The Consequences of Bad Decisions | A Conversation with William Boyle
Interviews
By Willy Vlautin
Once in a while you just start hearing about a writer. Not from reviews or the internet but the old-fashioned way. That’s what’s been happening to me in regards to Bill Boyle. A couple months ago I was talking with a musician and he said, “Have you ever read this guy named William Boyle?” A few weeks after that I called a friend of mine who works at a bookstore and he said, “Well I stayed up all night reading this guy name William Boyle. You ever read him?” On a recent trip to Germany a guy started talking to me and the only words I could understand were, “William Boyle.”
There’s good reason for this word-of-mouth swell. Boyle’s novels always deliver, and they always work on different levels: as noir and crime, as character studies, as working-class social commentaries. They’re also impossible to put down and stay with you long after you’ve finished them.
I had been looking forward to interviewing Bill for a long time, as Shoot the Moonlight Out (Pegasus) is one of my favorite novels of the year—and also because he’s a true student of literature, film, and music. To me, one of the luckiest things in life is being around a person who is a true fan with a great memory. Bill can remember which era of an unknown band to buy; he’ll know which noir novels to seek out from which era and which pre-Code 1930’s movie you have to see. So keep a pen and pad nearby because, besides being a great writer, the man has great taste.
Willy Vlautin: I’ve always admired your ability to juggle so many different characters and points of view. I’m thinking of A Friend Is a Gift You Give Yourself and City of Margins as well as Shoot the Moonlight Out. When you write early drafts, are the novels crafted the way we see them now? Do you outline before you begin? Do you jump from one character to the next or do you write each storyline out and then cut them up and piece the book together later?
William Boyle: I write the drafts that way, jumping from one character to another. It keeps things from getting stale. I’ve always loved ensemble casts. Robert Altman and Alan Rudolph movies have had a big impact on my sense of storytelling. I never used to like to outline, but I’ve been doing it more the last couple of books. Helps cut off trouble at the pass. I write a fifteen or twenty page breakdown of the novel, figuring out the main plot points but also leaving room for narrative detours and exploration. The main thing is to get the cast figured out and which chapter will be from whose perspective. It almost feels like structuring a book of persona poems in that way.
WV: There’s a scene in Shoot the Moonlight Out that really floored me. It’s in a chapter marked Charlie; the scenes involve Charlie and Greg. Greg you describe as, “maybe twenty-seven or twenty-eight but he looks like he’s in his forties. Dark smudges under his eyes. A week or two of black scruff on his face. Eyebrows that are way too big for his little mousey face. Snot-welded hairs protruding from his nostrils like fucking stalactites. He’s sweating hard. Dying for a fix.” What gets me about this chapter is that we’ve all seen this before in movies and books—a broken junkie getting pressured by someone who uses that addiction to get what he wants. But what you do that’s so remarkable is bring a real humanity to Greg. You slow down long enough for the reader to get a glimpse into Greg’s life, his state of mind, and the handcuffs of his addiction. When you write a scene like this, is it your intent to give a voice to even minor characters? I mean, besides the fact that Greg has the key and he’s the son of a mob boss, Stacks Brancaccio, he doesn’t mean a whole lot to the story. But his pain and the ugliness of his life have stayed with me.
WB: It’s definitely my intent to give voice to even minor characters. I’ve always been obsessed with minor characters: people you meet for a paragraph or a few pages and there’s a whole world there, a whole other story. My favorite thing about these kinds of characters is that they’re often not planned out. They just kind of show up. Greg wasn’t in my first draft of the book. Charlie was, but I knew I had to expand his story a bit and give him more POV chapters. So I started writing this scene with him and Greg. He’s a character I liked and felt sympathy for right away. Trying to be something he could never be, getting lost, a bit stuck in time. He’s the type of character I think about a lot afterward, and he’s somebody I could imagine going back to down the road, seeing where he was in the ’80s and ’90s. Building minor characters in this way means they’re there to go back to, even when they get clipped. I wrote this minor character called Amy Falconetti in Gravesend, not realizing that she was somebody I’d wind up worrying about and wanting to write a whole book about. That’s where The Lonely Witness came from.
