Why Chuck Palahniuk Enjoys Making People Uncomfortable

What is it about that feeling of discomfort that brings you joy? Or that you enjoy giving to people that are reading your stuff? Is it just that you don't like the cliche sloppy endings where everything is going to be fine and everything is great and the world is different in literature than it is in real life? What is it about these moments of darkness where you do break everybody's heart? Why do you enjoy them so much? I enjoy them because they prove I'm not the only one. I'm not the only one that's had these moments of complete humiliation. More complete powerlessness. One story I've always loved is my best friend in college, his father was this mining professor and this very super macho guy. My best friend Franz was like the son that just wasn't turning out right. In their household they had a bunch of kids, girls and boys. One day Franz's dad had all of his beer drinking football buds over to watch the Super Bowl. Franz found this old doll that had been around the house for decades. It was called Sissy and it barely had a hair left on its little doll head. Franz sat there as maybe a five or six year old little boy. He very carefully untangled Sissy's hair and he back combed it and he teased it and he dressed it into a big bouffant. He even got one of his mother's broaches and he put that brooch through the front of this beehive hairdo to hold it in place. He was so proud that he turned this really decrepit ugly thing into something passably pretty. He had sort of redeemed it and then he took it to his father in front of all of his father's friends in the Super Bowl. He said, Daddy, Daddy look, I made Sissy pretty. And his father was so humiliated that he beat Franz right there in front of their whole peer group. He just beat Franz. And the story is so painful but everybody's had a pain like that. Everybody has done that thing out of innocence and expression that for whatever reason got you slammed and nobody talks about it. Nobody talks about it because it's so painful and because everyone thinks they're the only one. And so if I can take some of those stories and bring them to light, it creates this opening for everyone to say, oh my God, I once did this thing and my parents reacted badly to it. Or it destroyed my life and I've never been the same. And when Franz told me that story, he was almost weeping, but he was laughing as he was telling the story because he had to keep laughing in order to keep telling the story. And that's what I'm always shooting for. Those are the moments, like those kind of stories are the ones that hit people the hardest because you know that the child has no idea that what they're doing is going to be uncomfortable for anybody. Like they have real pride in it. Like here's the parallels, the story that you told before, I guess three years ago, when you were talking about the writing workshop that you had done where you were talking about someone else's story about how they were jacking off in a jacuzzi and their anus got prolapsed. And this woman in the writing workshop felt comfortable enough because you told that story to tell her story about being in the Girl Scouts or the Brownies, the Brownies before the Girl Scouts. The heating pad story. The heating pad story, where she had put this vibrating heating pad on her vagina and had her friends do the same thing and the mom came home and she was only seven years old. She thought it was cool. Like, look, I found this thing. And then the mom beat her with the wire that was plugged into the wall and called her a dirty whore and she never orgasmed again. And she said in summation that if I could tell the story that I had just told that was so self-debasing and so humiliating, but also make it funny, then that would that gave her proof that she could make her own story. Funny and that maybe she could someday go back to her mother and say, remember the heating pad and that maybe ultimately she could have an orgasm because until you can kind of reveal these things and resolve them, they run the rest of your life and you're never going to get beyond them. Yeah, especially when you don't see it coming when you're just a child and then you do something that you think is totally fine. And all of a sudden you're getting the fuck beaten out of you and you don't understand why. All you did is make a doll pretty. Like, what happened? Well, and it occurs in so many different ways. Several years ago, I got a job house sitting a farm that was famous for being haunted and had all these paranormal studies. So as soon as the owners were gone, I invited a bunch of psychics out to do a seance and I wanted to know. And my father had been murdered about five years before that. And one of these psychic women that I had never met before said there was a man standing with you. He's wearing a white t-shirt and he's holding something wooden and he is really, really sorry he did what he did. But he was in a very, very young man at the time. He was only 23 or 24. He's holding something wooden and he's about to dismember you. Does that make any sense whatsoever? And I just kind of nodded my head and I said, I have no idea what you're talking about. But when I was maybe three or four years old, my mother had taken my siblings into town and I was in our rural farm. And I put a fender washer around one of my fingers and I couldn't get it off. And so I waited until the finger was swollen up and turning sort of purple black. And I went to my father and I said, can you help me with this washer thing? And my father had said, I can help you, but I want you to learn a lesson that you have to, there are consequences to everything you do. And I will help you with a washer if you accept responsibility for your actions for the rest of your life. And he took me and we had to wash the axe that we kill chickens with. We had this hatchet and he took me and we sharpened the hatchet and we washed it really thoroughly so there were no germs on it. And then he had me kneel down by the chopping block and put my hand on the chopping block. And at the time, there was no drama. It was just complete clarity. My father was helping me to resolve the situation. And at the last moment, he missed my hand with the axe. The axe went into the chopping block and then we went inside and used dish soap to take the washer off. And I knew that story would just make my mother insane. So I never told anybody my entire life that story.