Interview with the Author

Troublemaker

Introduction

An Interview with the Author

Excerpts:

Excerpt One: "Colorado Springs"

Excerpt Two: From Chapter One

Excerpt Three: From Chapter Two

Excerpt Four: From Chapter Two

Brian Pera Interview with the Author

A Chat with Brian Pera, Author of Troublemaker

What was the most challenging thing about writing Troublemaker?

Technically, it was the voice, the structure – the things that compelled me to write the thing in the first place. But overall the hardest part was trying to write a book for myself despite thinking nothing would ever happen with it. I didn’t believe I was worth a finished story, basically. Finally I decided I’d rather write a book than do anything else I could think of or hang out with most anyone I knew. That made it easier.

What's your favorite part of the novel?

Probably the sections in Buford, because they’re based on a place that’s pivotal to me, and somehow I feel like I maybe captured why. But also the sections about Walrus, which I strung together as a short story and sent out to a few writers. One of the responses profoundly changed my life in this generous way that’s made being published and anything I could get from it forever secondary, and almost beside the point.

How autobiographical or purely fictional is the book?

Aside from the carnival scenes, which are fantasy, the book is entirely autobiography and fiction. The truth of my experience as I see it. The majority of the people in there exist(ed). Some are conglomerations. Some get at the role of one person in my life by creating another. But my personal life’s just that, and separating what’s what for everyone seems to me like trying to break poetry down word by word. I get really disgusted with how willing people are anymore to give their stories away to some bigger apparatus that cheapens the best parts and slaps a slick coat of varnish on the worst. It makes me sad and angry, and increasingly private. It’s just not worth it to me, the idea I could tell everyone my mom was a crack whore and make a lucrative career out of it; sell myself short by making the saddest parts of my life the trendiest; make friends with all the cool people. I always thought the cool people were just the other ones in disguise.

Who are your major literary inspirations?

Dennis Cooper, Dennis Cooper, Dennis Cooper.

Earl's voice is so distinctive that I'm guessing you studied a lot of writers with a similar emphasis on voice.

I stayed away from reading any writers I felt would influence the voice of Earl or the kind of story he was telling while writing the book, because I wanted his voice to be entirely his own. Because slang seems to me the exact opposite of pretense, like Earl, I used slang dictionaries, as many as I could get my hands on, compiled lists of my favorite words and combed the novel fifty million times to find where I might use them in a way that complicated them and revealed the centuries of wisdom in idiom.

With whom would you most like to be compared?

I’d like to be incomparable.

Why did you become a writer?

My aunt told me she used to find me locked in my Nana’s study, writing, when I was like five or six. I've had a lot of people work hard to shut me up in my life, make me feel I was nothing, that I'd never add up to more. From the beginning I understood I had to work even harder than they did. When there was stability in my life – which is to say no moving around every six months to a year – I wrote stories in spiral notebooks. Eventually I started keeping a journal. When I started writing stories again I did my best to capture that inner voice I’d been using, the rhythms of my thoughts and being alone with them. I never showed my writing to people, with the exception of one or two, until I sent it to those writers a few years ago. I didn’t want people to read my thoughts, basically.

I like the way that issues of class and sexual orientation collide in Troublemaker. It reminds me why I feel that all forms of oppression are linked. Was illustrating this--especially perhaps to a lot of middle-class readers, the kind that can actually afford to go out and buy a hardcover book--a part of your goal with this book?

I had no outwardly articulated goals, if only because I believed the book would never be published. I didn’t see how it possibly could be, once I’d decided to write it exactly the way I wanted. I wrote for myself at first, until my own self-defeatism stalled it. When a certain writer responded encouragingly, I finished it for him, because in some fundamental way he was the only person to ever truly accept me unselfishly, and I wanted to send an extended thank you.

I had a unique situation growing up. Divorced parents. One with money, one without. Two different geographical regions, vastly different worlds. I identified with the latter, and felt like a spy in the former, until eventually I was ostracized from both. I've circled the periphery of every group I've ever run into, a lone wolf, and every group has its own rules, its own oppression it applies towards insiders and outsiders alike, but outsiders take the brunt of it. Yeah, I think it’s all related, it’s how community becomes corrupt, and I think it takes someone on the outside to call the bullshit. So I consider that position sacred by now, and don’t regret a minute of it.