A life in writing: TC Boyle

'Writing is the best rush I've ever found. I'm utterly, hopelessly addicted to it. I go into a kind of dream every day'

Interview by Richard Grant in the The Guardian, Saturday 28 February 2009

Author TC Boyle. Photograph: PR

Life, says TC Boyle, "is tragic and absurd and none of it has any purpose at all." He is sitting contentedly with a glass of wine in the west room of his Frank Lloyd Wright house in Montecito, California. "Science has killed religion, there's no hope for the future with seven billion of us on the planet, and the only thing you can do is to laugh in the face of it all."
T Coraghessan Boyle, as he used to call himself, has always enjoyed making mincemeat of conventional pieties.
He emerged in the 1980s as a satirical novelist and short-story writer with a black sense of comedy and an exuberant prose style. He dressed like a rock star, and his self-chosen middle name, pronounced Cor-rag-essan, sounded like a battle cry.
In 1993 he gave a famous free reading in Central Park with Patti Smith, and today, at 60, with 12 successful novels and a 750-page volume of short stories lined up in hardback on the burnished redwood shelf above his fireplace, he still looks like a punk Mephistopheles.

The house is a low, spreading, cruciform structure of redwood and glass, built in the prairie style with a Japanese influence, and Boyle's latest novel, The Women, is about its architect. "I really didn't know much about Frank Lloyd Wright when we bought the house in '93. Living here, I got curious and started reading about him and found out what a bizarre, outlandish character he was, with all this incredible turmoil in his personal life, and I knew I had to write about him."
Architecture is touched on in The Women, but the novel's main concern is Wright's scandal-racked love life and how it was experienced by the four women involved. "All the events in the book are taken from the newspaper accounts and biographies, and I really put my soul into trying to keep the details accurate," Boyle says. "Where the fictional process is at work is when I enter the heads of the characters and imagine what they were thinking, and why they did what they did."
He based his main narrator, a Japanese apprentice called Tadashi Sato, on the many international architecture students that Wright charged for the privilege of doing his cooking and cleaning, and who were required to obey all his commands without question.

Wright's first wife was the long-suffering Kitty Tobin. They married young and had six children, and then he fell in love with one of her best friends, an early feminist called Mamah Borthwick Cheney, who was also married with children.
Publicly announcing their freedom to follow their hearts and hounded by the press, Frank and Mamah went off to live together at Taliesen, a shimmering country estate in Wisconsin that Wright built as his own private utopia. In 1914, while Wright was away on business, Mamah was murdered there by a crazed manservant with an axe. In the same rampage, he killed her two visiting children and four other adults, wounding two more and setting a fire that burned Taliesen almost to the ground.
Read Richard Grant's full, fascinating piece here.