Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself (25 page)

There’s this fascination with homosexuality in the script, which is very odd and mean
.

Yeah. It’s kind of a
nasty
movie, but it’s very funny. [A set of taillights crosses into our lane.] This guy is a
true
asshole.

It’s truly funny, it knocked me out as a kid. Then his career ended
.

How did it end, by the way?

He made—Funny Farm was the last movie he made. Chevy Chase, a splashy bad real estate purchase. Strange, biggest director in the
’
70s … A Little Romance …

He made
A Little Romance?
It was a great movie.

The Sting and Butch Cassidy … huge seminal hits …

How did his career go away like that?

I think he just stopped doing hits … Diane Lane in A Little Romance … wonderful
.

Broah! Oh yeah! I know, I’m agreeing. Not to mention the fact that she grew up into, to just be a fucking
angel
. She was in
The Cotton Club
, but she’s been in hardly anything else.

… also in Streets of Fire …

I hate this: “Vehicles are closer than they appear.”

So you thought this was coming, right?

What?

That someone was going to read these things to you …

Read as much as you want, as long as I don’t have to respond.

You had to know that somebody would ask you about that … that’s the kind ofthing you write … When you write a scene like the one with that kid, and Lyle talking about wanting to be famous. You know that someone’s going to come back and ask you about those things
.

Except only another writer would. That’s the good and bad thing about choosing you to do this. I’m serious, man, if you—like this would have been over a
day
ago if you hadn’t been somebody who writes novels.

Well, I appreciate that …

I can be very
tough
when I have to be. It’s actually—it’s the way to get me. Is get me to like the person, and I’ll like become
way
more passive and worry about their feelings and all this stuff.

… have you been worried about my feelings?

It’s part of, you know, this
mélange
of various things. It’s one reason this is tiring. Yeah, and also, I had this incredible—I mean I’m rubbing my hands together so I can call you in six or seven months. I can’t wait till
you
like have somebody, you know, hanging around. Wanting to hear your—it’s all so interesting.

Nothing, the kind of thing that’s happened to you happens to young writers once every five or ten years
.

It may not be something of this length. But you know enough about how—I mean this—some version of the dog-and-pony show goes along with having a book come out.

No, that’s true. But the kind of attention that you’ve gotten … maybe happens once in a decade to someone our age. …

No, this is like—this is like two things. This is the thing in
The New York Times Magazine
and the thing in
Rolling Stone
.

[Slightly disingenuous]

I follow, for better or worse … writers. When they break into certain kind of levels of success, when books get certain kinds of attention … and this kind of stuff happens very, very rarely
.

Huh!

Oh, you know it too. Come on—you’re smiling! You
know
you know it too. You follow this crap also, come
on.

I follow the crap. But I struggle much harder against the
temptation
to follow the crap. And I follow it from much more of a distance—and yeah, I have some sort of idea of it. But have some compassion. I mean, I’ve already told you that, like, I gotta be
very
careful about how much of this stuff I take inside. Because I go home, and I spend a month getting this manuscript ready. And then I got to start working on something
else
. And the realer this shit is to me, and the more I think about it—and, of course you’re holding the tape recorder so that I will end up
reading
what I’ve said in this article. That will
feed
the self-consciousness loop. (Laughs) That like, I
need
to be—so I’m not just, I’m not fucking around with you, and I’m not playing you like you’re stupid.

You’ve just gotta realize that, that I’ve gotta be real disciplined about how real I make this stuff to me, and I also don’t want to overblow it. I think something—the truth is somewhere between what you’re saying and something about what I’m saying. I mean Amy Holmes is doing a tour for
The End of Alice
that’s bigger, and involves more interviews, than the tour I’m doing. You know? So it’s maybe like ten books a year, ten literary books a year by young, by young writers are—

Publishers want it to happen. They bait the hook in various ways. And they’ll bait it with a lot of horsemeat—or whatever they bait it with—or a small amount of horsemeat—

Conch
, I think, is what cuts up nicely, into cubes.

I was thinking of a kind of big fleshy thing, sure
.

Huh!

But they throw it out there, and it doesn’t always get a strike. I mean, they throw it out there, and they don’t know who or what’s gonna bite
.

So there’s been a strike this time?

A marlin
.

The rod is bowing way down. Bowing.

A huge marlin. A marlin of, like, prehistoric proportions …

Ah-huh. [Trying to control pleasure]

Which happens very very rarely
.

But it might be one of those fish that you get all happy, then you lean over to gaff it and it takes your arm off.

Yeah, but in this case, it’s been gaffed, and it went
fine
…

Uhhhh
, let’s—Why don’t you call—I’ll tell ya, here’s what would be real interesting, you can find him. Why don’t you call Jay and ask for
his
take on this book. McInerney.

[Who gave the book a mixed review. Samples:

OK. I
will
ask, and I will call him. But here’s the thing: Do you know how many times Rolling Stone has done a young writer, a profile, in the last ten years?

Uh-uh.

Zero
.

Really.

I checked, zero
.

Except let’s
realize
that, OK, right; I think I wrote a good book. And I think for some reason—like the timing was right or whatever. But one reason
Rolling Stone
is interested has very little to do with me or the book, it’s this kind of miasma of hype around the book, that feeds on itself.

Well, no, but it’s just, it’s—I mean, you’re talking—you want to know what this
tour
was like. Forty percent of the interviews were interesting, and 60 percent were very charming people. Who you know, “I gotta admit, it’s such a big book, I’ve only read five pages. But what I’m really interested in, is, what do you make of all this attention?” You know? And I’m just—the phenomenon is not lost on me. And given that fact.
Plus
the fact that I got a serious investment in having a certain amount of detachment from this … So all I’m trying to do is explain to you that—Yeah, if I’m playin’ a little dumb I’m not, I’m not trying to condescend to you or act like you’re stupid. It’s just I don’t, I don’t want to
feel
every edge of this quite yet.

