Full transcript: Chuck Palahniuk on London Real
2:29 Brian Rose: This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Chuck Palahniuk, the American best-selling novelist and journalist, best known for writing Fight Club and Choke. Over the past 24 years you published 23 best-selling books, including 17 novels, a collection of essays, a travel guide, two coloring books, and a personal memoir. Your 1996 book Fight Club was adapted into the Hollywood blockbuster movie starring Brad Pitt and Edward Norton, which The New York Times called the defining cult movie of our time in 2005, during a live reading of your horror story Guts, 67 people fainted due to graphic content, and today you continue to push the boundaries of storytelling.
3:07 Your latest book, The Invention of Sound, is the chilling tale of a father searching for his missing daughter, and has been described as, quote, your most suspenseful daring and genre-defining work yet. Chuck, welcome to London Real.
3:21 Chuck Palahniuk: Hey, thank you very much. Wow, you know, uh, just to correct it, it wasn’t 60. I’ve never had 63 people faint at one event.
3:29 The most I’ve ever had is eight people, and that was in Brighton, England, at the, uh, Brighton Fringe Festival.
3:37 Brian Rose: Do, uh, English people faint more often than Americans?
3:41 Chuck Palahniuk: No, it was just that it was such a vast crowd. It might have been 1,800 people in this Corn Exchange hall, this big Victorian sort of huge cavernous building.
3:52 Brian Rose: And was that, um, while we’re on this, was that a, a win for you?
3:57 I mean, you kind of, is that always something that you like to see, or is that something you’ll always remember, or was it just something that surprised you?
4:08 Chuck Palahniuk: I am always trying to revisit, recreate the kind of strength that stories had when I was a child, stories that you would hear around a campfire, stories that would sort of completely terrify you and overwhelm you, and so anytime a short story can have any kind of a strong effect like that, whether it’s people passing out or people weeping, I love to see 20-something people who have it so together. I love to see them start to cry, especially if they’re young men.
4:42 That’s the kind of huge effect that I think stories can have, and completely reaffirms my choice to be a writer.
4:49 Brian Rose: And you think if they were reading the same story, as opposed to being in a room where you’re reciting it, could, would they have the same reaction, or is there something different with that group energy and the voice, tonality, or vibrations?
5:04 Chuck Palahniuk: You know, there are a lot of accounts of people who’ve been reading that particular story and they, they fainted on subway platforms, or they, they fainted sitting in public transport.
5:15 So I even saw a man standing in line at a book event, waiting to get a book signed, and he was reading the story, and he fainted standing there in line. So the story seems to hold up, but for other stories, in particular the one that tends to make people weep, I think delivery is a large part of that one.
5:35 Brian Rose: Yeah, I honestly recall moments in my life over the past 24 years where I was reading one of your books, and I remember looking up from the book and looking around, and almost feeling like, I hope no one knows what I’m reading or thinking right now.
5:52 You know, almost like I had to look over my shoulder, as if, if someone was reading my mind or even knowing what you were saying, that I might be shamed somehow.
6:03 Chuck Palahniuk: You know, and that’s kind of the, the wonderful bonus of the book. You go into it all by yourself, and you’re the only person experiencing it, and I think that’s why a book can go to places that movies just can’t. Movies and television and music, well, music can be consumed alone, but everything else risks being consumed by a very large group.
6:26 Brian Rose: Yeah, books have that privacy. And I guess when you’re reading it, you can take yourself to places in your mind. Well, maybe your subconscious can know to take you places you normally wouldn’t go, and those can be more terrifying than any CGI graphic Hollywood could ever create.
6:45 Chuck Palahniuk: And also, you know, through the abstraction of language, you can actually depict things that would overwhelm the, the audience if they were to see them literally made and depicted in a film, that the audience would have to walk away or shut down, leave the narrative.
7:03 But language gives you so much abstraction that you can depict these things and get away with it without completely shutting down the audience.
7:12 Brian Rose: And I’ve, I’ve heard that you’re really intentional about your language to make sure that the reader can, can first of all, you can convey certain emotions, but also so they don’t necessarily formulate things in their mind. I think you said you, you don’t use abstractions.
7:30 Chuck Palahniuk: That’s, uh, one of the, the main tenets of the style of minimalism that I was taught.
7:35 Is that abstractions and pejorative language, things like that, are all shortcuts, and they, they cheat the reader out of, uh, a more powerful experience. That, you know, when you have a character described, in other characters being six foot tall, then you’ve lost the opportunity to describe the point-of-view character’s life and experience, and how for them another character of that size would occur, because we never really see things in terms of, you know, 100-degree day, a six-foot-tall man driving 35 miles an hour. The, the point is to use all of those descriptive opportunities as a way of describing the point-of-view character’s perception of the world.
8:28 Brian Rose: And I think you’ve also said, if I was telling you a story, I wouldn’t say, Chuck, I met this guy, and he was six foot tall, and it was 100 degrees out. I would have been like, this guy was massive, and it was sweltering, and I was going super fast. I mean, we wouldn’t talk to each other if we were telling that story that way.
8:47 Chuck Palahniuk: Exactly. You would particularize the language, and you would burn the language.
8:51 What we call you would misstate things, but you would mistake things in a way where the language was just your own, and it was a language that was really unique just to that story. And so the toughest part of my job is to reinvent story, story, uh, as appropriate for every single story, whether it’s a novel or a short story. That’s tricky to do. That’s exhausting, and with so much of my work is, uh, is about listening to people, listening to how they burn the language, how they sort of warp and reinvent the language when they tell a story.
9:30 And with the lockdown, that’s become almost impossible.
9:34 Brian Rose: Where would you go to listen to that, and would you do it on the sly, or was it just conversations with people you knew?
9:42 Chuck Palahniuk: A lot of times it would be in groups. It would be at parties, because at parties you’re looking for people who throw out a topic, and then you’re looking to see how readily people engage with the topic. At the workshop that I was running with students, just before the lockdown, we were talking about a magazine-story used bookstore that recently closed, and someone in the group said that, uh, people who were selling their used copies of their collections of Playboy would no longer have a place to sell them, and then somebody else said, I wonder if that’s how the big box of porn in the woods happens.
10:22 And everyone at the table, students from the age of 18 to 65, 70, all leaned forward, and they all had a story about finding a box of porn, or a duffel bag, or a garbage bag of porn, in the woods or in the desert or on the beach or stuffed up a tree, and they all found these things as children, and none of them had ever talked about the experience. And so finding that experience that resonates with everyone, but that no one has really openly discussed, is a big part of listening, and then listening to the language with which they finally talk about it. Uh, it’s, it’s, it’s such, it’s so powerful to discover that thing that everyone holds in common, but everyone thinks that they’re alone in their experience of it.
11:20 Brian Rose: It’s interesting how you create, Chuck, because I, I always assumed, and maybe this is true of a typical novelist, is there they’re like, I’m gonna make this masterpiece, and I’m gonna drop it on the world, and they’re gonna, they’re gonna be in awe at what I created. But you seem to, you, like, I’m testing myself in the world. In fact, I’m mirroring the world to a certain extent and finding these things that people never knew existed, and then I’m putting my construct on it, and then I’m putting it back out.
11:48 But you must already be somewhat confident that there’s something resonating there, because like I said, you’ve almost pre-road tested it.
11:56 Chuck Palahniuk: Exactly.
11:57 Brian Rose: You know, you’ve taken it to so many people, and you have tested whether or not they engage with it, whether or not they have a similar experience,
12:06 Chuck Palahniuk: and then they help develop the idea, because if they have experienced something like that, then they can sort of flesh out the theme with another example, probably a better example of what I brought to them, and they can also tell me if this, if the theme or the idea has been explored in popular culture in recent history, because you just don’t want to be treading well-trodden ground.
12:29 And so taking it to people and sort of field testing it does that. That tests whether people engage, it develops the idea with those people’s experience, and it tests whether or not the thing is worth pursuing, uh, if it’s already been sort of explored already in the culture.
