Page One:"How did you become a writer
and why do you write?"
Chuck: "I started writing because I
love to read. It's the same way that sickly children who were
always getting medical treatment will idolize doctors and become
one. Books were the main way I could cope with insomnia as a
kid. I'd read all night, right until it was time for 
school. I was the child with
the huge eye bags. I write now because I find fewer and fewer
books that interest me. After the first page, I'm putting them
down. It's like the old saying "be the kind of friend you'd
like to have" only I write the kind of books I like to read.
Page One: "How did you come up with
the idea for Fight Club? Invisible Monsters?"
Chuck: " For Fight Club, I'd gone on
vacation and gotten into a fight, then come back to my nice job
with my face black and blue. For months, no one looked me in
the bruised face, and I realized that you could do anything in
your private life as long as you looked so terrible nobody would
want to know about it. For Invisible Monsters, I worked as a
security guard at a big bodybuilding show, which was a joke since
the guards were all about half the size of the giant steriod
competitors we were supposed to control and protect. Even the
women were bigger 
than us. I joked that the
only way I could ever compete in this contest would be as a woman,
and another scrawny guard joked, "Yeah, you could call yourself
Brandy Alexander." At that moment, Monsters was born.
Page One: "Is it true you wrote Fight
Club to get back at those who who were turning down your work?
Kinda ironic what happened."
Chuck: "Kinda ironic is right. I figured
I had nothing left to lose. My work would never see the light
of day so I figured I could write anything I wanted. Just in
case it was rejected, I'd also put poison on the glue strip of
the self-addressed return envelope."
Page One: "Tell us a little about Raymond
Bongiovanni?"
Chuck: "God bless Raymond. He was a
property scout in New York, reviewing new manuscripts for 20th
Century Fox (Fox 2000). Raymond read F/C within weeks (days?)
of me sending the first draft to my agent, and hammered the execs
at Fox to read it also. He called me one Saturday afternoon,
probably to see if I was a crank-psychopath, and we talked a
couple hours. Then Raymond died. He'd been sick a long time.
In his obit in Variety, it said his last wish was for "the
gritty Chuck Palahniuk novel Fight Club to become a movie."
They even mentioned the book in his eulogy. I will always be
grateful to Raymond."
Page One: "Your writing is very honest
--- The terminal illness support groups in Fight Club -- Have
you been involved in groups like these? Why and where?"
Chuck: "I volunteered as an "escort"
at a hospice for young people dying without any money. Since
I couldn't nurse or cook, I drove patients around in my 13-year-old
Mercury Bobcat. Most of these trips were to and from their support
groups, where I'd sit on the sidelines waiting to drive my person
back to the hospice. I felt guilty being there and not being
dying, but it sure made the rest of my life look terrific and
problem-free."
Page One: "In Fight Club you give your
lead insomnia and beat him up. In Invisible Monsters you disfigure
a model --- what attracts you to the dark and subversive sides
of human nature?"
Chuck: "So far, mutilation has been
my favorite metaphor for the instant destruction of personal
identity. This destruction makes way for the character to evolve
into a better, stronger person, not so hampered by their past.
In my second book, Survivor, the narrator mutilates his brother.
The plan is never to use this metaphor again.
Page One: "In Invisible Monsters, whenever
there's a sudden shift in a scene, the narrator says, "Jump
to," or "Jump back" to introduce it. Were you
trying to employ a cinematic narrative? Why?"
Chuck: "Not really, I wrote Monsters
at the laundromatte where I sat and read zillions of doggy old
fashion magazines. It seemed like every article would start on
one page, then instantly jump to page 300 in the back. Then most
of the pages weren't numbered. I could never find anything. I
was trying to duplicate this kind of chaos. I would've loved
to have the pages in Monsters un-numbered, just blank."
Page One: "Do you read alot? What would
you like to read that you haven't read yet?"
Chuck: "That's a tough one. As soon
as I hear about a book, I get it. I've heard about a new book
by Bret Ellis I want to read."
Page One: "What questions do unpublished
writers ask you the most and what are your answers?"
Chuck: "Probably "How do I get
published?" And I'd say, write something so amazing, so
audacious that even the very bored people who read slush pile
manuscripts all day, every day, will sit up and take notice.
These are people who got into
publishing because they love books, but so much of what they
see is boring. They will be pantingly grateful if you make them
laugh, scare them, teach them something interesting, so do all
the above. Make it so good they can't reject it for fear that
another house will snap it up and make oodles of money."
Page One: "Are you back at work on
another book and if so could you give us a hint at what it's
about?"
Chuck: "It's a (very) dark sex comedy.
I'm trying to do with sex what I did with violence in Fight Club.
Playboy's already bought two chapters and will run them as short
stories some time this year."
the
northwest, both Washington and Oregon. He finished his first
novel, Fight Club, after only three months of writing while he
paid the bills as a mechanic for Freightliner. It wasn't his
first shot at writing, however. While accepting the award for
the H.L. Davis Award for Fiction, he spoke of two other books
sent off to New York that were returned with "really really
long . . . no's." In 1996, Palahniuk had a short story by
the name of Project Mayhem published in STORY magazine. That
project grew to become the astonishing Fight Club. A year later,
STORY published another of his shorts -- this one called Survivor,
which he would go on to craft into a full-length as before. This
past September, Palahniuk released Invisible Monsters with WW
Norton and is now touring in support of the book. He continues
to live in Portland, Oregon.