Bully Pulpit
"Fight Club" author Chuck Palahniuk is back with more weirdness
New York Post - 08.10.03

"Hey. This is Chuck. I am home right now, just before the Diary tour and I am packing the boxes of stuff to give away for the best questions. So if you want something handmade by me [Ed.—omitted in the Post article: "some piece of crap you could sell on eBay] then have a really great question, because I am just busting ass right now to bring the best things to each book event."

This is the most recent message Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk has left on his "audio blog" (http://www.chuckpalahniuk.net/blog.php —sort of a Web site with voice mail). The blog is part of the marketing effort for Palahniuk's new travel book, Fugitives & Refugees: A Walk in Portland, Oregon (Crown; $16.) It's a bit of a departure for an author best known for writing dark, angry fiction, but there are signature Palahniuk elements that make it far different from your average tour guide.

[Ed.—Omitted: The inside front cover of the book contains a map of several city blocks in Portland, Oregon. The neatly labeled streets are dotted with numbered circles that signify various Portland landmarks—most of which are more Palahniuk than Portland. Number 17 reads, "Chuck Got Beat Up Here." Number 32: "The 24 Hour Church of Elvis (Closed.)" Number 22: "Haunted Bathrooms."] Fugitives and Refugees—which came out last month—is a guided tour of the eccentricities of the author's native city, interspersed with pieces of autobiography.

Palahniuk says currently he's working on a book of non-fiction essays to be released next Spring, which he describes as "profiles of oddball people." But what in the world of the man who wrote the cult novel, Fight Club (later a cult movie starring Brad Pitt and Edward Norton,) constitutes "oddball"?

"There's 'Rocket Guy,'" he says. "The guy that's doing a privately funded space mission and building a rocket in his backyard. There's something really touching about it."

Palahniuk says he has always wanted to be a writer—it was my dream since fifth grade"—though he didn't start doing it professionally until he was 33. "By [that] time," he says, "I had exhausted all the pleasures of the world—drugs, sex, staying out all night—and was just tired enough to write."

This doesn't mean that Palahniuk's adventures are over. He's a member of the National Cacophony Society, a group of pranksters whose more notorious exploits include a seemingly random gathering of a few hundred people in Santa Claus suits.

Palahniuk's latest novel—due Aug. 26—shares Fight Club's pervasive sense of paranoia. Diary (Doubleday; $24.95) is about a woman who moves to an island in pursuit of a moneyed, gentle existence and ends up being exploited to preserve the island's status and wealth.

Palahniuk says the book was inspired by the Ira Levin novels of the 1970s (Rosemary's Baby, The Boys from Brazil) and hopes that it will address the issues of gentrification and immigration the way that Rosemary's Baby addressed abortion and women's healthcare.

Palahniuk says he has no plans to slow down—and that he'll always have time to talk to his fans. As he says on another recent entry on his audio blog: "I sent off 50 packages [to fans who sent me letters] today, and there's nothing I love better. That is my work, because I love doing it...Thanks a lot! You have a good day. Bye."