SOURCE: "A Leaner and Meaner Mark Leyner," in The Bloomsbury Review, Vol. 13, No. 4, July-August, 1993, pp. 5-7.

[In the interview below, Leyner discusses his literary influences and preferences, his research sources, and his thoughts on the writing process.]

So daunting is the mythic image author Mark Leyner—rhymes with complainer—paints of himself in his latest literary exploit, Et Tu, Babe, that the prospect of encountering him might have sent shivers through lesser mortals. Instead, the diminutive, albeit muscular, fellow who greeted us at the door of his temporary lodgings on the edge of the University of Colorado campus turned out to be one regular guy—within carefully controlled limits. The blue jeans, Oakland Athletics T-shirt, and ostentatious cowboy boots he sported had a premeditatedly unpremeditated quality, the hallmark of his ever-slippery literary libertarianism.

Notably absent were any remnants of Team Leyner, that fictious squad of devoted underlings dedicated to making their boss the most conspicuous name in contemporary cultural chronicles. In their wake was his wife, Arleen, whom he depicts at the conclusion of Et Tu, Babe as putting him through an especially messy divorce. We remarked, somewhat naively, how nice that the two of them were still together, despite their novelistic aftermath, only to learn later, much to our mutual consternation, that Mark and Arleen are indeed separated and entangled in new relationships. Too reticent to confess, or the never-ending process of re-inventing oneself? Leyner never lets on, one way or the other.

Ex-Mrs. Leyner in the course of our discourse resembled the dormouse during Alice's Mad Tea Party: awakening fitfully from bouts of slumber to mutter semi-intelligible rumblings—like worrying whether our tape recorder had clicked off.

As for the scenario in progress, it approximated a contemporary Alice in Wonderland: two erstwhile journalists situated at the foot of his royal bed while the hookah-less caterpillar strove vaingloriously to impart wisdom. (Leyner was continually in the process of lighting a cigarette, but never managed, due to the intensity of our discussion. Or so one, or both, would like to believe.)

Leyner's insights about the grueling art of promoting a book were also unexpectedly human: exhaustion from the three to four hours of sleep per night he averaged; an avowed aversion to all airplanes and airports he attended; and not least, the dizzying mixture of excitement, hilarity, and confusion he harbors about becoming America's latest inflatable cult figure.

In keeping with that last perception, Leyner apologized for the cramped accommodations gamely endured for the length of our talk. He made assurances that when next our paths crossed, the atmosphere would reflect his deservedly megalomaniacal reputation—an assertion, it should be noted, as worthy of a grain of salt as any other he made that day. But therein lies the fun of mixing it up with Mark Leyner: separating fact from fabrication, showman from charlatan. If he so chooses not to recognize the disparity, who can blame the rest of us for enjoying the joyride?

On the afternoon we met, Leyner was in an outspoken frame of mind, although it did take a few minutes to break through his perfectly sensible schizophrenia regarding the press—whether to court or condemn.

[The Bloomsbury Review]: Your prose has been compared to such surrealistic stand-up comedians as Steven Wright. Do you worry more about how your writing reads aloud, or how it appears on the page?

[Leyner]: Doing readings has made me pay a lot more attention to how a passage sounds. But when I'm writing, I'm more attuned to how it reads on the page. It's a very pragmatic question, because if you happen to be doing a number of readings while you're also in the course of writing a book, then you'll be very aware of how the new one's going to sound. And that will affect the writing. On the whole Et Tu, Babe, reads very well out loud. That's because, as you get more notoriety as a writer, you're asked to read more. It's a very practical kind of influence. And I'm not averse to allowing that motivation to shape my work.

I really love readings. I've made a conscious effort to be a good performer. Some people don't, but it's something you have to think about, an entirely different discipline. You can't just get up and read as you would to yourself when writing. It's a transforming experience when you're performing. It took me a couple of years to understand the difference, but I'm pretty good at it now. When I'm really on, I'd compare what I do to stand-up comedy. Some critic in Los Angeles described me as the first stand-up fiction writer, or some such phrase. I don't mind that description, I feel very much like that when I'm performing. You get your timing down. You know how long to wait so you don't step on laughter. They're all Borscht Belt tricks in a way, but that's what you have to do. In all honesty, I'm influenced by stand-up comedy in a formal way, but I don't know Steven Wright's work all that well. Usually, I'm not that familiar with the writers people say I'm influenced by. It's always interesting for me to see.

