David Gilmour Part 1: October 21, 2002

Epp: How Boys See Girls is a good book, a very funny book, but if we take the title at its word and say, ‘This is how boys see girls,' isn't that kind of sad? The boy never seems to ‘see' the girl at all, only his lust for her, or the emptiness he's trying to fill with her, or something.

David Gilmour: I don't think that it's particularly necessary to ‘see' the girl, ever. I think when you have a sexual obsession with somebody, all you want to do is fuck them. You don't really care what her personality's like, you don't really care about anything to do with her, and there's a real difference between a love affair, a grand love affair, and a sexual obsession. I don't think personalities have much to do with sexual obsessions, and so I don't think it's necessary for him ever to have found out who Holly was. This guy was like a heroin addict, and what he simply needed was a fix of this girl every 18 hours, every 24 hours, and what she was like really didn't matter insofar as you can imagine a sexual obsession with a woman being like an addiction to heroin: does it really matter whether the heroin's from Mexico, or Turkey, or New York? It doesn't matter, man. What counts is, is it junk? Will it get me off? End of story.

Epp: How self-aware of his behaviour was Bix? Did he think it was real love or did he recognize it as obsession? I mean, the situation doesn't make him happy, but he keeps going back to it.

Gilmour: I think that he knows what's going on. There's a time in your life—and I'm not there anymore but I used to be—when you think that supreme sexual gratification might as well be love. In other words, is it, isn't it, it doesn't really matter. What it is, is the most vital, important game in town. So I think he's really self-aware of the fact that Holly is like heroin to him, but I don't think he thinks that it's important that it be anything bigger than a sexual obsession, just because it makes him feel the way it does. I used to be like that myself. I used to have girlfriends and have these dreadful relationships, and I'd be up all night fighting and then fucking all morning and then fighting again and breaking up...and I used to think that that was the nature of real passionate love, that you had to have that kind of emotional violence if you were going to have a great sexual life. I always believed, and still do believe, that a great sexual life is probably the key and most significant element in any relationship between a man and a woman. Some peoplemight say that there are other things that matter, and yeah, that's true, but to me the one thing that you cannot be without, the one thing that you are entitled to almost from birth, is a great sexual thrill. That's the one thing in a romantic relationship I won't do without. When I was younger I would do without camaraderie, I would even do without friendship...the woman in How Boys See Girls was based on a woman who, actually, didn't like me very much, but I didn't really care. I'm not like that anymore, but the relationship that I have to this day is still characterized by being a great sexual relationship. If it weren't, I don't think I could pursue it.

Epp: Personally, whenever I would contemplate the state of pursuing sex for its own sake, with no thought to any deeper meaningful emotional bond, I found the pointlessness of it to be pretty depressing.

Gilmour: But why is a great sensation of physical pleasure pointless? What else is there in your life, given that you and I are both going to be a bag of ashes in 100 years, what could be more significant that the sensation of pleasure while we were alive? And if so, how could that then be pointless?

Epp: Well, in your own books there's anguish caused by the shell-game nature of it all, where people aren't thinking in the way you just described. The two people aren't thinking the same way, one of them expects more than the other can give, thinks that here's something that'll last forever and solve all of his/her problems, and when it doesn't they're crushed.

Gilmour: Right, I agree. It's true, but that's how I felt 10 years ago when I wrote that book. I don't think like that now, although I still insist that a great sexual relationship is absolutely key to my personal makeup. But I also think that a love affair isn't a legal contract. It's not a guarantee. It probably won't last forever, and I think your obligation, if you think like this, is not to be a ‘good person,' but to explain to people what you're like. If you say, “Listen, I am only interested in this, and when this dies, I will be gone,” I think that you've done your duty. And if someone decides to play ball, what you're doing is saying to them, ‘I think you're an adult, I'm not going to make your decisions for you. I'm not thinking, ‘Oh, this poor fuck, she can't make up her own mind, I'm going to be Daddy, I'm going to say this isn't good for you.'' What I think you do is say to them, ‘Look, here's what I'm like. I'm going to give you an accurate honest description of what I like and what I can offer: I'll fuck you every day, and I'll never cheat on you, and when our sex life dies, I'll leave. These are the things I can promise you that will happen.' I think that's a reasonable deal because it treats her like an adult. They can then say, ‘Well, I'm going to get old, and when I get old I'll lose my sexual attractiveness, and then I'm going to lose you. Fuck that .' But it gives them the option to make that decision. They can think, ‘Yeah, that sounds fine with me,' or, if they're like most women, what they really think is, ‘I can change him. I'll change him. He thinks he's like that now, but I can change him.' And I actually have been changed. A woman did change me. That woman there. (Points at a big photograph on the wall behind him.) We've been together off and on for about ten years, and I have now changed my tune. But I thought that way for a long time, and I have a son who's sixteen, and I tell him that's all he has to do to a woman, just tell her what you're like, and let her make the decision. But one thing you have to do is, you have to be straight with her. Don't promise what you can't deliver.

