Interview with Patrick Somerville, Real American Hero

21st Century Lit recently had the pleasure of interviewing Patrick Somerville, author of Trouble.  He made us laugh, he made us cry, and by the end of the interview, we were both entertained and genuinely moved. 

Q: How old were you when you first started writing? When did you realize that writing was something you wanted to pursue?

PS: I knew that I liked to write, but I didn’t read what you would call a substantial piece of literature until I was sixteen, when I read Catch-22; up until then, I was either going to try to be a fantasy writer and jump onto the Dragonlance franchise in whatever capacity I could (there was a solid year in there when I was sexually fantasizing about female elves) or try to get involved with film. After that phase, when I was trying to write more serious stuff, I think a lot of what I wrote—when I was 18, 19, 20—was pretty self-indulgent, stories about getting drunk in the freshman dorms at Madison and lamenting life. (Those were, incidentally, the exact sorts of stories I dreaded getting when I was teaching creative writing.) Eventually I matured and started writing about fourteen-year-olds fantasizing about female elves. Anyway, through most of college I didn’t really entertain the idea of being a writer because I knew what a ridiculous career choice it was.

Q: You were born and grew up in Wisconsin. How has your Midwestern upbringing influenced or seeped its way into your writing (that is, besides all the snow that shows up in your stories)? What does it even mean to be a Midwestern author?

PS: The Midwest that I knew when I was a kid was largely the Midwest of suburbs: strip malls, a huge high school and Top 40 music, and I think because of that I now end up often writing about people who are generally happy and kind, but also people who have many of their needs superficially met by mainstream culture, and who go into some kind of internal revolt when they realize it’s just not enough.  There are all of these complicated and secret lives buried beneath extremely amiable exteriors, and there is tension because of that.

Religion is an important part of life in the Midwest and I grew up an atheist, so that’s a huge gap in what I know about “being” Midwestern.  And, like most people, I didn’t come from a farm, and really don’t know anything about farms.  My mom is from England, and that altered how I came to know where I was from, too. Since she had been transplanted and was always sort of special because of her Englishness, I grew up with one-and-a-half feet in Wisconsin and half a foot in England.

I think I had to get away and live in a few other places to appreciate the different types of experiences people in Wisconsin have, and to see how worthy and literary a landscape it is, and how underrepresented it is.  Television and movies always give you the white-bread, happy-family stuff, as well as the rubes. It’s just way more complicated.  There are brilliant, interesting people in every little nook and cranny of America, and whenever you stop looking for them, you’ll miss them.  To answer the question, though: coming from the Midwest gives me a good sense of humor and intolerance for total bullshit. Here’s hoping those two qualities made it into the book.

Q: Like many stories in your collection, “Trouble and the Shadowy Deathblow” is offbeat and hilarious. Where did the idea for the story come from? Did you have prior knowledge of the synthetic food industry or did you do any research? Oh, and have you ever tried administering the shadowy deathblow on someone?

PS: I didn’t know anything about the food industry, and I made most of it up.  You can never go wrong with the word riboflavin—that’s as good a starting principle as you can get. My friend had been to a food scientist conference, and literally, while I was trying to imagine what that must have been like, a guy on the BART sneezed on me.  The deathblow part came from an episode of Star Trek I watched that night about Klingon coming-of-age rituals.  So that story is a reinterpretation of one weird day in San Francisco. 

What’s really bizarre is that last August, right after I moved to Chicago, I was walking down the street and I came upon a scruffy man with two huge macaws, and I thought, “This is Georgia without the wheelchair.”  He was pushing them along on a big cart, and talking to them both. I stopped him and we chatted and I told him that I’d already written a short story about him, and he would have to get a new identity. He didn’t understand what I was saying. Maybe if he cross-references the publication date of the story with that particular encounter, he’ll understand why I’m about to sick a team of intellectual property lawyers on him.

Q: This is a question many writers hate, but I’ll ask it anyway: How do your story ideas come to you? I know some writers start with an image or a “kernel” of an idea. Is that true for you? Or does it always vary from story to story?

