Lit: Stranger Than Fiction

STRANGER THAN FICTION
CHUCK PALAHNIUK
DOUBLEDAY 2004

By Paulette Perhach

If you happened to sit next to Chuck Palahniuk on a long flight, and if you had the guts to ask him all the questions you would ask the man who wrote “Fight Club,” you might get a conversation a bit like his book “Stranger than Fiction.”

Someone who writes of such immensely “flawed” up characters and equally disturbing scenes is either one of the most imaginative writers of our time, or he leads a rather flawed up life.

This non-fiction collection of essays offers the answer, which leans toward the second option.

Though his personal essays take up the last section, they’re worth skipping to the end to read first. We ride along as this socially awkward shock author mingles with the polished world of Hollywood while his novel “Fight Club” becomes a movie. The L.A. schmoozing and meetings with Brad Pitt serve as a gleaming backdrop that shine more light on Palahniuk’s discomfort and roughness, such as when he arrives at LAX with a scabbed and shaved head because he refused to try to look good.

He finds the themes from his fiction books bring out the themes in life. Everywhere he goes, people tell him how they’re just like the people in “Fight Club.” The waiters who mess with people’s food, the projectionists who splice porn into family films, the Una-poopers.

If you don’t skip to dessert by reading the personal essays first, the book starts with a section called “People Together.” The opening piece, a quasi-pornographic account titled “Testy Festy,” serves as a warning sign at the entrance to these tales: If you can’t handle the raw, raunchy truth, put this book back on the shelf. But it’s also a promise: Palahniuk will include the details most writers would just tell their friends about, no matter how much they make the reader cringe.

In the tales of people together, and also the intimate stories of the “Portraits” section, Palahniuk takes us to see Marilyn Manson give himself a tarot reading in his attic and to talk with the drunken drivers of a farming machinery demolition derby. We feel the mixed reaction of the day that Palahniuk and a friend dress in costume as a dog and a brown dancing bear and walked downtown Seattle, simply because he was tired of being just a boring white man. He takes us through his time as an escort to a one-legged Hospice patient and lists the things he had to take care of after his death so the man’s mother wouldn’t find them.

You can’t make this stuff up, even if you’re Chuck Palahniuk.