Epp: It sounds like you've got the sexual parameters of relationships pretty much nailed down to your satisfaction—what about love? Your books made me think about the confusion surrounding it all; people confusing sex for love, what do people mean exactlywhen they use that word, when I say that to her, is she defining the word the same way I am..?

Gilmour: Right. I'll try not to make this a complicated answer. Like Proust, for a long time, I used to believe that desire and possession were incompatible, that the only way you could stay hot for a woman was if you never quite had her, and the second you actually got her soul, you no longer desired her. For a long time I was like that.

Epp: Isn't that attitude just...arrested adolescent?

Gilmour: I think it's—this is a pompous way of saying it—I think it's the human condition.

Epp: What is, wanting what you can't get?

Gilmour: That the act of truly desiring to have something, and the act of possession, are almost incompatible. Most of us have been in that position, and not just about women. You must have had certain triumphs in your life, where you imagined how they'd be, and then when you got them...something happened. They were better when you wanted them. And when you had them, somehow the magic tiptoed out the back door.

Epp: Yeah, sure.

Gilmour: I say this because I'm a recent convert to love, now. I now feel that way about a woman I actually have, who I still have an enormous desire for. But my theory about that is, there's a part of her, in her head, that she will not give me. There's a series of secret drawers in her personality into which I have no access. In other words, I don't actually have her. And that leads me to think that you may not ever actually possess anyone, that the idea of possession is, in fact, an illusion. If you think about how complicated your own interior life is, your daydreams, your sexual fantasies, and you imagine a woman being like that too, you never really possess her. You never really get to get all of her. I tell my girlfriend I don't want to hear about her dreams if they involve other men, and I sure don't want to hear about any fantasies she has, but I imagine they exist. In other words, you don't really ever get to have another person. Another is, by definition, unhaveable.

Epp: Isn't it kind of stupid to think of possession in that sense? My feeling for my girlfriend isn't based on an idea of me possessing her in this heavy dominating way you're talking about.

Gilmour: I'm not talking about dominating her, I'm talking about possessing her.

Epp: I don't understand.

Gilmour: You must have been with a woman who wanted you more than you wanted her. Well, that's the sense of possession I have. I don't know, you're only 30, so I'm interested to see what you think about that...Sometimes when I was single I would ask someone out just because I had nothing to do, I was between wives. I'd think, ‘Well, this is kind of depressing, here I am with a Saturday night coming up, and I have a date with somebody, but I'm not that interested, and wouldn't it be great if I had a date with someone who was actually interesting?' So then, at quarter to eight , the girl calls me and says, ‘Look, I can't come. My friend's sick and I have to take her to the hospital.' Within ten seconds, my interest in that girl has been mysteriously piqued. You can call that adolescent, but I don't think it is. I think it's human. So then, I go, ‘God, I'm actually really disappointed.' Fifteen minutes later the girl calls back and says, ‘You know what? My friend's okay. I don't have to take her to the hospital. I can go on our date after all.' And I experience this strange letdown, because now I'm back to feeling vaguely disappointed that I have a date with someone on a Saturday night who I don't really want and that's what I'm talking about and I don't think that adolescent. I think that's really human.

Epp: I guess I found getting on that whole emotional treadmill was just too exhausting. I kind of gave up on all that a few years ago, met my current girlfriend through dumb luck, and she's great...

Gilmour: Are you happy there? Like, if it stays like it is now, will you stay with her?

Epp: Yeah, that's the plan. In the past, whenever I'd be with a girl I'd always feel like I was performing, like I could never really relax, and I feel really comfortable with her. I'd be happy to stay with her forever.

Gilmour: But have you had experiences in your life, in your past, where you walk into a room, you meet someone, and the chemistry's just really overpowering? And you don't even have to particularly like them...the French have an interesting saying I put into one of my books, they say that love is really an affair of smell. I'm inclined to agree, insofar as all the women I've really adored have all smelled really good. Like really really good. Bix's love is not an ideal relationship, but that book is not a manual for correct living. It's a description of an obsessive relationship. But I think we've all had, or we should have had, relationships where there is an inexplicable desire, period . And I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I'm not saying it's a place you should live in forever, but I am saying it's a great place to have been to.

