by Matthew Rettenmund

Have you always wanted to be famous?

Yes, yes, yes! It's always been there since childhood. I was the brat who stood in front of mirrors, holding a hairbrush, singing along to "Bohemian Rhapsody." This is the sort of thing I can't analyze.

You posed in your underpants for Interview before Mysterious Skin came out. Were you concerned that the photo might make people take the book less seriously?

Yeah, the first time I saw the photos I thought, "oh, god." But Richard Pandiscio, the guy at Interview, convinced me that showing my jutting-out ass would help sell books or whatever. And I thought, you know, if someone's going to judge me on the basis of this without reading my book, then fuck them. If they read my book, then they can judge me as a writer, but not because of a silly picture of semi-nude me in Interview magazine.

As a redhead, did you ever have to deal with imaginative nicknames like "carrot top"?

All the time. During my early years I wore my hair very, very long and women constantly stopped my mother and complimented her with, "Oh, what a pretty little red-haired girl!"

Like the characters in Mysterious Skin, did you play Little League?

Yes.

Were you any good?

Yes. I had the best average in the League one year with the most home runs and RBIs. My crowning moment was when the team from Pretty Prairie made fun of me--"She can't hit it, strike the girl out!", etc--and I gave 'em a slug-bunt (where you pretend you're going to bunt and then fake out by raring back and whamming it) and hit a triple with the bases loaded and won the game. Brag, brag, brag.

Mysterious Skin was optioned for the movies. Did you find writing a screenplay a big challenge?

The producers who optioned the book are really happy with the script I wrote, but it's so early on in the process I'm trying not to think about it--it's such a long shot. But yeah, I loved writing the screenplay. I was distanced enough from the initial finishing of Mysterious Skin as a novel--three years, really--that it didn't bother me to shuffle and abridge and metamorphose the events and emotions and characters in the book. It was actually quite fun. I'm very happy with the way it exists as a script.

Scott Heim's Mysterious Skin, starring. . .?

I've been asked that before and I never really know what to say. I love the actor Brendan Sexton--he was that lewd, sneering boy in Welcome to the Dollhouse--and I think he'd be absolutely perfect for the role of "Neil." I'm not so sure about the other characters.

How are you describing In Awe?

"A novel about three outcasts in a Kansas town--a woman in her thirties, a woman in her sixties, and a teenage boy--and a rather terrible chain of events that befalls them over the course of one autumn." Well, that's pretty vague, isn't it? It's also about obsession and the lengths people go; the way obsession blinds us to reality. It's about stalking and being stalked, about family and friendship, about (like Mysterious Skin was, too) memory and the way people warp or interpret it.

Can you remember some of the things you were most "in awe" of earlier in your life?

Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, UFOs, and ghosts. Men with lots of body hair. Spelling bees. And music, always music: Abba, Queen, and Kiss. Television.

What's your favorite TV?

Currently, the X-Files. Unsolved Mysteries reruns. But Twin Peaks was the greatest. And SCTV, of course. I was also a huge fan of Zoom! as as kid. In Search Of... and Jeopardy! are great, too.

What are you in awe of at this stage in your life?

Music still. Anything in music or films or books or art that inspires me to extreme emotion, whether it be happiness or sadness or some wild synaesthetic hallucinatory experience. The Cocteau Twins, Dario Argento, Flannery O'Connor, certain drugs, sex (sometimes), Twin Peaks, Slowdive, My Bloody Valentine, my boyfriend, my close friends, The Wizard of Oz, Hitchcock. I could make a longer list but I won't.

Do you remember the first "gay content" writing you ever read?

Hmmm.... it was probably Oscar Wilde, although it didn't speak to me because of its time and place. When I read Dennis Cooper's Closer, though, everything in my world came together--here were all these things I was interested in, all these people I had known and been, told in a kick-in-the-teeth way that I could understand and relate to. It's one of the all-time greatest books, I think.

As Cooper has done with his work, you've said you want to shock people with In Awe. Some artsy writers would find that concept distasteful and cheap. Why are shock--and publicity--thought of as such negatives by so many writers and other artists?

I think it's wrong to dismiss "shock" or "horror" or "violence" in writing, or any art or media form for that matter, because they are valid human emotions, and they can be completely revealing and epiphanic and beautiful.... I just read an interview with David Lynch were he was asked this question, too; he said that "terror and unease are beautiful," that "there are different kinds of beauty," and I totally agree with that. Too many people just want to be made happy or energized or coddled by what they see and read, which I think is wrong. Writing should be happy and funny and sweet and nice, yeah, but it should also be about hate and sadness and infidelity and fights and car crashes and madness and shit and piss and death. Those are the things, really, that interest me the most in art.

I'm completely fascinated by, say, the psychologies behind the most horrible and disturbing things--the JonBenet case, the Green River murders, autoerotic death, and so on--and I want to explore that in what I write. If someone has a problem with that, that's fine and dandy--they don't have to read about it in what I, or other people, write. But that stuff's going to be in the newspapers, anyway.

What have been the highpoints of your career so far?

Probably some of the press Mysterious Skin got: being included in the "30 Artists Under 30" layout in the New York Times Magazine or some of the bigger reviews. But, cheesy as it might sound, I can honestly say that getting feedback from readers, and having people come up to me at readings or wherever or write to me and say they liked the book, is what's most important to me. Isn't that why most people want to write in the first place, because they have something to say, and they want others to hear it?