Interview With Bryan Charles!

Bryan Charles is the author of three books — the novel Grab on to Me Tightly as if I Knew the Way, the 33 1/3 book about Pavement’s Wowee Zowee, and the new memoir There’s a Road to Everywhere Except Where You Came From. That book tells the story of how he moved to New York City from suburban Michigan with the ambition to become a writer, and how the necessity of keeping a day job set in motion a chain of events that led to him being present in the World Trade Center on the morning of 9/11. In this interview, Bryan and I discuss the process of writing a memoir, his experience working on the Pavement book, his thoughts on contemporary fiction, and the way the internet lacks an obvious framework for promoting new writers. Enjoy!

Matthew Perpetua: I read a review of your new memoir that you had linked from your tumblr, and their take on you was that you’re telling your story, but keeping the reader at a distance, not really letting them in. Do you think that’s true?

Bryan Charles: Yeah, I agree with that review to an extent, though it seems clear, too, that the reviewer seems to prefer less minimalist prose. But I posted it anyway, because it was a fairly thoughtful assessment of the book, and not just a plot summary. The book’s pared-down style was a result of two things. First, I had scrapped a couple of different tries at a novel using the same material, the first of which was incredibly overwrought. It was meant to be this broad, all-encompassing statement on 9/11 and its aftermath, and it just kind of collapsed under the weight of itself. The next version I tried was less like that but still didn’t feel incredibly urgent to me. At that point I decided to start over again, this time without any of the flabby, vaguely fictionalized, half-disguised parts. And I was reading a lot of crime fiction at the time, really hard-boiled stuff, and that was the mode I started ripping off as I began writing the memoir. But I discovered that that style really seemed to serve the material, at least in terms of how I wanted to address it. I mean, 9/11, it’s such a huge subject. Time hasn’t really diminished its power. And the only way I could go at it in the end was to hack it away to its essence in terms of how I experienced it.

Matthew Perpetua: It’s actually notable and interesting for how you don’t try to make sense of 9/11 at all. I think a person could read the book and maybe not see it coming, but in the context of the book, you’re going through all this personal turmoil and lack of direction, and then suddenly a plane crashes into your office building and you’re thrown into this horror scene. But it doesn’t seem incongruous, it actually seems like some kind of logical climax, and you’re passive to it.

Bryan Charles: Yeah, there’s no analysis, no attempt to make sense of things, partly because it still doesn’t make sense, but also because I was trying to stay true to the time period. I based the book on old journals, and there certainly weren’t long passages, or any passages, where I was breaking down American foreign policy in the Middle East, or anticipating how this event would affect future generations. The journals of that time were more just these numbing recitations of the small events of my days, set against the backdrop of what felt at the time, especially in New York, like total cataclysm.

Matthew Perpetua: I asked about whether you felt like you were keeping the audience at a distance because my experience of reading this book is different than most people in that I know you, I’ve spent a lot of time talking to you, I know a bit about your history, and so when I read your stuff I hear everything in your speaking voice. And I think to a large extent, the character of your writing is roughly the same as the one you present in your regular life. A bit dry and deadpan, but pretty open. You write about a lot of stuff I’d never consider being open about. I thought in a way it was a bold decision to be so open about lusting for all these random women you met, for example. You really owned that.

Bryan Charles: That’s a good point, actually. I’ve never connected the dots in that way before, but I guess the book is pretty revealing in its — for lack of a better word — deadpan way. And pretty embarrassing, when you get down to it. There’s a lot of floundering about and misguided infatuations and dashed expectations and petty jealousies and so forth.

Matthew Perpetua: Yeah, but that’s all very human. I think if you look at books — or really, any kind of art — as being a way for someone to have insight into other people’s lives, you definitely communicated. I think it’s more a question of tone — you’re writing in this pared down way, it’s not as warm as some people can be when they write about themselves. Do you read many memoirs?