Another possible influence, in terms of your jagged and unruly narrative style, must be the Monty Python television series.

Sure. But let's say I never made a point of sitting down every week to watch it. Of course, readers believe that, because some similarities undoubtedly exist. It's just that people are so positive certain writers served as antecedents or progenitors for my work. William Burroughs, for example, comes up a lot in reviews and articles about me. In reality, I've only read bits and pieces of Naked Lunch and nothing else. I have great respect for him, but that's not the same as trying to emulate his writing.

Then you don't even think his impact is subconscious.

I know it's not. I know why I do what I do. It's not mysterious.

Would you say you're more influenced by pop culture than by contemporary literature?

I'm not interested in contemporary literature at all, because I don't read it. There are two main currents that have conflated to form my style. One is a pretty rigorous education in literature. Those are the authors I still read.

Laurence Sterne's literary oddity, Tristram Shandy, comes to mind. You both share a cavalier attitude towards accepted methods of storytelling.

Yes, I know that novel. But my influences are really much more traditional than that. Like The Iliad and The Odyssey. John Keats' Odes. Shelley. The Essays of Charles Lamb I love very much. And Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé. ["Nothing is to me more distasteful than that entire complacency and satisfaction which beam in the countenances of a new-married couple." Charles Lamb (1775–1834) "There are in every man, at every hour, two simultaneous postulations—one towards God, the other towards Satan." Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) "The poet makes himself a seer by an immense, long, deliberate derangement of all the senses." Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891) "The flesh is sad, alas, and I have read all the books." Stephane Mallarmé (1842–1898)]

Does that mean you read the last three in the original French?

I can read them in the original French when there's a facing page with English. [Laughter.] I try to go back and forth. I do like to learn how the poem reads in French, because that's how it was meant to work, obviously. But what kills me is that people expect my major influences to be authors whose styles are similar to mine. And I tend not to like those writers for some reason.

Kurt Vonnegut, for instance.

Another writer whose work I can honestly say I've never read. I have very antique tastes in poetry, fiction, and drama. When it comes to nonfiction, my reading is very contemporary. I'm much more omnivorous, as far as that goes.

Biographies?

Yes, biographies. Books about the Philadelphia Mafia. This species of mammals I'm interested in—naked molerats—I just got a book about. I've got this wonderful Taste of Paradise by Wolfgang Schifflebusch, a cultural anthropological study of chocolate, tobacco, alcohol, and spices. It's fabulous. So my interests in nonfiction are eclectic, to say the least.

That's quite apparent in your writing.

Not to mention lists of magazines. Scientific American. Science News. Sassy. Boxing magazines. People.

Do you ever pick up supermarket tabloids as a source of information?

No. The stories are too close to the fiction I eventually come up with. There's no need for me to read supermarket tabloids because somehow I end up creating tabloids of my own. So they're of no interest to me.

We recently interviewed Tama Janowitz who said she actually invented plot twists [in The Male Cross-Dresser Support Group (1993)], which turned out to be true, that later appeared in newspaper headlines. Does that phenomenon ever occur with you?

I hate when that happens.

Can you remember any particular examples?

That's a risk you take when you deal with anything topical, or when you incorporate celebrities into your work. Because the currency of that celebrity is volatile. I use Paula Abdul somewhere in the book, very fleetingly. Still, you don't know, by the time the novel comes out, what will have happened to Paula Abdul? The half-life of these people amounts to nothing. Also, something could happen to her; she could lose her legs, but it's too late, the book is out. Or she fades away into nothingness, that could happen in the course of a year or two. There's a part in Et Tu, Babe where a daughter is talking to her mother, and she's saying, "Mom, I don't understand Mia Farrow. How could one woman love sensitive artists like Woody Allen, Andre Previn, and then be married to someone like Frank Sinatra? Who calls women cunts and broads." And they have this discussion. Then this whole controversy occurs with Woody Allen, which was very disturbing to me. As the author of this book, I didn't quite know how that was going to change the texture or fabric of that bit I did. It didn't completely subvert it, but it came close. That's the sort of risk you take.

