Interview:
Martin Perlich

1. Your Adequacy Quartet is loosely based on your journal entries, which you began when you first moved to Los Angeles in 1972. At what point in your life when you were ready to adapt these writings into novel form? What inspired you to pursue creative writing outside of journaling?

I started writing when I left university to live in Florence. But quickly realized: at 21 I had too little life to write about, so tapped out a few ‘poems’ on my Olivetti portable and---after a year of impersonating an opera accompanistee — sailed for New York.

For a few years in the Midwest, I wrote radio scripts, reviews, columns and articles. Maybe a few more ‘poems’ — finished and not-so-finished. I came to LA in 1972 as a jock on KMET, and then worked in various forms of music TV.

When, as a single parent in the '80s I would drive my young son around to activities, doctors, etc., I began carrying a legal pad with me. These were the beginnings of my Journals — of the '70s, '80s and '90s — which at some point filled two large cardboard boxes. A radio colleague loaned me one of the new home computers — another Olivetti portable, as luck would have it — and I decided to type as many of my journals as I could into the new medium, saving the results on floppy discs.

At some point in the early '80s, I realized I’d amassed more than 1,000 pages of Journals. Writer friends said “it’s at least one novel!” I divided it into two drafts, ‘novelized’ over many years  — on the side, as I shuttled between other projects: film, TV, radio. etc.  — and the first two novels seem to have emerged: The Wild Times and The Perfect Fool. The third novel  — Adequacy  — s a fictionalization of my bout with clinical depression in the late 90s.
 

2. You once referred to your novel series as a “Styronesqe Epic,” referring to the writings of William Styron. This was especially evident in Adequacy because you describe with full, unflinching, brutal honesty how depression cannot only affect the person who has the disease, but also everyone he/she encounters. Every time an author’s work is read, he/she feels a type of vulnerability. Since the Quartet is based on your life — especially when you deal with depression in Inadequacy  — were you ever reluctant making your stories public? Has there been any backlash from your friends, family, and co-workers in terms of how they were portrayed in your books?

   I still feel vulnerable; but I always treat my friends well in my novels. As for my co-workers: they get what they deserve. I guess I’ll leave it to the lawyers to decide whether or not I’m in danger of charges of libel. Let the games begin, so to speak.

3. On the subject of Styron, I am saddened to say that I have never read his memoir Darkness Visible, which deals with his depression. Have you read that book and if so, did it play an important role in how you technically approached the Quartet? And if not, was there any novel that dealt with depression, which helped guide?

   Yeah, Darkness Visible was extremely influential, but I didn’t even know about it till midway through Adequacy. In any case the ideas, characters, story line, and narrative arc come directly from my journals. The Styron book, as excellent as it is, is an ex post facto account by a writer of recognized genius, as opposed to Adequacy — a real-time chronicle by a writer of debatable talent — me. My most fervent hope is that my book — the third in the Adequacy Quartet — reflecting the moment-to-moment suffering of the author of the journals — will provide the reader a different (do I dare say “more intense and visceral”?) contact with what victims of clinical depression go through day-to-day.
   
   In any case, the books that influenced me the most were by Kay Jamison: An Unquiet Mind  — an account of her lifelong bipolar disorder, and Night Falls Fast magisterial study of suicide.
    

4. Another dominant feature in your book series is the “counterculture character” of the '70s. Would you say it had a more sociological impact (in terms of the arts, science and technology, religion and politics) on the U.S. than the '60s (which had often been labeled as the decade that changed everything)?

   Good Question. Here is the answer (excerpted from my first 2 novels:
   
          “In the 60s the only direction was Out. We had all simply wanted out. Out of the Las Vegas culture that thinks that Vietnam is fine as long as you keep it off television, of the suburban security-guaranteed, air-conditioned nightmare of denied feelings and objectification, of the world of Better-Thans and Stronger-Thans and Richer-Thans and No-You-Can’t. Death on Lay-Away.

          “No!! Out!!

          “No Frank Sinatra. No Nixon. No Mom and Dad. Tune out; fade out, zone out, check out. Light out for somewhere else, where the smell of brain cells soaking in Booth’s or Tanqueray wouldn’t rot our olfactory bulbs. Out of sight, out of our minds, out to getcha, outer limits. Whip it out. Out at the plate. We outta here.