Bryan Charles: I don’t ready too many memoirs, and I actually never thought I’d write one, especially after about 2005 or so, when it seemed like some portion of every third memoir coming out was entirely made up. But there are some that I really like, like Bob Dylan’s memoir. His book is great — and weird — because he writes incredibly openly about all these things that, in theory at least, no one would be interested in reading about in a Bob Dylan memoir, like the making of Oh Mercy. One tricky thing about memoirs is creating scenes. I read Barack Obama’s first book, Dreams From My Father — which I think is fantastic — and was blown away by the level of detail he included, like looking out a certain window at a certain moment and remembering exactly what occurred to him as he gazed out at the street or something. There’s less of that in my book. Unless I was fairly sure about how something went down, or had some form of documentation in my journal, or confirmation from other individuals involved, I didn’t include it. Another thing that accounts for that stripped-down style, I guess.

Matthew Perpetua: Yeah. Well, I guess a difference too is that Obama and Dylan are like these mythic figures, and it’s easy to make their lives into stories. They’re larger than life.

Bryan Charles: True, but Obama was still pretty life-size when he wrote his memoir. That’s what makes it great. It isn’t an after-the-fact accounting of a series of cabinet meetings and trips to Europe or something. Not to get too off-topic, but that’s one of the things that drives me nuts about conservatives who say things like, We just don’t know enough about Barack Obama? Who is he really? What was his childhood like? And it’s all there, in his first book, written before he was a nationally-known figure.

Matthew Perpetua: Yeah. One thing I was just thinking is that you’ve written three distinctly different types of books — a memoir, a book that is basically a piece of longform music journalism, and a novel — and despite the fundamental differences, your voice is totally consistent and it all seems pretty personal, in all three you’re kinda dealing with your history in Michigan. Are you going for that, or is this more like — you are who are?

Bryan Charles: I guess that’s just the kind of writing I’m going to do, or have done up to this point. In a strange way, I see Wowee Zowee and There’s a Road as of a piece. I was planning and writing them at more or less the same time. Well, not quite the same time: I wrote the first draft of Wowee Zowee in about three months, between drafts of Road. And even though it’s about Pavement, it’s still an intensely personal book. In the early days, when I was writing my first short stories, say from the late 90s into the early 00s, I was far more likely to create characters and situations out of thin air. I was writing these wannabe New Yorker stories that were pretty uptight and less rooted in my own experiences. That could be just because I had fewer experiences to draw from. But at some point that kind of writing started to seem pretty dead to me, and I wrote the short story that formed the basis for my novel, which takes place entirely in Michigan. And you’re right, on a certain level, embracing where I come from and thinking about how it informed me, and continues to inform me, has had a liberating effect. I get into this in the memoir. When I moved to New York, I was really insecure about being from Michigan. I guess it’s a classic dilemma for writers who move here. You’re in town for three weeks and already writing about cocktail parties on the Upper East Side and how much Williamsburg has changed in the last six months.

Matthew Perpetua: Do you feel motivated to go way in the other direction, try doing a kind of fiction that is maybe fantastical, totally removed from your life experience?

Bryan Charles: I do. I think about that all the time. It’d be scary for me, to be honest, because those early efforts were so weak. But maybe enough time has passed that I could pull it off. On the other hand, there are plenty of writers who spend their careers mining their own lives for their fiction. Henry Miller leaps to mind. Richard Yates. If anything, Yates worked his real life to increasingly diminished fictional returns. He had a few notes, and he hit them relentlessly. Also, I’m leery of fiction that doesn’t seem at all informed by the writer’s life experience. I know that sounds weird, because it’s fiction, it’s supposed to be made up. But when something sounds like it was composed by a brain in a vat — a super-genius brain, maybe, but still — I tune out. I think of Jonathan Franzen as being like this. It’s trendy to diss that guy, but he does seem to me like just a sentence-spewing machine. He probably hasn’t had a job in twenty years, and for that reason alone I don’t trust his take on the Way We Live Now.

