T. C. Boyle / Features / Untitled Books

If I wasn't writing? I'd be dead.

T. C. Boyle

T. C. Boyle is the author of twelve books, and many more short stories. His latest novel,The Women, is about the relationships in the life of the architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

I'll take the Fifth Amendment on that one.

Where are you right now?

At home, staring through the mullions of Frank Lloyd Wright's first California house and out into the greenery beyond.

Where do you write?

At home, staring through the mullions, etc.

How do you write?

Only God (if He/She happens to be lurking anywhere near) or my psychiatrist could answer that one.

What keeps you writing?

An obsessive/compulsive disorder. For elucidation, see my essay about the writing process, This Monkey, My Back, at tcboyle.com, at the bottom of the About the Author page. The short answer, though, is that I have no choice.

Who do you write for?

Everyone in the world who knows how to read.

Do you discuss your work with anyone?

No. But I do read aloud to my long-suffering wife nearly every day, just to hear the rhythms of the day's work.

How do you know if your work is good?

Excellent question. Instinct, I suppose. Rigorous self-criticism. Experience. Feel the joy.

Do you have any unwritten characters in mind?

I want to say hundreds, but the real number more closely approximates thousands.

Which book do you wish you'd written?

The numbers here are similar to the ones above. And there are many by my contemporaries I'd love to have written, but to spare them any embarrassment, I'll pick one from the past: Tortilla Flat. This is a novel that holds up beautifully--I've just recently reread it--and that plumbs a wonderfully charming, not to mention hilarious, American mythos.

What is your literary guilty pleasure?

I don't read genre books, so I guess I don't have one. Unless you count nature/ecology books, which I love. But I never feel guilty about them. Even when the sexual habits of weasels are invoked.

Which writer made you want to write?

First was Hemingway, as with all American male writers, but it wasn't till I discovered Flannery O'Connor in college and the wild worlds of Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon and John Barth shortly thereafter that I felt the uncontrollable itch.

Who's the most exciting author writing today?

I'll take the Fifth Amendment on that one.

If you weren't writing you'd be...?

Dead.

What next?

A new book of stories, Wild Child, due out next year at this time, and a new new novel, now about two-thirds finished, for the following year. And, I fervently hope, a whole new spate of stories I'd like to be writing by the end of this current and yet very young year.

Tuesday, 10 March, 2009