A drug user's guide to not writing

Essayist Geoff Dyer on the difference between fiction and nonfiction (none), the usefulness of marijuana, and the importance of doing nothing.

By Suzy Hansen

Feb 24, 2003 | In "The Rain Inside," one of 11 essays in Geoff Dyer's "Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It," the author falls apart. Sitting in a Detroit diner called the Clique, looking out the window and noticing the rain, Dyer writes: "That day in the Clique I looked down and saw it was raining inside as well as outside. My egg-smeared plate was becoming wet. Drops of water were falling onto my toast, moistening my eggy hash browns. As I looked it rained harder and I could not see. I was crying."

At the time of his ostensible breakdown, Dyer was visiting the Detroit Electronic Music Festival. His search for some sort of erotic encounter had failed, and one might assume that he was suffering from terrible loneliness. But readers ought to remember Dyer's introduction to the book before diving into the rest: "Everything in this book really happened, but some of the things that happened only happened in my head; by the same token, all the things that didn't happen didn't happen there too."

What's remarkable is that you never know what's fact and what's fiction in Dyer's essays and, perhaps more important, you don't care. As in "Out of Sheer Rage," a hilarious account of Dyer's excruciating attempt to write a critical study of D.H. Lawrence, the essays in "Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It" defy categorization. They blend travel writing and memoir, criticism and fiction. The result is often exhilarating, and endlessly entertaining.

In his latest effort, Dyer travels from Rome to Libya to Indonesia to the Burning Man festival in the Black Rock Desert of northern Nevada. But he was in his favorite city of all, San Francisco, when he spoke to Salon about the one experience that nearly ruined him as a writer, why he doesn't feel the pressure to write fiction anymore, and why, for writers, drugs should be tax deductible.

At the publisher's luncheon for your new book you said that you were starting to feel that you didn't have to write fiction anymore. Is that true? Why do you think that many writers think that writing fiction is the crowning achievement of their career?

I think the answer would have to be historical. Now more and more is being done in the "neither one thing or the other" realm, so I'm happy to be one of the people opening up that territory. It sort of bugs me that some of the most conventional or least novel things being written are actually novels. So often it seems to me that the whole form of many novels is close to a cliché. You notice it in the last 40 pages of a book, when you feel it all being driven towards its novelistic apotheosis and climax.

Do you read much contemporary fiction at this point?

Less and less as I get older. But then, when I read "The Corrections," it was a fantastic experience of complete immersion in this other world. Recently in England Richard Yates has been rediscovered, so I read "Revolutionary Road," and there is a thoroughly traditional novel that's really, really gripping. Quite often now I can't be bothered to go through the whole process of the novel becoming a novel. The remarkable thing about "The Corrections" is that it starts being amazingly gripping by Page 3. I recently read the new T.C. Boyle book, "Drop City," which again I was loving from Page 2. So the experience is still available.

So you don't have any plans to write another novel?

No, all the time that I was failing to write "Paris, Trance" I had this sense of regret and failure hanging over me because I'd always wanted to do my version of "Tender Is the Night." And then I did it and it really did sum up what I wanted to say and let me work through my Fitzgerald thing. Now I feel happy in this first-person stuff which has elements of fiction but wouldn't end up being classified as a novel.

I think I was always disadvantaged when it came to writing fiction in that I have never been able to think of stories or plots. There are ways of getting around that. There's that famous E.M. Forster comment, "Oh dear, yes, the novel tells a story." Still, plot and story are important parts of a novel. In addition to that, I felt I'd never been that strong on character either.

When I left university, I thought there were two ways to go: Either you became a writer, which meant you wrote novels, or you became a critic, which meant you wrote about other people's novels. Then I discovered [the work of] these European people like Roland Barthes -- it was commentary and it was incredibly imaginative. Walter Benjamin would be part of that. And then crucially there was John Berger, who, although he was English, seemed very much in that European mode of "neither one thing or the other"-type writing. His book on Picasso ("The Success and Failure of Picasso"), which was this incredible work of art history and art criticism, was also as gripping as a novel.

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