          “In the 60s they were “The Kids” as they were known then to the newly hatched youth industries targeting them for Market Day. By the end of the 70s they’d become solid citizens, cautiously eyeing retirement accounts and maturing portfolios, but in 1970 charter members of the Youth Culture were just beginning to begin their own Long March, a decade-long relax into the new media-calibration as “Boomers”.
   War Babies. Hatched when their soldier dads climbed out of foxholes and into beds with girls they’d left behind.

          Baby-boomers

          But not all the children born before after V-J Day in 1945 were prospering by the end of the 70s. Some, to be sure, were moldering in graves far away in Southeast Asia. Others had made it back ‘in one piece’, from their war only to rot on the topsoil of Rust Bowl center-cities sidewalks  — alcohol, coke, speed and heroin their lover and sweet death, as nightmares, rage and chronic unemployment succumbed to the interrupted synapses of drug-deepened despair.

          Vietnam had lain across the American landscape like an unclaimed fart. No one seemed put off by the smell. Every time you looked up the handhold of the vaunted Counter-culture was loosing its grip. Bureaucracies grew where victories had first pushed through the frozen tundra of mid-century. Black studies, Feminism and Calvin Klein replaced Civil Rights, Women’s Liberation and the leveling facade of denim, in Berkeley, “Woodstock”, and most everywhere else.

    

5. The one thing I admire about your depiction of Mitchell Hertz, your alter-ego in the series, is how “real” he is, meaning he is very human. Too often I have read books by authors whose works are on the NY Times Best Selling List that portray their protagonists as heroes who “just can’t do anything wrong.” You show Mitchell in his truest human form, warts and all. And yet, he’s sympathetic without being maudlin. While writing these novels, how difficult was it for you to maintain this balance of “humanity”?

   Well I hope it’s not, as your question seems to imply, the only thing”! But paranoid quibbling aside, the act of ‘journaling’ (as they say in therapy) is telling the truth. No one’s going to read it (despite what Susan Sontag says) so ‘let the warts grow’, say I.

6. I remarked that your writing is very similar to two talented writers: the technical style of Jack Kerouac and the emotional sensitivity of J.D. Salinger. Who were your literary influences that might have played an important part in the formation of your novels? Has your musical background played a role in how you approach your writing?

   The usual masters. In chronological order: Kerouac, Mailer, Baldwin, Isherwood, Ginsburg, Salinger, Miller, Genet, Selby, Orwell, Bukowski, Proust, Burroughs, Bowles, Pirandello, Brecht and many more I can’t remember. All autobiographical novelists – as far as I can tell – from whom I’ve tried to derive certain lessons. For example Bukowski way of creating fictional names (SEE: Question 8)

7. In the beginning of your instructional interviewing guide, The Art of the Interview, you give two simple rules: Prepare and listen. I read this after I read your novels and I discovered that these two rules should also be the essential tools for a writer, especially in journal writing. What other “rules” have you utilized when you created your Quartet?

   Re listening: I think I’m insufficiently observant of details; I think I’m terrible at locations, descriptions, characterization. I write from Journals, where it is unusual for an author to follow the novelist’s craft. So I use only those details, which seem emotionally relevant, i.e. the ones I remember. As far as research, I’ve had more or less full-time employments: multiple overlapping projects, ‘day jobs’ in radio, etc. which have left me almost no time to do formal research (especially before the Internet). Which is why I write about myself: not only do I not know anything else to write about, but also the Journals stand in for research as such.

8. You describe a lot of revealing personalities in your series, specifically the characters that Mitchell deals with during the radio broadcasting years. Understandably, you had to change the names for legal reasons. After all four books in your quartet are published, are you going to delve into — either as a memoir or as a novel — regarding your experiences at KCSN and its sad demise of the talk show format? Or is there a different project you are going to work on? What’s next for Martin Perlich?

   As I was saying about Bukowski: He uses fictional names that are almost caricatures of the real-life originals. So I feel free to use the renaming process not to disguise, but rather to comment on the characters themselves. As far as Adequacy (the third novel), which is set against the background of a prominent LA public radio station, I’m actually scared poopless! I am hoping that whoever ends up publishing it will have brilliant legal minds on staff.
   
   Well… the last novel American Trance is, like its three predecessors, a work of fiction. Currently (December 2008) barely sketched from journals, emails, etc from my KCSN years. But, like Adequacy, it uses the radio station only as background, the story residing with Mitch’s tormented neurology.