T.C. Boyle (right)
T.C. Boyle’s new novel, San Miguel — his fourteenth (to go with his nine short-story collections, with a tenth due out next year) — just hit bookstores. The subjects of Boyle’s imaginative novels often alternate between wild-eyed eccentrics or lowly outsiders and fictionalized takes on real historical figures (Alfred Kinsey, Frank Lloyd Wright). San Miguel is in the latter camp, and yet with a difference: Boyle says this is his first “realist” novel. Set atop a weather-battered rock pile that makes up the westernmost of the Channel Islands on California’s coast, San Miguel alternates between the diaries of two women — one from the 1880s, the other from the thirties — to tell how they dealt with life on the lonely spot. Vulture caught up with the prolific author at Chez Jay in Santa Monica, where Boyle opened up on topics as diverse as self-discipline, his daunting competitiveness, and why he will never adapt one of his own novels for the screen.
You've been publishing fiction since the late seventies. Is there anything that’s been written about you that’s become conventional wisdom but is patently false?
I don’t pay too much attention, but I will tell you though that your press likes to "get a handle" on you — and once they do, that’s it forever, no matter what. So the handle on me, which is beginning to wane, finally, is, you know, He was a heroin abuser. He was a punk who sang in a band, but he pulled himself up and he writes these crazy books. Well, okay: true. But that’s a long time ago. And I still write crazy books, but it’s a different story now. I’m also a professor and I work hard at what I do. It’s not like you can be out in a club all night and then be a great artist. You gotta live a regular life and devote yourself to your art.
I don’t pay too much attention, but I will tell you though that your press likes to "get a handle" on you — and once they do, that’s it forever, no matter what. So the handle on me, which is beginning to wane, finally, is, you know, He was a heroin abuser. He was a punk who sang in a band, but he pulled himself up and he writes these crazy books. Well, okay: true. But that’s a long time ago. And I still write crazy books, but it’s a different story now. I’m also a professor and I work hard at what I do. It’s not like you can be out in a club all night and then be a great artist. You gotta live a regular life and devote yourself to your art.
You also teach writing at USC. What do you hope to teach the kids studying literature under you.
I don’t teach literature. I teach a writing workshop — only. And I don’t teach them anything: We just write. They publish their work for the class; we read it, we write about it, we interpret it — and the writer says nothing and just listens. That might be instructive, or it might not. No promises made.
Link to Vulture for full interview
I don’t teach literature. I teach a writing workshop — only. And I don’t teach them anything: We just write. They publish their work for the class; we read it, we write about it, we interpret it — and the writer says nothing and just listens. That might be instructive, or it might not. No promises made.
Link to Vulture for full interview
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