WV: I know you’ve said you like putting together playlists for books you’re working on. What was the playlist to this one? Shoot the Moonlight Out is named after a Garland Jeffreys song. He’s an artist I didn’t know about before this novel, but I’ve been listening to him a lot ever since. Can you tell me how you discovered him and his importance to you as a writer?
WB: Here’s the playlist for this one. These songs really hung over the book in some major way. I started with the Garland Jeffreys song. I first discovered him via Lou Reed. I’ve been a big Lou Reed fan for as long as I can remember, and somewhere along the way I saw him mention Jeffreys in an interview. When I first listened to Ghost Writer, it blew me away and quickly became one of my favorite records. “Shoot the Moonlight Out” comes from the album American Boy & Girl, which is also terrific. I love the title and it just sparked a story in me; that’s really the extent of it. I sat down with the title and started building from there. There’s something about his music that really captures the feel of New York City to me. I think “New York Skyline” is one of the most beautiful New York songs out there. Same goes for “Coney Island Winter.” Jeffreys is up there with Reed, Jim Carroll, and Bruce Springsteen for me in terms of shaping the way I think about tone and feel when I come to a book.
WV: Related question: can you write to music? If so, is it a certain type, a certain constant playlist, instrumentals only, or music popular during the time in which you’re writing about?
WB: I do write to music. Mostly instrumental stuff. What exactly varies depending on the book. With A Friend Is a Gift You Give Yourself, I was listening to a lot of John Carpenter. Some stuff’s always in heavy rotation: Nick Cave & Warren Ellis’s film scores; Dirty Three; William Tyler; John Fahey; Miles and Monk and Coltrane; Angelo Badalamenti; lots of Max Richter and Jóhann Jóhannsson. Lately, I’ve been listening to Noveller a ton. I find Sarah Lipstate’s soundscapes cinematic in all the best ways.
WV: You’ve said in the past that you’ve been trying to strip things down to what’s essential. I’ve always been attracted to that style of writing. Can you remember when you first realized you wanted to write like that? Were there any novels that led you in that direction?
WB: I know we’re both big fans of William Kennedy’s Ironweed. That was huge for me. I read it when I was about eighteen, and I’d been mixed up about motive and method at that point. I knew I loved writing, but I didn’t really know what approach I could take. I was seeing a lot of sloppiness, and that book reined me in. I discovered John Fante soon after that. He was another influence. And then Jean Rhys. I’m realizing these writers all have some kind of melancholy core—a real sense of humanity, especially about bums and lowlifes and failures—and that’s what drew me in and made me realize I wanted to write like that, to get to emotions that are honest even as they’re couched in crime dramas. Recently, I read Agota Kristof’s The Notebook, The Proof, The Third Lie: 3 Novels—it’s maybe the purest distillation of that style I’ve ever seen. I’m late to Kristof, but now this is one of my favorite books.
WV: One of my all-time favorite writer memories was sitting in a restaurant in Oxford, Mississippi, with you and three other guys, all writers, and after a few drinks you all began talking about your childhood love of Stephen King. I don’t know why it struck me so hard. Maybe part of it was that there were five guys at a table who loved books. I didn’t come up in an MFA program and I never knew any men who liked novels, so, that was a really important night for me. I wasn’t a freak after all, or, if I was, there were four others sitting next to me who were just as bad. And then hearing your discussion on Stephen King, a writer whose work I hadn’t read, it was just so much fun—just the excitement and joy you all felt for his books growing up. I remember a list was put together of his novels to read and I went home and read them. While going through them, I thought: “Hell, there’s a whole generation of writers who probably started because of Stephen King.” I guess my question in all this is: how did you get interested in novels in the first place?
