Lonely PersonAll my books are about a lonely person looking for some way to connect with other peopleThe dream is a big house, off alone somewhereHow you write a novelYou plan and research. You spend time alone, building this lovely world where you control, control, control everythingYou stay in your story world until you destroy it. Then you come back to be with other peopleReading a books is not a group activityIn my own cycle, it goes: Fact. Fiction. Fact. FictionJournalist and NovelistThe journalist is always rushing, hunting, meeting people, digging up facts, researching. Cooking a storyThe novelist imagines itFriendship based on a shared passionWriting. Or theater, or music. Some shared vision. A mutual quest that would keep you together with other people who valued this vague, intangible skill you valuedFight ClubI started telling myself a story about a guy who haunted terminal illness support group to feel better about his own pointless lifeSupport GroupsSupport groups serve the role that organized religion used to. We used to go to church to reveal the worst aspects of ourselves, our sins. To tell our stories. To be recognized. To be forgiven. And to be redeemed, accepted back into out communityStaying connected to people resolve our anxietyAnywhere people had nothing left to lose, that's where they told the most truthStorytellingThe world is made of people telling storiesWe live our lives according to storiesYou want to give the reader a break from their own life. From their own life storyThis is how I create a character. I tend to give each character an education and a skill set that limits how they see the worldA big segment of storytelling is about personal suffering. There's the stink of catharsis This is your life, but processedSelling your story. To turn that misery into big moneyMartin HeideggerMartin Heidegger pointed out how human beings tend to look at the world as a standing stock of material, ready for us to use. As inventory to be processed into something more valuable. Trees into wood. Animals into meat. He called this world of raw natural resourcesIs it possible to exploit your own life for the sake of a marketable storyLegacyAs more people grow old, with the experience of a lifetime to remember, the more they worry about losing it. All those memories. Their best formulas, stories, routines for making a dinner table burst into laughter. Their legacy. Their lifeBoredom and FictionHow can we create exciting, edgy books and movies if we only live boring, sedate lives?Fiction is a safe laboratory for exploring ourselves and our world Instead of life letting just happen, we could outline our own personal plotThe worst part of writing fiction is the fear of wasting your life behind a keyboard. The idea that, dying, you'll realize you only ever lived on paperSlang is the writer's color of palette Invisible, Eternal WorldAll our problems and all our blessings could be readily dismissed because they'd be no more real than plot events in a book or movie. An invisible, eternal world would render this world an illusionSoftware of FictionFiction is a software code that operates in the hardware of your mindSo why I write. Because most of times, your life isn't funny the first time though. Most times, you can hardly stand itThat's why I write, because life never works except in retrospectAnd writing makes you look backBecause since you can't control life, at least, you can control your versionKierkegaardAdam in the Garden of Eden, happy and content until God shows him the Tree of Knowledge and says, "Don't eat this". Now Adam is no longer free. There is one rule he can break, he must break, to prove his freedom, even if it destroys him. Kierkegaard says the moment we are forbidden to do something, we will do it. It is inevitableHollywoodHollywood creative people to brainstorm terrorist scenariosWe want to know every way we might be attack . So we can be preparedMillion ReasonsWhat's coming is a million new reasons not to live your life. You can deny your possibility to succeed and blame it on something elseStop living as a reaction to circumstances and start living as a force for what you say should be. What's coming is a million new reasons to go ahead
Palahniuk is right. These essays of his are most certainly stranger than fiction. Just from the every first essay alone, you’re hoping that he’s making all this up. But no. The annual Rock Creek Lodge Testicle Festival just outside of Missoula, MT, detailed in the aptly-titled “Testy Festy”, is the kind of bizarre and mind-boggling public orgy that you think can – or should, rather – exist only in the most perverted of minds. (The shocking writing and fantasy worlds of Marquis de Sade comes readily to mind.) Yet it is all very real. (Too much Viagra and Spanish fly, perhaps? One can only wonder.)Luckily for us, the rest of this volume of odds and ends Palahniuk composed in-between his novels are much less pornographic, but just as equally bizarre. In the first section “People Together”, we meet semi-professional wrestlers hoping to make the U.S. Olympic team (with or without cauliflowered ears), desperate amateur screenwriters making their three-minute pit to studio hacks, die-hard combine demolition derby contestants in rural Washington State, Northwest castle-builders (a favorite chapter of mine, as I too fantasize about living behind medieval walls…with modern amenities, of course), and psychic shyster who are surprisingly capable of actual divination (but only after one too many glasses of red wine). In the section “Portraits”, Palahniuk spends a lot of time shedding light on the oddity known as Hollywood. Whether it be his odd interview with Juliette Lewis (mainly for her naïve belief in Scientology – that racket of all rackets), or even Marilyn Manson’s depressing tarot-card self-reading in his attic, I am reassured once again that a lot of money – no, make that too much money – can make a self-deluding nut out of you. (The spirit of Howard Hughes is alive and well in the Hollywood Hills and the ephemeral and fickle world of celebrity-dom.) In “Personal”, his third and final section, Palahniuk exorcises many a demon by confessing to a brief addiction to anabolic steroids – which he kicked after his balls shriveled up (which may classify as TMI for some people) – as well as the odd encounters that he still gets to this day from fans of Fight Club, his novel-turned-cinematic-hit.Palahniuk’s prose is best described as a form of personal confession, but told with the eye of a cultural anthropologist, voyeur, and journalist all wrapped in one. I may not know his fiction one bit – except for seeing David Fincher’s cinematic adaptation of his novel Fight Club – but my curiosity is now piqued. Let’s hope it’s just as riveting and astonishing as his non-fiction.