Epp: Well, it wasn't for me.

Gilmour: Oh it wasn't, eh?

Epp: No. It sucked. Whenever I would experience what you just described, I'd get carried away, start playing this Walter Mitty-style fantasy track in my head, and when I didn't get my happy ending, when it didn't last forever, I'd feel really let down.

Gilmour: I never cared, because I always thought that the sensation of pleasure I'd had while I was in bed with her paid the price for the hit I would later take when the relationship would inevitably fall apart. Like, ‘Yeah. I know it's gonna fall apart, I know it's gonna hurt, I know it's gonna feel like shit, but I'll take it all, because the pleasure's worth it.'

Epp: I just didn't like it. It felt like playing a game without knowing the rules.

Gilmour: Yeah, I understand that. You don't know the rules, but...

Epp: Maybe I just did it wrong.

Gilmour: No, you can't do it wrong. The point is: they're dead-end relationships. The question is: how do you look upon a dead-end relationship? And I don't think that a relationship that ends is a failure. I've been married twice, and I don't view either of my marriages as failures. I think they ran their course. Relationships like the one that Bix has with Holly aren't supposed to last forever. And you're supposed to pay the price. At the end of the meal you get up, the waiter gives you a fucking huge bill, and you pay it. Listen, I walked around for six months having withdrawal symptoms from one of these women, but I swear, man, it was worth it. I even went to a psychiatrist because I was so upset, and he said, ‘You know, you're really good with the pleasure, David, but you're not so good with the pain. And if you're not careful, you're going to do this to yourself again.' And said, ‘Well, yeah . I hope so.' Because I liked the sensation. I was lucky. At fifty I ended up with someone who I sexually desire and is also a real pal, and I've developed a new way of thinking about all this which is: in the end, sex is real crucial, but you have GOT to be able to hang out together. If you can't hang out together, you're fucked. It's just a matter of time. And you can literally hear the stopwatch on those relationships, that tick tick tick tick tick, it's just a question of time. So you've got to be able to hang out together. So now, my girlfriend and my children claim I've been ‘born again.' My daughter said to me, “You've been such a bad guy, you've had so many girlfriends, you've behaved so badly and it's not fair that you've ended up with a great woman now. It's like, what does that tell me about life? How come a sinner like you is allowed to get away with it?” I've got a lot of thoughts about all this, but most of it is in the past for me because I'm with someone now. But if our physical life died, I think we would eventually separate. Some couples are hot for each other and then they slide into a kind of brother/sister neutrality. Some people think that's okay and they can live like that. I have friends, married guys, who haven't been laid in three or four years. I used to feel superior to them, and I don't anymore. I think they get other stuff out of the deal, other stuff that they like, stuff that means more to them than it would to me. I just don't want to see myself jacking off to a copy of Penthouse magazine while my wife is sleeping upstairs. I don't want my life to go that way.

Epp: That happens to a lot of guys.

Gilmour: Yeah, it does. I just don't it want to happen to me. And the one thing about being single is: there's always hope. In the situation I just described, there's no hope. There's no place to go. My married friends complain to me about their marriages endlessly, and I always say to them, “Imagine if your life is going to stay like this forever, and not get any better. How do you feel about that?” Most of them say they'd like to shoot themselves. And my experience is that once a relationship is settled, it doesn't change.

Epp: What if Tina got Alzheimer's, and not only couldn't satisfy you sexually, but required your constant care? Would you just hit the bricks, then?

Gilmour: No I wouldn't, because I'm not an asshole. But that's a pretty dramatic example. I'm not talking about cancer or anything like that, I'm talking about the kind of sexual neutrality that descends like dust over a couple. But I believe in monogamy, I don't believe in cheating, I think cheating is just absolute bullshit. If you're gonna fucking cheat on your wife, don't be married to her. I've come to this business late. You may not agree with me on this, but I think you've got to go through a lot of women, a LOT of women, until you find someone who's right for you. And I think most people give up too early. Two nights ago I was having dinner here with Brian Johnson, the film reviewer for Maclean's magazine, and he said something I found very interesting. He said, “You know, I think the so-so relationships are the ones that last. I think the really good ones are the ones that don't last. Perfect relationships that are really hot never last, but the so-so ones that are just pretty good, those are the ones that go on forever.' I've never been with a woman for longer than three or four years so I don't know, but Brian has, and I think that might be an interesting observation that's really worth thinking about. That the really hot ones don't last, but the sort of okay ones do. What do you think about that?

