I have decided to retire the literary Would You Rather series, but didn't want to stop interviews on the site all together. Instead, I've pulled together 40ish questions - some bookish, some silly - and have asked authors to limit themselves to answering only 10 of them. That way, it keeps the interviews fresh and connectable for all of us!
Today we are joined by Tyler C. Gore. Tyler is the author of My Life of Crime: Essays and Other
Entertainments (Sagging Meniscus, 2022), which the Independent
Book Review recently featured in their "Impressive Indie Books of 2022.”
Tyler is a graduate of the Brooklyn College MFA program in creative writing,
and he has taught writing at Brooklyn College, Hunter College, and for Gotham
Writers Workshops. He is the recipient of a Fulbright grant for creative
writing, and has been listed as five times as a Notable Essayist by The Best
American Essays. His essays, stories, and reviews have appeared in many of
the fine, high-quality journals preferred by discerning readers like you. You should definitely buy his book, because
it's delightful and you will love it. Find out more at https://tylergore.com
Why do you write?
Surely out of some self-destructive impulse. Kids, your
parents are right: this is not a rational career choice, and you should
definitely go to law school. Don’t get me wrong—writing is a truly noble
vocation, and a world without literature would be like a body without a soul.
But generally speaking, the pay sucks.
I suspect most of us who write do it because it’s a
compulsion. Moths to flame. Writing is the only work I do that feels like it actually
matters. I write because I can’t not write.
What
made you start writing?
Reading. That’s the gateway drug.
What
do you do when you’re not writing?
A lot of puttering and brooding.
What’s
your kryptonite as a writer?
Other people. I can’t write in the presence of anyone other
than our cat. I need to be alone to 1) think about writing, 2) procrastinate
about writing, and 3) sit at the keyboard actually writing.
There are writers who can work in the middle of a crowded
party—I know at least one, and I’ve been astonished to see him open a laptop
and start typing away in a room filled with chattering friends—but I’m the kind
of writer who will look for any excuse to stop working, and talking to other
people is definitely easier than writing.
I can’t write if my wife is home because she’s a charming
conversationalist and I’d much rather talk to her than rewrite the same
sentence 14 times in a row. I can’t write in a library or a coffee shop with
all those bookish nerds thinking around me. I feel oppressed by their
studiousness. Probably they’re all reading Buzzfeed or checking their Instagram
likes, but I can’t shake that impostor syndrome feeling.
Strangely, I can write in a crowded bar, and often do
when I’m alone, but I think I can do that because it feels so
unproductive.
Describe
your book poorly.
My Life of Crime: Essays and Other Entertainments
(Sagging Meniscus, 2022). Lackadaisical , semi-employed New Yorker lives in
a series of spectacularly crappy apartments, amuses himself with childish
pranks, wanders aimlessly around the city encountering weird strangers, gets
appendicitis, has appendix removed by a pretty surgeon, worries about his anorexic
cat, exasperates his mostly sensible wife, obsesses about Kafka, parallel
universes, and skiing, and complains a lot. Non-fiction.
What
are some of your favorite books and/or authors?
Uh oh. This is a tough one because, damn, I have so many
different books and authors I love, and they vary wildly in terms of style,
era, and genre.
Well, my own book, My Life of Crime, is a collection
of personal essays, so I suppose I should kick this off with some of the
essayists I most admire. Off the top of my head that list would include (in no
particular order) David Foster Wallace, David Sedaris, Geoff Dyer, Joy
Williams, Alain de Botton, George Orwell, Ben Miller, Annie Dillard, George
Prochnik, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. I don’t know if those writers even belong in
the same universe, but they are all masters of the art.
But I also read tons of fiction. (I write fiction, too!) So,
let’s see… well, there was a time in my life when I read and re-read everything
Milan Kundera had written. I’ve always admired his essayistic approach to the
novel, and the way he uses sexual comedy to explore the paradoxical nature of
the human condition. His philosophical, break-the-fourth-wall approach to
storytelling quickly brings to mind some other favorite books—all very
different, but with some shared qualities: William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity
Fair, John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman, and A.S. Byatt’s Possession.