WB: That was a great night! Stephen King was an early inspiration, for sure. I didn’t grow up in a family of readers. My dad was a reader, but he wasn’t really around. I’d go with him on weekends occasionally. He had Stephen King and Ed McBain books in his attic, and he’d let me read those. I loved movies from a young age and, after I saw something I liked, I’d go out and find the book if there was one. That’s how I wound up reading Jim Thompson’s The Grifters at age twelve. Beyond that, libraries were everything to me. I didn’t have people telling me what to read and what not to read, and I gravitated toward crime and horror when I was browsing at the library. I hated reading whatever teachers assigned in school, but I loved reading stuff like King. My mom wasn’t into books, but she didn’t police what I was reading at all. She encouraged me. She just always thought it was good if I was reading. I remember reading It—I must’ve been eleven—on the sly in school, all throughout the day. Putting it on the seat next to me at my desk and keeping it open and flipping pages quietly, reading straight through all my classes. It wasn’t easy. I went to a Catholic school with a lot of hard-ass nun teachers. But it felt dangerous and exciting. King definitely opened something up in me as a reader and a fan and a writer. My mom and stepdad took me on vacation once to Nova Scotia. It wasn’t really vacation. We just kind of got in the car and drove north, with some sense that we were headed for Canada. I begged them to go to Bangor, Maine. We detoured there, went to Stephen King’s house, just stood outside for a few minutes, then left. I was so damn happy.
WV: Along those same lines, you dedicated A Friend Is a Gift You Give Yourself: “For the libraries and video stores where I spent my childhood.” I was the same in that I was drawn to libraries and record and video stores. I was addicted to disappearing into different worlds. No one else I knew had those same obsessions. Why do you think you were so drawn to these places?
WB: There was definitely an element of wonder. Something really thrilled me about standing in those places surrounded by books and albums and VHS tapes. The promise that I’d find something that would switch my brain. I loved stories from a very young age, and I guess that’s ultimately what I was responding to across the board—getting swept up in stories, language, sounds, images. Beyond that, I loved the physical spaces. Wandering among the stacks at the library. Flipping through records, CDs, or tapes. Staring down a wall of VHS boxes. It sounds cheesy to say it this way, but I knew even then that school wasn’t much and that this was where my real education was happening.
WV: Can you talk a bit about your love of Hollywood’s pre-Code movies? I have to say I’ve never met anyone with the knowledge of movies that you have. It’s just unreal that you have seen all the movies you have and can remember them so well.
WB: Oh man, thanks for saying that! I feel like I’ve got so much still to learn about movies. I definitely responded to pre-Code movies at a young age, although I probably wouldn’t have known to call them that or what the Hays Code even was then. Early gangster movies like The Public Enemy and Little Caesar hit me hard. They felt so raw and alive. It was a time when Hollywood was really testing boundaries, fully in discovery mode when it came to storytelling. Formulas didn’t quite exist in the same way. Later, I discovered other films from that era and read up about it and saw how wild and exciting it really was. Many of those movies feel radical still, especially when you hold them up against movies from the late ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s. Dark and dangerous. Messy, complicated characters with messy, complicated morals. I have so many favorites, but here are a handful: Heat Lightning; Baby Face; The Black Cat; Freaks; Gold Diggers of 1933; Three on a Match; Mandalay; Merrily We Go to Hell; Red Dust; Red Headed Woman; Safe in Hell; Wild Boys of the Road; Night Nurse; One Way Passage; Back Street; Of Human Bondage; Bad Girl; and Blonde Venus.
WV: In that same vein: I grew up living inside movies, it’s been a bad crutch I’ve used most of my life. Do you ever live inside films and if so which ones? And which actors and actresses do you disappear with?
WB: I also grew up living inside films, and I still do. As a little kid, my favorite was Back to the Future. I remember really wanting to disappear into that story. By the time I was twelve, my tastes had started to run a little darker. I watched Pump Up the Volume every day—or at least a few times a week—in junior high and high school. That was a movie I really folded into. I was in love with Samantha Mathis’s Nora Diniro. Since my old man was out of the picture, I think I was always looking for fathers in movies, too. It was also a way of dreaming about other places. I grew up in southern Brooklyn but so many movies from the ’80s and ’90s were about the suburbs—I wondered what that was like. I still live inside movies. Mostly old ones. I dream my way into that world. What it might’ve been like to write for the studio system in the ’40s—stuff like that. There are many actors and actresses I disappear with. This year, it’s been Kay Francis. Montgomery Clift is another one who takes me away. Gloria Grahame and Audie Murphy, too. Gena Rowlands always. Barbara Harris. Karen Black. Nicolas Cage and Jennifer Jason Leigh.
