In The Long Run Assault On The Capitol Will Be Good

“The Capitol is shaped like grandiose buildings so that those outside feel powerless and those inside omnipotent. Altering human history did not require more than an hour. The police did not get involved.” The day of adjustment (Literature Random House), the last novel by Chuck Palahniuk (Pasco, Washington, 1962) anticipated what happened in the US Congress on January 6.

Raised in Portland, next to a forest where he took refuge when his parents argued, and trained as a journalist After working as a mechanic, he published his first novel, Fight Club, at age 31.

Until then his disturbing books had been rejected, but whenDavid Fincher turned that work into a film , starring Brad Pitt, definitely changed his luck: he had detected a general discontent that brought him closer to millions of readers. Today she lives on the outskirts of her city with her husband, Mike. He serves us by Zoom with his dog Egg, a Boston terrier who comes to the screen and says hello.

What made you think they would take over the Capitol?
It seemed like the natural progression of things. When you can’t communicate, you express your frustration physically. It is our war to identify the new leaders.

Are you saying that future political leaders of your country could emerge from the assault?
Yes. Leaders are distinguished from the rest by their bravery during battles.

Did the assault hurt American democracy?
No. It shows that as a population we are alive. It was the battle in the absence of a war. In the long run, it will be good.

Do you condemn it?
Do you condemn the sunrise in the morning? It is part of how society works and serves to enable a nation to stay alive. It’s natural.

Did you think you were writing a dystopia or what would happen?
It has happened for years: Occupy Wall Street was the same, the protest unites people and makes those who change things emerge.

Does leading the future require being violent?
Luther King was not violent, but he did incur civil disobedience. We are facing a world so populated that there will not be opportunities for everyone. People will find radical ways to find their opportunity.

He wrote that policemen turned a blind eye as citizens stormed. What happened to the Capitol Police?
Some believe that they did not intervene because they needed at least one death before acting. Another theory is that the police agreed.

Could your book have instigated that action?
We are facing a generation that has not shown anything in the world. They look for the opportunity to prove what they are capable of. They need that challenge.

Shatter?
We hardly learn anything about peace. The break is the previous step to building something new.

Was Trump a leader of the 21st century?
He has been a disappointment for those who saw him as a leader. Like Reagan , he has been a father figure. During Obama’s eight years there were almost no protests. People only sheepishly protested to a black president so as not to appear racist. Protests always arise against a white man in the White House.

That is, against the usual power.
We are allowed to protest to the father figure. And, rich and white, Trump was, especially after eight years without protesting.

What made so many poor people vote for Trump that wouldn’t fix the healthcare system?
He promised to solve immigration, which in the eyes of those Americans is a threat. It did not.

Did you vote for Trump?
I have been a voter for Jill Stein [Green Party] , the lesser of evils.

Does the danger of fascism exist in the United States?
Fascism is explained as something bad, but once, in Germany, the head of Bertelsmann, my editorial, clarified to me that it is an organic phase that emerging countries go through to unify their identity. Italy united as a nation just before fascism, just as it had in Germany.

Do you defend that you unite over confronting and dividing?

Fascism mutates. First unite, then change. Adjustment Day portrays a fanciful scenario: people who feel the need for a civil war. I wonder if the country would be better organized into three states: one for blacks, one for whites, and one for homosexuals. And I try to show that it would not result in a better country.

It describes the massacre of the educated at the hands of the uneducated.

Those who kill in my book feel betrayed by their education. I left university with a training that served me very little and with a great debt. I felt ripped off by academia, which does not teach skills, but ideology. Ideology doesn’t pay the bills.

It seems to write to a wounded world. Is it your way of telling them that you see them?
I am not writing to help anyone. I take my frustrations and amplify them until I completely exhaust my reaction to those problems. If I take them to monstrous scenarios, my problem disappears.

The frustration of The Day of Adjustment
It was my sickness of seeing politicians argue without solving anything. He was fed up with them seeking the attention of the electorate instead of doing politics. It was my catharsis.

You will not need therapy.
No. I am able to dissolve my own frustrations. Here the writing workshop has replaced the psychoanalyst. For years, people went to the psychologist. But it was very expensive and the public health system began to give them painkillers that repressed the unresolved conflict. Now people prefer to write about their problems and discuss them. Writing replaces psychotropic drugs.

Can anger and revenge change the world?
They serve to warn of the need for change, but they cannot last forever because they annihilate everything.

What do your thousands of followers have in common?
They are looking for a strong experience. Other books comfort or help you sleep. My readers are looking for shock.

His books are macabre…
People watch horror movies to suffer.

Is it nihilistic?
It is the exit door. Heidegger wrote it: you have to understand that we are all going to die before you can fully surrender to your passion.

When did you indulge in yours?
At 28, after a self-help seminar and an idea from Kierkegaard: you can exhaust all distractions so as not to confront your mortality, but in the end you will have to. Nothing matters, do what you love.

Do you love to write or know yourself?
They cannot be separated. Writing is my way of meeting people and exploring ideas. It seems small, but it has given me friendships that have lasted longer than any previous relationship and money so that my husband can go to Las Vegas to care for his mother until she dies.

Is rich?
No, because my accountant stole from me for years. But compared to the poverty of my childhood, I am very rich.

What kind of poverty are you talking about?
From walking miles each day along the tracks to pick up the potatoes that fell off the freight trains. My brother and I were going. It was our contribution to the family. But I will never feel rich. When you grow up with many deficiencies, you always think that you can lose everything. And when you have enough, you start sharing it. You create austerity because you are used to it.

Are you a slave to your followers? He is always looking for something more shocking …
I write like when I didn’t publish: I find something in my life that I can’t solve and I look for a way to explore it in a story until I have exhausted any reaction. Even if no one published me, I would write like that.

