Joe Meno is a fiction writer and playwright that lives in Chicago. A winner of the Nelson Algren Literary Award and the Society of Midland Author's Fiction Prize, he is the author of four novels, The Boy Detective Fails (Akashic 2006,) Hairstyles of the Damned (Akashic 2004,) Tender as Hellfire (St. Martin's 1999), and How the Hula Girl Sings (HarperCollins 2001.) His short story collection is Bluebirds Used to Croon in the Choir (TriQuarterly 2005.) His online serial, The Secret Hand, runs through Playboy magazine at playboy.com. His short fiction has been published in the likes of McSweeney's, Witness, TriQuarterly, Mid-American Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Washington Square, Other Voices, Gulf Coast, and broadcast on NPR. He is a contributing editor to Punk Planet magazine and is a professor who teaches creative writing at Columbia College Chicago.

Douglas Light: So how’s Chicago?

Joe Meno: Chicago’s good. I just got back. I was on the road for about a week, doing some readings.

DL: Did you read anywhere interesting?

JM: It’s always interesting. Went to Cleveland, Pittsburg, New York, and Philly. Five cities in five days. It was tough.

DL: Was it the Five Cities, Five Days, One T-shirt tour?

JM: (Laughs) No. I had five T-shirts, one pair of jeans. It was pretty incredible, though. In each city we got press. In Philly, I got two reviews in their weekly papers. It’s really the only way, at this point in publishing—when there are so many books out, especially this time of year—the only way certain newspapers will write about the novel.

What’s pretty interesting is that they have this new thing called BookScan—it’s been around for a few years—and it tracks the sales of your book. It tracks mostly chain stores, some independent, but I’ve found that there’s a direct correlation between the places I’ve toured and the sales of my book. We can check BookScan a week after a reading and see that the sales for the region are four times more. It’s real interesting.

Touring is a model based on what a lot of punk bands did, where they’d record their own record, then go out on the road and sell it because they couldn’t get commercial air play. They’d develop a type of network over the years and create a type of “Do It Yourself” distribution. To me, going out on tour is a really important part of getting the book out there.

DL: You have the writing process, the creating of the art, and then when the book is complete, you have to shift your focus to the fact that it is now a product.

JM: I’ve had this argument before, and I definitely agree: It is a product. But I think it is a different product than an umbrella, or a tennis shoe. But it’s a product. Without a doubt.

If you’re a writer, or any kind of artist, and you’re putting the work out there for sale, and you’re still thinking it’s something other than a product, then I think you’re mistaken.

I actually do think there is a difference in the way an indie publisher or a small press looks at a book, the creative end of it, than say the way a corporate publisher looks at a book. I’ve been really happy working with Akashic.

DL: Your first book was with St Martin’s, yes?

JM: My first book was with St. Martin’s, and my second book was on HarperCollins, and then I had the opportunity to work with Akashic on Hairstyles of the Damned. It was a really great experience with that book. I did much more touring, something like thirty-two or thirty-six cities. It was the first time I tested the theory that, if you can’t afford ad space in the New York Times, there is some other way to level the playing field. We were really luck with the success of that book, and hopefully, people who enjoyed that book will pick up the new one.

DL: Speaking of The Boy Detective Fails, what I found fantastic was the fact that it goes even further than most novels. It not only provides the reader with an engaging tale, but with riddles, puzzles, a decoder ring, and even a recipe for one of the character’s Angel Food cake. At what stage of writing the novel did you say, “I want to make this more than just a book”?

JM: Probably around three-quarters the way through.

My last book, Hairstyles of the Damned, was about a bunch of kids making mixed tapes for each other. Music was a real important idea. As I was writing the book, I thought, “Why don’t I make this book a mixed tape?” I structured some really short chapters, and then there are chapters that are longer. There’s even a love song chapter. I wanted the actual structure to be like a mixed tape.

With Boy, I was about three quarters of the way done when I asked myself, “What is this book really about?” For me, it’s about this guy who is trying to contend with the idea of order, and order in the world, and really accepting the notion of mystery, and that mystery isn’t necessarily a negative thing. It can be something really beautiful; it can give us hope. And so I started thinking about some of the ways structurally that I could get the audience, the reader, to mesh to that. Definitely, there are puzzles and codes, and in the little sister’s diary there is a code, and there’s also a code at the bottom of the page. You can even sense it from the epigraph from H.L Mencken: “Genius: the ability to prolong one’s childhood.” To me, it is so totally true. There are so few moments in your life where you get to dream or wonder. And I think that that’s what reading a book allows you to do. It is very different then watching TV. It is very different than watching a film where you’re a lot more passive. To read a book well, you have to put a lot of work into it. You have to image this whole world. So by putting these codes in, and the decoder ring, it was just another way to hopefully give the reader a reprieve or a moment to do this childlike activity. If it is just a gimmick, that’s one thing. But I feel it comes directly out of what the book is about.

The other idea—with the recipe and the word search—I wanted the book to have the feeling of one of those activity books that your mom would give you on a rainy day. Because of what the book is about, I wanted people to have the opportunity to have this moment of wonder.

DL: I found it interesting that the main character Billy does fail. He comes to the realization that there are certain mysteries in life that are even too complex for him.

JM: That’s where the book really began for me. I actually started writing it as a play first. It was about the time when Iraq war began. It’d been two years since September 11, and I had just turned thirty. I felt I was confronted with these huge questions of good and evil. I wondered at what point in your adulthood do you realize that there are things that happen in your life that you don’t always get answers to. I wanted to come back and explore that in different ways in the book. There can be something really beautiful in not having the answer.

DL: Enjoy the trip and not the destination.

JM: Exactly. That’s really hard to keep in mind sometimes when you’re going through your day-to-day life. You have the bills to pay and everything.

