A drug user's guide to not writing

Would you say that you personally were in a state of ruin for the pieces in "Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It"?

Well. My friend said something quite clever about the book. He said that if "Paris, Trance" is my version of "Tender Is the Night," which it certainly was, then this was my version of "The Crack-Up" [Fitzgerald's semi-fictional memoir of his alcoholic collapse]. Yeah, the book does record some unhappy moments. For example, last night [at a reading in Seattle] I was reading the bit about Detroit where I collapsed into tears. Everyone was really disappointed. They said, "Oh, so you had some kind of breakdown." I said, "That's all a bit exaggerated for comic effect."

There was a lot of malaise going on. It seems a bit of a cliché to reduce it to a midlife crisis. One of the historic novelties of our time is that you can be in a state of crisis from adolescence onward.

Very often, as you admit, you're blurring fact and fiction.

Oh, yes, always. I was saying the other night that at one stage it looked like they were going to publish this as a book of nonfiction in the U.S. and as a work of fiction in England. I liked that very much. The distinction means absolutely nothing to me. The fiction I've written tends to be autobiographically based and I like to write stuff that's maybe only an inch from what really happened. An awful lot of artifice and contrivance and art can take place in that inch. The test is hopefully that you can't tell when I go from faithfully transcribing what happened to completely inventing something, or importing something from somebody else's life. To that extent, the technique is indistinguishable from that of the fiction writer.

I especially wondered about this during the passages while you were on drugs: the piece on Paris, "Skunk," and the passage about the trousers in the Amsterdam piece, "Hotel Oblivion." How did these memories come to you if you were so messed up? Or, rather, were they even true?

That would be a good example because last night I read the bit about the trousers in Seattle and they were really disappointed when I said I made that up. That was something that a friend told me, about being on acid and trying to change his trousers and putting the same ones on again. I imported that into my story and completely exaggerated it. The Paris one is, of all the pieces, the most straightforwardly literal and exactly what happened that day.

Let's stay on drugs. Were they just incidental or did you want to experience certain places in that way for a specific reason?

I suppose I would broaden the question out and say, "Was the traveling something I did on purpose?" It's funny that at this moment I'm perceived as a travel writer, but you know, I don't particularly travel. All I do is live my life. Traveling is of course a part of that, and so is writing. It would be a not-so-good life if I didn't travel. Is travel incidental to the life or inherent to it? Well, it's inherent. And the same way with the drug use really. I've liked taking drugs for a good long while and it's pretty much always, apart from the few freakouts, been really valuable on the level of this kind of responsiveness to place. As I say in that Paris piece, it enables one sometimes to have these really intense responses to a place. There's a long tradition of that.

On the other hand I find it useful on the creative level. Smoking pot when writing seems to be incredibly useful. A typical thing that people say is that when you're stoned you write all this stuff and you think it's so great and in the morning you think it's all garbage. Well, the truth is that some of it is garbage, and lots of it is not usable in exactly the state in which you scrawled it all down, but you make all sorts of connections and ideas. To that extent, I really think that as a writer it should be tax deductible. There's that nice line of Thomas Pynchon's: "Marijuana -- that useful substance."

In terms of the psychedelics, well, that's a different thing because obviously psychedelic experiences are so huge. You get into this whole realm of the visionary and you're much less able at that moment to record what's happening. But afterwards, just as when you've had any big experience in your life, the impulse is to communicate.

That's all the nice, positive side of head drugs. Then what can also happen is this great desire to heighten the moment, to make a great moment still greater. Of course, you can just mess it up. I'm quite drawn to the confusion that drug use can lead to. That incredible chronic indecision -- there's a lot of scope for not just humor. That in itself provides insight into a contemporary malaise.

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