Chuck Palahniuk - How The Cult Author Of Fight Club Made Nihilism Fun Again | London Real
London Real
Brian Rose
4.4 • 1.9K Ratings
🗓️ 22 October 2020
⏱️ 87 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
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Chuck Palahniuk is a man who needs little introduction – the iconic author and legendary wordsmith who penned the anarchic 90s cult classic Fight Club and went on to repeat his formula for success with the psychological smash hit Choke.
Growing up in a mobile home in Burbank, Washington, followed by a stint on his Grandparents cattle farm, few might have expected such a feverish literary mind to emerge from such rudimentary beginnings.
Having begun his career as a journalist working locally for a newspaper in Portland, Chuck perhaps unsurprisingly left the desk job behind to become a diesel mechanic, a job he seemingly flourished in and it was only in his late twenties that his calling began to shout louder.
Despite being revered as a game-changing exploration of postmodern masculinity, mixed with equal parts philosophy, satire, violence and shameless seediness, the sensory overload that accompanies Fight Club went unheralded until long after Hollywood's adaptation.
These days, with 23 bestsellers to his name, Chuck Palahniuk continues to push the boundaries while maintaining his unique sense of reverie and with his latest instalment to the repertoire The Invention of Sound, making a similarly typical Palahniuk style impact, his prolific resume shows no signs of abating.
His latest work 'The Invention of Sound' is a chilling and typically offbeat tale of a man's search for his missing daughter and show's Palahniuk at the peak of his literary powers in what has been described as his 'most suspenseful, most daring, and most genre-defying work yet.' As a fan of his work, it's a huge privilege to have him on the show and we are sure all of you will walk away with much to ponder.
Join us as we will be talking with Chuck Palahniuk to discuss his new book, Fight Club, censorship in writing, writing workshops and his process.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | History can do without one man. Who am I? |
| 0:05.0 | That I can't just kind of throw away my life on this quest to write one perfect sentence. |
| 0:12.0 | Once you can face your mortality, you realize, you know, I really have nothing to lose. |
| 0:17.0 | So why don't I do the one thing I dream of doing? |
| 0:20.0 | And that is creating something that transcends, not just my experience, but really connects |
| 0:26.1 | with a lot of people. |
| 0:27.6 | I remember looking up from the book and looking around and almost feeling like, I hope |
| 0:32.3 | no one knows what I'm reading or thinking right now. |
| 0:35.7 | There are a lot of accounts of people who've been reading that particular story, and they fainted |
| 0:41.1 | on subway platforms, or they fainted sitting in public transport. |
| 0:45.7 | I am always trying to recreate the kind of strength that stories had when I was a child, |
| 0:52.2 | stories that you would hear around a campfire, |
| 0:54.8 | stories that would sort of completely terrify you and overwhelm you. |
| 0:59.2 | And so anytime a short story can have any kind of a strong effect like that, |
| 1:04.5 | whether it's people passing out or people weeping, |
| 1:07.6 | I love to see 20-something people start to cry, especially if they're young men. |
| 1:13.6 | That's the kind of huge effect that I think stories can have and completely reaffirms my choice to be a writer. The world is changing. |
| 1:36.3 | Inspiration is everywhere. |
| 1:40.3 | It has never been so easy to connect, share, and bring people together. |
| 1:50.0 | We're learning from others and finding the best in ourselves. |
| 1:59.0 | Challenging our beliefs. |
| 2:01.6 | Sharing our vulnerability. |
... |
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