A Genius In Flip-Flops: An Interview With Christopher Moore

How do approach something so personal and still find the humor in it?

My default setting is humor. In other words, even in some pretty dire circumstances, I tend to react by making fun, looking at the absurd side of it. So even as I was attending to those very heavy events, my mind was going ninety miles an hour coming up with funny things to say - which most of the time I didn't say, of course, but I thought them.

You've come back to San Francisco as a setting after being in the Middle East for Lamb and running with the whales for Fluke. What made you decide to come back to the city?

Well, for one, I really like San Francisco as a setting, especially the area where Charlie has his second-hand shop, right between North Beach, which is an Italian Neighborhood, Russian Hill, and Chinatown, and only blocks from the water. It's a great place to be, and can go from being very bright and cheerful, to feeling very dark and foreboding very quickly when the fog comes in off the bay. It's just a great place to set a horror story, and it gave me an opportunity to spend some time wandering the city, observing, taking pictures, talking to people.

You do a lot of research for each book. What did you learn from doing the background for A Dirty Job?

Funny thing is, most of the stuff I learned while doing the research for A Dirty Job I didn't use. I studied death rituals and beliefs from all over the world, but in the end, I didn't use them. They would have taken the story too far away from the characters, so I mainly depended on the observations I made while caring for the dying, as well as some of the conventions from the Tibetan Book of the Dead. There were some great personifications among the death myths, which I drew on, namely the Morrigan, which is a triumvirate of sisters, like the three graces, who take the form of Ravens and crows, and fly over the battlefields during the Middle Ages, killing, taking souls, driving warriors to frenzy. They ended up as characters in the book.

You've written about the many flavors of religion from Buddhism to Cargo Cults. Did spirituality play a part in your examination of death and dying?

Actually, it did. But not so much as any particular religion defines it. One of the things that you become acutely aware of when you're around the dying is the immediacy of a moment, the inherent passion that lies in every moment of living, if you decide to take it. Whether you believe that a persons essence will end at death, will go on to some reward or punishment, or will move into another incarnation, the time they have here, now, with you, is limited, ending, and you become aware of the importance of that "right now". If there was any direct spiritual influence, or epiphany in doing this book, it would certainly be the realization of the passion that resides in every moment of life.

Charlie is pretty wound up, and you've said before that sitting down to write makes you anxious. What's your biggest worry?

I worry about writing badly. That's a hydra with many heads. There are many, many ways to fail, and you can actually come up with whole new ways to fail. Generally, that's the worry: That I'll screw up in some new and exciting way.

You've described yourself as a Buddhist with Christian tendencies. What has your study of Buddhism taught you?

I'm not sure I can describe that. Anything I could say would sound trite, and probably not be accurate. In Buddhism there is a saying, "Trying to achieve enlightenment is like trying to bite the teeth." Perhaps trying to describe what my study of Buddhism has brought me would be a similar thing. There's nothing really spooky or mystical, just a sense of being more of a part of everything. Heightened awareness - does that make any sense?

You've said a few times that Lamb is your best work. How do you feel about that book now that you have a little distance from it?

I'm still very happy with it. There are some aspects of the book that were molded by the circumstances in which I wrote it - I finished it late, and was writing in a motel in Big Sur, so the end may be a little more hurried that it could have been, but on the other hand, there are parts of the book that I think are outrageously funny, that were written under that kind of pressure, so I can't claim I was hamstrung. Overall, I'm happy that I was able to pull it off, and I'm overjoyed with the response people have had to it.