MC: Who turned you on to Bernhard?

GD: Various people.  Particularly this Austrian woman, Clarissa, I was hanging out with in Paris.  She was a total Bernhardian character.  It was from her that I got that joke that one of the characters in Paris Trance makes.  Clarissa said that artists shouldn’t write letters.  And I said, ‘You’ve got to be crazy! Van Gogh’s letters are great.’  And she, in her Bernhardian way, said, ‘Yes, but have you seen the letters?’

MC: ?

GD: ‘Have you seen the paintings!’

MC: I see your books are sorted according to genre: fiction and non.

GD: I’ve said I like this stuff that’s neither fiction nor non, but what I most respect is straight reportage like what’s come out of Iraq and Afghanistan. In an interview about his great book The Good Soldiers, David Finkel said something like, ‘Every sentence reports a fact.  And then the next sentence reports another fact. And out of that, a narrative emerges and any literary qualities the book has are a direct consequence of that.’ The emphasis on fact is what has caused it to become literature.  Its literary-ness is a product of its devotion to fact. Lots of stuff is made up in my nonfiction, but those things are not being offered James Frey-like, whereby the value of the book is dependent upon my having experienced this or that. I’m saying I ate a donut when in fact I ate a croissant. It’s not so much the difference between did it happen or didn’t it happen that matters, it’s much more about the formal expectations that people bring to a certain work. I’m convinced of this.  Sometimes people are disappointed by my books—not because of what they are, but because they are not behaving in the way people expect them to behave.  But the thing is, from my point of view, that’s the point: the book was never meant to be what people expected it to be.

MC: Salon called Out of Sheer Rage “about as rational as a toddler's tantrum—and it’s not even as entertaining.” Are bad reviews fun to read?