Matthew Perpetua: Right. But Franzen is still this guy going for some kind of realism, whereas you could always go in the direction of magical realism, or just straight-up genre fiction that doesn’t need to have a direct connection to the author’s reality. I know that for me, all the fiction I have an interest in doing would only have metaphorical connections to my life. For me, nothing would be more boring to people than writing about the events of my life. There’s not much of a story there, and what may be a story is stuff I would prefer be kept secret.

Bryan Charles: I do think about genre fiction a lot, especially crime novels. Some of the best writers out there right now are crime writers. George Pelecanos and James Ellroy are two of my favorites. They do all sorts of mind-blowing stuff within the genre framework that makes straight-up social realism look pretty undergrad. If I ever tried something like that, though, I’d want to make sure it wouldn’t seem like moonlighting, like some kind of post-McSweeney’s lark or experimental exercise. That’s a pretty rich sub-genre in itself, the so-called literary writer who’s like, Hey, wow, now I’m gonna write fantasy! I’d want to steer clear of that vibe.

Matthew Perpetua: Isn’t there one dude who was a literary writer, a lit professor, and he was just like “fuck it, I’m gonna do a vampire trilogy” and now he’s selling well? Someone was telling me about that.

Bryan Charles: Yeah, exactly! That guy made a ton of dough. So it works for some people. I’m not opposed to it, I’d just want to make sure I had the chops. Reading a few dozen crime novels — or graphic novels or sci-fi or whatever — doesn’t necessarily qualify me to write one. But again, the best genre stuff says as much, or more, about what’s going on in the world and in the culture than thick social-realist novels about unrest in the suburbs.

Matthew Perpetua: Right, and the social-realism in the suburbs genre thrives mainly because that’s the location or roots of so much of the audience for literary fiction. Write what you know. Ha, so how would you like to totally sell out? Vampires and zombies, that’s kinda played out. Maybe you can do a sci-fi thing, like sci-fi noir. Sci-fi YA noir!

Bryan Charles: Man, at this point I feel like I’d do just about anything. But maybe not, because I was talking to some people a while back about writing a YA book under a different name. I almost said yes. But I would have had to write a big chunk of the book up front, with no guarantee that they would try to sell it. If they had given me some money up front, who knows? I might have banged out a draft. But you don’t know how close to the truth you are. There are people in offices right now thinking up various YA mash-up combinations to try to sell to publishers. I’d be astounded, actually, if sci-fi YA noir hasn’t already been proposed. So, yeah, I spend a lot of time fretting about money and thinking of how I can make more of it, and then essentially spurning random job offers and other potential money-making opportunities that come along.

Matthew Perpetua: Not that there’s much money in it, but do you have any interest in writing more about music? Non-Pavement music?

Bryan Charles: Yes, I would like to write more about music. But I like the long form. And even though it was a ton of work and caused me a lot of agony along the way, I liked doing the interviews for Wowee Zowee. So I could see doing something like that again, something even longer and more far-ranging. The 33 1/3 book was a fantastic opportunity, and the series, on the whole, is great. But there’s a strict word count. I pushed it a little. I think I got a thousand more in there. But I could have gone one for probably five thousand more, easy. I trimmed a lot. So that’s part of why that book reads the way it does, the speed of the prose.

Matthew Perpetua: Who else do you think you could write about at length?

Bryan Charles: Well, I shouldn’t reveal this, because it’s still so vague in my mind, but I’d like to write full-length about Billy Corgan. I have a long and tortured fan relationship with that guy, and I find him totally fascinating. I picture it being sort of like that Nicholson Baker book about John Updike, although I haven’t actually read that book. But something about Corgan calls out for further study, a mix of the critical and the personal. I got into it a little in Wowee Zowee, but had to cut it short by design.

Matthew Perpetua: Right, Billy is kinda like the villain of your Wowee Zowee book in a way, always turning up to foil Pavement’s plans or cast Malkmus in sharp relief. I like that about the book. He’s such a fascinating figure. He’s so frustrating, but I think that makes him interesting. A lot of odd psychological depth. The problem of writing about Billy Corgan though is that you’ll have all these superfans calling out for your head!