Have you seen Woody's latest, Husbands and Wives?

No.

It's really eerie how so many of the events depicted were probably going on at the time the film was being shot. The movie appears to have amounted to a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Strangely enough, Et Tu, Babe turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy itself. It's a book about the apparatus of celebrity-making, which I am now a part of in a very real way. It's what takes me all over the country.

But to return from a number of different tangents, the way pop culture has affected me more than any other influence is in a formal manner. The formality of television, for instance. Not the content of it at all. But its formal grammar, its kineticism, its ability to juxtapose thousands of images against each other in 30-second and 60-second ads.

Which raises another issue: Et Tu, Babe does reflect a short attention span typical of the American public. To say nothing of the entire notion of sound bites.

I'm certainly aware that there's a fortuitous match between my work at the moment and the sensibility of people who also have grown up on television. But my decisions to write the way I do had more to do with starting out writing poetry, and then seeing if I could make a kind of prose that was as dense with event, surprise, humor, and lyricism. Which had no dead spots. I think I really started coming up with these ideas when I was a sopho-more or junior in college. When you'd read a long book like George Eliot's Middlemarch, for example, where if you're in a rush you can skip entire sections. If somebody visits a country home, there will be 25 pages describing the front lawn that the reader has to cross to get to the front door. If there's a test the next day, by all means get to the door. You don't need to read all that. Now, of course, being an older and more serious reader, I wouldn't skip that passage. There's probably wonderful stuff in there, details that turn out to be important, some psychological tapestry that's been painted by this description. I thought at that time, though, I didn't want to write books that include transitional passages which merely serve to move characters from room to room. Or which explain how a person is related to someone else. I want every sentence to be unskippable, very intense and charged. That's how I started developing my style. I didn't say to myself I wanted to come up with something which approximates the jagged feeling of a day of television. Although they are very similar.

In a sense you're redefining the whole concept of what a novel is, or what a novel is capable of doing. Including the way you use yourself as a comic presence. Can you define how you differ from, and conversely resemble, the protagonist of Et Tu, Babe?

I exaggerate certain characteristics. It's an extreme hyperbolic version of myself. But if you scale it back, turn down the volume, look carefully at all the details, it's very much me. Many of the details of the book are true.

Ever had any complaints from people whose life stories you incorporate into your work?

Not this book so much. After all, my dog can't complain. Martha Stewart, whom I also mention, likes it. Actually, we got to be friends through that, which is part of that weird life/art relationship we were discussing before. The Mark Leyner in the novel and the real Mark Leyner have been forged into this indistinguishable lump by the media and my own ambitious machinations. It's hard to tell what the interior, or exterior, of either of us is. But the book itself is the first novel made up entirely of jacket copy. On the outside and the inside. Even the photo of the author and the blurbs. Most people think I've made up all the blurbs on the book. Which I didn't, because I do all those things in the book. So it's funny; I've encouraged some sort of Chicken Little syndrome, where no one believes anything I say anymore. There are some people to whom I could say anything and they'd believe me. I'll admit, a lot of extraordinary things have happened in my life.

So, one of your points is that fact and fiction, in your experience at least, are inextricably linked.

I've always been fascinated by that issue—the way the creation of public figures has hybridized fact and fiction. Or the way we promote idealized images of ourselves to acquaintances in our intimate life. The whole business of fact and fiction is never as clear as people make it. It's quite fuzzy.

Another way of looking at it is that "fact" per se only happens in the present, the "now." Once it becomes part of the past, or a person's recollection, it becomes fiction.

Fictionalization starts the instant a phenomenon is perceived by an observer. A fictionalizing component occurs in the very sensory perception of an event. What we're seeing, hearing, touching, smelling is not the entirety of the event, it's some version which we've been biologically evolved to have. From the very beginning of an experience, it's not fact or fiction, but simply how we tend to look at it. This false opposition between the two is just rampant throughout our lives. When I got the idea to do Et Tu, Babe, that angle was what I most enjoyed. I've always had this interest in using real people, though I'm certainly not the first writer to do it. For instance, the poet Frank O'Hara used real people throughout his poetry.