12:47 Brian Rose: So parties kind of used to be your research and development lab in a way, but now that’s hard, harder to do, or it’s impossible to do, because you could have those same people on a Zoom call, and they might say nothing.
13:02 If you bring up the box of porn on a Zoom call, whereas in a group environment you could see the cues, and then it would start.
13:12 Chuck Palahniuk: Exactly. And, uh, the other most important aspect of testing it is that, especially when I teach, the most important feedback people can get to their work is when they read it aloud and they listen to the emotional reaction, that kind of unintellectualized gasp or laugh, or that fantastic silence that indicates tension, because after that, what they get is intellectualized, academic feedback, which is almost entirely useless.
13:47 What you want to hear is how the story works in front of an audience, where it lags, where is it where it gets boring? Uh, to discover where the laughs are, or you didn’t realize there was a laugh there, um, you, where you needed extra time, an extra beat, to allow that laugh to build, or you might be able to add a laugh after that. And so reading it and testing in front of an audience, just for their unfiltered emotional reaction, is the most important aspect of that process.
14:21 And on services like Zoom, it doesn’t work, because only one person at a time can make a noise.
14:27 Brian Rose: It sounds more like stand-up comedy, Chuck, than, than what I would assume the writing process is.
14:34 Chuck Palahniuk: It’s very similar to how you would open a show out of town, and you would, uh, you would run this play or musical through a lot of different smaller markets and really get the kinks out of it before you would eventually take it to a big market, open it in New York.
14:52 Brian Rose: Do you, do you think a lot of writers read their work to other people and get those reactions, or is it usually, like, read this and then tell me what you think afterwards?
15:05 Chuck Palahniuk: You know, that, read it and tell me what you think afterwards. I, I hold very little, uh, boy, respect for that, because what you get is they’re sort of obligated intellectualized fixing of the work, and there’s a lot of politics involved in that. There’s a lot of kind of showing off involved in that, so that is, you know, almost more detrimental than it is beneficial.
15:33 What I want is to be able to read it and to test the clarity. The only question I really have afterwards is, did you understand everything that took place in this story? Because clarity is the most important quality of a story, in my mind.
15:51 Brian Rose: Interesting. I guess that’s interesting.
15:54 Do you ever want someone to have to read something 10 times before they really understand it, or do they read it 10 times to see it in 10 different ways at 10 different times in their life?
16:07 Chuck Palahniuk: The latter, because the first time they’re going to read it, they’re going to get the, the horizontal of it. They’re going to get the physical plot of what happens and how it ends. And subsequent readings at different points in their life, when there are different emotional places, they will read it and they will get different messages from it.
16:30 So yeah, a bunch of readings, but across a long period of time.
16:35 Brian Rose: But you want clarity on that first reading, no matter what.
16:39 Chuck Palahniuk: Exactly. Oh, my. You know, it took me forever as a child to learn to read, and I was always so self-conscious about not being able to read until, you know, all of my classmates could read.
16:53 That I just don’t want to make the reader feel stupid. I never want to confuse the reader or make the reader feel like they’re not understanding what’s taking place. So physical verbs, uh, a lot of clarity, a certain amount of repetition, and things paced in such a way that the reader is actually kind of ahead of the narrator, and the reader will come to realize what’s taking place before the narrator realizes the true nature of what’s happening. And when the reader feels smarter than the narrator, then you completely have the reader, uh, under your control.
17:35 The reader feels sympathetic to the point-of-view character, and the reader feels so joyous that they’re actually sort of ahead of the game, and that’s when you hit them with the big, big plot event.
17:50 Brian Rose: And do you use this technique in all of your works, or your fiction works?
17:55 Chuck Palahniuk: I try to. You know, it is what I aspire to do, but, you know, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. You know, everything is an experiment.
18:06 Brian Rose: I, I just had a weird thought. Tell me if I’m way off here. I’m wondering if that’s why people like watching YouTubers and reality TV, because we can all see how someone’s going into a train wreck they can’t, almost by definition, because that’s what life is, and we get to see it in real time, and then something ultimately happens, and then, like you said, we have that feeling of, I always knew that was gonna happen. Do I have anything there, or not?
18:35 Chuck Palahniuk: What, uh, what is the first thing that Scarlett O’Hara says in, uh, Gone with the Wind?
18:41 Brian Rose: It’s that war line, right?
18:43 Chuck Palahniuk: War, war, war. There is not going to be any war. And the moment she says that, the reader thinks, oh, you poor, beautiful, charming, wealthy idiot, and regardless of all of her gifts, we are smarter than her, and we know that she’s about to go through something really miserable, and so we care about her, and we feel superior to her. And that’s not a bad place to put the reader.
19:12 Brian Rose: Does the same thing happen in Taxi Driver, where you’re kind of going along the narrative with Travis, and as I remember, about 30, 40 minutes in, he kind of goes off the reservation, to where you’re like, okay, now this guy’s taking it even further than I thought he was going to take it? And then does something similar happen in that storyline, or is that a different technique there?
19:38 Chuck Palahniuk: You know, I always talk about how do you create authority? And I always see that as one form of creating authority, is to, to dare to go to a place that the reader didn’t anticipate, or that the reader didn’t think that anyone would have the nerve to go to.
19:56 I’m thinking of in Jesus’ Son. There’s a short story called “Dirty Wedding,” in that story collection by Denis Johnson, and in the story “Dirty Wedding,” the main character, who’s known as f***head, takes his girlfriend to an abortion clinic, and he’s waiting while she’s having the procedure. And a nurse comes out and says, uh, Michelle is at peace now. And, uh, and the point-of-view character says, uh, is she dead? And the nurse becomes very flustered and says, no, of course she’s not dead.
20:30 Why would you even ask that? And, and f***head says, because I, I kind of wish he was. And that moment is so brutal, but it establishes Denis Johnson’s authority that he is going to do things in this story that completely surprise us, and that are completely brutally honest, but also really ugly. And after that, we read him with this kind of trepidation, but also this respect. It’s as if he’s kind of reached out and slapped us.
21:08 We have kind of a new sort of wariness, but we’re also so much more engaged. I think that kind of happens to Taxi Driver a little bit too, when he starts shaving his head and burning his arm over the stove, and you’re like, okay, he’s taking it to another level. Now I was with him. Now I’m watching him do something, but I can’t stop watching him as well, and, and then ultimately, when it leads to that huge bloodbath in the hallways, uh, that doesn’t come out of left field anymore, because we’ve now been kind of primed that anything can happen at this point.
21:50 Brian Rose: Yeah, but the funny part is, is when he takes his date to the porn movie in the beginning, you can kind of forgive him. You’re like, ah, he didn’t know any better. He probably, you know, so it’s like you’re still trying to stay with him as he starts going further and further away, but then at some point he goes so far to where now you’re spectating as opposed to maybe accompanying him. I don’t know, it’s kind of, it’s interesting when you sort of compare that scene to the scene where Dustin Hoffman takes Katharine Ross to the porn movie in The Graduate, in order to really offend her and hurt her.
22:26 It’s just interesting how you see the same thing happen, what is played for comedy and what is played for drama.
22:33 Chuck Palahniuk: Yeah, it’s fascinating.
22:34 Brian Rose: I, I read somewhere, I heard you on an interview, talk about how when you look at your work many years later, you’ll read it and realize that your subconscious was actually playing a narrative out in your head, or doing something that maybe your conscious mind didn’t know it was doing at the time. And that really sat with me over the past couple days when I was preparing for this, and I had a reflection on what I’ve been doing here for the past nine years.
23:01 I’ll just give you a quick update. I mean, before I started having these conversations with people, I was kind of a Wall Street banker in London, and I was really miserable, and I was, uh, trying to do everything I thought was the right thing to do, which was make as much money as possible, and I was slowly drinking myself to death. And at one point I just stopped, and I started having these conversations, Chuck, and it made no sense. It made no money. But when I look back at the nine years, I think it was forcing me to do everything I hadn’t done in my life, which is, forced me to be around strangers.