Bryan Charles: Yeah, but I wouldn’t mind that so much, I guess because I consider myself a super fan in a way. Not of the recent stuff but certainly of the man in his prime. I see him as tragic figure now, sort of like the “Mark Zuckerberg” of The Social Network. That was one of the challenges of writing the Pavement book — and maybe why the other book about them is so bad — there really is no great drama there, no story. The story is basically this semi-genius from California got together with his buddies and made a handful of records, most of them in just a couple of weeks. There’s only so much you can say about that, especially when the semi-genius in question has no great interest in ballyhooing his achievements. So part of the story of Wowee Zowee is me actually trying to figure out what the story is and then writing the book. I know some people didn’t dig that, or thought it was half-baked or whatever. But Pavement, more than most bands I can think of, really resist interpretation. They’re such great guys, and as you’ve pointed out, all really interesting personalities, but what they do together is surprisingly hard to explain.

Matthew Perpetua: Yeah, the dynamic of that band is very unique and hard to really grasp unless you’ve been observing it closely.

Bryan Charles: That said, as a fan, writing that book was a dream. I did a reading in Portland with Mike McGonigal, who wrote the 33 1/3 book about Loveless, and he said something about wishing he hadn’t agreed to write a book about his favorite record. I assume he was mostly kidding, but I understand the sentiment. There were times when I thought, How am I going to pull all this together? Then I thought, Fuck it, don’t worry about it, take a cue from Malkmus and just get it down, “hit it on the first or second pass.” I’m incredibly happy with how it turned out.

Matthew Perpetua: Some people have asked me why I never tried to write about Pavement, and man, I don’t think I could do it. I hate writing about Pavement, honestly. I’m too close to it. I’m glad you were the guy to write the book about my favorite album, not just because I like your writing and take on it, but because I’d rather read about Wowee Zowee than write about it. I shouldn’t say I hate writing about Pavement, more accurately, I don’t think I’m good at it. I think I did a good job with the greatest hits album on Pitchfork, but that’s more me selling people on the idea of Pavement in general.

Bryan Charles: Again, I totally understand that. But by the time I realized I was too close to Wowee Zowee — and Pavement in general — it was too late! I had already signed the contract.

Matthew Perpetua: What was it like meeting all those guys in person finally? I know you met them after one of the shows in Central Park and had to do all the interviews over the phone.

Bryan Charles: It was pretty overwhelming. Bob put me on the guest list for one of the Central Park shows, and I showed up with copies of the book to give to everyone in the band. I got this backstage pass, which I wasn’t expecting, and watched the show from the side of the stage. Afterward, I almost bolted. I was extremely nervous, even though I’d talked to them at length on the phone and had traded dozens of e-mails with them trying to set the interviews up. Finally I just took a breath and went for it, and they were all really nice about it, as you’d expect. They were mostly just like, Oh yeah, cool, you’re the guy, you wrote that book. I doubt if they’ll read it, but I’m glad I got to meet them in person and give them copies.

Matthew Perpetua: What do you think it’d be like for them to read it?

Bryan Charles: I assume it’d be weird. I mean, I think it’s weird to read things written about my books, and I obviously haven’t generated the ink they have. They’re probably used to it, though, and it’s just another thing to add to the pile. I like to think of my book as a little bit different, though, in that I’m not a music writer, and I’m not coming from that background, or employing a standard set of music-writer tropes. But that’s something I hope everyone might appreciate about it, and not just the guys in Pavement.

Matthew Perpetua: What have you been into lately? Just general cultural stuff — books, movies, records.

Bryan Charles: My cultural references aren’t all that current, I’m afraid. I just finished reading The Brothers Karamazov. It took about six weeks to read. It was a real mind-blower. Now and then I read big books like that, both to fill in gaps in things I’ve missed and to fight against Internet attention-span erosion. Musically, I feel antique as well. I don’t download music, or listen to music on my computer. I listen to vinyl more often than I listen to CDs, and my favorite bands are either defunct or have been kicking around since at least the 90s. I’m pretty up-to-date on most TV, though. I like all the shows that everyone else likes. Others have said it, but TV is in a golden age. The writing on TV is just so good now. Even the stuff I’m not that into, like Community or something, I recognize the sharpness of the writing. Once in a while I’ll catch a rerun of a show from my youth and it’ll seem like something from the 60s. It’s sort of shocking. It’s like hearing “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and realizing that kids now think of Nirvana the way I used to think about the Doors.

