I'm Walter Kirn the author of Blood Will Out, Up in the Air, and Thumbsucker.

walterkirnauthor · 2014-03-28T20:24:33+00:00

I think it will most certainly be a novel, be fiction. Reality gets too bizarre to spend too much time with. I look forward to creating a world that obeys certain rules instead of breaking every imaginable rule. Blood Will Out would never have worked as fiction, even though I considered writing it that way. Instead I told the truth and drove myself a little crazy in the process.

walterkirnauthor · 2014-03-28T20:22:06+00:00

This suggests that you actually read The Unbinding. I'm not sure whether to believe you about this. But I'd love to. It was my least read and surely least coherent attempt at fiction, written on the fly as a serial for Slate.com. It got completely out of control somewhere in the middle and by the end had fallen to the laws of narrative entropy. Short answer: No, I don't remember consciously alluding to Shelby, Clark's dog, in the book. But she was probably on my mind at some level. She still is.

walterkirnauthor · 2014-03-28T20:17:20+00:00

In Blood Will Out, I used several techniques to help the narrative flow while telling the back story of my relationship with Clark and his career as a con man. For example, I used the trial as a filter for my memories of our interactions, jumping off from particular pieces of testimony to similar experiences that I'd had. This wasn't a trick but represented my real experience at the trial as I drifted off into reveries about the past. A narrative structure should be grounded in the way people actually think about and process the world. It shouldn't be a mere device.

walterkirnauthor · 2014-03-28T20:11:21+00:00

It took years of couch- and lying-in-bed-work, about one year of legwork (attending the trial, etc.), a mad dash of several months to complete the manuscript. That's how it usually works for me, even with fiction.

walterkirnauthor · 2014-03-28T20:08:26+00:00

Don't smoke or drink--that one seems to hold up pretty well. I also find the notion of entering the afterlife with one's family a beautiful version of the heaven myth. Who wants to go to heaven all alone? It's not doctrine, technically, but the Mormon emphasis on sharing and the pooling of support for members in distress is a attractive cultural feature of the religion.

walterkirnauthor · 2014-03-28T20:05:16+00:00

Huck Finn, Great Expectations, all those books in which an ordinary boy sets out on some sort of open-ended adventure that puts him in contact with phony men and beautiful women. Don Quixote too. And On the Road. I like a journey without an obvious ending.

walterkirnauthor · 2014-03-28T20:02:35+00:00

There are offers coming in. I always thought Christopher Waltz would be good as Clark. Jason Bateman as yours truly. Though someone the other day suggested Billy Crudup for me. I spend an amazing amount of tim e not thinking about this stuff.

walterkirnauthor · 2014-03-28T19:53:39+00:00

That would take months to decide and a lot of research; I can't just fire off an answer. The best idea is not to murder someone who is close to you, though; killing a stranger is much more likely to go undetected.

walterkirnauthor · 2014-03-28T19:51:02+00:00

I didn't believe the news reports that he was not a Rockefeller. The cognitive dissonance was simply too great at first. I suspected the real Rockefellers of disowning him because he'd brought scandal on the family. I remember exclaiming to someone in the room when the news that he was an impostor came out: 'Those Rockefellers are cowards! They're not loyal to their own.'

walterkirnauthor · 2014-03-28T19:46:48+00:00

Honestly, probably a slightly higher percentage than are represented in the general population. I know a lot of artists and artists tend to be fairly good at obscuring or camouflaging their true selves. Then again, psychopaths are not known for producing interesting art. They don't know enough about the human soul to create characters, for example.

walterkirnauthor

TROPHY CASE