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In Hella Nation: Looking for Happy Meals in Kandahar, Rocking the Side Pipe, Wingnut’s War Against the GAP, and Other Adventures with the Totally Lost Tribes of America (Putnam Adult), Evan Wright dives into American subcultures. His reportage is fair and thoughtful, no matter how offensive or way-out the subjects might be to mainstream readers.
Wright started his writing career as a movie reviewer for Hustler. From these humble beginnings, he rose to win awards for his reporting in Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair. His first book, Generation Kill (Berkley Trade), was a bestseller.
Hella Nation has just been released in paperback. It’s full of fascinating stories about porn stars, white supremacists, American soldiers in Afghanistan, taxi dancers and anarchists. Wright took time from his busy schedule of observing subcultures to answer these questions for Reading Local.
TB: In Hella Nation there’s a piece about Eugene anarchists. Have you spent much time in Oregon? Do you have other Oregon connections?
EW: I have a family member who lives in a remote woods somewhere a few hours from Ashland, so when I visit all I see are trees.
TB: How do you decide how much of yourself to include in your pieces?
EW: As a reader I’ve never liked too much first person in reporting, unless the author is really good at it, like David Foster Wallace or Hunter S. Thompson. Bad first person can distance the reader from the subject you’re writing about. Used sparingly, it can bring the reader closer. I write about picking up a wrench when I was with the anarchists, or my experience of being in couples’ therapy while working at Hustler magazine, with the hope that this will take the reader inside situations for which he or she probably has no reference points.
The danger is the author’s ego. If you do it to make yourself the hero, or look better than your subjects–to show your moral superiority–that doesn’t really work. So, when I did the neo-Nazi piece in Hella Nation–”Heil Hitler, America”- I avoided making my own condemnations of my subjects’ beliefs because I thought most readers can probably guess I’m not a Nazi, and it’s far more effective to have my subjects condemn themselves through their own words.
In my combat writing–the one essay in Hella Nation about Afghanistan as well as my book Generation Kill–I put myself in as comic relief from grim situations. Plus, there are things I could only describe through first person, like what it feels like to have a bomb explode near you and miss.
David Foster Wallace used to refer to his own first person writing as his “schtick.” One thing I really treasured about him was the fact that he did not take himself too seriously–as a friend and through the voice he developed as an essayist. That’s the trick of using first person, to inject the “I” while being self-deprecating. It’s a balancing act.
TB: Which is your favorite piece in Hella Nation?
EW: Each piece when I was working on it was the only thing that mattered to me at the time. Looking back on them, I mostly remember where I stayed when I was researching them–whatever crummy motel, or couch I was surfing on. The Afghanistan essay I wrote in a tent in Kandahar, running my computer off a portable generator, using a crate as a desk. I was bit by a scorpion and was ill for a couple days near the end. The tent reached 135 degrees in the day. But one thing that couldn’t reach me there was my editor or anyone, since I had no phone or internet access. That was probably one of my best times to work. As for which I like best, I have no opinion. I’m like a skyscraper window-washer, I never step back to admire my work.
TB: How has sobriety affected your journalism? Did it affect your connections with the people you write about or with other journalists?
EW: Drinking dulled my senses and separated me from people emotionally, so writing sober is much better. I like to have senses in tune as much with my surroundings as is possible. Also, when I drank I was blacked out much of the time, and a nervous wreck when I was conscious, so I really couldn’t spend that much time writing. For me, it’s better to be sober. But I wouldn’t knock people who write drunk, or drink a lot. Everybody has his or her own way to get to their work.
TB: Any stories you’re willing to share about dumb mistakes or things going wrong while interviewing people for an article?
EW: First interview I ever did was with Russell Means, a leader of the American Indian Movement, who was behind the shoot-out with federal agents at Wounded Knee and other notorious events of the Native American rights movement of the 1970s. I was so nervous during the interview when I flipped the tape on my recorder, I somehow recorded over the first hour with the second hour. This was unfortunate because in the first hour Means talked about his passionate commitment to rights for Native Americans, but in the second hour he plotted his dream to get rich selling a TV show featuring hip hop teenagers on an Indian reservation who solve crimes with the help of a psychic. I am not making this up. I have it on tape somewhere.
TB: If you could go back in time, what defunct groups or subcultures would you like to study and write about?
EW: I wish I had been around in the 1950s when all these squares–from Time magazine publisher Henry Luce to A.A. founder Bill Wilson, to officers in the CIA–were experimenting with LSD. This was before Timothy Leary. They were exploring the possibilities of profound psychological change offered by the drug without any of the baggage of its later associations with the 1960s hippie movement. Obviously, the CIA was experimenting with it for nefarious purposes, but there were so many other leaders in psychiatry, media, industry, etc. who were experimenting with it. You think of the 1950s as so conformist, but there were all these people you’d never expect taking acid trips and having their minds blown. I read a very well researched and written social history of LSD called Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream by Jay Stevens. Fascinating book. I am at work on a memoir about brainwashing–about the only way I can sum it up–and read Storming Heaven as part of my research. But I highly recommend it for anyone interested in a profoundly important but little known era in the U.S.
Image credit Vanity Fair, IndieBound.