Matthew Perpetua: I don’t have any experience with those big Russian novels but I really admire stuff with that scope and ambition — I like a lot of non-novel things that get compared to that style — and I should probably just dive in.

Bryan Charles: Yeah, that’s the thing, the scope. It’s like when I read Moby Dick, it made all contemporary stuff — including my own — feel so, so small. That’s the kind of thing that can get drummed out of you in an MFA program. If Dostoevsky had workshopped The Brothers Karamazov in grad school, I’m sure some lunkhead would have said, Look, Fyodor, this thing is way too long, why not just focus on the ONE brother? And what about the sisters? Do they have any sisters?

Matthew Perpetua: Do you think that’s a problem with modern literary fiction? Workshopped into something too tame?

Bryan Charles: To a certain extent, yeah. Not to say anything bad about MFA programs, because I went through one. But the best thing about it, for me, was working one-on-one with the teachers I had there. The workshop itself was intermittently helpful, but it was mostly just this blizzard of conflicting opinions. I get into this a little bit at the end of Road. You could turn in a story about a father and son, and invariably someone will say, Yeah, but what about the mother? Why isn’t there more of her in there? Or something vague like, I don’t think this story really begins here, I think it should start on page four. And it is true that a lot of ambition has been dialed down, maybe because workshops are best suited to the short story, something self-contained that you can discuss in a single sitting. That’s one of the reasons I loved The Brothers Karamazov so much — and I guess why people respond to sci-fi and fantasy epics — it was this beautiful collision of all these different characters and themes and story lines and even prose styles. And you do get that in a lot of television shows these days. I’m thinking especially of The Sopranos, where you might get a thirty-minute dream sequence, or a whole season devoted to a previously minor character like Vito. You’re taught in writing workshops to constantly rework and revise. That’s a good thing, and I’m certainly a compulsive reviser. But it can also translate into, Cut this whole section, it doesn’t serve the narrative, what’s the point? And that’s not always good.

Matthew Perpetua: What are some recent books you’ve been into?

Bryan Charles: A friend of mine named Grace Krilanovich just published a fantastic book called The Orange Eats Creeps. It’s unlike anything you’re likely to read, and I don’t normally say things like that. She’s got a great story, too, because she finished the book a few years ago and had been trying since then to get it published. Two Dollar Radio finally took a chance on it this year, and it’s a hit. Grace was picked by the National Book Foundation for their 5 Under 35 honor. So much in publishing — all the list-making and awards-granting — is so compromised, but that’s a well-deserved honor and a book I recommend without reservation.

Matthew Perpetua: My friend Josh was recently telling me about that book, and it made me think about how there isn’t really much to get the word out about new books by new writers who aren’t obviously commercial. Like, why isn’t there an equivalent to Pitchfork telling us what the Best New Fiction, Best New Non-Fiction, etc is? Some institution with a bias toward celebrating new writers.

Bryan Charles: That’s a good question. A lot of the stuff people tend to hear about as far as literature — most of it, I’d say — is pretty firmly establishment-entrenched. Honestly, I don’t know how that machine works. It’s just like, one day you wake up and everyone is talking about Super Sad True Love Story, and every major review outlet — of which there are precious few these days — is reviewing it.

Matthew Perpetua: Right. I guess things ramped up for Gary Shteyngart, it’s not like it’s his first hit novel. It just seems like there are soooo many books being put out every year and the internet is failing in its chances to help out a lot of these smaller writers who make up the bulk of what gets published.

Theoretically this is something that the internet could do better than random small book stores. More reach, and you have things like Amazon and Powells that have that “long tail” inventory.