What frustration were you dealing with when you wrote Fight Club ?
With the terror of dying without having understood anything important about yourself. I had done what my teachers said and was where everyone else: without finding my place. I turned 30 and realized that being a good person with a boring job wouldn’t get me far.

The best teacher I ever had, Tom Spanbauer, advised me: write about what you can’t solve. That way the writing itself is the payoff, not the success or the publication. It is another way of defining success.

How much of the frustration you investigate comes from your childhood?
Little My parents fought. I developed both intolerance and attraction to conflict. I grew up in the country, and nature is a great place to escape any conflict. That is why I now live next to a forest.

He thought that death surrounded his youth: his grandfather murdered his grandmother and his father died at the hands of his girlfriend’s ex-partner …
That happened in the past. Writing saved me. When you understand that, that the world will go on without you, you surrender to your passion. To be passionate is to risk losing.

Did you have a good relationship with your parents?
Yes. She was an accountant. He did other people’s taxes. Look: here are mine for 2020, already organized in January.

That is an inheritance.
Yes. Thank you, Mom, you made me an accountant!

What did his father turn him into?
In inventor. He worked for the railroads adjusting the brakes on trains. But he was hell-bent on inventing machines that would make him rich.

Have you invented a literary formula to get rich?
[Laugh]. In the end it was not a machine …

You have mentioned your husband twice. But it was difficult for him to make his homosexuality public.
Mike and I have been together for 25 years. I’ve never been in a closet. But I didn’t want to be cornered on the shelf where ethnic or LGTB literature is.

Why are you more interested in porn than in love?
Love, like beauty, is an illusion.

In Snuff he describes the filming of intercourse between a retired porn actress and 600 actors. In Fight Club , the protagonist manages to supply his emotional needs by pretending that he is dying. In Asphyxia, pretending to be drowning in restaurants.

That gives them attention and care that they lack. Snuff is based on the story of Annabel Chong , who brought together hundreds of actors to film sex. Many of them assured her that they would always love her. They had seen her in movies and were so excited they cried, and she had to comfort them and help them complete the sexual act. They could not. That got me excited.

He argues that love is too abstract to write about, but it is the big theme.
A decent writer cannot impose feelings on the reader. You must build the conditions for the reader to feel the emotions. You have to lead them to emotion. Any shortcut is prohibited.

Have you felt loved?
Yes, well… I grew up in a big family and took care of my mother until she died.

What did you learn by caring for her?
He spent the last day of his life paying bills. My older sister and I were with her. He looked at us and said, “Less than a year ago I was mowing the lawn in the garden and now I can barely write my name.”

Isn’t remembering that an act of love?
It was exciting to see how he realized how quickly life is ending. Also the nobility of spending his last day paying his bills. I don’t think he recognized his mortality until then. He died that night. Many people warn me that I will not always be able to write as I have done. And that’s exactly why I do it. That is why I write wild stories. I want to do it while I can so that on the last day of my life I don’t have to wonder why I didn’t.

What if at the end of his life he wonders why he wrote savagery and didn’t look for love?
In each of my books there is a loving relationship. They are just unconventional. They are people who try to get love in a non-reciprocal way.

Callous antiheroes… why do you care?
Because it’s how I see the world: people who put on makeup to be liked. People need recognition and attention even if they get it dishonestly. The result is that the true self is not the one that gives itself to others and the love they get is not true either. That absurd circuit moves the world. That is why you have to start by making people laugh: by the time the offensive comes, the readers are inside and they can’t leave the novel.

Is that what your readers aspire to, to know the end?
The eagerness to meet him drives them forward. My job is to deceive them. If you announced on the first page that you were going to write a story so offensive that you were going to pass out, people would stop reading it.

Why have you written so much about addictions: drugs, alcohol, sex, money?
The addiction gives you control, the addict has the peace of mind of knowing what he is going to die of.

What are you addicted to?
To writing. Right now I drink too much white wine, but I think it has to do with confinement. I have a compulsive personality. My characters look for models that work for them. You break with your way of life when you meet another in which you think you will be better. One form of security is exchanged for another.

What gives you security?
Knowing that I’m not going to live forever, knowing that by being funny I’m only going to go so far. That is why I constantly sacrifice dignity. My characters are always forced to abandon it.

What’s so good about humiliation?
I try to show the reader their greatest fear and overcoming that fear. In many children’s stories parents die. If you can show a child how Bambi finds reasons to live after the death of his mother, you are showing him how to survive what seems like the end. Most of my readers are young. In this phase, the important thing is to be attractive.

So they want to see how you can remake yourself if they humiliate you. They want to see someone who loses everything and is not devastated by it. Scarlet O’Hara: she is pretty, crazy, young and loses everything. But by losing it, he gets another form of power beyond his youth. That’s why I despise dignity, because that allows us to focus on survival.

Has your family read your books?
My mother read Invisible Monsters and was very concerned. I was convinced that I was going into a sex change. There were things from Fight Club that hurt her. When someone in my family finds something in one of my books that they think has something to do with him, they stop reading them, they are afraid of finding something else. You feel betrayed.

Doesn’t that happen to your husband?
No. I always ask him about the reactions of the protagonists and the twists of the narrative.

He has written that when you turn 30 you become your worst enemy. Was it your case?
30 is an age of uncertainty, but only difficulty opens doors.

What doors open with 58?
I know that the worst defines the best. Epiphany is only possible after the disaster that precedes it. The disaster has to be of sufficient magnitude to allow for rebirth. Therefore, with the great mess that we have, a decade of prosperity, joy and happiness awaits us. Then we’ll get in trouble again.