WV: As I look back at Shoot the Moonlight Out, I can’t stop thinking about Bobby. He’s a marginally likable character—a character who, early on in the book, commits a horrific act, but more out of boredom than malice. The act of a mischievous adolescent that carried a heavy weight even though he was never caught. Later on, Bobby gets a real chance at redemption, a chance at a life that could hold promise, happiness, and relief. But, given this chance, it’s almost as if he wants to destroy it, even if only subconsciously. Again, it’s your gift with empathy. The new love between Bobby and Francesca feels so lucky for them and so real for Bobby, but he can’t seem to accept it. I guess what I’m asking is: what is your view of Bobby? Was the death he caused as a kid the result of who he was deep down, or did that death set him on the path of constant minor self-destruction where he seems to destroy any chance of real happiness that comes his way?
WB: Definitely the second option. That death set him on a path of self-destruction. I think I’m always hung up on exploring the consequences of bad decisions. The way things ripple out. Bobby’s life before that, his situation, led to that moment. He was heartbroken by his mom splitting. Never could figure out a way to simply be. I like Bobby. I feel bad that the cards turned for him the way they did. When I’m writing a character like that, I think about every stupid decision I ever made as a kid and how lucky I was things didn’t go wrong like they did for him.
WV: A question on noir. I know we’ve talked about Jim Thompson, Charles Willeford, and David Goodis. But how did you come across them in the first place? It seems to me it takes a certain person to like those writers. A lot of people I’ve tried to get interested in them don’t get it. I remember going to the movies once, and the woman tearing tickets was reading a David Goodis novel. I said to myself: “Goddamn, she must have an edge to her a mile wide; she must be a ledge-walker to read Goodis.” It’s like meeting someone one who’s a big fan of Elliot Smith or Nick Drake or Townes Van Zandt. You already know something serious about them just by that. Did writers like Goodis, Willeford, and Thompson make sense to you when you first read them? Was it like hearing a dark Townes Van Zandt song and knowing you were entering a desperate and dark world—but the same desperate and dark world your heart lived in already?
WB: I saw Stephen Frears’s adaptation of The Grifters when it came out. I was twelve. That led me to Jim Thompson. Stephen King was a big Thompson fan, too, and I thought that was cool as hell. Going back to the source. Willeford and Goodis I came to a little later. I already had a few of the Black Lizard editions of Thompson, and I loved Barry Gifford thanks to Wild at Heart, so I started picking up Black Lizard books wherever I could find them. I always liked reading about desperate characters in desperate situations. I wouldn’t have been able to articulate this back then, but I liked the urgency that came from that. I responded to the dark melancholy of Goodis, the beautiful strangeness of Willeford. I loved the same things about Thompson. The way their books reckoned with paranoia and regret, failure and loss. They were unpredictable writers. They definitely had an edge. I think they made sense to me when I first read them, at least on an elemental level. I also loved their work ethic. These were writers who really worked hard. They had that ability you needed, in the pulps, to turn stuff out at a high rate. But it was all high-quality. And they were writers that the French admired early because they were saying more about America than stuff that was appearing in The New Yorker or wherever. The comparison to being a fan of Elliott Smith, Nick Drake, or Townes Van Zandt is spot-on. You hear someone likes them or likes Goodis, Willeford, and Thompson, and you just know you’re on the same wavelength.
WV: Your novels are always set in Brooklyn; in particular (as you’ve said), at the border of Gravesend and Bensonhurst. In an interview you also said: “City of Margins is set between 1991 and 1994. I was ages 13–16 at that time, walking everywhere, taking the bus to school, making regular stops at my regular video store and pizza joint, getting into fights in the schoolyard, playing stickball at dusk, discovering the records and books and movies that would change my life, learning about evil.” So many struggling writers, as Lily mentions in Shoot the Moonlight Out, don’t have a strong sense of place or even a real reason to write. Did these stories from Gravesend-Bensonhurst always come to you? Did you experiment in the early days—did you ever write stories set in Hawaii or Martha’s Vineyard or Jamaica or Reno? Did you always have such a concrete vision? Also, when thinking about the quote above, I’m always stopped by your comment on evil. How did you learn about evil? And what do you mean by evil?