Bryan Charles: Well, theoretically, the Internet is doing this, or that’s what publishers think, or hope, anyway. But for writers with no marketing budget behind them, it’s all on them. I remember when I went to the HarperCollins office when my first book was coming out. I was going to meet my publicist, and the point of the meeting was to learn about all the things HarperCollins was going to do to promote my novel, but the vibe was really, Here are all the things you’re going to do to promote your novel, you’re going to join MySpace, and you have a daily blog, right? I’m not against doing some of that stuff, but it takes so much time, and writing takes time, and they both employ the same machine, and so it becomes complicated. But I don’t really know what sells books. I’m not sure anyone does.

Matthew Perpetua: Right. I think it’s like a lot of things, and it just has to catch on with the right people. But who are the right people going to be? Hard to say! Once the ball gets rolling, it moves along. But if it doesn’t, it’s just a non-starter.

Bryan Charles: Exactly. It’s like a major label pouring money on a young band they think is gonna get hot. Plenty of writers get big advances — well, maybe less so these days — and get hooked up with full-page ads in the New York Times Book Review. But it ends up being a dead Swedish guy who sells a million copies.

Matthew Perpetua: Yeah. Which is a combination of something catching an unexpected zeitgeist — Swedish cyberpunk SVU? – and getting great word of mouth among people who actually buy books. I think maybe the cover design helped there. Those covers jump out on the display, especially among the more typical airport books you see that all look exactly the same. Have you had any input into your book covers?

Bryan Charles: I have, and I feel I lucked out in that regard. With my first book, it was my editor’s idea to ask Jay Ryan if he wanted to read the manuscript and maybe do the cover. Jay said yes, read the book, and showed us a few sketches. I picked the one I liked, and he went from there. It was really amazing watching it go from his first sketch to that final cover, which I love a lot. With There’s a Road, Open City has their go-to designer, Nick Stone. He showed us a few mock-ups, and we all zeroed in on the one that, with one small change, became the cover. Again, it was pretty easy, and I feel really lucky, because there are so many bad book covers out there, and I know plenty of writers who have had little to no input in their covers.

Matthew Perpetua: It seems really strange to me that writers can’t have more say in this. I understand if a book company is like “no, that’s a horrible idea,” but c’mon. I feel like the impulse is often to make a design that blends in instead of stands out, which sends a horrible message to curious customers. I know from getting lots of records sent to me that when people have good taste in cover art, they tend to be better artists in general. The stuff with terrible art most often is bad music. This is eight years of experience talking.

Bryan Charles: It’s often a case of people with no artistic abilities in positions of power thinking they know more than the person who has actually made the record or written the book. I guess these people think they know because they have marketing degrees or whatever it is. Also, at least in publishing, I’m sure it’s a cost-cutting thing. It’s more expensive to hire a great photographer or an outside designer and have them work with the writer to really help nail the writer’s vision. In both cases, major-label music and big publishing, there’s at least a whiff — even if it goes unremarked upon — of, Just be glad we’re putting your shit out.

Matthew Perpetua: I wouldn’t be surprised if you had something happen like with Spoon, where getting on a smaller label allowed you to thrive and better find your audience. I feel like people trust the Open City name.

Bryan Charles: Man, I could only hope. But actually, I’ve used that analogy in my mind a lot. It’s been interesting publishing with Open City after working with HarperCollins. I had a good experience with HarperCollins, and I still have a few good friends there, but when my agent sent There’s a Road to them, there was this really lukewarm response. It was hard to take, especially after I’d put so much time into the book, in terms of ditching the bad version of the novel, and rewriting it as a memoir, and this whole four-year odyssey. It was like, Yeah, we like this, but maybe it could be more like this, or a little bit more like that, maybe if you make some of these changes we’ll make an offer, let us know, get back to us. With Open City it was different. It was, Hey, we love your book! Let’s publish it! And then I did about six more months of work on the book. So it was a better deal all around. Open City got a better book, and I got to work with Open City.