Sometimes we make assumptions about influence when similarities between two writers' work are so strong, but they're still just assumptions. Some things are sort of zeitgeist-y. There's a collective consciousness and we're all drawing from it.

Jay Wexler is my kind of writer--a weird one, and a wry one, and one who isnt afraid to act silly in a sort of bait-and-switch that, to the readers surprise, moves him as much as it makes him laugh. Like all the best comedians, Wexler is clearly nursing a heart that the world broke a long time ago. Ed Tuttle is a book that cant decide what it wants to be when it grows up, but as with most cases of arrested development, theres something very serious going on behind all the antics. Plus, there are pictures.

I don't know if it's something that we as a species are hardwired for or if it's more of a contemporary phenomenon related to technology and rapid dissemination of data. I did know that whatever its cause or nature, I wanted to interrogate this phenomenon. But the only way for me to do that, the only tool I have to dissect it with, is a fictional narrative.

Sometimes we make assumptions about influence when similarities between two writers' work are so strong, but they're still just assumptions. Some things are sort of zeitgeist-y. There's a collective consciousness and we're all drawing from it.

I haven't written a whole lot of nonfiction, but what I have written leads me to believe that it's an entirely different muscle. The ongoing paradox is that sometimes it's harder to get to the emotional truth of something when you only have the facts at your disposal.

Partying means drinking. It also means playing records by Lou Reed and Chicago, which I thought was a city but is also a band it turns out.

People have invoked the ghost of Hemingway quite a few times in writing about the book. I could get into sticky territory here if I let myself go on about this subject. The more I hear it, the more it rankles, frankly.