23:38 It forced me to put myself on camera. I’m a natural introvert, and it forced me to get uncomfortable in ways that my constructed life kept me away from, but it was also making me miserable. And now when I look back, it was the exact antidote I needed. In a way, I hate to make this analogy, but it was almost like my Fight Club, where I had to push myself into these structured, uncomfortable situations to do what I had almost conditioned myself not to do, because of this societal norm that says, when you make the money and you got to this, you’ll be successful.
24:10 So I don’t know, curious what you think of that, and how do you look at your work in retrospect? Do you see parts of your character that was crying for help, or, you know, pulling you in certain directions?
24:25 Chuck Palahniuk: Uh, the workshop where I learned minimalism was led by a man named Tom Spanbauer. and Tom’s sort of program of teaching, he called Dangerous Writing, and he said the point is to write about something that you don’t really fully remember, and you don’t really fully understand, but it troubles you, and it’s something you can’t resolve in your life, so that in writing about it, you can explore it through a metaphor, and that way, even if it never sells, then at least you have the kind of benefit of the therapy of having cathartically looked at every aspect of this, this issue again through a metaphor.
25:08 You’ve exaggerated it. You’ve blown it up out of proportion. You’ve turned it into a gigantic monster, at least on the page. You’ve resolved it, and you’ve really exhausted your emotional reaction to it, and so typically by the time you’re done with the story or the book, your reaction is gone, and that issue is gone. It’s, it is so amazing.
25:32 It’s so much like magic that by the time you’re writing about the story, about the story, the real issue has vanished from your life. You come out of writing, and the thing is gone entirely. It’s just fantastic.
25:46 Brian Rose: So even if you didn’t find an editor, an agent, a publisher, uh, you would keep doing this Dangerous Writing. Do you need that mentor, though, to keep pushing you to go into the darkness, and you have to show up and prove your work, and have the workshop people come back to you and say, come on, Chuck, you’re not, this is BS, you’re not actually going where you need to go?
26:10 Chuck Palahniuk: Well, you know, workshop helps. Oh my gosh, to get that reaction every week, uh, and to get the, just the task validated. Tom always used to say that 99 of what, 99 of what any workshop does is just give you license, validate the task of writing, because otherwise you’re just a person terrified that you’re wasting your time. And in workshop, you’re able to discuss these issues but in a craft way. It’s not, you know, what am I doing with my life?
26:50 It’s what is the character doing, and what if the character took this action, and isn’t the character aware of this thing or this element, and what about if this other element came in? So you’re talking about it in this kind of hands-off, detached way, and that’s really kind of the only way you can talk about these things that are so uh, frightening to you, so kind of submerged in your subconscious.
27:13 Brian Rose: Interesting. I think therapists do that with kids, where they’ll have, like, a doll or a, you know, a stuffed animal, and they’ll ask them how the stuffed animal feels, and they can tell them how the stuffed animal feels, but they don’t tell them how they feel.
27:28 I don’t know, just kind of came to my mind.
27:31 Chuck Palahniuk: You know, there’s a writer, Steve Allman, and he teaches writing workshops around the country, and he’s made the observation that talk therapy, you know, was very popular and very effective, but it was also very expensive, and so it was more or less replaced by pharmaceuticals, and now people are coming back to talk therapy, but they’re doing it in the form of writing workshops, where it’s very cheap, sometimes it’s free, and you get to have the benefit of kind of a rap group or a therapy group, but you’re all doing it under the guise of writing fiction.
28:10 Brian Rose: That’s fascinating.
28:11 Chuck Palahniuk: And you have to do the work. You can’t just show up and talk. You kind of have to go back and create something and go deeper.
28:18 Brian Rose: It provides a little more accountability there, maybe,
28:22 Chuck Palahniuk: and also you have to do it in such a way that it’s engaging. You can’t just go and kind of vomit like you would with a therapist.
28:29 It has to be, you know, something that engages, that’s clear, that other people can relate to.
28:34 Brian Rose: Yeah, I never, I never realized that workshops could do that much. I just assumed it was a way to write things, but I guess it’s much more than that. There’s another observation I had when I was looking through the past nine years, and we’ve, every now and then, we have a guest on my show that I, I don’t know, resonates with me, and we go make a documentary film with them.
28:55 We hang out with them for weeks or months, and we tell a story around them, and I’ve got posters on our wall of six of them, and when I look at them, Chuck, they’re all these alpha males. That’s what they are. People come by and they’re like, why are they all men? Why are they all these alphas? Is a Navy SEAL, or a punk rocker, or a high-performance coach, or a bodybuilder?
29:14 And I’m like, I don’t know, but when I look back at my nine years, I feel like I’ve been searching for that male role model I never had. Maybe that’s a father figure. And now when I look at the people watching us, I feel like to a certain extent that’s a lot of what’s happening too, and it’s mostly males, but still females too. And funny enough, Chuck, it’s those strong archetypal male figures that get the most views, even though sometimes they’re politically incorrect.
29:45 But it’s, it’s almost like this thing I feel like maybe I’m searching for, or maybe the world is searching for, to a certain extent. I know you explore that in some of your, your, your, your works, but just wanted to get your thoughts on that.
30:00 Chuck Palahniuk: Yeah, Joseph Campbell did a lot of work around what he called the secondary father. That men and women have a primary father, a biological father, and that father can take them to a certain point in their life, but that father cannot be kind of the master to their apprenticeship.
30:17 That father can’t be as kind of brutally strict as the secondary father can, and the secondary father typically was a teacher or a drill instructor or a coach, or sometimes someone in the clergy, but someone who could be the master. In my case, you could argue my secondary father was Tom Spanbauer, and I went into Tom’s workshop and I thought I could write, and I couldn’t write. I couldn’t write s***. I was writing really bad Stephen King ripoff, uh, garbage, and Tom said, no abstracts, no pejorative language.
31:00 Tom gave me a thousand rules, and he made me write according to these rules. And so in a way, you’re describing secondary fathers, people who have achieved a kind of mastery in a field, and they can be the really hard-ass, badass sort of coach that people need beyond the primary father, beyond the biological father. And I think people are, it’s the kind of model of master and apprentice that we’ve forgotten about, and so we have a lot of sort of apprentices looking around for who does what they themselves would like to do.
31:40 Brian Rose: And why can’t the primary father, you know, be in that role? Is it because ultimately they love the child too much to be strong and rigid, or is it that the child will never actually listen to the father, because they have maybe, because they know that ultimately they love them, so they, they know they won’t push him as hard as someone that could walk away?
32:02 Chuck Palahniuk: I don’t know, it’s a complicated question. I think it’s a little of all of those. The, the primary, the biological father can’t risk losing the affection of the child, and it may not have the skill set that the child really needs, so it’s, it’s kind of a, a crapshoot whether the father could even teach what the child needs taught, especially in, in a culture where people are aspired as something better than their parents or different than their parents.
32:31 They need to find a secondary father who’s not just an extension of the biological father.
32:37 Brian Rose: Yeah, it’s true. Again, and I’m looking at the wall of my secondary fathers, and they all bring something unique to the table. You know, one is a physical, one is, uh, you know, a psychedelic master, one is a high performance, one is a Navy SEAL, one, you know, they all bring all these different parts that I guess one man could never bring anyways. And maybe back in the, the days of the clan and the village, I would have exposure to these different men, but, you know, in this modern era, I guess you kind of have to search them out.
33:12 Chuck Palahniuk: In a way, too, the secondary father also connects the apprentice with the larger world, that when I finally wrote a publishable manuscript, it was Tom Spanbauer, my teacher, who said, uh, you need to submit it to to, to Tom’s agent, and so that’s how I got my agent, and the agent connected me with publishers. And so the secondary father has connections in the world that the, the primary father, you know, is not likely to have.
