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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Chuck for kids? Hard to swallow

Chuck Palahniuk (Associated Press / The Spokesman-Review)
By Bill Goodykoontz The Arizona Republic

To say that “Choke,” which opened Friday, has an unusual premise is an understatement.

It’s about a man who makes himself choke in restaurants, so the people who save him will give him money. He’s also a sex addict who cruises Sex Addicts Anonymous for “dates.”

Just more from the mind of Chuck Palahniuk, who wrote the novel on which the film was based. He also wrote “Fight Club,” which was turned into a successful movie in 1999.

Q: What do you look for when you watch a movie made of one of your books?

A: I go in hoping I’ll be surprised that they’ve done a whole bunch of different things, so that I don’t have to see every word of the book made manifest. Really, I’m hoping there will be a whole bunch of stuff there that I don’t know.

Q: Do you now see the actors as the characters in your books? Sam Rockwell in “Choke,” or Brad Pitt or Edward Norton in “Fight Club”?

A: You know, I really don’t see a person physically (when writing). I tend to think of a character as an accumulation of actions. … I try to avoid a physical description, so that … the character ends up kind of the way the reader would imagine them.

Q: Where do all these crazy ideas come from?

A: So much of it is things people have told me about. My own experience would barely fill a very thin book. The idea is to always be out there, collecting the experience of a lot of people. In doing so, you’re much more likely to produce something that will resonate with a lot of people.

In a way, you present them with their worst-case scenario, something that they pray will never happen. And then you show a character surviving that and actually improved by that. And you give them this freedom that they don’t have to be as terrified of that thing as they always have been.

Q: Do you ever think you should try something different? Like a kids’ book?

A: For a long time I was working on a kids’ book, about a little boy whose mother had died, and he came back from her funeral still dressed up in his little suit. He knew that his father had a card, so he called the number on the card and ordered a new mother. The number on the card was really an escort service that his father periodically would call. …

This very jaded, very world-weary prostitute showed up at the door thinking that she was going to have to run this mommy scenario with some perverted middle-aged guy. And instead she gets this really sweet 7-year-old kid in a bow tie. She ends up having a terrific day being his mother, for $300 an hour.

And then I realized that there was no way they could sell this book to kids.

The birthday bunch

Actress Anita Ekberg is 77. Singer Jerry Lee Lewis is 73. TV personality Bryant Gumbel is 60. Comedian Andrew “Dice” Clay is 51. Musician Les Claypool (Primus) is 45. Actress Jill Whelan (“Love Boat”) is 42. Actress Emily Lloyd is 38.