You Laugh So You Don’t Blow Your Brains Out | A Conversation with Bud Smith
Interviews
By Kimberly King Parsons
There’s a moment early on in Teenager, Bud Smith’s exhilarating, tragic, and hilarious new novel, where young Kody Rawlee Green turns to his grieving girlfriend, Tella Carticelli, and says: “I wish my guts glowed in the dark so if you looked down my mouth you could see my heart even if the night was starless.” He’s just busted out of juvie and murdered Tella’s parents, and the two of them are about to set off on a new life together. Both Tella and Kody are in possession of traumatic histories, extreme naïveté, and now this reckless, all-consuming first love. It’s a dangerous, propulsive combination—Kody’s glowing guts comment is heartfelt and deranged, just like the rest of this brilliant book.
I have a soft spot for bighearted screwups—characters who have “totaled their souls,” as Denis Johnson put it—especially teenage ones, and Kody and Tella are impossibly charming as they careen and rampage across a tilted, twisted version of America, with Smith’s soaring, exuberant prose as their fuel. I had the pleasure of talking to Smith, a writer I’ve long admired, about loving every single character you write, using mushrooms as a revision tool, what Waiting for Godot and the movie Hot Rod have in common, and more.
Kimberly King Parsons: I absolutely love Kody and Tella—separately and as a couple. They’re so charming, even as they’re making this huge mess of their lives. You’ve managed to make these dark, often violent characters (Kody especially) somehow very sweet. How conscious were you of balancing light/dark and agency/circumstance in the book? And is working for the reader’s empathy something you consider?
Bud Smith: Not so much working for anyone’s empathy, just finding my own. I’m writing about people. The longer I hang out with them (writing their story), the more I learn there’s some other side to them—redeeming or damning. Nobody’s perfect, even fictionally.
On job sites, working construction, I’ll get paired up with some new person who I’ve decided I can’t stand based on a first impression. But then I get to know them and realize I was wrong in my assessment—of course I was! A couple shifts later, they are one of the most interesting people I’ve ever met. My preconceived notions got erased. Every single person you’ll ever meet is interesting if you have the capacity to become interested in them. It’s the same way with characters. In a novel, you get more time to explore how convoluted a human being is and how convoluted living a life can be. In a short story, the characters just race by. There’s only a little time to get to know them, let alone understand them. But in a novel, there’s time and you have to try and understand them. If I’m going to attempt to write down a character’s life, I have to do something about my preconceived notions about them. Otherwise, they aren’t going to come alive for me.
But ultimately, I can only investigate what interests me.
As far as the reader’s empathy . . . Some readers would put me up against a wall and shoot me in the back of the head, or not exactly me, but the characters. Others would throw the characters a ticker-tape parade. I can’t worry about everybody reading. I can only worry about figuring things out for myself, getting over my preconceived notions. I’ve just got to find the soul of the people who live in my stories, in the space I’ve got, and just show it, and not seem like I’m campaigning to get any of these characters elected to public office. Some of the characters don’t deserve any love at all. But I still have to love them. I mean, the eraser is right there, the white out/correction tape is right there, the delete button is right there. If I don’t love a character, you’ll never see them in one of my stories because they were destroyed by me before they could get to you. I love every single person I’m writing about.
The universe is completely unfair and we are all fucked. But since we are all completely fucked, it’s up to us to make our lives beautiful in defiance of the death sentence. In little ways, we do that every time we sit down and write a poem, or go for a walk in the park and throw pumpernickel bread to the ducks, or get laid on the balcony in full view of whoever, or fill in the blank—it’s your life.
KKP: One of the ways you make Tella and Kody so lovable is that they’re so damn hilarious. That mix of serious and silly is one of the things I love most about Teenager—how it deals with heavy issues while still being really funny. What role do you see comedy playing in your work? And what role does it play in your life?
BS: Comedy and tragedy. That’s the balance you just asked about. That is how I tell an anecdote, and it just blooms out from there into whatever the other work is. Like this novel. Tragicomedy. Black comedy. You laugh so you don’t blow your brains out. A pressure release valve.
Most fiction isn’t funny enough for me. Plus, there’ve been many times I’ve met an author in real life and they’ve been funny as shit, but they don’t put that side of their personality into their work. It’s because of snobs. Authors feel like their work will be degraded with comedy in it. And maybe it will, but only by the exact critics that don’t matter at all. Self-serious, bloodless people. But I say that any serious work of fiction that’s not balanced out with some buffoonery, some clowning—no thanks.
Most well-made movies are not funny enough for me. And I’m not talking about winking at the camera. I mean, anyone who really reads Samuel Beckett will tell you that work is some of the most brutal and harrowing work ever. But it’s also slapstick; it’s pure joy to counteract the devastation.