Even people he didn't know?

No, not to the extent I do. His focus was more on people he knew, about having lunch with so-and-so. But I never felt any need to restrict myself to people I really knew. My latest book is the story of someone who flips himself into the television, so that he can hang around with these famous celebrities. That's what I've tried to do.

Did a Hollywood producer really use the phrase, "Et tu, babe" ad infinitum when talking with you?

No, but I did meet a producer who used the expression "babe" as a coda to every sentence, the first person in my life who'd ever done this. To have a person actually speak like that made a big impression on me.

And he managed to speak that way without any sense of self-consciousness.

None. In fact, I was in Las Vegas once, and I tried to say "babe" one day to lots of people. The response I got was nothing. No one thinks you're being funny, it's a real dialect out there. But that producer inspired my artistic decision somehow.

Could that mean you've aspirations to dabble in the movie business?

I'm about to have some heavy meetings in L.A. I was in Los Angeles last week for preliminary discussions. Then I'll be back with Fox and various other studios about some television/movie ideas. Some of them mine, others other people's. It hasn't always been an ambition of mine, but now I'd like to give it a try, sure. To be moved out to Los Angeles for some months and write a few episodes for some series. That would be fun.

Would such projects reflect your personal style of surrealism, or would they be more what viewers expect to see on your average TV program?

You know, someone once told me—I think it was Jay McInerney [Bright Lights, Big City (1984)]—that the best thing that could happen is to get paid a ton of money to work on a project, and it's never made. So you never have to be embarrassed by it. That's a writer's dream of the L.A. experience. Don't misunderstand me. I think there are some good things on TV. My viewing tends to be along the periphery. Mostly pure television like CNN and ESPN, the weather, and home shopping networks. Infomercials I enjoy watching. The actual network shows, I don't even know what they are. I never watch them. I prefer events. Any big news event I love to see how it's being covered. The Gulf War had me glued to the set, or the Olympics. I watch a lot of sports on television; I'm a big sports fan. The Simpsons is a wonderful show. If I could do something that was good, and if it could really have a bit of flavor of what my work is like, that would be great. We'll see what happens.

How seriously can readers take the scientific information that pops up in your books? For example, that thousands of people in American compulsively pull their hair out.

Trichotillomania. Yeah, that's real. But these numbers tend to be inflated by support groups for the disease. Somewhat. Still, it's hard to imagine 30 million people compulsively pulling their hair out. Because I think we'd see the hair around somewhere.

Seriously, though, we've never met anyone guilty of that habit. Not that it isn't a hilarious image.

I've met people who play with their hair, but don't actually pull it out in great gobs, or handfuls. Nevertheless, in Et Tu, Babe, just about all the medical stuff is real and appropriate. Not just some name I found and stuck in.

There is a definite science-fiction undercurrent in your work, however.

Again, I've immunized myself against certain questions and accusations by not ever reading these kinds of things. The only science-fiction book I've ever read is Neuromancer [1984] by William Gibson. And that was only after people had accused my work of being cyber-punk: "You better see what you're being compared to." I got this question asked a lot, because there is science in my fiction. But, obviously, that doesn't make me science fiction. There are also references to pop culture, books, and so on.

I try to include what I see and hear and know as much as possible. So, of course, science is going to be there. Pop culture is the same way—these are the disenfranchised areas of our society, traditionally, in terms of literature. Only recently has science fiction been taken seriously at all. The inclusion of pop culture in books is still considered unusually suspect.

Literary slumming.

Yes, it's still an issue. That seems ridiculous to me. Unfortunately, the scientific references are the most salient point to a lot of readers.

Oddly enough, this subject brings us back to your habit of glossing over descriptive passages in novels. Does it bother you that Americans, with their aversion for technical details, might be reluctant to humor your scientific esoterica?

