Pulphead: Essays
Amazon Best Books of the  Month, November 2011: What a fresh and daring voice. John Jeremiah Sullivan is a dynamic and gutsy writer, a cross between Flannery O'Connor and a decaffeinated Tom Wolfe, with just the right dash of Hunter S. Thompson. In fourteen essays ranging from an Axl Rose profile to an RV trek to a Christian rock festival to the touching story of his brother's near-death electrocution, Sullivan writes funny, beautiful, and very real sentences. The sum of these stories portrays a real America, including the vast land between the coasts. Staying just this side of cynical, Sullivan displays respect for his subjects, no matter how freakish they may seem (see Axl Rose). Put another way: if Tom Waits wrote essays, they might sound likePulphead.--Neal ThompsonExclusive Amazon.com Interview:[if !mso]> <style> v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} </style> <![endif][if gte mso 9]><xml> <o:OfficeDocumentSettings> <o:AllowPNG  /> </o:OfficeDocumentSettings> </xml><![endif][if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:View>Normal</w:View> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:TrackMoves>false</w:TrackMoves> <w:TrackFormatting  /> <w:PunctuationKerning  /> <w:ValidateAgainstSchemas  /> <w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:DoNotPromoteQF  /> <w:LidThemeOther>EN-US</w:LidThemeOther> <w:LidThemeAsian>X-NONE</w:LidThemeAsian> <w:LidThemeComplexScript>X-NONE</w:LidThemeComplexScript> <w:Compatibility> <w:BreakWrappedTables  /> <w:SnapToGridInCell  /> 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Roman","serif";} </style> <![endif]Though his stories have appeared for a decade inHarper's,GQ, and other magazines, John Jeremiah Sullivan wasn’t a recognizable name untilPulpheadstarted landing on year-end best-books lists, includingTime, theNew York Times, and Amazon'sBest Books of 2011. TheNew Yorker’sJames Woodcompares himto Raymond Carver - "with hints of Emerson and Thoreau." Elsewhere, Sullivan has been called the new Tom Wolfe, David Foster Wallace, or Hunter S. Thompson, or some combination of all three.I prefer to think of him more as the Tom Waits of long-form journalism.Sullivan’s sportswriter father was an early and lasting influence. "The stuff he wrote was so weird, when I go back and look at it. It would almost have to be classified as creative non-fiction," Sullivan told me.I asked Sullivan if his father encouraged him to become a writer."He did the smartest and best thing he could have done for me, which was to take a very coolly distant but encouraging attitude,” he said. “I think he could tell early on that it's what I was going to do, that I wasn't really suited for much else.After college and a brief “lost period” in Ireland, Sullivan got an internship atThe Oxford Americanmagazine and spent a month in Mississippi, living in a brown-carpeted room at the Ole Miss hotel, with hookers conducting their business nearby.One night, Sullivan told his editor, Marc Smirnoff, about his musician brother’s near-death electrocution from a microphone. Smirnoff suggested he write a story about it, giving Sullivan his first professional byline."It was just one of those things where somebody opens the door and steps aside and says, 'Don't f**k it up'," Sullivan said. "And that piece made a lot of cool things happen for me."Cool things like bylines inHarper's,The Paris Review, andThe New York Times Magazine.Over the next decade he honed his reporting skills, his unique voice (personal not cynical, thoughtful not intellectual), and a particular interest in outliers. I asked: do you look for oddballs, or do they find you? "It probably betrays a weakness for grotesques," he said. "And grotesques give you little angles of insight into human nature. There are things they can't help exposing."Sometimes I take pleasure in writing about people who make it hard for you to see their basic humanity. It gives me a very clear task as a writer to insist on it."Pulpheadis filled with hunks of other people’s sometimes misshapen humanity."The things that can happen to people... it just blows your mind."Four more questions for Sullivan:Where      do you work? "I used to be one of those people who could write      anywhere but for the first time I've become real attached to this corner      office in our house that’s become sort of a cocoon. I keep it real      disgusting so nobody will ever want to come in here. My daughter will show      it to friends, almost like you'd show somebody the dungeon."Who      are you reading? "It’s more about staying in constant contact      with writing, always being intosomewriter. That keeps me      inspired and it keeps me feeling like, when I sit down to write, it's part      of a preexisting and ongoing conversation. It's not the scary void that      people talk about of the white page. I do everything I can to cancel out      that feeling."You’re      a fan of bourbon – can you write drunk? - "Drinking and smoking      for me are useful for getting over humps. For cracking things open. But if      I try to do it in a sustained way, it gets kind of sloppy and      pudding-headed. So I have to introduce it into the process at the right      moments … (Bourbon) gives you a little bit of that what-the-f**k      feeling."Do you      think of yourself as a southern writer? "I'm not an authentic      southerner by anyone's definition, and I don't self-identify as a southern      writer … I'm interested in regionalism. The fact that I sort of grew up      back and forth between the Midwest and the South, it sensitized me to the      differences early on … Mainly I’m interested in the psycho-geography of      regionalism, and how it gives shape to people's personalities.”