33:41 Brian Rose: Right. It’s interesting. I just had children.
33:44 I’ve got a three- and a four-year-old son, and, um, and I’m looking at him, and I mean, it’s just, it’s hard to imagine. I just, I love them so much. I’ve never, ever felt love like this, and so I don’t know if I’ll be able to be the disciplinarian I need to be. And funny enough, one of my mentors says this. He says, I don’t want my kids to love me.
34:05 He said, 25 years after I’m dead, I want them to respect me. Okay, now he’s the hardcore of that spectrum, but that’s the way he mentors, to where it’s, he tries to physically remove that bond of love so he can mentor in the best possible way, but I think it’s rare for fathers to be able to do something like that, and maybe it’s good they can’t also.
34:31 Chuck Palahniuk: And I would have to agree with him, because I grew up with a kind of ideal that I wanted Jon Hausman as my secondary father.
34:40 I wanted somebody who would just be really brutal and not give me a participation trophy. I would say not good enough and just throw my work back at me. Growing up, I grew up in a very rural community, and I really admired the Mormon families, because the Mormon sons always had to call their father sir, and my family felt that that was so demeaning and so uh, ridiculous, and so antiquated that they made fun of the Mormon kids for calling their father sir and their mother’s ma’am.
35:17 Uh, well, that was something that was a kind of respect that I longed for. I just dreamed of that.
35:22 Brian Rose: I totally understand what you mean. I mean, you know, one of the lines in Fight Club that everyone, like, loves to quote is, you know, we’re a generation of men raised by women, and it goes on further. I’m wondering if another woman’s exactly what we need, but for the first part, I mean, my, my parents were divorced when I was seven, and I saw my dad once every two weeks.
35:43 Um, you know, a lot of us in the newer generation grew up without that father figure. Some would say a lot of the commotion that you see these days and a lot of the protests and things come from not having a father figure in the family for the past 20 or 30 years for certain communities and certain people. What are your thoughts on that?
36:08 Chuck Palahniuk: You know, I don’t see it as as much of an aberration as I think a lot of people do, because one way in which people achieve a kind of new generation of leadership is through conflict, and whether it’s conflict in a military battle or a civil rights conflict, that’s where our next generation of leaders emerge.
36:30 And even if you don’t emerge as a leader, like, uh, like John Lewis, or like Jesse Jackson, you know, these people who came out of the civil rights movement as leaders and established their authority as leaders in a conflict, uh, even if you didn’t come out as a leader, you still came out with a sense of being tested and having kind of exhausted an aspect of self, so that later in life you wouldn’t be constantly regretting that you hadn’t taken those chances and done those things when you were a younger person, uh, with fewer things to risk.
37:08 Brian Rose: And so when you see what’s happening now, and some people say, this is the worst it’s ever been, do you see that as just a, the natural cycle of humanity? And when you look back to 1968 or these other points in time, do you just say, no, this is just something that humanity actually does to itself?
37:28 It’s just a natural evolution of the younger generation, the older generation, new ideas?
37:35 Chuck Palahniuk: I do, and I, I just see it as just a really organic cycle of how people establish themselves in the world and how they achieve adulthood in a world that doesn’t, hasn’t given us a lot of really clear channels to adulthood right now. You know, we don’t really have a frontier you can go into to, you know, try to establish yourself, tabula rasa. So we have to reinvent the frontier by kind of creating these war zones, so I don’t see it as the big upset, travesty that other people might, and do.
38:11 Brian Rose: You think we also have a tendency to forget and, uh, rewrite our own past? I think I heard you commenting recently that when you saw some of the protests in Portland, you were like, what are these kids doing? And I think one of your friends reminded you that you used to do this too. Chuck, do you think sometimes the older generation forgets that they once were young and either did these things or thought these things too?
38:33 Chuck Palahniuk: Oh, you know, one thing that kills me is my father worked for the railroad.
38:37 He was a brakeman, and he would get us up in the middle of the night and put us in a pickup truck, my two sisters, my brother, and I, and he would drive us through the desert for hours until we came across an enormous train accident, a train that had freight that had been derailed, and we would be there with all the other kind of subsistence families in the area, and we would loot the train. We would take whatever, uh, was being shipped, to the boxcars that were busted open, and all these things that were just in disarray. And, uh, and I forget about that, and the other day I was, I was kind of pissing and moaning about the looting in Chicago and the looting in Minneapolis, the looting in Portland, and a friend of mine just kind of leaned in and said, you did that.
39:28 You did that as a kid, as a teenager. So you really can’t say too much about people who are doing it now. So yeah, there is a big aspect of forgetting our own lives when we start to criticize other people’s.
39:42 Brian Rose: Yeah, and even forgetting how we felt when we were teenagers. Like, I can still remember when I was a teenager thinking, I can’t trust anybody over 30, and probably nobody over 25.
39:55 Like, they don’t get it. They’ll never get it. I still remember having weird thoughts like that, and I think it’s hard for us to really understand how they’re feeling in so many ways.
40:08 Chuck Palahniuk: You know, I don’t really, you, I don’t think you get over that now until uh, your late 20s and your early 30s, and at that point you kind of realize that you’re going to need. You’re not going to have the power and the vitality of youth much longer, and you’re going to need to transfer to a different form of power, and you try to do that through education, to try to do that through connections and networking, but youth is gonna pass for you, and at that point, uh, you do need to rely on other people.
40:42 You know, I was having a conversation with someone recently, and they were in their 20s, and, you know, they’re asking me lots of questions about life, and I said, honestly, I think your late 20s are the hardest time in your life, um, they were for me, because the honeymoon of being a kid is over, and yet you haven’t built up the processes, or even necessarily the neural structure, to kind of go to that next level, and you’re looking in the mirror saying, I should be further or I should know more.
41:10 Brian Rose: And like, my late twenties were an absolute mess. I mean, I literally was a 30-year- old boy.
41:15 I was in New York City quoting your line to all my friends, and I was just a total f***up at that point, and it wasn’t until I finally got away from all that life of New York City, and drug addiction, and watching Fight Club 100 times on replay, and moved to London at 31, that I finally got to where I needed to go, but I was so hard on myself for those last few years of my 20s. I don’t know, for some reason, Chuck, I thought I should have figured it out by now, and every month that went by that I didn’t, I just was almost beat myself up even more. Um, I’m curious what you think of that.
41:52 Chuck Palahniuk: You know, I think that’s completely natural and organic, and it kind of breaks my heart when I get students who want to, they want to learn writing, and they’re 18 or 19 years old, and I, I just tell them not to put the cart before the horse, that they have 10 years in which to kind of put together all the best stories that they’re going to tell for the rest of their lives: all the poorly chosen friends, all the misadventures, all the, all the anecdotes that they will be called upon to tell forever. You know, when you think about Jack London, you think about Charles Darwin, their formative years were those years, and they spent the rest of their lives milking those experiences. So I always tell my younger students, yeah, it’s great that you want to learn this skill, but don’t neglect the messing-up part of your life, because you need the messing-up part of your life as the material that you will be working with for the rest of your life.
42:56 Once you’re 31, 32, 33, then your skill set in writing and your experience in messing up will come together, and they will work together, and you will, you’ll have stuff.
43:07 Brian Rose: Yeah, it’s, it’s fascinating. Um, about two years ago, one of my guests came into London Real, and, um, his name was John Joseph. He’s the lead singer of the hardcore punk band the Cro-Mags. They were big in New York City in the 90s, and he challenged me to run an Ironman race, because after partying and smoking crack and all the stuff he did, he finally got sober, and Ironman races were his way to stay focused and clean, and so I agreed.
