Raw, tender truths from 'Fight Club' hard-hitter

Stranger Than Fiction

True Stories

Chuck Palahniuk

Doubleday: 234 pp., $23.95

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Chuck Palahniuk's six novels, including "Choke," "Lullaby" and "Fight Club," share themes of isolation, addiction and nihilism. His characters often yearn for companionship, no matter how dysfunctional or damaging.

In the introduction to his latest book, "Stranger Than Fiction," Palahniuk writes: "If you haven't already noticed, all my books are about a lonely person looking for some way to connect with other people." Every essay in this collection is "about being with other people. Me being with people. Or people being together."

Palahniuk finds that the "one drawback to writing is the being alone. The writing part. The lonely-garret part."

In 23 pieces -- some of which appeared previously in publications such as Gear, Black Book and the Los Angeles Times -- Palahniuk writes expansively on topics ranging from bizarre to tragic, outrageously funny to tender -- sometimes in the same piece. Throughout, he offers insight into his approach to writing fiction: "Each time you create a character, you look at the world as that character, looking for the details that make that reality the one true reality. Like a lawyer arguing a case in a courtroom, you become an advocate who wants the reader to accept the truth of your character's worldview."

"Stranger Than Fiction" includes both journalistic essays and more personal pieces; it's the autobiographical material that proves most compelling. Yet Palahniuk's voice is so distinctive and intimate -- he writes as though he is recounting a great story to a close friend -- that even the slighter pieces are full of wonderful moments. Anyone who assumes, for instance, that Palahniuk is too concerned with violent and macho material may find those notions overturned. (He devotes a piece to his love of Amy Hempel's fiction and its influence on his writing.)

In "You Are Here," Palahniuk offers a sardonic take on an event in the ballroom of an airport Sheraton Hotel, a spectacle in which desperate writers pitch book manuscripts and screenplays to agents, publishers and movie producers. The material of one's life becomes reduced to a story to be packaged, marketed and sold. (Each writer has paid for the privilege of face time with would-be buyers, and each gets only seven minutes to make a pitch and get lucky.) "Maybe a book contract is the new halo," Palahniuk writes. "Our new reward for surviving with strength and character. Instead of heaven, we get money and media attention."