Fight Club

book, Fight Club.
    It was only seven pages because my writing teacher, Tom Spanbauer, had joked that seven pages was the perfect length for a short story.
    To make the short story into a book, I added every story my friends could tell. Every party I attended gave me more material. There’s the story about Mike splicing porno into family movies. There’s the story about Geoff pissing in soup as a banquet waiter. Once, a friend worried these stories might prompt people to copycat, and I insisted that we were just blue-collar nobodies living in Oregon with public school educations. There was nothing we could imagine that a million people weren’t already doing.
    Years later, in London, a young man pulled me aside before a book event. He was a waiter at a five-star restaurant—one of only two five-star restaurants in the city—and he loved how I’d depicted waiters spoiling food. Long before they’d read my book, he and the other servers had messed with the food they served celebrities.
    When I asked him to name one celebrity, he shook his head. No, he couldn’t risk telling.
    When I refused to sign his book, he waved me closer and whispered:
    "Margaret Thatcher has eaten my cum.”
    He held up one hand, his fingers spread, and said:
    "At least five times…”
    In the workshop where I started to write fiction, you had to read your work in public. Most times, you read in a bar or coffeehouse where you’d be competing with the roar of the espresso machine. Or the football game on television. Music and drunk people talking. Against all this noise and distraction, only the most shocking, most physical, dark and funny stories got heard. Our test audience would never sit still for "Barn-Raising Club.”
    Really, what I was writing was just The Great Gatsby, updated a little. It was "apostolic” fiction—where a surviving apostle tells the story of his hero. There are two men and a woman. And one man, the hero, is shot to death.
    It was a classic, ancient romance but updated to compete with the espresso machine and ESPN.
    It took me three months to write that first draft, and the book sold to W. W. Norton in three days. For an advance so small I never told anyone. Not anybody. It was six thousand dollars. Other authors now tell me this is called "kiss-off money.” It’s an advance so low the author is supposed to feel insulted and walk away. This lets the publisher off the hook without offending any staff members who wanted to acquire the book.
    Still, it was six thousand dollars. That would pay my rent for a year. So I took it. And in August 1996, there was a hardcover book. And a three-city tour—Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco—where no more than three people showed up at any reading. The book sales didn’t even cover what I drank out of the hotel minibars.
    One reviewer called the book science fiction. Another called it a satire on the Iron John men’s movement. Another called it a satire of corporate white-collar culture. Some called it horror. No one called it a romance.
    In Berkeley, a radio interviewer asked me: "Having written this book, what can you tell us about the status of the American woman in the world, today?”
    In Los Angeles, a college professor on National Public Radio said the book was a failure because it didn’t address the issue of racism.
    On a plane back to Portland, an airline flight attendant leaned close and asked me to tell him the truth. His theory was the book wasn’t really about fighting at all. He insisted it was really about gay men watching one another fuck in public steambaths.
    I told him, yeah, what the hell. And he gave me free drinks for the rest of the flight.
    Other reviewers hated it. Oh, they called it "too dark.” "Too violent.” "Too strident and shrill and dogmatic.” They would’ve loved "Barn-Raising Club.”
    Still, it won the 1997 Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, and the 1997 Oregon Book Award for best novel. A year later, at the KGB literary bar in lower Manhattan, a woman introduced herself to me. She was the lead judge for the Oregon award and said she had to fight tooth and nail to convince the other judges. God bless her.
    A year later, in the same bar, another woman introduced herself to me, saying how she’d be designing the computer-animated penguin for the Fight Club movie.
    Then, there was Brad Pitt and Edward Norton and Helena Bonham Carter.
    Since then, thousands of people have written, most of them saying "thank you.” For