Books & Poetry

How did you manage to write a book as complex and ambitious as ‘Bright Shiny Morning’ with the ‘Oprah’ storm raging around you?
‘I just got up every day and went to work. I didn’t give a shit about any of that stuff. I always say this and people think I’m weird, but everyone has bad times at their job, and that’s all it was – a bad time at my job. I actually started the book in October 2006. By that point the real insanity was gone, so I could hole up and write.’

One of the problems with literary mega-celebrity is that there aren’t many precedents for it, so when it occurs it always feels singular and strange – to the media and the public as well as to the writers themselves.
‘The odder club is the Notorious Club that I’m sort of president of. You never become a writer with the expectation that you’ll be recognised on the street. The real explosion of “A Million Little Pieces” was a totally surreal experience. It was like being in a Camus book.’

Is that one of the reasons writers take liberties with memoirs – because there’s no expectation that the book will ever become enough of a phenomenon for it to matter, or for the writer to be caught out?
‘No book has ever been investigated or picked apart the way mine has, before or since. I think if you look at memoirs in general, any one of them that’s readable is going to have the same issues that mine had. It became so big and so famous and sold so many copies. Once you reach that level of celebrity, people just want to pick you apart – which they did. So be it. In many ways I’m happier with the position I’m in now than I was before the controversy occurred.’
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Why?
‘Because “A Million Little Pieces” was written as a novel, and its intentions were all literary, all artistic. It was meant to be an insult to self-help books, and somewhere along the line it became one, and I was really uncomfortable with that. I was like, this is me spitting on self-help books. But I got put on this pedestal as a recovery and addiction superhero, and that was not at all what I wanted. The effect of the fuss was to reduce it back to a book, to a piece of literature. It made me just a writer, but a notorious writer, and most of the writers I love were notorious writers: Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Hemingway, Céline, Bret Easton Ellis, Mailer… I grew up listening to punk rock and getting in trouble. I don’t want to be a guy on TV talking about addiction. Fuck that.’

The main character in ‘Bright Shiny Morning’ is Los Angeles itself. Tom Wolfe once wrote that it was only possible to encapsulate cities in novels by using the techniques of Victorian realist writers. Your way is to have several key plot strands, but also a mass of extraneous information and hundreds of characters making fleeting appearances.
‘Most of the books about LA are about Hollywood or crime. I wanted to write the first big, ambitious book about the city that I think is most exemplary of what America is right now and is moving towards becoming. But I wanted it to be unlike anything that’s ever been done.
I thought about Hugo and Dickens and Tolstoy, about John Dos Passos and, to a lesser extent, Tom Wolfe, but I wanted it to be constructed and conceived in a way that was in tune with the zeitgeist. We live in a world that’s very fractured and fast. We get vast amounts of information thrown at us. That’s sort of how the book works. You get a ton of different information in different ways, very quickly and efficiently.’

The narrative is interspersed with lists of facts that may not be facts, and gobbets of history that may or may not be made up.
‘That was a statement of defiance. I researched it as I wrote it. I’d go online and find the shit, and if I couldn’t find it, I’d make it up. I mean, one of the joys of this being classified as a novel is that none of it has to be accurate or real, and if people want it to be, they can fuck off. Some of the reviews have been funny. I saw the book being discussed on “Newsnight Review” and one of the guys was like, “Well, this information better be real, I feel like he’s conning us again,” and I’m like, “You fucking dumbass. It’s a fucking novel. None of it has to be real.” Frankly, he reacted just the way I hoped.’

With hindsight, don’t you wish you’d been more emphatic about how you wanted ‘A Million Little Pieces’ and its follow-up ‘My Friend Leonard’ to be classified?
‘There were mistakes made, sure. But I don’t look back and worry about it. Whatever happened happened, and I’m really happy now.’

You have a lot of fun with closeted gay actor Amberton Parker and his sham marriage.
‘It was fun to write, yeah. The best stuff was at the end when he’s running around with the crazy Russian guy. He’s not based on anyone. He’s based on rumours that exist about a bunch of people. My idea was to show what the reality of those rumours would be like. Amberton’s just a fool.’

Do you see yourself as a novelist now, rather than a memoirist?
‘I’m not interested in genres. It’s just storytelling. I’m starting another book just now, about what I think the messiah would be like if he was walking the streets today. It’s going to be written like the Bible, in chapter and verse. I don’t know if my idea of the messiah is going to be the same as the one many Americans have…’

‘Bright Shiny Morning’ is published by John Murray at £12.99.