Yeah, I guess people probably skip that sometimes. Usually, my object is not to make the books difficult, not to confuse people. I want what I'm doing to be accessible so that readers can enjoy it the way I intended. I'll explain what I mean. I don't say there are 20 to 30 million people who suffer from trichotillomania, then expect you to look it up, come back, and laugh. I'm not trying to lord over the reader because I have some amateur knowledge of matters scientific.

Do these little tangents require much research? Or are they simply tasty tidbits you've accumulated mentally over the years?

I get this digest every week—Science News—which I read carefully. And I always read the science section of The New York Times every Tuesday. I buy Scientific American or Discovery every now and then. I'm just interested. I keep my eyes open, it could be in Newsweek or Time. I jot facts down. I don't find I have to go out and make a special effort of fishing out this information.

By recreating your own persona, you seem to be fooling around with the whole area of authorial voice. To an extent you're practically suggesting, "It doesn't matter who I am. Just enjoy my writing and shut up." Much as Vladimir Nabokov might have done.

[Laughter.] Satirizing authorial voice is not a concern of mine at all. I've tried to develop a style that maximizes my freedom as a writer. Doing it as I've done gives me the most latitude—with myself as narrator, and being able to wander back and forth between actual autobiography and complete fantasy. I'm constantly after a structure which unleashes my imagination. My methods have nothing to do with satirizing authorial voice: That's much too academic for the way I think. I'm very practical as a writer. Very much a writer and not an academic when I look at these problems, and the way I enjoy solving them. My approach is much more nuts-and-bolts. Much more about the process of being a writer. One can talk about matters like this, and it's valid. Because I've done this, it does raise some interesting questions about the whole notion of authorial voice.

Do you plan in terms of a large arc as far as the plotline is concerned?

Depends on the book. My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist no. That book was intended to be read like you'd enjoy one of those candy samplers. Pick and choose, put it away, come back, pick and choose. Et Tu, Babe is best appreciated from beginning to end. I had a very simple notion of how it should work, which is illustrated by the bedspread I'm sitting on, remarkably enough. [The bedspread is a series of oval patterns.] See, we've all been brought to this room for a reason. [Laughter.] This is the exact shape I had for the book, and how it was going to work. I had no idea how I was going to do it, but I figured Team Leyner would reach some kind of apogee in the middle of the book, when it would be most powerful. The Leyner character would be at his most megalomaniacal. His delusions of grandeur would be full-blown. Then gradually, the Team Leyner minions, personnel, and staff would start deserting him. Until, at the end, there's no one. My dog, Carmella, even deserts me. I was telling someone recently Et Tu, Babe, as compared to my other books, reminds me of Jane Austen. It's so tightly plotted. Of course, this is very relative—people who don't know my work read Et Tu, Babe and say, "This is so wild, this novel. It goes everywhere." But to me it's the most novelistic of anything I've done.

Was the way in which the novel begins to fall apart towards the end meant to reflect the hero's literal and figurative decline as well?

Yeah, but again, I was feeling constricted by the book itself. At the beginning of the chapter you refer to, I say something about being depressed by the eccentricity of the narrative. Also, at the time I was writing that part, all kinds of things were going on in my life. My ability to pay attention to a long chapter wasn't there. I realized in order to do it, I had to work in miniature and make it more interesting for me. I just wanted to explode the book a bit at that point. [Gesturing once again at the oval patterns on his bedspread.] But I didn't want to destroy the curved skeleton of the book I'd made. So I had to keep sneaking in little bits and pieces of information that were significant in terms of the narrative. My favorite method, as far as that goes, is the game show written in the form of a play. Because at that point, I had a sense of what the length of the book should be. [169 pages of compact prose, to be precise.] It was getting to be time to get rid of a lot of the characters so that the Leyner character could be alone at the end and we could have the whole section with everybody claiming to have been with me in those final hours and whatnot. But I didn't want to go through the tedious process of narrating how people were getting sick of me and leaving. Especially at this point where I was very impatient with that subject. So I came up with this game show idea—I don't know how exactly—and within the game show context the contestant picks Team Leyner as a category. Through that, I managed to get rid of four or five characters and explain why they left, and work in comic material that was lots of fun for me and the reader. Also, it's a pretty fucking interesting narrative device.

