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Sex and food and Abraham Lincoln

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The pornography of pharmacology

So do you see the book as science fiction?
Technically it’s science fiction because I’m taking a technology that doesn’t exist and putting it into our world. I’m saddened by genre divisions -- there’s a lot I think literary people can learn from genre. The whole Hollywood high-concept thing I’m getting more and more excited about. I see it as sort of thinking experiments: an author finds this bizarre thing to put into motion that’s going to play out, that’s going to force us to think in knew ways about familiar subjects. And when you find one of those concepts it’s so great. There are so many authors that I love that do small domestic books. Sometimes I’m very saddened by how many women are doing small domestic things and not doing thinking experiments. Women authors: that’s my call to arms. Stop with the small, domestic. Get out there and do things we’re not expected to be doing.

Speaking of gender stuff, did you find it challenging writing from the perspective of a middle aged man?
At first I didn’t have much sympathy for Win. As I got older, I had more sympathy. I grew to love him even with all his foibles. I was very interested in the guy mid-life crisis. Women have our version, but it’s not as much around ego and performance and success. It hits men really hard. The cultural stereotypes are more powerful and screwed up and difficult for people to measure up to. It was something that was kind of a stretch for me, the challenge of being a woman and looking at men. And I imagined a recreational drug, a club-drug, that guys at their 20th reunion would take. I liked thinking about different kinds of recreational drugs for different populations. Like what if a typical gathering of guys, football heroes with thinning hair, what if they had their own drug?

There’s a long tradition of drug literature -- Carlos Castaneda, Tom Wolfe, and you reference Thomas De Quincey who wrote Confessions of an Opium Eater. Where do you place your book within the drug lit tradition?
I’m more of a non-fiction writer, and had a habit of including huge swatches of non-fiction in the book. So much got pulled out because it got too nerdy. De Quincey wrote the first drug literature. He came up with the idea of trying to take the experience and transforming it into words. He was basically an advertiser for opium -- after the book came out, opium use went up. It’s a question of how do you simulate a drug experience on the page. It’s this pornography of pharmacology. He was taking a drug that was just seen as medicinal; you wouldn’t have thought that it was harking of new states of consciousness. He really saw something in it and expanded what it means to be conscious. I liked the idea of having a scholar who was wrapped up in those ideas; it was nice to have that as a kernel behind the book. And I thought Win was sort of De Quincey: broke, junkie, miserable, desperate for money. De Quincey sat down and wrote this thing and also managed to really change the culture. I saw Win as someone who could be that person.

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