A Conversation with Chuck Klosterman

Photograph by Kamilla Kraczkowski

Chuck Klosterman is a journalist and pop culture critic who has published books of non-fiction, including Fargo Rock City; Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs; Killing Yourself to Live; and Chuck Klosterman IV. He also contributes articles to Esquire and the New York Times Magazine and was a former senior editor of Spin.

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Magazine. His first novel, Downtown Owl, will be released by Scribner in September 2008. This interview was conducted in May 2008.

PIAFSKY: Mr. Klosterman, your role until this novel has been primarily one of critic. After the novel is published, do you anticipate any change in the dynamic with the people you interview?

KLOSTERMAN: No. I don’t think that will be a factor because when you interview somebody, they don’t care who you are or what you’ve done. I have come to realize that if I interview a member of a band, the musician is only doing something that the label has forced him to do, and he doesn’t care anything about me. It doesn’t matter how great the conversation is. We are not going to become friends. Neither of us is interested in being friends. The reason we are talking is because someone else set up the interview. I am only there as someone who is going to write a story, and he is only there as someone who is promoting either a product or himself. We have no relationship outside the interview or the article. And I’m comfortable with the idea that these subjects have no interest in me whatsoever. Maybe I’m just trying to rationalize this because that could become a problem. I’m sure it has for some people. There is nobody Tom Wolfe can interview now—there’s almost nobody he can interview —who is more famous than he is, so he can only interview working-class people.

But I’ll tell you this: because I’ve now been interviewed a number of times, I perceive the process of interviewing much differently than I used to.

PIAFSKY: How so?

KLOSTERMAN: A lot of times when someone interviews me, they will use certain techniques that I realize I will never use again when I interview somebody else. I will never try to break the ice by using some long anecdote from my life that is meant somehow to be analogous to something the subject has written or experienced or done.

I guess I didn’t completely realize how unpleasant the experience of being interviewed was. I now feel a huge degree of sympathy when I interview people, and probably in a way that I didn’t before. I suppose that has made me a better interviewer and a better journalist because I’ve got a higher degree of empathy. But it makes me less excited about doing profiles. I used to enjoy that process, but it’s been a while since I have. The first time somebody interviews you, it’s incredibly flattering. The second and third times are also very interesting, but only because you begin to see how similar the experience is. And pretty soon it becomes almost identical. In a way, the Internet has adversely affected how people go about doing profile interviews.

PIAFSKY: Why would that be?

KLOSTERMAN: Well, I am as guilty of this as anyone else, but it’s now incredibly easy to read, in a very short amount of time, every interview and every story about any given subject. You can see everything they’ve ever said in the past two years or the past twenty years. Because of that, it’s difficult not to couch your questions in the context of what you know this person has already said, or to try to get them to respond to things they’ve said in other interviews, or to make them react to things that were interesting in the past, or to respond to things they’ve been asked about over and over again so now it suddenly feels like something you...