JJS: Like I was trying to be Swofford, or something. I couldn’t walk out the door in the morning. So I just tried to be as subversive with my bourgie-ness as I could. And I think there are times for just having a little fun, and seeing if you can give people a little pleasure with your prose. Or at least give them something to get pissed off about.

RM: Have people gotten pissed off?

JJS: Well, you know, part of working for the Times is experiencing the comments section for the first time. It’s like opening a portal into hell. These people, there’s just no governor on their tone.

RM: A lot of your work has a kind of soft-postmodernist feel: Walking around stoned in the hyperreal space of Disneyland, for example, or that moment at the end of “Peyton’s Place” when your daughter is wondering if she’s on television. You call Michael Jackson’s body the greatest postmodern sculpture. And you use the word “homosocial” in “Mr. Lytle,” which is a telltale sign of someone who’s attended a gender studies course. And yet, you’re not going around quoting Baudrillard, or Derrida, or Foucault. Do you think it’s important to read those guys? Do you enjoy reading them?

JJS: It’s hard to enjoy that type of writing, but I do think it’s crucial. I think there are a lot of questions when theory can clarify your take on what’s really going on, in terms of unequal power dynamics. But I’m not especially interested in it, at the end of the day, as a way of talking. And I think that’s one of its weaknesses, rhetorically: it’s very ungainly. And that’s a problem for a discourse that thinks of itself as existing primarily for political reasons, because it doesn’t have much persuasive power. In my work, I’m interested in it as a kind of lived thing.

When all is said and done, I’m most interested in story. So sometimes theory kind of happens to your narrators. But they’re not mainly interested in it as a way of putting together the world. I think I tend to rely on older narratives for that. But at the same time, I just don’t think you’re being self-actualized these days if you tune out theory completely as a possible source of, not necessarily wisdom, but insight.