JJS: Yeah, you know it’s weird. Right at the time when colleagues of mine were starting to do that kind of thing, I was getting married and having kids and buying a house. When I left New York, I made all of the major life decisions in about four months. So it kind of—it didn’t really preclude me from doing it, but it made me a lot less inclined. It had something to do with my turning more inward, and starting to do more pieces about the interior of America.

RM: On that note, of turning inward: compared to most writers, you give a lot of your life away. Not compared to, like, David Sedaris, but certainly compared to David Grann. Do you ever have readers approach you and talk to you as if they know you, the way they do with standup comedians?

JJS: I think that’s starting to happen more, maybe. People didn’t use to come up to me, period, so there weren’t opportunities for them to say that sort of thing. But yeah, it’s happened to me a few times now. It’s kind of fun. Of course it always touches off this instinct to start differentiating yourself, on a microscopic level. Like, the narcissism of minor difference.

RM: Of course, because it’s only a persona, right? It’s you, but it’s not entirely you….

JJS: Yeah, in those magazine pieces, it’s a character that jumped from piece to piece, and I got interested in developing it the way you would a character in a novel. It didn’t really have to speak for me, necessarily. The only rule was it couldn’t say anything that was factually untrue.

RM: I’ve always wondered, in your piece “Getting Down To What Is Really Real,” about The Real World, I’ve always wondered if that bro-tastic voice was you poking a little bit of fun at GQ’s presumed readership? Because you defined yourself as a counterculture kid, early on—you listened to The Smiths and all that. But then you find yourself writing for this decidedly un-counter-culture magazine.