43:35 I went to New York City and I trained with them, and when all that physical training was happening in a place in New York where I almost ruined my life and overdosed twice, and it all came out, and while we were filming the movie, I decided to tell the story for the first time ever, and I hadn’t told my wife in 16 years, and it all came out, Chuck. And honestly, I thought that the time in my life was going to be this dark black hole that would never serve any purpose, but it ended up being a massive feature of what we made. A film out of it, and when so many people saw it, it ended up being this incredible source of light to a lot of people, and it, it made for a great journey and story, that actually now I’m so glad it all happened, and it actually planted the seeds for what I would even do later, because once I survived that, I felt almost grateful to be alive, and I felt like I had a new chance at life.
44:27 So it’s funny how those really difficult times of life, of living, create all that material for later.
44:35 Chuck Palahniuk: And also imagine if you had just stayed the good boy and you had followed the kind of path that was laid out as the blueprint for success, and you had done everything right and kept your house clean and detailed your car, just how you would have felt by the age of 40, when all the opportunity to do that had passed you by. Uh, I think that’s the tragedy, is when you reach middle age and you realize that you’ve been the altar boy all that time, and it’s too late to be the kind of acting-out bad person who has those experimental experiences.
45:17 Brian Rose: But Chuck, I almost died. So how far do you push it?
45:21 Chuck Palahniuk: Okay, almost, and that’s what I tell people. I say, have fun, choose your friends really poorly, have your adventures, just don’t die. You say that, but you, if you don’t get close, then you’re not doing it, and a lot of times you don’t have a choice.
45:38 And you know, that’s, I come from a kind of a punk aesthetic, and that is that if you don’t go too far at some point in the work, you will kick yourself. You will regret having not gone there, because someday you’re going to be an old person, and you’re going to be shaking your head and saying, why didn’t I put that line in? That really lied. I was so afraid of offending people. I was so afraid of, you know, being thought poorly of.
46:05 Why didn’t I just do it? Uh, there’s the line in Fight Club where Tyler and Marla have sex for the first time, and I thought that the most romantic thing you could say is, I want to have your baby. So the Marla character, being who she is, she says, uh, oh, Tyler, I can’t wait to have your abortion. And that was the line that just drew lightning bolts. Everyone hated that line, but that line had to go in there, because there has to be something that goes too far.
46:39 Otherwise you regret it, and the whole project just feels like garbage afterwards, because you compromised. And it’s funny. As an old man, you’ll always look back on that and think, why was I so worried? The world was going to end, and my career was going to end, because clearly it wasn’t. The old man always knows it wasn’t, but the young man is always worried about that time, right?
47:06 And I think, if I can, as an old guy, I, if I can talk about social media, I think people, young people, are even more aware of public perception. They’re not occupying the kind of creative vacuum that somebody like Thoreau did, or somebody like Bernard Shaw did when he moved to Ireland and gave up his banking career, that they’re not getting this, this kind of isolation in a hut that is really needed to develop your own voice, because you’re always too aware of what the world might say, or what the world is saying.
47:44 Brian Rose: Yeah, so it’s stifling creativity, growth.
47:47 Right?
47:48 Chuck Palahniuk: Yeah, if people let it. I remember when I first started writing, I would unplug my telephone, and my friends were so angry. They thought it was so uh, rude that someone would unplug their telephone and be unreachable for two or three hours at a time, and now I think about it, you know, we’re so much more connected that unplugging your telephone seems like nothing.
48:15 Brian Rose: So true.
48:16 It’s so true. You mentioned Fight Club, and I remember, I think it was a book you wrote or I read some article. I remember this image, Chuck, where I think you were in a hotel bathtub the night before you’re going to go on set and meet Brad Pitt and Edward Norton, and you decide to shave your head for some reason, and I remember the story of you talking about shaving your head, and you might have made some cuts, and then you show up on set and you’re talking to these guys, and I remember these guys, they think maybe you’re Tyler Durden, but you’re not, and it was just a weird experience to be the writer on the set of this Hollywood movie.
48:51 I’m just curious, what do you remember about that whole experience?
48:56 Chuck Palahniuk: That wasn’t actually during production. That was the very first time I had ever gone down to pre-production meetings, and, uh, everyone in Los Angeles just seemed so groomed and so attractive compared to people in Portland, Oregon, and I, I kind of realized that there was no way I could compete on that level, so I, I just thought I would just, rather than try to have a great haircut, I would just shave my head, and I used a kind of caustic lye solution called Magic, which is marketed to, uh, Black men for shaving with.
49:33 You put it on, and it’s, like, near, it burns the hair off, and you scrape it off with a spatula, and I did not realize you needed to use a spatula, so I put it on my head, it burned my skin, and then I used a razor, and I ended up scraping off two or three layers of skin, so I ended up with this head that was just this big bleeding, boozing, bald head, and everything it touched stuck to it. So all throughout all these meetings, anytime something touched my balding, bleeding head, it would stick to it like bits of lint, and there was a strange kind of power in that in these settings where everyone was so beautifully presented. They would look at me, and there was this sense that I had to be someone, because anyone who was that unattractive and so badly presented had to have some kind of power that would allow them to be in this situation.
50:35 So there was a kind of authority that came from being the ugly thing. Uh, and I love that. That was just a nice thing to realize.
50:42 Brian Rose: Is that similar to the, the Edward Norton character in Fight Club with the bruises at work, where no one asks him or he has them? Or I guess it’s a slightly different dynamic than that?
50:52 Chuck Palahniuk: It is very similar, and in a way I’m kind of playing with what I call tableau horror. Uh, in, in most horror, you don’t see the horrific act take place in the movie. Se7en, you, you’re always coming across crime scenes after the fact. In the book The Alienist, you’re coming across murdered child prostitutes that have been ritually arranged after the fact, because nobody wants to see those horrible acts take place, that would shut down, that would exclude the audience.
51:25 And in, uh, in the new book, The Invention of Sound, I wanted to do this kind of tableau horror, but I wanted the screen to be the only existing tableau, the only evidence of the violence that took place, so the screen would become kind of an audio tableau that the reader could be with, because the reader couldn’t tolerate the actual uh, violence. And in Fight Club, the kind of black eyes and bruised faces sort of reinvent tableau horror, and princess, it presents it to the world to see whether or not people will even acknowledge it if it’s in their midst, because typically when I had bruises like that, no one in my workplace would ever mention them, and they became culturally invisible because nobody wanted to know the act of violence that had taken place.
52:18 Brian Rose: I actually had one of those experiences. So when I moved to London, I started training in mixed martial arts and jiu-jitsu, and I was working in basically a bank. I was a banker, and a couple times I showed up with some really busted-up eyes, and I noticed that no one said anything, and I just had the flashback to your book and the movie, because it was so weird. I literally have a butterfly bandage here, and I’m in a suit, and I’m the only one like that, and no one said anything.
52:48 Chuck Palahniuk: It’s wonderful. It’s, you realize just how they don’t want to know. They don’t want to know what your private life is like.
52:56 Brian Rose: When you look back on everything that was Fight Club, how do you feel about it now? I know it, and also, how do you feel about the fact that it almost never happened?
53:06 I mean, I think a lot of people don’t know the book didn’t do well at all. I think you said they were even going to pulp some of the copies that weren’t sold, and then all of a sudden it became this massive juggernaut, that then became a flop at the box office, and then became this cult piece. How do you, how do you put that in your own history?
53:29 Chuck Palahniuk: You know, you just keep writing. It was never about sort of selling a book in the first place.
53:35 It was always about sort of exercising that demon in, in Tom’s Dangerous Writing. So it was always about doing that fun, interesting exploration through a metaphor, presenting it every week to see if it would work, and then having the community of other writers, having that group of friends that weren’t based on proximity. We weren’t just people who lived near each other, or went to university together, or people who worked together. We were people who valued the act of writing, and that would keep us together for decades as a workshop.
54:12 And so what becomes of the writing is almost inconsequential, because the writing itself is so useful in my life, and I would be doing it regardless of whether or not I ever sold anything, or a movie was ever made.
54:32 Brian Rose: Do you ever wish it didn’t happen?
