I am a Chuck Palahniuk fan. I love his voice. I love his fiction and his real life accounts. His trials and tribulations, successes and failures. His eclectic experiences with family, friends, loss, lame day-jobs and his practical advice on writing. I especially dig his non-fiction oddities, bizarre observations and first hand anecdotes. He is one of the most fascinating authors alive today.
Palahniuk’s newest People, Places Things: My Human Landmarks debuted exclusively as a Scribd original this week. Available in audiobook and ebook formats this personal essay is a reflection of influences that have helped shape his work and life. Scribd is the reading subscription that offers access to a WHOLE bunch of content and is a cost-effective way to read a lot of books. A vast online library with originals from Margaret Atwood, Charles Yu, Roxane Gay and many, many, MANY others.
In People, Places, Things: My Human Landmarks, you can read all the thinking on display. Degrees of separation are in full effect here. While Palahniuk takes an atypical approach sharing challenges that he has overcome and nightmares that he still lives with today, he also instructs right from the start with “When you are learning to write, never start with your most important story.” It’s about the journey and not the destination, right? Anything you choose is still you.
His writing style is built extensively on a hyper-specific formula. That’s not a bad thing, the formula (like using “choruses” and repetition, like “I am Jack’s *blank*”) works like gangbusters when you first encounter it. In this essay, there are a lot of mantras such as ‘Case in Point’ and ‘Let it be tagged as People’s Exhibit’ A,B,C, or whatever tangible evidence provided by the prosecutor to indicate a defense’s guilt. Palahniuk’s prose is best described as a form of personal confession, but told with the eye of a cultural anthropologist, voyeur, and journalist all wrapped in one. A keen and sensitive observer, Palahniuk covers a lot through flash-forwards, sideways and flash-backs. Through triangulation of small towns and serial killers, wars that use us and how some cope by taking the ugly stuff of life turning into art AND if a dream was actually a dream, or a memory of a memory of a memory, etc. Palahniuk can be very intense and every page of People. Places, Things: My Human Landmarks holds insight.
You can find it from Scribd. Highly recommended.