One of the best-written films, a personal favorite of mine, is Hot Rod starring Andy Samberg. Pam Brady wrote it. The more I watch that movie, the deeper it becomes. It’s a screwball comedy on the surface. The synopsis is this: A kid with a moped wants to be a stuntman because his father has died and he compares the father to Evel Knievel. The kid, Rod, does stunts around town that always fail. The kid’s stepfather gets in physical altercations with Rod all the time, but it’s playful, and always seems to be in self-defense: the kid punching up, the stepfather reacting to attack. Rod wants to prove he’s a man, so he challenges the stepdad to endless battles. And Rod keeps losing. The stepdad seems to actually care about helping Rod become a “man” in a “hard world,” he’s not just going to give the kid a pass. He’s going to make him earn it, and Rod wants to earn it himself. When the stepdad comes down with a serious illness and needs a new heart (which I don’t believe is actually true at all in the film; I believe he’s faking, in order to teach Rod the rest of the lesson), Rod ups the stakes on his stunts and tries to raise the money required to get the man a new heart. But his real goal is this: once his stepdad is healthy again, Rod is finally going to kick his ass!
On the surface, Hot Rod just wants to entertain you. But there’s so much pathos and terror of the soul in it. It’s juvenile, and it’s about juvenile people, but there’s such wise slyness to that plot. It’s truly beguiling to me. I take it so seriously. But I believe that if I’m not laughing at something, the creator has failed to make the thing full in expression. They failed to balance out all colors in the spectrum of humanity. And, yes, I understand that some topics just can’t in good taste be handled with humor. What I’m advocating for is this: forget good taste. Humans don’t show good taste in private. Among their peers, when they’re alone, etc. I think if we focus on bringing comedy back into the fold of self-serious work, it will cease being pretentious and will become meaningful again.
What I’m saying is, Waiting for Godot is just as funny as Hot Rod, and Hot Rod is just as serious as Waiting for Godot.
KKP: Teenager is full of gorgeous, soaring sentences that transcend and spiral time and run wild. Here’s a great example:
“The minor chords switched to major and the same song carried on, but right there in the middle there was a turn, a new verse, his voice changed and rose in pitch and became saccharine and the miserable characters in the song canceled revenge and made amends, the knife was pulled out of the heart and the blood was wiped off the blade, the wound closed up and the wrong itself rewound like wire on a spool so the wrong was never done and the people were kissing in the daffodils, bluebirds swooping all around them and never a better match ever made in the history of the world.”
These kinetics seem to mimic Kody’s wanderlust. Do you start with structure and work your way to the sentence level? Or do you work from the sentence level up?
BS: I start with the characters and the situation. Later, I have to discover their language, in that place, and in response to what is happening to them, or what they are doing. My early drafts lack the language. I’ve got to kind of wild out and crack apart my narratives in response to the characters’ emotions, but I can’t do that right away because I don’t totally know the world or the characters yet. I don’t want to make it sound like there’s a process or method. What I’m talking about it is sitting down in the chair and losing my mind a little more into it. That happens for me in successive passes. For instance, I’m really excited for the weekend right now because I’m going to get back to my typewriter and retype forty pages of a novella that I’ve written on my phone. That retyping is a chance to do something drastic with not only characterization—and not only plot—but also language. Finding the poetry in the place and the people. Then, when I retype the typewritten pages back into the laptop, that’s another chance to go somewhere else with it, to experiment, improvise (close to the groove/don’t stray that far). I’ve got to cut loose, lose my mind and find the poetry.
KKP: You write on the weekends, but are you generating first drafts at work? I recently met Christopher Paul Curtis, who used to work in an auto factory in Detroit. His job was to install car doors; he had to do something like a door every six minutes, but for every thirty minutes of work he’d get an hour off. Some people slept or read on breaks, but Curtis started writing, and he said that, in many ways, that job was the ideal creative situation (time to write, time to break/zone out and exert yourself physically, more time to write, repeat). I know you work heavy construction—does your job allow for a similar type of creativity? Do you think your day job benefits your process in other ways too?
BS: First drafts yes. I write on my phone, text messages to myself mostly, in chunks, in the work truck or machine shop on job sites, when I’m there. Fifteen minutes to half an hour at a time. Coffee breaks and lunch breaks. And for twenty minutes at the end of the day when everyone else is fighting their way out of the massive job site parking lot. If I make use of that time, I’ve got an hour or so to focus on my art instead of doomscrolling. The physical labor might help just a tiny bit because every human needs to move and get exercise. I don’t know. I still come home and lift weights or swing a kettlebell or whatever to get my heart going. But if I had an office job I would probably need to build even more motion and movement into my leisure time. But since I’m climbing ladders all day, often hundreds of feet up, or dragging pneumatic guns around and beating on knock wrenches to take apart large machinery, I feel like my leisure time is actually leisure time, even if I am using that leisure time to study language (read) and implement language (write/edit). When I get home, if I have the energy, I write in my apartment in a simple room on a busy city street. Just like anyone, I work on a laptop to finish things, to send emails and all that. I’m no different than any other writer. You read me and there I am. That’s all that matters—not how it got made. An artist just wants to make things. It doesn’t matter how much they make, or how often they make something. It’s the want. When I’m not making some art, I feel like I’m wasting all this evolution our species went through. If humans evolved for anything, it was to make art.