Epp: I think my experience is probably too limited to really have an opinion on it. I pretty much gave up on all of that a few years ago, and just happened to meet my girlfriend on a bus coming back from Ottawa , and we've been together ever since.

Gilmour: You actually met her on the bus? How does that work? How do you pick up a girl on the bus?

Epp: People ask me that.

Gilmour: I bet.

Epp: It's happened before. In a bar, a woman is smart enough to know what the deal is, why a man would go to a place like that, so she has her guard up, she's prepared for the same old schtick, but if you start talking to her on a bus, or at the library, or on the sidewalk, the whole novelty of it seems to help out.

Gilmour: Well, was she sitting beside you?

Epp: It's weird. She was behind me in the line to get on the bus, and we talked a bit there, but I was in a pretty bad mood, so I didn't give it too much thought. And then she sat down first, I went to sit behind her or something, and she told me to sit down next to her. And I'm looking around for the candid camera, you know?

Gilmour: Right, right. But you obviously weren't looking, and a man who's not looking is very attractive. ‘This guy's not looking, he's not on the hustle, he's got no agenda...'.

Epp: And nothing turns off a really attractive woman like the drooling admiration of a would-be doormat.

Gilmour: Absolutely. So she just thought, ‘Nice friendly guy, doesn't need anything, doesn't want anything, gotta have him sit beside me.' So were you a couple when you got off the bus or did it take a few dates?

Epp: Um, it didn't take too long.

Gilmour: And where does she live?

Epp: Well, she lives on Church St. (in Toronto ) but she's moving to Hamilton so we'll be closer to each other.

Gilmour: That's great. But tell me again why you don't move here and live with her in Toronto . That sounds like a far saner approach, especially with you being a writer...it isn't because of your stupid job, is it?

Epp: Well, I'm told it's pretty expensive to live here in Toronto ...

Gilmour: It is. It's a joke. But Toronto is where writers come to.

Epp: Maybe I will have to someday...

Gilmour: And she's really okay about leaving Toronto and moving to Hamilton ?

Epp: I guess so.

Gilmour: She must really like you a lot , man. Moving to Hamilton to be with a guy, that's love. You talk about dealing with a partner who has Alzheimer's—moving to Hamilton 's a lot worse than that. If she moves to Hamilton , make sure you keep her happy. If she moves there and doesn't like it, you'll do something about that, won't you?

Epp: Yeah. And the funny thing is, she's honestly the most beautiful woman I've ever seen. Hang on—(takes picture out of wallet and shows it to Gilmour).

Gilmour: Oh, she's beautiful. She's absolutely beautiful. Where is she from— Ethiopia ?

Epp: Rwanda .

Gilmour: Well, that was the luckiest goddam bus ride you ever took, wasn't it?

Epp: Yeah, it was pretty strange.

Gilmour: Are you going to marry her?

Epp: Yeah.

Gilmour: Good. She's fantastic. I'd marry her in a second. Well, that's a great story, Darrell.

Epp: Thanks. Um, was Bix capable of real love? Was the situation described in your book just an interval between serious relationships or was that as good as he could get?

Gilmour: No, that's what he was doing, and that was the best game in town. And because he felt so strongly for her, it passed for love. I don't think it was love, for a very simple reason. If, after she left him, she had been run over by a car and killed, that actually would have been more of a relief than a sadness. I think if you feel that way about a woman, you don't really love her. Like, the woman I'm with now, if she left me and ran off with another guy and was run over by a car, I would truly think that was a great sadness, and a great loss. Whereas, if the girl I had based Holly on had been hit by a bus and killed after leaving me, I would have thought, ‘How sad, but at least she won't be fucking anyone else.'

Epp:You're still friends with your ex-wives?

Gilmour: Absolutely. But I have children with them. I'm not friends with most of my ex-girlfriends. For some reason, most of my girlfriends tend to cross to the other side of the street when they see me coming. I think that's partially because I'm a writer, and one way that manifests itself is a kind of malignant self-absorption. I think what most of my girlfriends have experienced is the sensation of ‘playing in my band.' I write the songs, I call the tune, I book the gigs, and the ones that left, I think they just got tired of being in my band. And so, when they see me on the street, they're often irritated with themselves for having twisted and distorted themselves into a shape that would please me, rather than insisting on being who they were. But I'm very close to my two ex-wives because we have children together, and because I happen to understand that you can go to bed with an asshole, but you NEVER have a child with one. So I was very careful, when I was with my ex-wives, to see how they treated the men before me, because how a woman treated the men before you is how you are going to get treated. If they're lusting for revenge and they want to get even and they want to fuck somebody over and they want to see someone unhappy then that, my friend, is your destiny. The women I had children with, I knew at the time that I probably wouldn't be with them for the rest of my life, but I knew that they would be great about it after it was over. They wouldn't be thirsting for revenge. Consequently, there were no lawyers, no alimony, no recriminations, no nothing. Literally none of that stuff.

