![]() It wasn't until I'd signed the last book that a clerk said two people had fainted. But when I did, the faces in the front row looked a little gray. You don't get many moments to look up from the page. Reading "Guts" takes a full head of steam. About eight hundred people filled the store to fire code capacity. A film crew was there from The Netherlands to shoot a documentary. This was in a crowded bookstore in Portland, Oregon. On the promotional tour for my novel Diary, I read "Guts" for the first time in public. ![]() Nightmarishly wrong.īut these were stories so funny and sad that for years, every time I boarded an airplane, I said the silent prayer: "Please God, do not crash this plane because I'm the only one of Your children who knows all three of these great stories." In silence, I'd bargain, "Just let me do something, make something to preserve all three."Īnd then I wrote "Guts." One of twenty-plus stories that would alternate with poems and the chapters of a book, binding together dozens of mostly true stories. They were three funny, gradually more-upsetting true stories about experiments with masturbation gone wrong. Two had happened to friends, and the last had happened to a man I'd met while attending sex addict support groups to research my fourth novel. No, this week, my writer friends just laughed, and I told them how the three-act story of "Guts" was based on three true anecdotes. Later, her therapist would ask for a copy of that story to help with her psychoanalysis. This was better than the Tuesday before, when my story called "Exodus" sent a friend into my bathroom where she cried behind the locked door for the rest of the evening. No one scribbled helpful notes in the margin of their copy. At moments, the room had the silence of total shocked attention. No one fainted, in fact my friends laughed. My goal was to create horror around very ordinary things: carrots, candles, swimming pools. Each week, I would read another of the short stories I planned to include in a novel to be called Haunted. This was on a Tuesday night, in the writers workshop where my friends and I have shared our work since 1991. No one fainted the first time I read the short story, "Guts." ![]() He is also the author of a profile of Portland, Fugitives and Refugees, and the nonfiction collection Stranger Than Fiction. Chuck Palahniuk's six previous novels are Fight Club, Survivor, Invisible Monsters, Choke, Lullaby, and Diary. ![]()
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