All of those, in some respect, are novels of ideas, and all, in some respect,
use romantic comedy to explore the profound, bittersweet absurdity of being
human.
Most of my work has a lot of humor in it, and I’m a big fan
of Mark Twain, who is still incredibly relatable and witty even in the 21st
century. I love V.S. Naipaul’s early Trinidadian comedies, especially A
House for Mr. Biswas, one of the best 20th-century novels I’ve ever read.
No one has ever matched the unapologetic batshit lunacy of Fear and Loathing
in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson. Oh, and a book I adore that few people
have read is Fisher’s Hornpipe by Todd McEwen, which was published in
1982 and is criminally out of print. It’s laugh-out-loud funny, and McEwen is a
brilliant prose stylist.
But I’m leaving out of lot here. As a reader, I have a very
wide range—I love literary fiction, I love magical realism, I love science
fiction and fantasy (a shout-out to Neal Stephenson and Susanna Clarke), I read
poetry and I read graphic novels, and I could sit here and list authors and
books all day long. Jeez, reading this over, I didn’t even mention Kurt
Vonnegut. Or Ursula K. Le Guin. Or Dickens. This is why I’m not going to answer
any questions about books and desert islands.
What is your favorite book from childhood?
The Chronicles of Narnia series by C.S. Lewis. I read
those books until the spines cracked apart. If I were absolutely forced to pick
one of the Narnia books as my most favorite, that would be The
Magician’s Nephew (the sixth book published, but the first chronologically,
since it tells the story of how Narnia was created). There is something
enduringly resonant about the Wood Between the Worlds, that eerie, silent
forest dotted with shallow pools—which turn out to be portals to an infinite
number of parallel worlds. That forest and those pools feel like something
drawn out of mythology, something deep and true.
Lewis was well ahead of the curve with that invention,
anticipating the contemporary obsession with the multiverse. The Wood Between
the Worlds has been riffed on by many later writers, including Neil Gaiman and,
of course, Lev Grossman of The Magicians.
The spell that Narnia cast over my childhood imagination has
never really faded. To this day, whenever I open an unfamiliar closet door, I
still harbor the faint hope that I’ll find myself staring into the depths of a
mysterious, snowbound forest illuminated by single iron lamppost.
Do you
think you’d live long in a zombie apocalypse?
I am the person who always politely lets some asshole jump
me in line at the airport, so I’m not very confident in my zombie skillset. On
the other hand, I used to be okay at dodgeball as a kid. What I mean is that I
wasn’t entirely awful at it like I was at other sports. Not very good at
throwing or catching the ball, but surprisingly good at getting out of the
way. That might be useful in a room full of zombies. But face it, I’m
probably gonna get bit in the very first episode of the season. You might want
to shelter with someone else.
Are you
a toilet paper over or under kind of person?
Why does everything have to be about politics?
Are you
a book hoarder or a book unhauler?
If you ever visit our apartment, the answer will be
self-evident. There’s barely room for a couch.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A bike-pedaling angel careening through rush-hour traffic.
The mystery of a sandwich found in a bathroom stall. A lyric, rainy-day ramble through the East Village.
Whether confessing his sordid past as a prankster or
recounting his family’s history of hoarding, Gore is by turns melancholy,
profound, and hilarious.
The collection culminates with the novella-length essay
“Appendix,” a twisted, sprawling account of “routine surgery” that grapples
with evolution, mortality, strangely attractive doctors, simulated universes,
and an anorexic cat.
“Tyler Gore is mischievously funny, with a wicked sense of
timing…an essayist at the top of his form.”
—Sarah Stodola, author of The Last Resort
buy a copy
https://a.co/d/fWiOXpR (amazon)
or visit https://tylergore.com
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