Steve Almond
The author on shame, candy, Kurt Vonnegut, and surviving reality TV
Steve Almond is Boston's self-proclaimed "Dork-Stud Writer Mascot." He is the author of two collections of sexy, canny short stories - My Life in Heavy Metal (2002) and The Evil B.B. Chow (2005) - he's co-authored a novel (2006's Which Brings Me to You, with Julianna Baggott) and given us last year's Candyfreak, a delicious confection of memoir and candy diatribe, tracing the heart-wrenching demise of the independent American candy manufacturer and Almond's own lifelong obsession with sweets.
In the just-released Not that You Asked: Rants, Exploits and Obsessions, Almond switches over into point-blank essay writing, giving us the straight stuff on all his other obsessions: his teenage hot tub abuse, his illustrious career as "The Red Sox Antichrist," or his paean to Kurt Vonnegut, his boyhood literary hero. To love Almond is to love voice, and that flawed, snarky, horny, dweeby guy you crushed on in college. He's familiar, yet strange and always funny. With this new book, Almond "wants us to know that he's not just a clown. He's an upright citizen, who is heartbroken at the state of moral decline in this fallen world."
-Erika Schickel
CityBeat: So many of these essays are dealing with shame on various levels. What pushes you in that direction?
Steve Almond: To put it in cynical terms, that's the good material. You have to really find the emotionally dangerous moments in your life and write about them honestly. I'm always looking at those experiences and saying, "God that fucked me up. What was I doing? That sucked to be that angry, that aggrieved." I'm not going to varnish it, I'm not going to obscure it with "style." In fact, shame is the style, so deal.
In your essay "Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt" you describe a panel you saw Kurt Vonnegut do towards the end of his life in which everyone spoke in inane sound bites and Vonnegut seemed ineffably sad.
Vonnegut at the end of his life was heartbroken. He'd been sending the same, simple message for 60 years-plus as a writer: We must be more kind to one another, we mustn't thoughtlessly kill one another, we must question why some people have tons of money and resources and why others don't, and we must recognize that as a fucked up, childish way of being. What the assholes on that panel didn't understand was that ultimately this world wore him down.
The end of that essay is kind of nihilistic, isn't it?
I hope it isn't nihilistic ... I don't think the best part of Kurt Vonnegut was what we saw on that panel, but is in his books and those remain a precious human achievement. Sixteen year-old kids who are fucked up and confused and raging on bad hormones find those books and are suddenly much more human because of them.
You got a lot of hassle for quitting your job at Boston College after they invited Condi Rice as commencement speaker. You got drawn into bruising debates with right-wing pundits like Sean Hannity. Was it worth it?
Oh, hell yes. I'd have never met - or slept with - Sean Hannity if I'd just remained a quiet little liberal church mouse. That mean fratboy thing he does on TV? That's not who Sean really is. He's a totally sensitive lover.
Seriously, he kicked my ass sideways! You can't say to [him], "You know, Sean, obviously you're an angry, troubled guy, and that's not the best of who you are. You're articulate and it's okay if you want to have certain conservative principals, but why are you so absolutely hateful?" Pop culture just keeps us at the level of grievance and mindless stimulation.
Speaking of which, what about your stint on the reality TV show Totally Obsessed where you became the self-described "Candy Monkey" aping for the camera? Worth the humiliation?
It's my God-given right as an American to act like a dipshit on TV. That's in the Constitution! It's the new American Dream, the driving ecstatic delusion of our age. If I'd refused to allow that TV crew to invade my home and take over my life for three days, that would be like allowing the terrorists to win.
I get why [reality TV is] so seductive. We're all drama queens inside and we get off on these shows. But they are falsely conjured, inauthentic dramas. The folks who came and did that reality TV show were all telling themselves, "I'm gonna keep it real, I'm gonna make an important piece of art ..." [But] the real story is anything that makes money, regardless of quality, will be considered important and successful. Period.
If you were to pit religion against capitalism, which do you think would come out of the ring alive?
Well Capitalism is religion at this point. It says whatever you have you have a right to, and nobody should fuck with that, and if they do they're fucking Communists/immigrants/homosexuals whatever. I was reading a Giuliani profile in The New Yorker and he had this quote: "The thing that scares me about Hilary Clinton is she wants this health care stuff. It's just some kind of crazy idea of taking your money away and giving it to people who are in need." And I just thought, What?! And his supporters are going: "That's right! Fuck those people, what have they done for us? It's not my problem that they were born poor, goddamn cleft palette, drooling on me!" It's insanely selfish.
So what are you doing about it?
I'm gonna make my little stand and hope that some people respond to it. I quit my part-time job, [thinking] okay, maybe this will shine a light on Condoleezza Rice's actual record. Fuck, no. Totally not. Instead, it was the right-wing nuts who were kind of like, "We've chewed up Cindy Sheehan, she's done, now who's this dumbshit? Let's come after him." They're all false moralists so they need to attack anybody who they even suspect has a genuine conscience.
The reason I'm trying to put essays into the world instead of short stories is because I feel a powerful sense of that social responsibility. Artists and writers in the absence of a more humane, compassionate, consistent message of religion or politics have to start being insistent and hold a mirror up and say, "Look, greed is fundamentally wrong." I feel like if we are going to beat all these people out there retailing hate, there have got to be some people on the other side saying, "No!"
Most people still know you as the guy who wrote Candyfreak. Are you cool with that?
Absolutely! It's my dream to be viewed as a sugar-fueled superclown for the rest of my life. Given the choice between literary respectability - contributing to the cultural discourse about the meaning of consciousness - versus free, high-grade chocolate, I mean, it's really no contest.
Memoirs are so pervasive in publishing these days. Do you ever see memoir as the reality TV of writing?
It's a great question because there are superficial similarities, but it's actually the opposite of one another. Reality shows are the opposite of sustained self-reflection. When you read a good book you are caught up in it, not witnessing it. The equivalent in the literary world would be writing in the ironic mode. Looking down on all those foolish humans as they go about their foolish tricks. But that's not what great literature does. Great literature says: "You too are a fool and how are you going to bear it?" You can only bear it by realizing you're not alone. I'm comforted by the sorrow I find in literature, but when I watch reality TV, I feel more lonely than ever.
Published: 09/20/2007
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