It had to be over Zoom, as I was on another coast. We started batting around times to reschedule the interview. Breaching the membrane which separates them is possibly his greatest talent. These two modes are not unrelated, as Chuck is preoccupied by structural exoskeletons as much as he is by the guts. He was able to diagnose and fix this because before he wrote any of his visceral masterpieces, including Choke, Lullaby, and Fight Club, Chuck worked at the Portland-based trucking company Freightliner, fitting front axles to very big trucks. A rock had jumped from the road and lodged itself between the disk brake and rotor. Now the car has 57,000 miles on it and eats tires. When we met in 2014 for our first interview for this magazine, he picked me up at the airport in a white Prius wagon. Are you free to talk tomorrow? My apologies.

It’s no excuse, but I had car trouble and got stranded. The last three I received were, “Hello from Chuck Palahniuk,” “Chuck checking in,” and “Welcome to Portland.”Īfter fifteen minutes of staring at my own face, hoping the author himself would pop into the frame, I felt a lurch of concern in my stomach, clicked the red button to end the meeting, and went for a walk. The subject lines to Chuck’s emails are declarative, to the point of him sounding like AI. When Chuck Palahniuk didn’t show up for our initial Zoom interview, I assumed he was dead.

Chuck palahniuk 2022