Name a childhood hero.
Tug McGraw.
Name a work you wished you’d written.
Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy.
If you had to order your work by how successfully you completed what you set out to accomplish, what would that list look like?
Purple America, Demonology, The Black Veil, The Four Fingers of Death, The Diviners, Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven, Right Livelihoods, The Ice Storm, Joyful Noise, Garden State.
Name a writer in history you would’ve like to have been a contemporary of and why.
Plato. All the big questions, all the formal questions, weren’t settled yet.
Name a work of yours whose reception you’ve been surprised about and why.
Almost all of them. But The Black Veil does come to mind. It didn’t seem so controversial to me.
Correct a misperception about you as a writer in 50 words or less.
Most of the work is intended to be funny.
Name a trait you deplore in other writers.
Vanity.
Name your five desert island films.
These are just five I like and should not be considered definitive: Fanny and Alexander, A Woman Under the Influence, Trash, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Decline of Western Civilization.
Name a book not your own that you wish everyone would read.
Rings of Saturn, by W.G. Sebald.
Name a book you suspect most people claim to have read, but haven’t.
Infinite Jest.
If you could choose one of your works to rewrite, which would it be and why.
I wouldn’t rewrite Garden State, because it’s not worth it, but I could probably make The Ice Storm a little better if I wrote it now.
Share the greatest literary secret/gossip you know.
No thanks.
Name a book you read over and over for inspiration.
Rings of Saturn, or Moby-Dick.
Name the writing habit you rely on to get you through a first draft.
Fifteen hundred words a day.
Name a regret, literary or otherwise.
I wish I had kept my mouth shut.
Name a question you get about writing to which there really is no good answer.
Where do you get your ideas?
Name a question you wish you had been asked.
Will the Mets be competitive in (fill in year here)? How do you feel about the Doug Yule years of the Velvet Underground? What is the best kind of pie? Los Angeles or San Franciso? Where exactly do you think the Midwest starts? At the Mississippi? Or further East? What happened to John Hughes after Weird Science? If you could choose a favorite punctuation mark, what would it be? Which age of life is the most useless? Is there an outside of capitalism?
