Nothing Good Comes From Nothing
by Chuck Palahniuk
Nothing good emerges from nothing. Years back, Max Brooks and I were alone in an otherwise empty lecture hall. His book World War Z had become the all-time bestselling zombie novel, but I suspected it wasn’t about the walking dead. Okay, it was and it wasn’t.
About his father, Mel Brooks, Max told me, “We never ate in restaurants because all through dinner men would line up at our table to tell my dad their best jokes. Every Jewish dentist dreamed of making their hero, Mel Brooks, laugh.” And laugh he did, whether or not the joke was funny, while his wife, Anne Bancroft, graciously played along with the performance. Relaxing it was not.
Here I saw my opening and asked, “Your mother?” I asked, “Is World War Z really about your mother?” This wasn’t a random guess. The last year of his mother’s life coincided with the year in which it seemed he’d been writing the book.
Max’s eyes got, well, misty, and he said, “No one’s ever caught that.” He went on to say that in the last year of her life, he’d driven his mother to oncologist after oncologist. Each had confidently assured them about a new cancer treatment and set their minds at ease. That’s why each government in the novel confidently announces a new plan for resolving the zombies.
Each promising cancer therapy had failed, and that’s why after a year the zombies had won. Max said readers hated the downer ending of the book, but that’s how it needed to end because after a year of battling cancer Anne Bancroft had died.
Max and I alone in that lecture hall, well, it was a moment. A nice moment.
Max is funny and hairy and has flat feet—a defect that got him bumped out of military training. All his life older men had told him, “Your mother, in The Graduate, she’s sex personified! The sexiest woman alive!” so he’d never watched the movie. His fear was he’d get an erection, and then what?
The truth was Anne Bancroft had always raised her own vegetables and saved the seeds to replant year after year. She canned food. During the Rodney King riots she’d watched the smoke rising over Los Angeles and calculated how long her family could eat if she butchered the family pit bull and harvested the koi in their backyard pond. Max told me, “She was basically an Italian peasant,” but not with rancor. With pride.
In the year after her death he’d compiled everything she’d taught him. About gardening, about canning. As a tribute to her he’d put all of this legacy into his book, The Zombie Survival Guide.
I wasn’t surprised. This is what it takes to write a good book. My best writing teacher, Tom Spanbauer, taught me as much. Tom called it “Dangerous Writing,” and by that he meant that a writer had to explore an unresolved personal issue that couldn’t be resolved. A death, for instance. Something that seemed personally dangerous to delve into. By doing so the writer could exaggerate and vent and eventually exhaust the pain or fear around the issue, and that gradual relief would keep the writer coming back to work on the project despite no promise of a book contract or money or a readership.
Moreover, the writer had to explore the issue through a metaphor. Like zombies. Or Fight Clubs.
Read the full article: https://chuckpalahniuk.substack.com/p/dangerous-writing
.jpg)