What do You think about Non-Fiction (2015)?
I don't yet have the stomach for Chuck Palahniuk's fiction. I've tried reading pretty much all of his novels and 'Fight Club' is the only one I've been able to finish, and that's because I'd seen the movie and pretty much knew what was going to happen. His writing is just so over-the-top graphic, filled with human suffering and self-loathing that for me they're too much of a mental, emotional, and physical workout to get through. But at the same time I would like to one day be able to read his stuff, let myself experience all the emotions, memories, and associations his writing churns up for me AND be detached enough to just finish the &$^*!! book. So I was pretty stoked to see this collection of his non-fiction writing on the library shelf. I think a more accurate title would have been, "Perhaps Stranger, but Definitely More Boring Than, My Fiction." Compared to his fiction writing and his fictional characters, like Tyler Durden from Fight Club, the real-life people and their situations he writes about in this collection come across as a little ho hum. Even folks like Marilyn Manson. I found myself wishing that he would take the best, most interesting parts of this non-fiction work and combine them into something fictional. Which I guess is what fiction writing is all about.
—Joaquin
Con todo el punch que promete, y habiendo disfrutado ya de algunas novelas de Palahniuk, debo decir que la lectura sucesiva y continuada de estas crónicas, que en su forma original obviamente no estaban recopiladas, me dio pronto una sensación de hastío, de haberme topado con una fórmula para asombrar. Rompedoras como sean algunas de las historias, el tono de Palahniuk para presentarlas, esto-es-lo-que-hay-no-sé-por-qué-ofenderse-o-asombrarse, las iguala en cierta forma en la que, pues ya que todas son extremas, ninguna lo es. No sé, tal vez si lo leía antes de ver tantos episodios de "Tabú" en NatGeo me gustaba más...Pero tampoco es que lo odié. Una cosa que puedo recordar ahorita es que el español me saltaba a los ojos, o sea que la traducción me descolocaba un poco por antinatural o forzada para llegarle al estilo del escritor, que de esto no puede ser culpado. Puede, sí, un poco de bañarse con excesivo placer en las repercusiones en su momento de El club de la lucha en los segmentos más autobiográficos del libro. Pero quién no lo haría, pues.Deje este libro por ahí en su casa y lea una crónica de vez en cuando, como menú de variedades entre libros. Así lo disfrutará más.
—José Vivas M.
Here’s a question for you: can Chuck Palahniuk do wrong?? It doesn’t seem so to me. From someone who I associate so strongly with dark, twisted, soulful fiction I have now found dark, twisted, soulful nonfiction as well. Stranger Than Fiction is a masterful blend of storytelling, lecturing and questioning; in every way that Palahniuk explores his stories to find something deeper about them, he does the same to his readers and pushes them to look beyond the ordinary. Through Palahniuk’s way of speaking about the extraordinary as if it were run-of-the-mill, each of the book’s sections — People Together, Portraits and Personal — flip the world on it’s head in unique ways; from a touching (yes, touching) interview with Marilyn Manson to a Testicle Festival, GQ photo shoot gone wrong and a drunken seance, Palahniuk crafts morals like a man who dared to stare the devil straight in the eyes and broke the silence with a fart noise.That’s a good thing, I promise.
—Corinna Scott