54:35 Chuck Palahniuk: No, because it bought me my freedom from a day job. Yeah. It was the, the moment when the apprentice actually turned out kind of a masterpiece, and that established me as someone who could do this thing, and so no, I would, I never, you know, wish it didn’t happen.
54:59 But it’s also not all glamour and gleam, that process. Making movies is the most boring thing in the entire world. You know what the only other thing that’s more boring than making movies is? Rich people.
55:18 Brian Rose: Oh my God, tell me, rich people.
55:21 Chuck Palahniuk: People who kind of seem to be focused around the abstraction of making money, uh, their lives aren’t very interesting, and their stories are incredibly dull and boring, and their problems are really not fascinating problems. So you know, I hate being around wealthy people, because they have nothing to steal. They have no great experiences.
55:52 Brian Rose: Yeah, I guess if your one main goal is maximizing your wealth, then you’ll always be behaving in a certain way that maybe is conservative or conformative, or is that what you feel and see?
56:09 Chuck Palahniuk: Exactly. Okay, and you’re not taking these enormous kind of, you know, 20-something risks, and you’re not risking looking bad, because everyone is constantly avoiding looking bad, and if you can go into a situation and you tell a story that allows you to look bad, you give everyone else their freedom to look bad. And rich people are just not going to take advantage of that freedom. They are never going to really tell that goat story, where they were completely slapped down, where they were completely humiliated.
56:43 And those are the stories people want to hear, because people want the comfort of knowing that it happens to other people, and they also want the opportunity to tell their own story about being the goat. And rich people, they just don’t tell their goat stories.
56:58 Brian Rose: And you like telling those goat stories at parties to first get the reaction, put the audience in a certain frame, and then ultimately get them, like you said, to reciprocate, and that’s when the gold comes out.
57:10 Chuck Palahniuk: Oh my gosh, you know, I love hazing stories, and I used to talk about, you know, I tell this pretty plain story about working at the Freightliner truck assembly plant, and on my first day, my foreman sent me to a different workstation and said, get our squeegee sharpener, and don’t come back without the squeegee sharpener. And the four-minute, the other workstation would curse me out and send me to another workstation, and I’d spent the whole eight, ten hours being cursed and being sent somewhere else on this wild goose chase. But it introduced me to every foreman I would ever meet, and they all met me as a new hire, because every new hire was sent to collect this non-existent tool for their entire first day, and it taught me the entire layout of the plant.
57:58 So it was kind of like this ritualized pilgrimage, this kind of journey, in a very Joseph Campbell kind of way. You’re sent on a journey, a grail quest, to collect a grail that doesn’t exist, and you are ritualistically subjugated and humiliated throughout that whole thing, and in doing so you attain a shared experience that every single one of the people you have worked with have all had. And so it bonds you on your first day. You know, the hazing story does so much, and then if you tell it well enough, it evokes hazing stories from everyone who listens, and those hazing stories just go all over the, some of them, what surgeons do to each other are just brutal.
58:47 What police do to each other are just brutal, and, uh, and their goal, too, fantastic stories.
58:54 Brian Rose: Yeah, I’m about to tell you my hazing story, but I won’t, but you should tell it. I got the fraternity hazing story.
59:03 Chuck Palahniuk: Uh, but you know, hazing is this piece of cultural technology that, like you said, ultimately has a purpose, and yet we’ve phased it out because it’s cruel and unkind.
59:16 Brian Rose: Yeah, it’s become kind of a cultural scapegoat, and we really, really lose the function of what it, what it performed for us.
59:25 It’s a shame. Yeah, yeah. Now, with the fraternity, uh, we just, you know, we had a kind of a hell week scenario that was presented to us as pledges in the fraternity, and, you know, we were already kind of being treated as subservient, but when hell week happened, which we thought was work week at MIT, we thought we were just fixing up the fraternity house before the term started. It turned into this massive hazing ritual where we had to play the classical music song Boléro on repeat for about five days straight and not sleep for five days while we were engaged in all these other types of activities, just to see if we could hack it.
1:00:05 And if we couldn’t, then we were shown the door. And, uh, you know, I don’t even know if that’s allowed these days, but it was so important, and I remember when I finally made it and they gave me my Greek letters that I could wear, and I was a brother. I didn’t take the shirt off for three days. I was so proud to be part of this thing, and it became a really defining experience of my life at school. And I don’t know if they even have many of those anymore, and it’s a shame, because it had bad and good with it, but it was this incredible time of men among men and learning the rituals of the wolf pack and how you behave, and if you don’t behave that way, the pack is going to let you know, and it taught me a lot about how to deal with men that I never learned my whole life, Chuck, in high school living with Mom and Dad.
1:00:53 Chuck Palahniuk: So I would broaden that. That’s not just men. That is the world. And when your writing workshop is brutal with you, when I’m brutal with my students, uh, I’m trying to give them a little bit of a taste of what the world is going to do to them, what agents are going to do to them, what publishers who don’t like their work are going to do to them, uh, what critics are going to do to them, what Amazon one-star reviews are going to do to them. It’s kind of toughening them up a little bit, so no matter what happens in the future, you can say, at least I’m not listening to Boléro anymore.
1:01:33 Brian Rose: Yeah. I had, uh, Tim Kennedy on the show. He was a Green Beret and was one of the top UFC fighters, and he said there was a point when he was training to be a Green Beret where he just thought he knew everything, and he went on a mission, and, um, they, uh, he basically kind of screwed up, and they came back and said, uh, meet me in the boxing ring, and he was a really, a good boxer and really fancied himself, and he showed up, and it was the whole squad, and he had to fight them one by one by one.
1:02:02 And he won the first three or four matches, but the last three, they beat him to a pulp. And he said he said that probably wouldn’t be allowed today. And I said, so they were loving you? And he said, yeah, Brian, they were, they were showing me the team was more important than the individual. And he said that that was such the incredible lesson, but it literally had to be beaten into my head to get it.
1:02:28 Chuck Palahniuk: Yeah, and that goes to some really difficult dynamic to teach in fiction. And when I hear people talk about, you have to outline every project, you have to know every single plot point, part of me wonders, how can you create transformation if there’s no transformation in you as the creator? So if you know everything that’s gonna happen, then I think chances are the reader is gonna anticipate everything that’s gonna happen, and if you yourself are not coming out as a different person at the end, because you’re just basically writing an extension of who you are, you know already, then what’s the point of even doing the work?
1:03:11 And so there has to be that destruction of self in order for the creation of the new. Whatever.
1:03:18 Brian Rose: Uh, yeah, you can’t go in a winter and come out a winner. You have to lose somewhere in the middle. And so talk to me about The Invention of Sound.
1:03:28 I mean, do you know how this is going to end, and did you change in writing the book?
1:03:35 Chuck Palahniuk: Oh my gosh, you know, I thought that was just going to be a quick and dirty novel about a guy whose kid disappeared 17 years ago, and and I knew that by the third act he was going to hear her scream dubbed into a really bad horror movie, and was going to start a discovery process, and he was going to track down the people who had kidnapped and killed her, and get me Mel Gibson on the phone. You know, it was just going to be one of those Liam Neeson thriller movies, and, uh, and then it went nuts in the third act, and it had that fantastic plot reveal about the huge conspiracy, and it had this, uh, it went global, with the whole purpose for why those screams were being collected, and it completely surprised me, and that’s why I write.
1:04:32 The third act is always just such a, just a complete revelation. I have no idea that Tyler is going to be the narrator. I have no idea that the story is going to go where it eventually goes, uh, and that is, that is so much the joy of doing this thing.
1:04:52 Brian Rose: Does it always happen, or does it always happen with the good ones?
1:04:57 Chuck Palahniuk: It always happens, but sometimes it takes longer, and you have to be with a kind of, uh, longer pregnancy, because when you’re waiting for it to happen, you are really miserable, because you are so sure it’s not going to happen, and you so want to rush things to conclusion.
