Chuck Palahniuk’s archenemy


Chuck Palahniuk learned to write in the kitchen of Tom Spanbauer. It’s something that happened often, apparently. Writers tended to hold workshops in their own homes. The year was 1991, and Palahniuk had already had all sorts of horrible jobs, including the one that allowed him to tell me a while back that he once swiped a hand through luggage passing through the baggage carousel at the airport.

Back then his horrible job was to get the bags up on that belt. Someone put their hand where he shouldn’t. And the hand went to another country and ended up parading along with the suitcases. Yes, their stories are made of that exact material, I told myself. Writers often do nothing but write down the way the world appears to them. Or, it just happens before them.

But back to Spanbauer’s kitchen. Let us remember before continuing that he is about to recover his, hopefully finally celebrated as it should, ‘The man who fell in love with the moon’ (Random House Literature). And now let’s continue. It’s a Thursday night in 1991 and Palahniuk is looking at a girl whose stories draw so much attention that the lonely hands on airport baggage carousels in hers go unnoticed. The girl’s name is Monica Drake. The place where the Spanbauer kitchen is located is Portland, Maine, the city where everyone lived at the time. Then Monica moved to study with Amy Hempel and the great Joy Williams — read ‘The Quick and the Dead’ (Alpha Decay) — and she kept twisting her stories.

the star of every week

“Monica was the star every week then,” Palahniuk himself wrote in a foreword to his most famous novel to date, the near-Ken Kesey Award—yes, the guy from ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ has an award. for literati who take risks on their behalf– ‘Payasa’ (Carmot Press).

The stories she read, “stories in which she spent all night locked up in the Portland Art Museum, solitary guarding the ancient mummy of a Chinese empress as she gazed at a plateful of the contents of her preserved stomach (mostly ancient pumpkin seeds)” took their breath away. And the worst thing, for him, is that they also made them laugh. Very much. And that they were based on people who, like her, lived on the hunt for supermarket coupons to eat.

It didn’t matter what one wore to read, wrote the author of ‘Fight Club’, because Monica always wrote something better

No matter what one wore to read, the author of countless macabrely amusing novels wrote, starting with ‘Suffocation‘ and of course, ‘Fight club’, because Monica always wrote something better, “and showed us how good stories could be.” It could be said that “Tom taught us the art of writing, but Monica showed us freedom, courage,” says Palahniuk. And in the next line he admits that, if he improved as a writer during that time, it was because “she always surpassed me”. He came home, each time, telling himself that the following Thursday he would be the star. But he never was. Drake has been thus, from the beginning, for him, what Katherine Mansfield was for Virginia Woolf, a rival who, instead of hating, cannot help but love herself above all else.

Reverse bright and wild

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Take a look at both ‘Friends with children’ (Blackie Books) or ‘The madness of loving life’ (Bunker Books) and, above all, ‘Payasa’ – the story of Nostrils, a ‘clown girl’ whom chasing misfortune, an absurd and hilarious misfortune, and also, an overly handsome and probably single policeman, in suffocating and desperate Declinetown, the city where everything, even the flowers of any disastrous garden, is for sale – is to plunge into the luminously wild reverse of Palahniuk’s own writing, or, conversely, to immerse oneself in any Palahniuk story, is to do so in one of Monica Drake infinitely more marked, or limited, by the desire to remain conspicuous on that kitchen table. than by the unstoppable world-stamping prose that characterizes Drake’s.

Drake’s laugh-out-loud stories were based on people who, like her, hunted for grocery coupons to eat.

That is why Palahniuk addresses her as her “arch-enemy”. And she says the writers can’t help but compete, but that it’s a “blessing” to do so with someone “as good” as her, someone whose stories “would make a dog laugh.” What does she say about him? She now teaches in Portland. And Palahniuk still lives there. They see each other from time to time. But she remembers coming back after her class with Williams and Hempel, walking into Powell’s bookstore and hearing herself. Actually, she heard Palahniuk telling a story that was a story that she had written. “It was downright flattering, I had whole sentences memorized!” she told her not too long ago. No, for her Palahniuk, as for Mansfield, Woolf, it was never such a big deal. There are those who do not need archenemies.


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