something so intrinsically depressing about meeting an author.
1:33:44 People meet me and they think they’re gonna meet Tyler Durden. They think they’re gonna meet my characters and then they meet this old man who wears glasses and I can see it in their face. I can see them kind of die inside. And so everything I do at these events is to try to mitigate the tragedy that is meeting an author.
1:34:06 Brian Rose: That is so not true.
1:34:07 You’re a fascinating guy, Chuck. And our moments of silence today were the happiest moments of 2023 for me.
1:34:14 Chuck Palahniuk: Thank you, Brian Rose. That is the truth.
1:34:17 Brian Rose: Thank you, Chuck.
1:34:18 I really appreciate you. Your work literally defined me as a man and possibly kept me alive in my 30s when I was trying to kill myself. So thank you for all your writing and everything you do. It’s a huge part of the human experience. It helped me process so many things and go on to create other things that maybe have helped people.
1:34:37 So thank you. Love the book. Please keep writing and please come see us in London so we can do this in person and not digitally next time. All right? Next time you tell me your story about finding the porn.
1:34:49 Chuck Palahniuk: I will. Deal. Thank you. Arizona. We’ll get into Arizona.
1:34:53 Brian Rose: Arizona. Yeah, there it is. All right, there we go. Not forever, but for now, get a copy. Thank you so much, Chuck.
1:35:00 We’ll see you next time on London Real. Take care, bye. Cheers. Thank you.