1:05:19 You just want to slap an ending on this thing and send it out and let it be a shitty book in the world, you know, good enough, but Tom always taught that the longer you can be with the incomplete thing and allow the thing to complete itself, the better the thing will be. And so it’s not about getting the baby out. It’s about letting the baby take as much time as the baby needs, and then the baby will be its own thing.
1:05:49 Brian Rose: And for you, how long can that be? Years?
1:05:52 You don’t sit on things for five or ten years, though, or do you only do short stories?
1:05:58 Chuck Palahniuk: Okay, the shorter. Oh my gosh, they’re sure. I wrote a short story called, uh, Zombies. I had this idea about, what about a kind of cluster of kids in high school who used cardiac defibrillators, and they stuck one electrode on one side of their forehead and one electrode on the other temple, and they press that big red button, and they put a huge amount, jolt of current, right through their frontal lobe, and they did that as a kind of way of lobotomizing themselves, because they were so frightened of the future, and after that, they were more or less zombies who were very completely happy with their circumstances, and they no longer worried or aspired to anything.
1:06:43 And that’s the story that tends to make young people cry, because it’s all about that terror that you feel in your late 20s and in your 30s, when the world expects you to accomplish all of your major life things. Set up a home, set up a career, set up a family, find a mate, and launch from your originating family. You’re under so much pressure during that time. Um, and we forget the terror of it anyway. I told that, that the concept to my trainer, and it wasn’t four or five years later that this trainer said, you know, you had that story about the kids with the defibrillator.
1:07:27 Did you ever do anything with it? And I thought, God bless you, Chris, because I had all but forgotten that story idea. And I thought, you know, if Chris D’Amato remember that premise for six years, then that’s a good story idea. And so, so often you come up with an idea and it really has to cook for six, seven, eight, or ten years, especially the short stories. Yeah, they just have to cook in your subconscious for a long time before you can really do something with them, and the short stories demand more sometimes than the long-form content, because they have to, they’re like a meme.
1:08:10 They have to work or not work, and they have to have their own language, because with the short story you can really burn the language. You can really distort and warp the language, as if you were a lyricist, because you know the songs work because they completely distort the language, and they also work because they only last three or four minutes. So the trick is with a short story is that you can really push the language and not worry about completely burning out the reader.
1:08:40 You don’t want to push the language that hard for 300 pages.
1:08:45 Brian Rose: Yeah, I think the original Trainspotting book, he pushes it in that Scottish you know, brogue stuff for the whole thing, and it’s hard to stay focused the whole time when you’re trying to understand that communication, but it can also work in some situations.
1:09:04 Chuck Palahniuk: It was, there was a really landmark writer in the late 90s, a man named Mark Richard, and he wrote a collection called The Ice at the Bottom of the World, and he was the big name, and he had one story called Fishboy that was really heavily stylized language, with lots of S’s and F’s and V’s, very soft sibilant sounds, and he decided he was going to make Fishboy into a novel.
1:09:33 And people really thought, you know, all of publishing was going crazy, saying Fishboy is the future. Fishboy is gonna be the, uh, the Ulysses of our generation. And then Fishboy came out, and it was such an extended, uh, sort of, uh, distortion of the language that people didn’t read it. It was just really tough for folks, um, and so that’s the benefit of the short story, is that the experiment will work where people won’t tolerate it for the longer form.
1:10:07 Brian Rose: Wow, that’s really insightful. I appreciate that. What’s next in the next few years for you? I know you love doing workshops, but I know the Zoom format’s not ideal, and you seem to be writing a lot more lately. What are your plans?
1:10:22 Chuck Palahniuk: You know, I, uh, I’m working on another kind of thriller. I think The Invention of Sound really forced me to kind of throw off a kind of snarkiness, uh, a kind of, uh, detached sarcasm and irony that typifies most of my work, and so I think in a way we are entering into an age where factual knowledge has almost no portent, that people constantly question the source of facts and what the facts indicate, and so you could make the most reasonable argument to your best friend, and your best friend would still say, what’s your source? Where’d you see that?
1:11:13 And would instantly negate the best argument, the best set of facts, by questioning the authenticity of the source, the authority of the source. So I don’t think that factual knowledge really carries very much authority anymore. I think more and more we’re going to see authority carried by emotional appeal, uh, almost like a real religious-based narrative, where, you know, with religion it’s all about the emotional engagement. It’s, it’s not really about any kind of facts.
1:11:46 It’s all about sort of engaging with the narrative as an act of faith and the emotional payoff of it. So I’m working on trying to write a lot more fiction that has that kind of really strong emotional engagement as opposed to that kind of intellectualized, clever, uh, distant irony that I’ve used a lot in the past. And it’s a new muscle for me,
1:12:19 Brian Rose: and you seem excited to explore that.
1:12:22 Chuck Palahniuk: You know, ah, it breaks my heart that there were, you know, another writer of my generation, David Foster Wallace, uh, he was so brilliant, and David was so clever, but, uh, he killed himself in 2008, and we never really got to see him kind of make the jump to more emotional, more, I don’t know, human work.
1:12:51 And I, I, I just want to make sure that I make that jump.
1:12:56 Brian Rose: Does that come with age, to a certain extent?
1:12:59 Chuck Palahniuk: I remember my grandfather being more or less a kind of an angry bastard until he reached a certain age, and then he mellowed and he became a really nice guy, and I think that I’m kind of reaching that age, that really nice guy age, when I, I don’t have to be angry about everything. I don’t have to be afraid of everything, uh, and I can risk being a human being and actually, you know, engaging with people as a human being.
1:13:33 Brian Rose: A lot of writers would be scared of that, because they would think they would lose their mojo.
1:13:39 Chuck Palahniuk: You know, and people like Hunter S. Thompson, if you’re going to play the tough guy your whole life, uh, that is really a small box, and I like to be able to live in a bigger box, or at least in a different box, uh, at least, you know, explore a different box.
1:13:55 Brian Rose: Yeah, maybe that’s what drove him to suicide. Maybe he, you know, he felt like he had to keep being that same character.
1:14:03 Maybe that drove him crazy. I don’t know.
1:14:06 Chuck Palahniuk: Yeah, and that’s that’s one reason for sort of trying to make the work stand out there in front, and not being the work yourself, not being the personality. I think Ken Kesey struggled with that as well. I guess the work, almost by definition, takes you out of your own head and tries to destroy the ego in a way where you can live a connected life.
1:14:28 If you really make it about the work, then it’s not about you, but if you make it about you, that seems always to go down difficult roads, and you’re more likely to take it personally when people don’t engage or they criticize the work, because then they’re criticizing you. But when you do make it about the work, then you yourself are always down the road already engaged with something else, so you’re not as emotionally invested in how the work is received by the world.
1:14:55 Brian Rose: Yeah, you know, you were always considered like the, the guy that made nihilism cool, but I’ve heard you say before that actually you’re more of a romantic, and it’s funny, even though on a granular level you unpack these nihilistic elements, like in Fight Club, and they really resonated with my nihilistic tendencies at the time, but there always is, I don’t know, in a weird way, a hopeful arc or some type of romantic arc in your work.
1:15:20 Is that true or not?
1:15:22 Chuck Palahniuk: No, that’s always true, and then in all of my work, it was about going through uh, this long, arduous process to arrive at a moment of sentimentality, a moment of connectedness, um, and sort of the glimmer of a new possibility after everything is over. And so, and I’d like to sort of expand from just a glimmer of possibility in new books, but, you know, I come from 1970s romantic fatalism, so I’m not sure if that is in my mojo, if I can achieve that, uh, you know, or whether The Bad News Bears will always lose, and Rocky will always lose, and, uh, the dance contest at the, uh, Odyssey is always rigged, uh, that 70s fatalism that I grew up loving, Carrie will always burn up in her, in her mother’s house.
1:16:22 Brian Rose: You think you can, you think it’s impossible to get some of that stuff out of your own DNA if you grew up and took it in subconsciously?
