Open Book

After our
mausoleum tour, Palahniuk admits that our trip itself was a
pretext, a protective device. (Palahniuk declined to be
interviewed at his home, and we agreed not to mention
the name of his partner in the article.) It becomes
clear this search for fresh structures for male
contact is very real to him. He says he experiences a deep
anxiety trying to relate to people without some
activity to bring them together. “In my family
we can’t just sit and be together,” he says.
“We have to be shelling peas or husking corn or
something. A larger task. Some way of being with
people. I’m not good at it.” He and his
partner live in a former church compound outside
Vancouver, Wash., with no neighbors for a mile and a
half in any direction. “That’s why we love
it.”

Palahniuk’s unease and isolation seems a natural
response to his background, which was inflected with
the same ruptures and psychological violence that he
writes about. Born in 1962, he grew up in the desert of
eastern Washington State. At 18, he learned the truth about
his grandparents’ deaths: His grandfather shot
his wife and then came after his son,
Palahniuk’s father, who was then 4 years old.
“My dad’s first memories are of hiding
under a bed, hearing his father call and seeing his
heavy boots walk past, the smoking barrel of the gun hanging
near the floor,” writes Palahniuk in
“Consolation Prizes” from Stranger Than
Fiction. While Chuck’s father hid, his
grandfather eventually shot himself. For years,
Palahniuk’s family vacationed in that same house in
Idaho.

In one of
Palahniuk’s own childhood memories, he slipped a
washer around his finger and couldn’t get it
off. When his finger was swollen and purple, he went
to his father, who said they’d just have to cut the
finger off and spent the afternoon sharpening his ax.
“There was no drama, no tears, no
panic,” he writes. “In my 4-year-old mind, my
father was doing me a favor.” Palahniuk knelt
beside the chopping block, where he’d seen
chickens beheaded on the family farm, and laid his hand out.
“If anything, I was wildly grateful to my
father’s help,” he continues. “I
had never told it to anyone…because I knew people
wouldn’t understand the lesson. All
they’d see would be my father’s actions and
label it cruelty.” His father swung—and
purposely missed. These are Palahniuk family origin
stories, where the double braid of intimacy and violence
winds so tight they are, like his novels,
inseparable—and perhaps inescapable.

In 1999,
Palahniuk’s father, long divorced from his mother,
was murdered, shot by the ex-husband of a woman he was
dating. Driving home from his father’s funeral,
Palahniuk tells the story of pulling over to the side
of the road and considering lying facedown on the pavement
until the police or EMTs arrived, because then they
would have to physically hold him. Ultimately, he
decided not to and instead wrote a book about
it—Choke.

Ironically,
Palahniuk, by most accounts, is very good at being with
people—as long as it is a lot of people. His
readings, what he deems “events,” draw
capacity crowds. He recounts with relish the dozens of
people who have fainted at his performances of
“Guts,” a short story from his
collection Haunted that involves masturbation, a pool
intake vent, and a prolapsed colon.
“It’s great when that happens,” he
says. “There’s death, resurrection, and
then afterwards people experience euphoria.” A
friend of mine recalls standing in line for a reading and
Palahniuk snuck in behind, eavesdropped, then said in his
ear, “Have you ever had a prostitute hold your
tongue and jab you in the chest with a knife?”
(“It was sick!” my friend said with a smile,
clearly having gotten what he came for.) For the
upcoming Snuff book tour, Palahniuk has signed
over 1,000 blowup sex dolls that he will toss into the
audience “to give people a chance to scream and yell
and hyperventilate blowing them up.”

Snuff is about nothing but people -- 600 of them.
Porn star Cassie Wright wants to break the world
record for “serial fornication” in a film
called World Whore Three, but Palahniuk has cunningly
placed her (and the sex itself) primarily offstage.
The book is essentially the stories of three men
waiting their turn. Mr. 72, a young Midwesterner who
carries a bouquet of wilting flowers, believes he is
Cassie’s long-lost son. Mr. 600 is an aging
porn star who brought Cassie into the business but is
so far gone he can’t even recognize himself on the
closed-circuit televisions playing Cassie’s
hits. Mr. 137, the most complicated of the three, is a
gay television star who participated in his own all-male
gang bang, and the revelation ended his career. By
popping Viagra, he’s hoping to burnish his
reputation -- and recast his orientation -- especially
since he thinks Cassie will die while making the film.

Given
Snuff  ’s raunchy setup, the
novel reads more like theater than hard-core,
unfolding through monologues threaded with tragic
backstory. Not surprisingly, Snuff started out as a
play, but “it was terrible,” Palahniuk says,
so he reworked it as a novel. (Palahniuk writes fast:
The first draft of Fight Club took him six
weeks, as did his forthcoming novel Pygmy. He wrote
Snuff in eight weeks.)

Palahniuk does an
enormous amount of research for his books, and for
Snuff’s source material he turned to Grace
Quek (a.k.a. Annabel Chong) and her own
“sextravaganza,” in which she, at age 22,
engaged in 251 sex acts with 70 men over a period of
10 hours, captured in the documentary Sex: The
Annabel Chong Story. Quek, then a gender
studies graduate student at the University of Southern
California, had been a victim of a gang rape as a
young woman; she said she wanted to “take on
the idea of the stud.” Palahniuk loved the ambiguity
of her experience, hovering between empowerment and
annihilation. “Was she exorcising her demons,
or was she just being used?” he asks. “Derrida
says that the undetermined, undecided thing carries enormous
energy. So if I write and refuse to take a moral stand
about Cassie and spoon-feed people, it’s much
more dynamic. Readers need to seek out the company of
other people to discuss the themes.” (Incidentally,
Quek was never paid for the video, though she claims
in the documentary that she “didn’t want
the money.”)

To develop his
themes, Palahniuk also conducts experiments in what he
calls “crowd-seeding”: At parties he tells
people what he’s working on and freely hands
out his phone number to generate ideas. For
Snuff, he says, “I had all these people
calling night and day, offering porn titles, or
hairdressers saying, ‘Did you know Lucille Ball
did this thing with wooden
toothpicks…?’ ” All of his books
are packed with this group expertise “so that
you feel like you’re learning,” he says.
It’s the Google-era technique of novel writing:
social composition. “I’m simultaneously
testing my material or premise with people and
tweaking it,” he says. “Plus, it’s a
fun game and gives people a role to play.”