As a character you grow further and further removed from the story itself, until you're simply somebody other characters refer to.

Yes, because I wanted to disappear from the book. In the last chapter I don't exist at all. I don't even exist as a narrator anymore, because I've gone and disappeared. But the great trick of Et Tu, Babe is the last part of the book, which is oral history. The last person to talk is Jessica Hahn, describing how they confiscated my laptop, then her testimony about this ends abruptly. She says, "He was in mid-sentence when they wrested away his final remaining possession—yes, his laptop!—and he di—." Of course, that means I've been making up everybody's oral history. Because my character is relentless in his exploitation of other people to aggrandize himself. Otherwise there's no reason why, just because they take away my laptop, Jessica Hahn's statement about it should end in mid-sentence. I consider it an interesting little knot at the end.

Do you specifically attempt to write books on the shortish side, so that every detail is reduced to its barest essential?

Some of these considerations are very practical. You live on your advance for a while, but you can't take forever writing a book unless you're not depending on that income. These are funny things most people don't realize. You need to finish, and hand the book in so you can get the rest of your advance. But I don't really think that was the real reason for Et Tu, Babe's length. In general I want to write books that are about 200 pages or so. Not much more, not much less. I just have a notion that's a nice length. I'd like people to be able to read my books in a couple of sittings. Because I think the experience of reading my books in a short period of time makes the density of pleasure that I'm after even more powerful, more concentrated as opposed to reading over a longer period of time. A book should be good enough to take in one quick dose.

Have you reached the stage where you can basically survive on the money you make writing?

Oh, yeah. For the past two, two and a half years. This is all I do now, which sometimes strikes me as so remarkable. No matter what else happens to me—say, I even get a television show or do movies, win the Nobel Prize—that will stand as the most profound thing that's happened to me in my life.

Funny. Virtually every author we've talked to says more or less the same. They feel almost guilt-stricken they're actually making a living doing what they love.

You just never think you're going to be able to do that. You know, I came out of the writing program at the University of Colorado, and the myth you're fed to live by is that you'll go teach, write books not many people are going to read, and that's your life. But I never wanted that. For a while I was ready not to regard myself as a writer anymore. Right before My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist was published, I said to myself, "Okay, this is enough. I can keep writing and enjoying it, as I would, say, in playing tennis or chess. I'm not going to think of myself as a writer anymore because I don't want to become a fiction collector, or just a small press writer who has to become an academic." There's nothing wrong with that, but I simply wanted to do something else. Because I'm very ambitious. This is a long way of saying that my schooling never prepared me for what the life of a writer is. It's interesting for me to hear other writers feel the way I do. I've never discussed it with anyone. But I can't imagine a more earth-shattering change in my life ever again.

A few final questions. How did you end up settling in Hoboken?

I'm from around there originally. From Jersey City, which is nearby. After graduate school I moved to Washington, D.C., to be with a girlfriend. Then I moved back to Jersey because my father had an interest in a restaurant in Jersey City, and I helped him for a while. Hoboken was the place to move to at that time. A cheap alternative to living in Manhattan. It's right across the river.

Finally, did you honestly go to a motel to teach your dog how not to sit, as the Times article states?

[Laughter.] No. That was sort of cheating on William Grimes. I had that idea a couple of days before the interview. This dog of mine is intractably disobedient. She really doesn't know how to do anything. We're together all day all the time, so there's no need for her to know. We're very much in synch—she senses when to leave me alone to write. She also understands to give me about eight hours before she can start bugging me. About five or six o'clock she just comes over and says, "That's enough. We need to go out and play." I've been lazy about training her. Actually, lazy is an understatement. So I knew she'd jump all over Grimes when he came to my place. And I was in the shower and thought, "Here's a funny idea." This is how to handle the media, though. You always like to have a few good lines beforehand. And it's always wonderful to see it work. You plant these ideas. Like the headline of the whole piece—"America's Best Built Comic Novelist"—I had a feeling they would use that when I told Grimes, in an offhanded manner, "You know even more than being known as the best comic novelist, I'd like to be known as the best built comic novelist." I didn't expect the cover with the headline, but it's always nice to see your sinister plots take wing.