1:16:32 Chuck Palahniuk: You know, if it came during really formative imprinting years, then on some level, t to me, that is a good story, and if I see a story that doesn’t end in that kind of dark, conflicted, qualified way, I can’t recognize the value in that story. So you know, I might be doomed to always writing these kind of unhappily-ever-after stories.
1:16:56 Well, tragedies always survive. Shakespeare is good at those, uh, yeah.
1:17:00 Brian Rose: There was, I just wanted to finish on something that was a quote, which I think is attributed to you, uh, where you said, we all die. The goal isn’t to live forever. The goal is to create something that will first of all, did you say that?
1:17:14 And second of all, what does that mean, and what will your legacy be, Chuck?
1:17:20 Chuck Palahniuk: You know, that’s actually a line from my book Diary, uh, and, uh, and I’ve always thought of myself as a, and not in a kind of martyr way, not in a kind of Catholic martyr way, but uh, not such a precious thing that I can’t risk wasting myself on something that, you know, history can do without. One man. I put that in another story, a character rationalizing his adventure. History can do without one man.
1:17:54 And so I always think, you know, who am I that I can’t just kind of throw away my life on this quest to write one perfect sentence? That, uh, it’s, it kind of goes to Kierkegaard’s leap of faith, that you can spend your life trying to keep yourself entertained and distracted, but eventually you have to face your mortality, and at that point, you, once you can face your mortality, you realize, you know, I really have nothing to lose, so why don’t I do the one thing I dream of doing, and that is creating something that transcends not just my experience, but really connects with a lot of people. And even if I fail at doing that, that’s not a bad thing either, because, you know, it’s what I chose to do.
1:18:46 Every time my life is messed up, I think, this is what I chose to do, and so I can’t argue with that.
1:18:53 Brian Rose: Are you usually able to also think, I’m going to learn from this, and this is going to make a great story? Or are you always not able to see it while you’re in the middle of a challenging situation?
1:19:08 Chuck Palahniuk: Now I can. Now I can kind of recognize the value in all, you know, horribleness.
1:19:14 Uh, I can take it to friends and talk to them and, and get their car crash story, and then eventually maybe a pattern will form, and we’ll, I’ll be able to do, do something with it. The big box of porn in the woods. Everybody has got the big box of porn in the woods, and if you can talk about your box and how it left you traumatized, then people will rush forward to talk about their big box of porn in the woods.
1:19:44 Brian Rose: Uh, yeah, I’m thinking of my porn story as well, in the woods.
1:19:49 It was in the woods as well. Um, uh, last question on legacy. Do you think we could look at every person in this world, and all of our behaviors come down to one thing, which is somehow we want the world to remember that we were here once? Which would be very Heidegger. Uh, yeah, this kind of quest for immortality, whether through our work, or whether through our spirituality, or whether through our offspring.
1:20:19 That was so much of what Heidegger talked about, which is, in a way, a constant denial of death.
1:20:28 Chuck Palahniuk: Oh yeah, I would say that that is for young people a big thing, because it’s young people who want to be vampires. Only young people want to live forever. Older people have seen enough that yeah, they could check out. Uh, they don’t want to be a vampire and live forever.
1:20:53 Brian Rose: Sometimes I look at what I’m doing, and I’m like, am I doing this because I know these digital files will be there forever, and people will remember I’m here? And then I think, do I really want to live my life knowing that I created this one asset that’s around forever? And then am I just getting too caught up in creating this legacy, that’s an ego-based decision? And I go back and forth with, what’s the right thing? It sounds like you lean more on, it’s worth it if I can give my life for something that’s going to be a value to the future.
1:21:25 That’s that’s, that’s important to you. Is that right?
1:21:30 Chuck Palahniuk: You know, boy, I am really all about, uh, oh, what is it called? Uh, is it Aristotelian selfishness? That if the thing, if the, the task does not serve me first and foremost, it’s not going to serve anyone else.
1:21:47 And so at its core, basically, I just want to have a good time. I want to make the best use of my time, so that when I reach the end of my life, I can look back and say, I had a fantastic time, and I wrote things that were so beyond my ability. I somehow achieve these things. I do a lot of rock work. I do a lot of stone building, and sometimes I look at these walls that are 9, 10, 12 feet high, and I think, how the hell did I get that rock up there?
1:22:24 That rock weighs 200 pounds, and I carried it up an aluminum ladder, and I placed it just right there and mortared it in. And so, in a way, I just want to live the kind of life where at the end of it, regardless of where the end is, whether it’s a car accident or whether it’s, you know, whatever it is, uh, at that moment I can say, I did some impossible things, and I’m really, really glad I did.
1:23:02 Brian Rose: Yeah, what scares you?
1:23:04 Chuck Palahniuk: My nightmares are all of my dog being in peril, and me not being able to save my dog.
1:23:12 Brian Rose: Does that mean that’s what scares you, or is that just the nightmares?
1:23:17 Chuck Palahniuk: That’s, you know, that is the kind of the greatest you know, fear, and whether the dog represents, uh, something other than the dog, children, that being buried alive.
1:23:30 Brian Rose: Okay, yeah, I know you’ve spoken of children and how you think you won’t have any, and how you explore those topics through your books. Have you ever considered that more, and would you ever?
1:23:44 Chuck Palahniuk: No, I, I think it was way too late in my life to, to really, you know, consider having kids.
1:23:51 And at this point, a lot of my writing, a lot of, you know, my speaking, is trying to sort of pass along the things that people have taught to me, at the same time that I acknowledge who taught me these things, so it doesn’t sound like everything’s just coming out of my mouth.
1:24:20 Brian Rose: Right. Chuck, I always finish with a couple of questions. I’ll just do this right now. If you could pick up some magic phone and call up 20-year-old Chuck and give him some advice based on everything you know now, what would you say to him, if anything, and what would he think of you calling him?
1:24:50 Chuck Palahniuk: But no comms going in there.
1:24:52 Brian Rose: Uh, I think that’s great advice. I think it’s great advice, and probably one of the hardest things to do these days for any young person is to actually tune out. Um, but yeah, it’s great advice, and I’m sure that’s where a lot of the gold lies. Uh, Chuck, thank you so much for your time.
1:25:07 Uh, if we do this again, let’s do it in person. Maybe you come to London, who knows. We’ll see what happens in the future.
1:25:15 Chuck Palahniuk: Thank you very much, and you do look great. That is a great tie with a great shirt.
1:25:20 Brian Rose: I’m sorry people can’t see that. I took a gamble today, and sometimes gambles pay off. You got to take risks, right? Purple on blue. Uh, so look, I appreciate your time.
1:25:30 I mean, I don’t want to be the guy that tells you another story about how much Fight Club meant to them, but I’m that guy too, so uh, I must have watched that movie a couple hundred times uh, on repeat, in 2001 in New York City when I was going through the worst year of my life, and somehow it was therapeutic. Who knows, Chuck, maybe somehow you kept me alive during that period where I almost died a couple times. So thank you for the creation of what you do.
1:25:54 I went on to read most of your books in London, and I remember having those moments where I was literally in public reading your book, feeling like I was doing something wrong, and thinking, man, just when I think he can’t go anywhere further out there, he goes light years further out there. And, um, yeah, I appreciate your writing style that caused that visceral reaction in me, and so many people. So thanks for doing what you’re doing. You seem like you’re in a great place.
1:26:18 This book is incredible, attention to sounds, and I’m looking forward to this, this new you, this new genre of you coming up. So, um, yeah, thanks for doing everything you do. I appreciate it.
1:26:30 Chuck Palahniuk: Hey, thank you. Wow, oh my dear is made.
1:26:32 Brian Rose: All right, good, that’s success. Then, awesome. We’ll stay safe, and hopefully next time we’ll do this in person, and, uh, all the best to you, Chuck. Take care.
1:26:40 Chuck Palahniuk: Okay, great.
1:26:41 Brian Rose: Thanks for joining us on London Real. We’ll see you next time. Take care.
