Palahniuk Inspires

“Maybe people have to suffer before they can risk doing what they love.”
You told Misty all this.
You said how Michelangelo was a manic-depressive who portrayed himself as a flayed martyr in his painting. Henri Matisse gave up being a lawyer because of appendicitis. Robert Shumann only began composing after his right hand became paralyzed and ended his career as a concert pianist.
…
You talked about Nietzsche and his tertiary syphilis. Mozart and his uremia. Paul Klee and the scleroderma that shrank his joints and muscles to death. Frida Kahlo and the spine bifida that covered her legs with bleeding sores. Lord Byron and his clubfoot. The Bronte sisters and their tuberculosis. Mark Rothko and his suicide. Flannery O’Connor and her lupus. Inspiration needs disease, injury, madness.
“According to Thomas Mann,” Peter said, “‘Great artists are great invalids.’”

The above is an excerpt from Diary, a novel by Chuck Palahniuk, who also wrote Fight Club. So far (78 pages into it) I’m hooked and (despite the cliché-ness of it) inspired by it. The above talk about artists and the writing style of the book itself is inspiring.

The nihilistic tone made famous by the rants of Tyler Durden is the basis for the book; yet in the blunt, crassness of the writing all that is faux is stripped away, leaving raw nerves, harsh realities. But those nerves and realities are what lead to authentic change.

In the book, an artist named Misty married young in art school and was swept away to some idyllic small town on an idyllic island home where she could paint pictures that would change people’s lives. But the island was spoiled by tourists, advertisements and commercialism, and her husband, Peter, shot himself in the family car.

While the husband sits in a hospital hooked up to life support, Misty gets calls from summer home owners in the idyllic towns near the island where Peter had done some remodeling during the winter. Everyone complains of kitchens or linen closets missing from their homes, leading Misty to find that Peter sealed in entire rooms from the house.

Inside the rooms are nonsensical, yet prophetic scrawlings covering the sealed-in rooms. Some of it is nonsense while others are crass descriptions of life on the island. Intermingled with the nonsense are random quotes from various artists that somehow apply to life on the island or Misty.

I don’t know what happens from then on as Misty tries to figure out what all that means but I know that Palahniuk is an engaging storyteller. And the artistic dialogue is spurring me on to produce something.