KKP: A while back, you tweeted something that really stayed with me—“comes down to just having faith in your project, if you give it yr time, and drag that shit through all your good days and some of the better bad days, it doggedly gets solved, like all of life does, over time, slow.” Something about the simplicity of that—it’s not magic, just routine and enthusiasm—really resonated with me. Was it a slow process writing Teenager? Was it as much fun for you to write as it was for me to read it?
BS: It’s always slow and has always been slow. Usually, I’m working on a few projects all at once: a short story (for a collection) while writing some novel, plus some poems. But I’m trying to stop all that and just work on one thing at a time and finish my books faster. To stay solely obsessed on one thing longer and not bounce around if I can help it. Teenager took me many years, but I was skipping from one thing to another. I can’t say how long it would have taken if I worked on it and it alone. I mean, I wrote many, many drafts of two other novels while working on Teenager. “Doggedly” is the word. I don’t mean to make it sound frivolous, but some people keep focusing on my “joy.” I mean, sure, be excited about what you’re doing, but it’s not going to be easy or fun all the time. Just keep showing up. Just keep coming back. When it feels like you can’t show up for it, show up for it. When it feels impossible to come back to it, come back to it anyway. By any means necessary.
It was usually fun to write Teenager. But there was a point right before the pandemic happened that I had a bunch of mushrooms in the apartment. I would eat them and trip out and, although I didn’t want to, I’d start thinking about Teenager—as much as I tried not to. This was at a point where the draft was approaching its true form that is in the final novel. I was just lying there completely incapacitated, my mind reeling, and it was like God was talking to me, saying, “Do not let anyone publish this book.” It’s because the characters are sent through such a maze of pain and doom, and I wish it could be better for them. I had this same feeling while sober, of course, but the drugs heightened it. I kept thinking I was making this box for them to be trapped in for eternity, the book, like it was the containment system in Ghostbusters. That wasn’t fun. I’ve never given my life a hard time while I was tripping, but I did give my book the most severe critiques I’ve ever given a book. The next day, I made a list of what was bothering me during that trip and then exacerbated what I was afraid of to a great degree in the next draft. Leaned into what was bothering me. So that wasn’t fun, per se, but like I said, if you experience something in life, use it in art, or what’s the point of making art.
KKP: Something that makes the book feel really joyous and special are Rae Buleri’s genius accompanying illustrations. They so precisely capture the tone of Teenager (and I want them a bunch of them as tattoos!). What was that collaboration like?
BS: It was a dream come true. I couldn’t imagine this novel without those drawings. The drawings are wild and distorted and the way Rae Buleri laid it all out . . . her initial design of the novel (with her placement of the art) was used by the professional at Vintage for their official layout, and we all just went bonkers with the novel. We made an art object out of it. There’s plenty of normal novels on the shelf; I just hope people pick up Teenager and open it up and say, “What the fuck is this?” And that when they read it, they find out the story is told with such love and the illustrations are made with love too. This demented art object was left alone to be a home arts-and-crafts project by a major publisher, and that’s partly because the editor I worked with, Todd Portnowitz, gave Rae and myself complete artistic freedom and advocated for us every step of the way.
Speaking of that collaboration, it began because of Todd Portnowitz. When he was acquiring Teenager, he mentioned wanting to have illustrations in it. I wasn’t sure how that would work. Next thing I knew, my dear friend and agent, Mike Mungiello, had mailed Todd a copy of a book called Dustbunny City that Rae and I had already done. She’d illustrated that. Poems and little stories about our neighborhood, with her line drawings. Rae came home from work and said she had gotten an email and been asked if she was interested in illustrating Teenager and what did I think. What did I think? I was floored. I’m not sure Todd even knew that Rae and I were married; he just loved her work in that book and . . . well, I don’t think I would have had the guts to suggest my wife for the project, even though of course she was the obvious choice now that I think about it. Nepotism and all that. And I’d always had it beaten into my head that you have to make concessions when you work with large publishers and you never get what you want. This one time, it wasn’t like that. As soon as Rae got involved, it was off to the races. The book just got stranger and more personal, and I realized nobody was there to say “No.” If we wanted to do something weirder, they said, “Please, go to town.”
KKP: Finally, have you read anything wonderful lately? Are there any books you’re looking forward to reading?
BS: I just read The Last Taxi Driver by Lee Durkee. That was incredible. He wrote a perfect comic novel with such depth of emotion, such fearless high-flying transcendence, and such crushing lows too. Big recommend on that. I’ve been reading my own work a lot, trying to get a solid draft on the next project. When I’m doing that obsessively, it slows down my other reading. But I keep meaning to start Underworld by Don DeLillo. It’s in the trunk of my car. Like some people drive around with a baseball bat, I drive around with Underworld in case I need it.
Kimberly King Parsons is the author of Black Light, a debut collection longlisted for the Story Prize and the National Book Award. Her fiction has appeared in The Paris Review and New York Tyrant, among others. She lives in Portland, Oregon, where she is writing a novel (forthcoming from Knopf) about Texas, motherhood, and LSD.
Illustration: Rae Buleri
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