Plot Twists and Spirituality: The Justin Taylor Interview
Justin Taylor’s books are full of bizarre tales, complicated spirituality and desire. Also (full disclosure) he was my roommate. I think back fondly on the many whiskey soaked nights where we rambled on about Christianity, lesbianism, and the Marquis de Sade, while listening to the Grateful Dead. And like most good things I didn’t really appreciate it fully until it was gone (A.K.A. I moved in with a horrible girl from Craigslist). Justin, who most recently published some short stories about Hong Kong, is a Harper Perennial star. His novel The Gospel of Anarchy had the LA Times calling him “a master of the modern snapshot.” Since we used to share mac n cheese, laundry mats, and living quarters, Taylor had no problem getting gritty with me and chatting openly about his love of a good debate, his fascination with religion, book tours, and ghetto Brooklyn.
Holy Diver: When did you first start writing? What do you remember most about this time?
Justin Taylor: When I was very young. I think as soon as I learned to write words I was writing stories. Certainly, by kindergarten. I got into trouble all throughout grade school because I’d read my own books or work on my own stories instead of doing whatever had been assigned to us–whether the assignment was math, English, P.E. It just never made sense to me–and I mean this quite literally–why I should spend time on these things I didn’t care about, when there was all this other stuff, these stories, that actually needed my attention. It was, in its dorky kid way, an assertion of a core value that has guided my life ever since.
HD: I remember once when we were roommates, you walked out into the kitchen pondering what to name a character. What’s the process like in naming your characters usually?
JT: They usually go through a few names before I settle on one. For the stories in Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever, many of the characters–the male narrators, especially–didn’t have names until very late in the process. The name would usually appear when it was spoken by another character, who was usually mad at them about something. That way of speaking a person’s name as though it were a guilty verdict. And some never got named at all. I made a point of choosing common, suburban contemporary-ish names for all the characters in Everything Here, because I wanted to make it clear that all the characters across the different stories were more or less of a piece, generationally. So with those things in mind, I was probably trying to pick something that had a nice cadence to it, and didn’t sound too much like anything I’d already used. In The Gospel of Anarchy everyone either has a name that’s also in that style or else they go by their made-up anarchist/hobo name. Almost nobody in either book has a last name.
HD: You seem to enjoy a good debate – religion, politics, academia, you’re not shy about your opinions. Where does that stem from? What gets you off about a good rant or argument?
JT: It comes from my father. He’s got this razor-sharp mind, and this limitless capacity for taking any idea or situation or proposition and seeing it from every single angle, and articulating exactly what he sees. He gave me my taste for debate, and debating with him–about anything from what was in the paper to why I should be able to stay up an hour later–taught me to speak quickly and with conviction, but never faster than I could think. We would debate until he convinced me I was wrong about whatever the subject was, then when I yielded he would offer to switch sides, and he would argue the lost point until it became the winning position. He’d un-convince me of the thing he’d just convinced me of. He taught me that comprehension is not the same as endorsement, and that understanding what you’re against as it appears to the people who are for it is just as important as knowing what you’re for. That’s a powerful concept, useful in every day life and also highly applicable to the writing of fiction, in terms of characters and their relationships, their perspectives on each other.