WB: I’m sure I tried to write stories set elsewhere as a kid, especially in junior high and high school. But, by college, I was pretty fully just writing stories set in southern Brooklyn. It was what I knew—where I came from—but the mythology also consumed me. I grew up with mob stories in the air, and that stuff seeped in. Coney Island wasn’t far from my neighborhood—a five-minute subway ride or half-hour walk—and I was always dreaming about Coney in its heyday. Brooklyn’s so expansive, and I was seeing people write about other parts of the borough, but there wasn’t a ton of stuff, hardly any, set in my area. John Fante was a huge influence, as I said. The way he wrote about growing up in Colorado. When I discovered him, I figured the thing to do was write an Italian-American coming of age story set in southern Brooklyn during the ’80s and ’90s. (Despite my Scottish last name, I’m half-Italian on my mother’s side and only grew up with that side of my family). That eventually intersected with my other interests and obsessions—crime, consequences, and characters in crisis crashing into each other. I think coming of age stories are usually all about young characters discovering evil. That is, thinking that the world’s one way—that it’s fundamentally good, that people will help, that there’s justice—then finding out it’s another way. That the world is full of bad people with bad intentions, that justice is hard to come by. The week before I turned eleven, Yusef Hawkins was murdered in Bensonhurst. That was when I learned about real evil. I saw it all around me—not just the kids who committed the crime, but the way adults reacted to it, the racism, all of it. I was a kid, and then I wasn’t a kid anymore.
WV: In another interview, you mentioned an English teacher “Mr. MacLarty, a veteran and retired cop who loved good books and movies.” You read Look Homeward, Angel, The Things They Carried, and Cannery Row. What luck for a future writer to have a teacher like that. I remember I had an old man teacher who loved Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath so much he’d start weeping when talking about it. That had a really big impact me: that it was okay to admit you loved books, that it was okay to be a man and cry over a book. I guess in a weird way this interview has me thinking a lot about men and novels. It was just so rare in my life to see men reading or discussing books. Do you think a teacher like Mr. MacLarty helped you become a writer or at least a lover of literature?
WB: Definitely. He brought that same emotion to it. Connected his own life to the books. He was wistful, sincere, and full of regret. Passion, too. He saw how complicated people were. Reading was a very private thing for me before that. I also didn’t really see men reading novels. I mean, my dad—who I saw only rarely until I was about fourteen and then not at all—read a lot, but we never talked about books. He never talked about what he was reading. I loved writing and reading before taking that class with Mr. MacLarty, but that was the beginning of understanding why and what exactly I was looking for. I encountered a handful of important books in high school, but the three you mentioned—ones that I read for Mr. MacLarty’s class—had the most profound impact on me. They were also the first books I’d ever been assigned that I loved. Before that, there was the stuff I read on my own and loved, and the stuff I was assigned in school and hated.
WV: You’ve talked about your love of Lucia Berlin before. A mutual friend of ours, Barry Gifford, turned me on to her, and I don’t think a month goes by where I don’t read at least one of her stories. There’s something about how she approaches the huge dents and struggles in her life. She has this Zen way of dealing with it, not blaming anyone for her situation, just saying, more or less: “I ended up here, and here is where I am, so I might as well just accept it and see some kind of light in it.” I’ll end with this question in hopes that people reading will remember her name and seek out her books. What about Berlin do you like? What’s your take on her stories?
WB: I love her stories so much. I discovered her a couple of years before A Manual for Cleaning Women came out. I saw someone mention her in an interview and tracked down the Black Sparrow editions of her books. I fell in love right away. Character, voice, place, economy, pacing, grace, her treatment of outsiders, the way she deals with desperation—she’s the best at all the things I love the most. “Melina” was the first story I remember reading and totally wrecking me. There’s no one whose stories I go back to more these days, no stories that move me more than hers do. You ever hear her voice? I listen to this recording of her reading “Unmanageable” (another favorite of mine) all the time, which probably says a lot about me. A Manual for Cleaning Women is probably the book I’ve most recommended to people over the last five or six years.
Willy Vlautin is the author of the novels The Motel Life, Northline, Lean on Pete, The Free, Don’t Skip Out on Me, and The Night Always Comes. He is the founding member of the bands Richmond Fontaine and the Delines. He lives outside Portland, Oregon.
More Interviews