60 SECONDS: Chuck Palahniuk
Chuck Palahniuk is the author of 11 books, including Fight Club, which became a film starring Brad Pitt. Readings of his short story Guts have apparently left audience members vomiting. Chuck's father was murdered in 1999. His new book, Rant, is about a group of party crashers – young people who crash cars into one another for a bit of human contact.
Party crashing seems a bleak comment on the state of society. Is that how you see it?
The concept is that people are always looking at different ways to be together. There’s a British anthropologist named Victor Turner who studied what he called liminoid spaces – places where people go to cast aside their identity and their social status, to live as equals and experiment with different social structures and roles. So party crashing is just like fight clubs or demolition derbies – places people go to screw around with ways of being together and being themselves.
Is party crashing a real phenomenon?
This book’s definitely based on my own experience – more stuff from the Cacophony Society, which I’m a member of.
What’s the Cacophony Society?
It’s basically a group of people, with chapters in almost every American city and one in London and one in Paris. The members meet up and host different outrageous public events, such as Santa Rampages or the Burning Man festival, or pranks or theme parties, and then they put out the word and invite other members of the group to help produce these strange events. It allows them to do chaotic things in their otherwise scheduled blue collar or clerical lives.
Fight Club inspired real underground fight clubs. Do you think this will have the same impact on party crashing?
Part of the irony of reporting on anything is that you kind of hammer a nail in its coffin by exposing it to the world but I think we’re going to see a lot more about party crashing before it starts to disappear.
You have a reputation as a ‘shock writer’. Is that restrictive?
No, not at all but I have a happy medium of doing one over-the-top shocking book and then one less shocking book. You don’t want to hit the same note over and over. This one, Rant, qualifies as a less shocking book.
People would have to live tame lives to be shocked by characters having sex with their parents
Really? Won’t some readers be shocked by characters having sex with their parents and then murdering them?
They’d have to live really tame lives to be shocked by that.
You’ve attended sexaholic meetings to research another one of your novels. What were the highlights?
I went three times a week and there was never a dull meeting. There were some extraordinary life and death moments. There was one really big guy named Phil who carried around evening dresses in the boot of his car. He would excuse himself from dinner with his wife and kids, then put on an evening dress and go to adult bookstores and give guys blowjobs. He was recording all this in a notebook as part of his 12 steps of recovery. He came to group and said: ‘I have to kill my wife. She found my notebook and made copies of it. Unless I give her all the money I have, the house, full custody of my kids and move to another state, she’s going to give copies of my notebook to everyone who matters in my life.’
What happened?
It took people in that group six hours to talk him around so he didn’t go home and kill his wife. It makes you realise why husbands might go home and kill their wives or themselves.
What makes a good scary or shocking story
Well, I naturally sidestep monsters and that kind of thing because it always feels to me like a cop-out. Besides, there’s so much in the world already that’s naturally occurring that is scary. The next part is to entertain people at the same time – to make your message but do it in a kind of sexy, seductive, funny, horrific way.
Is writing about dark subjects a way of dealing with things from your past – particularly the murder of your father?
I’m trying to make order out of chaos, trying to find some way of rationalising the horrific things that people do or the way the world is. If you flee from the things you fear, there’s no resolution. I’ve always rushed into the teeth of these things as a more effective way of addressing the unresolved mess.
Violence and destruction feature heavily in your books. What’s the appeal?
It’s hard to call it violence because when I write about it, I always make it consensual. It’s really a rough form of play or psychological exercise. Destruction is always an attractive idea. My brother and I used to spend weeks making models of cities so that we could destroy them in 15 minutes. There’s a fantastic joy in destroying something that you’ve meticulously built. Then you’re free to build a new thing. Destruction and creation… they’re inseparable.
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