Therefore, even when you're being interviewed, you're inventing a persona.

Certainly for that one. Because it was such a big deal. I was dealing with something that was potentially life-changing. What's happened to me since Et Tu, Babe is another whole stage. As far as this interview with you guys, no. [Indicating his less than grand motel room.] It's hard to create a persona for yourself in this environment. [Laughter.]

Tell us about your work habits. For instance, the hours you keep, what you prefer to write on.

I've gotten used to computers whenever I can compose on them. I used to write in longhand, and then transfer. But now I don't need that extra step. I love this new Mac Classic I just bought. It feels like it's part of you after a while. But don't get me wrong. I'm interested in calligraphy, Japanese and Chinese characters. So there's still something I love about seeing words on a white page. I'll do that too, sometimes at night in bed. I value that process.

That you work on a computer isn't terribly surprising, considering your prose has the shape of being refined, re-refined, and then refined again. While some of your sentences can be quite long, there's usually not a superfluous word in them.

My stuff is very, very worked-out. I spend a lot of time on sentences. I can spend a whole day getting a couple right. I recently wrote an essay about Keith Richards for Spin Magazine. They had me go spend some time with him one afternoon. It was great.

Is he a hero of yours?

Twenty years ago he was, and I still admire him. That's what the essay came to be about—what it's like to meet someone you idolized long ago. Internally, there seemed to be two trajectories at this meeting. I'm very aware of myself now gaining a certain kind of notoriety for my work. So I feel like there's an internal direction to my life. Meeting him was the inverse of that. I was thrown back chronologically, psychologically to a time when I was an anonymous person, obeisant to this idol of mine. To have both happen at the same time sort of made me ill. I was rather nauseous after meeting him. Later I realized it was because we'd both smoked about 800 cigarettes. I was probably just suffering from nicotine poisoning. [Laughter.] I enjoy the first theory much more.

But getting back to my original point, I wrote that piece and the people at Spin were great about it, although it had to be cut somewhat. Nevertheless, in the most well-meaning way, every time they tried to edit my writing in the most essayistic parts, they just ruined it. Not that their changes were stupid, but I am careful. You can't just chop my stuff up. Now I'm going to have to rewrite the parts they rewrote to repair them. They're very nice people, but I'm absolutely meticulous about how the language works. You can't mess around with it.

Apparently, one of your first editors complained about your punctuation, or lack of it.

I mean, it's amazing they published that book My Cousin, My Castroenterologist.

It's completely unpunctuated, completely disconnected. Et Tu, Babe is a very different story. You can see why it would be published at this time, do well, and get lots of attention. But that other book! It certainly gives one faith there are good editors in mainstream publishing.

You appear to be a bit reticent about discussing your first book I Smell Esther Williams. Explain what there is about it you don't like.

A lot of it is very pretentious. It seems rather juvenile to me. First of all, much of it is very derivative of the New York school of poetry. Writers like Frank O'Hara and John Ashberry. Some of it tries to show off how erudite I am, what a wonderful vocabulary I have. These flaws are forgivable, but I don't have to like the damn book anymore. If people ask what should I read of yours, I'll answer My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist and Et Tu, Babe. I don't imagine I'll ever think ill of those books. But I Smell Esther Williams was written in Colorado when I was a graduate student. I was a graduate student. I was only 22.

Describe your feelings about returning to your alma mater since achieving success.

It always gives me a "Hail the Conquering Hero" kind of buzz. I wish the person in graduate school could have seen the article written about me in The New York Times Magazine and thought, "God, isn't it great that could happen to someone!" Going through the process now is wonderful and very fulfilling, but you're so involved, and it's hard work. If you want to keep up that media attention, you work at it. These tours are pretty grueling. So you never get a chance to sit back and feel "Ah, am I famous! This is great!" Sometimes you have little glimmers, but I'd like to have some science-fiction trick where I could pull in the younger me and let him share this experience. Many of those feelings come back when I'm in Colorado. I have to admit it's nice to lord over some of these people and show off what a big shot I am. "I don't have to teach!" [Laughter.]