Another thing is, I think everything a writer writes is part autobiography. This book is about a guy who was a success as a kid, and he’s now thirty and trying to figure out, “Okay, what now?” I was really lucky: my first book came out when I was 24, and then Hairstyles of the Damned came out two years ago. Then I was faced with this realization that, well, maybe I’ll never write a book that gets that much press or does that well. So now what?

There is a definite American idea of being a winner. In all the detective novels, The Hardy Boys, and Encyclopedia Brown, and the Dick Tracy comics in the Sunday paper, they always get their man, they always solve the mystery—

DL: And they’re always home in time for dinner.

JM: Exactly. That is such an American idea, winning and victory. And then you have things like the Iraq war and the events of September 11 and you think, “What do we do?” I have way more questions than I do answers.

DL: I think that’s true of life. You understand things when you’re eighteen, but then you get to thirty and you’re like, “What the hell?”

JM: That’s exactly it. It’s like I knew everything when I was in my teens. When I was eighteen or twenty, I was so resolute. Everything was black and white. “Here’s the answer. Why can’t you people figure it out?” And in this book, I wanted to explore the idea that, maybe, one of the wonders of being an adult is realizing that it’s okay not have all the answers.

DL: Nearly all the characters in the novel are living an after-life; they’ve had their moments and are now not so such much living as they are just enduring.

JM: A lot of the characters are suffering from grief in different ways. Whether it’s the girl, Effie Mumford from across the street, who is almost like a has-been because of her failed science project, or Penny, who’s trying to deal with her husband’s death through compulsive activities. Definitely, that’s a theme. How these characters fail, and how, through their relationships with each other, they find some joy or happiness.

DL: Many of the characters in The Boy Detective Fails are like those friends whose life stops after high school—that’s all they ever talk about, high school. It feels like a lot of your characters are moving through life backward, gazing to the focal moment in their past, and reaching for it. Longing for it.

JM: When you reach your thirties, you can sometimes have this feeling that the carefree days are behind you.

The other way I was thinking of the book was that it was a coming of age story in reverse. In a coming age of story, the character has a great realization or gets these answers, but I wanted the opposite. When Billy was a kid, he had all the answers. He has all these press clippings from the cases he’s solved. And the older he gets, by the time he gets to the end of the book, he realizes he doesn’t have all the answers. He has to find a way to live with that.

DL: Music plays a big role in your life. How does it affect your writing process?

JM: It’s a huge part of what I do as a writer. It can be very overt, like in Hairstyles of the Damned, where the characters are making mixed tapes for each other. In The Boy Detective Fails, and in a lot of what I write, it’s more subtle. I might listen to a band or a particular song, and instead of looking at the lyrics, I might respond to the mood or the tone of that particular band. There are a couple bands, like Belle and Sebastian, where the music is melancholy and lush, and even a couple Beatles records, like Revolver, where they had the similar sense. It’s pop music, but it’s done in an interesting way that still manages to surprise you.

The Boy Detective Fails is by far the most pop orientated thing I’ve done, where I’m using a pop character [Billy Argo]. But I’m trying to do it in an interesting way.

DL: The book is almost a VH1 Behind the Music episode of Billy Argo.

JM: That’s a popular story now. Here are these kids, these child stars, or guys in a band from twenty years ago, and it’s really all about their decline.

DL: Everyone loves a good car wreck.

JM: That’s what it is. It’s a really popular form now that, for whatever reason, people are drawn to. And definitely, in the book the character is really having a hard time finding his place, and he’s popping a lot of antidepressant pills, and things like that. Ultimately, he does negotiate all this disorder in the world.

DL: Back to music a moment. Who would win a no-holds-barred cage match pitting the band Belle and Sebastian against Social Distortion?

JM: (Laughs) Well, Mike Ness is a pretty big guy. So…

But now that I think about it, there are only four guys in Social Distortion, while Belle and Sebastian has like eight or ten. So Belle and Sebastian might win by sheer number.

I don’t know. That’s tough one.

DL: What are some of your writing influences? Who, as a writer, has really made an impression on you?

JM: For Boy, one of them was Donald Barthelme. He has these little, short one or two page stories that are absurd and surreal. I tried to put a lot of that in the book. When you’re reading his stuff, the stories are just so short that when you go to the next one, you have no idea what’s going to happen.

DL: And sometimes you have no idea of what’s just happened.

JM: Yeah, you go back and read it again.

And then there’s this great Italian writer, Alessandro Baricco, and he wrote this book called Silk. The book is really short. Some of the chapters are a sentence, or a paragraph. I was really interested in how he created impressions, and how he put everything you need to know into one sentence.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I go back to him a lot, and I think about how he operates. He has this great sense of magical realism, but then he’s really grounded in whatever social issues he’s trying to address in the story. It isn’t just fantasy. It’s a way of looking at the world through these surprising events and making you realize the connection between what’s going on.

I just love William Faulkner’s stuff. In As I Lay Dying, he has these really short chapters, a couple that are one sentence.

DL: What’s next for Joe Meno?

JM: I’m going to head out to the West Coast and do readings out there in October. I’m also working on a play which will open here in Chicago in February.

DL: Is writing drama something new?

JM: Yes. There’s there great theatre here in Chicago call Redmoon Theater. They do a lot with spectacle and puppet theater, and they’ve commissioned me to write a play for them.

Read an excerpt from The Boy Detective Fails
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Douglas Light is the author of the novel East Fifth Bliss. His writing has appeared in various publications, including The New York Times, The Alaska Quarterly Review, The Morning News, and failbetter. His fiction won an O. Henry Prize, and was selected for inclusion in the Best American Nonrequired Reading 2003.