Got it
.

Because, because, you know, I’m thirty-four. And I’ve
finally
discovered I really love to write this stuff. I really love to work hard. And I’m so terrified that this—that
this
is going to somehow twist me. Or turn me into somebody whose hunger for approval keeps it from being fun, you know?

[Reason for it]

I want to be able to—I mean, you know, I think
Infinite Jest
is really good. I would hope that if I keep working really hard for like the next
ten or twenty years, I can do something that’s
better
than that. Which means I’ve gotta be
really
careful, you know? About, you know, you know, I don’t want to end up being somebody on
game
shows. And you’ve talked about it, it was when the tape recorder was on, nobody’s done, nobody’s taken this well. I mean this has never helped
anybody
. Anybody’s writing future. So I would be an
idiot
, you know, if I were not playing various psychic games and erecting defenses.

This is very smart. You say something that gets a rise out of me, and I begin talking, and it’s good because I like you, so I’m talking to you. But the tape recorder’s on …

But I was thinking, you were talking about your passion for the work. There’s a scene in one of Updike’s essays in Self-Consciousness, he says—

He’s got an essay called “Self-Consciousness”?

He has a book called that
.

I thought it was called
Getting the Words Out
.

No, “Getting the Words Out” is one of the essays …

Boy, if nothing else you’ve given me six things to read. Renata Adler, “Anonymiad,” Nabokov’s letters—

I’m not sure you’re running that risk, because you’re a much more centered person … I’m sorry to use a word like “centered,” you don’t think—you were shaking your head when I said “centered.” You don’t see yourself that way?

No, I don’t.

Why not?

I see myself as somebody who’s been
unbelievably
burned by no one
other than me. Through
not
being centered. I have an
enormous ambition
to be centered. But I don’t—I don’t perceive myself as that way. And I wouldn’t be so careful about this kind of stuff, if I felt very much confidence that I could handle it well. And I’m aware that this makes very good copy, and this will be a neat part of the article. But it’s also really like—you know, I feel like we’ve sort of become friends and … understand that. I mean this stuff, it’s
really
scary. And I think if we were in exactly the opposite situation, you’d be saying a lot of the same stuff. It’s great. But it’s also, it’s also really scary at the same time. ’Cause I’ve gotta—you know, I’ve got what I
hope
is like forty more years of work ahead of me.

Hah. Do you have a huge ambition in general, or no …?

Yeah, I think I do. What it’s been about has changed a whole lot. I mean I really, I’m now so scared of having the ambition be, to be regarded well by other people. Just cause it’s—it landed me in a suicide ward.

That it’s now, except for making vague, pretentious statements about art, I couldn’t really name what it is.

Is there someone then who’s better prepared for this than someone who was in a suicide ward about it?

I think somebody who’s been in a suicide ward is either way better prepared or way
less
well prepared. Because I mean, I don’t think we ever
change
. I mean I’m sure there are still those same parts of me. I’ve just got to find a way to not let them
drive
. Could I also have—if I can have my Diet Pepsi. [For drinking and then spitting]

You said you’re hardwired for addictive behavior. You were able to train yourself out of it, you don’t drink programmatically. Don’t you think you can train yourself …?

That’s safe to say. Except I would, I don’t like the word “programmatical.”

[Road quiet now. Just the rush of tires over cement, that slightly sibilant, airplane-y sound of the air we’re cutting through with the fender and windshield.]

I’m going to say, in the piece, that I noticed that you don’t drink … there are places where we ate when I would have ordered like a beer or something but didn’t
.

You can order whatever you want.

My friends who have been through the program, they say that they’ve always been very conscious—’cause when they first went in the program they
didn’t
want people to drink in front of them, and so I’ve always since not …

Well, I’m not any sort of authority on any sort of program. But from my very limited outside understanding of the program, people who have been in it for a while and are fairly—are fairly nice where they’re at: you could snort cocaine off the back of your hand next to them. And as long as they have a reasonably
decent
reason to be with you, you don’t have to worry.

Can I turn this off, or …? [The interior light] Boy, it’s easy to speed in this thing.

Seventy-five though is fair. You can hit cruise control …

Yeah, cruise control makes me nervous.

You killed off Michael Chang, too, I saw. In the book
.

[He laughs.]

OK, here’s the first quote, “The obsession with future-tense fame makes all else pale.” You don’t drink anymore, keep TV away from yourself … you had to train yourself away from it, but you know that being exposed to it might be harmful
.

Ah-huh. [His debatable: Ah-huh.]

Similarly you had to train yourself away during a very painful period from thinking about attention, right? And now it’s being pushed at you whether you want it or not
.

Right.

What about that …? Everything else you were able to regulate and control how much you got; not this
.

Well, notice that it’s not exactly like I’m a paragon of self-control. I’ve got a
raging
nicotine problem. That like that I really need to quit, at least the chewing tobacco. It makes your fucking jaw fall off. You know? I’ve got a sugar problem and I like, you know, I have a pretty hard time with girlfriends. I mean it’s not like, you know, I’m not like … And no, no, no, no—but I’m just saying, you know, it’s not like, it’s not like … but yeah, this stuff, this stuff’s really scary. And it’s really confusing, because if I had totally eschewed all of it, then I think I really would have
fucked
over Little, Brown, who took a huge chance.
But
there’s also—that could be a really great excuse, ’cause there’s a little part of me of course that
loves
this, you know?