Portrait of the Artist as a Young Jerk

In the book, one character says that great writers write the same story over and over, the story of “one more guy mesmerized by his own dick, wandering around the wreckage of his life.” Is this what this book is really about?

Well it is that. There’s a lot of connection in this book to Bellow and Roth and particularly Humboldt’s Gift. Humboldt’s Gift is about an ambitious writer, and a guy who’s kind of a spiritual master of the writing world, Humboldt, and the whole point in that book is that the Humboldt guy falls completely apart and dies and the more ambitious guy doesn’t. Well that’s what [Richard’s] doing, but I’m hoping that the book is entertaining and at the same time a fun kind of puzzle where you can keep thinking back and forth of how he ended up in this particular situation.

This book is so bleak about the relationship between men and women.

Yeah, I think some women don’t like that…Women buy books. Too bad there aren’t more sexes so we could have more variety in what people want or don’t want from writers.

Why does Richard have this bleak view?

Richard’s a writer, but Richard’s also a guy with a great degree of power in society and because of that he can do whatever he wants to do a lot of the time and he does. In fact he’s surprised when he can’t do what he wants to do. That intrigues me, men’s power in the world and how they move through it to get what they want. Is this a relationship between all men and women? No. I think this is a relationship where this guy really loses. One of the reasons why he’s so unhappy all of the time is that he lacks any capacity for a transcendent relationship with any of the people in his life. Richard, like many men I know, is specifically looking to have relationships with women who he can overpower [so] he doesn’t have to meet them halfway. He’s pathetic and he doesn’t even know that he’s being pathetic, which for me was kind of like the minor saving grace for the character.

His saving grace is also that he tells the truth—he’s aware of how alone he is.

Well, you do that as a writer. I mean, why do people start writing in the first place? You start writing cause you’re a geek and you go, “Yes, yes world, I totally suck at living. I have no girlfriends and I’m a jerk and everybody hates me, however, I write great books, so fuck you.” I mean, we are not jocks. Every once in a while there is a jock, there is that guy who wrote about the perfect storm there, he’s a big jock, but not everybody is that way. Probably Hemingway was just trying to overcompensate.

Is writing fiction different from writing plays, TV scripts, and screenplays?

You write the book, you write the page, you write the words, and the words on that page are the words that somebody’s going to read. And it’s from my mouth into your ear, and I love that. If I’m going to be expressive, I really want to do that in a way that really feels like it’s coming from in me to you. You write the screenplay, [and] people don’t go up to screenplay writers and go “my god, your screenplay, that so spoke to me.” If I write a screenplay and you never see really what I wrote and then the movie comes out and I go “that’s not what I had in mind at all, he completely missed my idea.” Then I can run away, but you can’t run away from a book. You’re completely stuck with it.

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Lizzie Stark is a freelance journalist who has written for the Philadelphia Inquirer and The Daily Beast. She also edits the lit-mag Fringe and is at work on a narrative nonfiction book about Live Action Role Play, or LARP.