I have decided to retire the literary Would You Rather series, but didn't want to stop interviews on the site all together. Instead, I've pulled together 40ish questions - some bookish, some silly - and have asked authors to...
I have decided to retire the literary Would You Rather series, but didn't want to stop interviews on the site all together. Instead, I've pulled together 40ish questions - some bookish, some silly - and have asked authors to limit themselves to answering only 10 of them. That way, it keeps the interviews fresh and connectable for all of us!
Today we are joined by Tyler C. Gore. Tyler is the author of My Life of Crime: Essays and Other Entertainments (Sagging Meniscus, 2022), which the Independent Book Review recently featured in their "Impressive Indie Books of 2022.” Tyler is a graduate of the Brooklyn College MFA program in creative writing, and he has taught writing at Brooklyn College, Hunter College, and for Gotham Writers Workshops. He is the recipient of a Fulbright grant for creative writing, and has been listed as five times as a Notable Essayist by The Best American Essays. His essays, stories, and reviews have appeared in many of the fine, high-quality journals preferred by discerning readers like you. You should definitely buy his book, because it's delightful and you will love it. Find out more at https://tylergore.com
Why do you write?
Surely out of some self-destructive impulse. Kids, your parents are right: this is not a rational career choice, and you should definitely go to law school. Don’t get me wrong—writing is a truly noble vocation, and a world without literature would be like a body without a soul. But generally speaking, the pay sucks.
I suspect most of us who write do it because it’s a compulsion. Moths to flame. Writing is the only work I do that feels like it actually matters. I write because I can’t not write.
What made you start writing?
Reading. That’s the gateway drug.
What do you do when you’re not writing?
A lot of puttering and brooding.
What’s your kryptonite as a writer?
Other people. I can’t write in the presence of anyone other than our cat. I need to be alone to 1) think about writing, 2) procrastinate about writing, and 3) sit at the keyboard actually writing.
There are writers who can work in the middle of a crowded party—I know at least one, and I’ve been astonished to see him open a laptop and start typing away in a room filled with chattering friends—but I’m the kind of writer who will look for any excuse to stop working, and talking to other people is definitely easier than writing.
I can’t write if my wife is home because she’s a charming conversationalist and I’d much rather talk to her than rewrite the same sentence 14 times in a row. I can’t write in a library or a coffee shop with all those bookish nerds thinking around me. I feel oppressed by their studiousness. Probably they’re all reading Buzzfeed or checking their Instagram likes, but I can’t shake that impostor syndrome feeling.
Strangely, I can write in a crowded bar, and often do when I’m alone, but I think I can do that because it feels so unproductive.
Describe your book poorly.
My Life of Crime: Essays and Other Entertainments (Sagging Meniscus, 2022). Lackadaisical , semi-employed New Yorker lives in a series of spectacularly crappy apartments, amuses himself with childish pranks, wanders aimlessly around the city encountering weird strangers, gets appendicitis, has appendix removed by a pretty surgeon, worries about his anorexic cat, exasperates his mostly sensible wife, obsesses about Kafka, parallel universes, and skiing, and complains a lot. Non-fiction.
What are some of your favorite books and/or authors?
Uh oh. This is a tough one because, damn, I have so many different books and authors I love, and they vary wildly in terms of style, era, and genre.
Well, my own book, My Life of Crime, is a collection of personal essays, so I suppose I should kick this off with some of the essayists I most admire. Off the top of my head that list would include (in no particular order) David Foster Wallace, David Sedaris, Geoff Dyer, Joy Williams, Alain de Botton, George Orwell, Ben Miller, Annie Dillard, George Prochnik, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. I don’t know if those writers even belong in the same universe, but they are all masters of the art.
But I also read tons of fiction. (I write fiction, too!) So, let’s see… well, there was a time in my life when I read and re-read everything Milan Kundera had written. I’ve always admired his essayistic approach to the novel, and the way he uses sexual comedy to explore the paradoxical nature of the human condition. His philosophical, break-the-fourth-wall approach to storytelling quickly brings to mind some other favorite books—all very different, but with some shared qualities: William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman, and A.S. Byatt’s Possession. All of those, in some respect, are novels of ideas, and all, in some respect, use romantic comedy to explore the profound, bittersweet absurdity of being human.
Most of my work has a lot of humor in it, and I’m a big fan of Mark Twain, who is still incredibly relatable and witty even in the 21st century. I love V.S. Naipaul’s early Trinidadian comedies, especially A House for Mr. Biswas, one of the best 20th-century novels I’ve ever read. No one has ever matched the unapologetic batshit lunacy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson. Oh, and a book I adore that few people have read is Fisher’s Hornpipe by Todd McEwen, which was published in 1982 and is criminally out of print. It’s laugh-out-loud funny, and McEwen is a brilliant prose stylist.
But I’m leaving out of lot here. As a reader, I have a very wide range—I love literary fiction, I love magical realism, I love science fiction and fantasy (a shout-out to Neal Stephenson and Susanna Clarke), I read poetry and I read graphic novels, and I could sit here and list authors and books all day long. Jeez, reading this over, I didn’t even mention Kurt Vonnegut. Or Ursula K. Le Guin. Or Dickens. This is why I’m not going to answer any questions about books and desert islands.
What is your favorite book from childhood?
The Chronicles of Narnia series by C.S. Lewis. I read those books until the spines cracked apart. If I were absolutely forced to pick one of the Narnia books as my most favorite, that would be The Magician’s Nephew (the sixth book published, but the first chronologically, since it tells the story of how Narnia was created). There is something enduringly resonant about the Wood Between the Worlds, that eerie, silent forest dotted with shallow pools—which turn out to be portals to an infinite number of parallel worlds. That forest and those pools feel like something drawn out of mythology, something deep and true.
Lewis was well ahead of the curve with that invention, anticipating the contemporary obsession with the multiverse. The Wood Between the Worlds has been riffed on by many later writers, including Neil Gaiman and, of course, Lev Grossman of The Magicians.
The spell that Narnia cast over my childhood imagination has never really faded. To this day, whenever I open an unfamiliar closet door, I still harbor the faint hope that I’ll find myself staring into the depths of a mysterious, snowbound forest illuminated by single iron lamppost.
Do you think you’d live long in a zombie apocalypse?
I am the person who always politely lets some asshole jump me in line at the airport, so I’m not very confident in my zombie skillset. On the other hand, I used to be okay at dodgeball as a kid. What I mean is that I wasn’t entirely awful at it like I was at other sports. Not very good at throwing or catching the ball, but surprisingly good at getting out of the way. That might be useful in a room full of zombies. But face it, I’m probably gonna get bit in the very first episode of the season. You might want to shelter with someone else.
Are you a toilet paper over or under kind of person?
Why does everything have to be about politics?
Are you a book hoarder or a book unhauler?
If you ever visit our apartment, the answer will be self-evident. There’s barely room for a couch.
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A bike-pedaling angel careening through rush-hour traffic. The mystery of a sandwich found in a bathroom stall. A lyric, rainy-day ramble through the East Village.
Whether confessing his sordid past as a prankster or recounting his family’s history of hoarding, Gore is by turns melancholy, profound, and hilarious.
The collection culminates with the novella-length essay “Appendix,” a twisted, sprawling account of “routine surgery” that grapples with evolution, mortality, strangely attractive doctors, simulated universes, and an anorexic cat.
“Tyler Gore is mischievously funny, with a wicked sense of timing…an essayist at the top of his form.”
—Sarah Stodola, author of The Last Resort
buy a copy
https://a.co/d/fWiOXpR (amazon)
or visit https://tylergore.com