PS: Well, see above for the “conflagration of events” model. It happens in different ways for me. Sometimes I sit on a story idea for six months before I get around to writing it, sometimes something occurs to me and I write it immediately.  Sometimes I forget, or even worse, sometimes I read something in a book, love it, forget that I read it, then write it and think that I came up with it myself.  A lot of it depends on whether or not I have the time to do it, and whether or not I’ve been reading enough fiction to have that part of my brain in good working order. 

In Ithaca, when I was reading and writing a lot, I would have these little ideas about possible stories, and as a kind of joke I would imagine a stapled packet of paper falling out of the sky and dropping on the street in front of me, representing the story that would one day come from this one thought that took a microsecond to think (also representing all the hours of work I’d have to do to make it). Most times these little ideas don’t come to fruition, but sometimes they do, and occasionally they’re even good stories. I remember walking past a garbage can, watching a bum eating some food he’d just pulled out of it, and I imagined some rich dude dropping half of his pizza into the trash, and then I thought to myself that if the bum eats this, then the yuppie rich-guy equivalent would somehow be a guy who eats his own money.  These were just the usual twists and turns of light thinking that your brain gives you as a soundtrack to your day, and it’s so easy to cast them aside as worthless, but I snapped that one up and sat down to write about a middle-aged man who eats money when he’s angry about his life.  What I ended up with is “The Future, the Future, the Future,” which doesn’t have a middle-aged man at all.  The money thing is tangential to the brunt of the story.  Still, though, I think of it and describe it as “the money-eating one,” all because of the starting place.

Q: The stories in TROUBLE are about boys and men in various states of growth or upheaval. You certainly capture—with humor and originality—a certain American-male malaise or haplessness. In assembling TROUBLE, did you consciously want the stories to connect thematically, or is this just the fictional realm that most interests you?

PS: No, I wouldn’t say this is what most interests me, but sometimes you can’t help it. I have no overarching ideas about the American male, nor do I want to be a representative of the American male. It’s just that when you’re a young writer, your skill is limited, so you try to stick closer to home. That’s what getting better as a writer is—being able to write about people further and further away from yourself, and being able to do it convincingly.  I don’t fundamentally agree with that pithy creative-writing imperative “Write what you know.”  My version would be something like, “Write what you know at first because most likely everything else you try to write about will be awful crap.  After you can write fiction from what you know that is not awful crap, then you should branch out a little.” I’m enormously happy about Trouble and I think that it’s the absolute best book I could have written at 24 and 25.  That doesn’t mean I’m interested in being the young man from Wisconsin who writes about being a young man from Wisconsin.
 
Q: Your stories are funny and loopy, but they never lack an emotional punch. It’s a delicate balance—outrageous comedy and heartfelt drama. How do you manage it? Is it something you aim for consciously, or does it come naturally?

PS: I am just so sensitive and so funny in person that it comes out automatically.  Everywhere I go, the same thing happens; people are doubled over laughing one second, weeping the next, leading to emotional upheaval and valuable cathartic experiences all around.  Just last week I couldn’t fill out my City of Chicago Parking Sticker Renewal Form without being tremendously moving and yet quirky enough to make for a rollicking good time with an undercurrent of real strength for somebody down at the DMV.

Q: What writers and books do you admire? Are there any that have influenced you more than others?

PS: I have these obsession phases when I read a lot of particular writers, and I get insane and excited about the possibilities of literature.  I would say the top four—and the top four binges I’ve had in my life—are Joseph Heller, John Cheever, Virginia Woolf, and Charles Portis. I would say that The Wapshot Chronicles and Masters of Atlantis are the two funniest, wittiest books I’ve ever read, and therefore they had a huge impact on me.  I would probably put Faulkner in there as a wildcard, because I had a similar Faulkner binge, but my writing is nothing like his, and I would never even try to write like him. I really appreciate humor in fiction and like basically any writer who is funny.  Since funny is now more permissible in literary fiction, I like a lot of contemporary writers, too: Lorrie Moore, George Saunders, Adam Johnson, Tama Janowitz, Donald Antrim, Jonathan Franzen, A. M. Holmes, and Sherman Alexie, to name a few.

Q: What’s your next project?

PS: I’m working on a novel about a young man from Wisconsin.