Epp: That's pretty rare.

Gilmour: Absolutely. But I was very careful about who I had children with. As you can see, I'm living in my ex-wife's house and you know where she's living? She's living in my apartment, because our son was living with her last year and she said, “He needs to live with a man, but he's happy there in his basement, so why don't you move into my house and I'll move into your loft and we'll just do that for a year.” And last week, there was a Thanksgiving dinner thrown by both of my ex-wives, and my girlfriend. That was the dinner where Brian Johnson and I had that conversation. As long as everybody behaves like a grown-up, as long as everybody remembers who the children are, it is amazing what possibilities there are in life. And, I've been lucky. But I've been careful, too.

Epp: When Bix experiences that anguish when Holly tell him she's not that physically attracted to him, it's not because he knows that something meaningful is ending, it's because he knows he won't be able to satisfy his lust in the same way. It's like she was more of a tool than a person.

Gilmour: Well, no, I think he really wanted her, and there are many things fixable in human relationships—I don't like your sense of humour, I don't like the way you dance, I wish you would tidy up your apartment more—but if someone says they're not physically attracted to you, you're fucked . And he knew, because he's a veteran of these wars, that that's the kiss of death. That's the one thing you can't fix.

Epp: All this stuff you've been saying about possession and obsession and desire, is that how you think most boys do see girls most of the time?

Gilmour: Absolutely. I think that it's how most men are with women for most of their lives. I have had an inordinate amount of experience and I have outgrown that, but it's a very long and difficult apprenticeship, to outgrow the notion that desire and possession are incompatible. It's also luck. I had a hundred different girlfriends, and none of them was right for me. It's not like I'm looking back on this battlefield saying, “Oh God, she was terrific, so was she...” NONE of them were! It took me a long time to find the right one. I don't mean to fly in the face of your experience, Darrell, but in my experience, it's a long hard grind. Just think of how many of your friends from high school you still see, how many of your friends from university you still see. They all fall away, except for maybe one or two people. I think the choice of your life mate is really like finding a four-leaf clover. I was a romantic, and I believed that if you got dumped enough and dumped enough and had enough patience to throw the little ones back, you'll end up with the person you're supposed to be with. But you have got to pay your dues. A guy like you, you were lucky.

Epp: I know.

Gilmour: But I'm telling you, most people I know, when I look at who they've wound up with, they should have hung in there a little bit longer, they should have looked a little bit harder. What happens is, you get lonely, you get depressed, you get frightened, you get old, and you settle.

Epp: Yeah, before I met Dorothee, I was starting to worry that I'd wake up one day and be a fifty-year old fat bald loser, living all alone.

Gilmour: That never worried me, actually. I always thought that if I just kept going, I'd get it. As I hit 45, 46, 47, people would ask, ‘Aren't you finding it more and more difficult to get women as you age? Particularly since you like younger women?' And my answer always was, “You don't have to get them all; you just have to get one.”

Epp: That's actually another thing I don't understand, the younger-woman thing. I'm 30, Dorothee's 27, and Bix was 40 and Holly was 19, and I'm pretty sure that when I'm forty the last thing I'd want to do is talk to a 19-year-old.

Gilmour: Well, Bix wasn't interested in talking to a 19-year-old either. He just wanted to fuck her. She smelled good . You know that scene in the book where the girl scratches herself below her armpit? I saw that happen once. It was a gesture of such unbelievable sexuality that it made me ill to my stomach. I was with my wife at the time, unfortunately, but I was ready to take that girl into a dirty washroom and do her right there and lose my whole family, the whole works. I'm not talking about vaguely being hot for somebody, I'm talking about being just ill with desire. And all Bix wanted from Holly was for her to make herself sexually available to him. It's just...desire. It's torture, but you get the prize. And it doesn't last, and you get these terrible withdrawal symptoms, and you spend three months thinking you're going to die, but you don't die. For some people, it's not worth it. For me, it was.

Epp: Was the time you spent making your way through the hundred or so that didn't fit the bill—

Gilmour: I'm fifty, remember, and I started when I was eighteen, so that's not a lot to go through. I just don't want to confuse what I'm saying with bravado, because it's not bravado. Thirty years is a long time. Any asshole can have a hundred girlfriends in thirty years.

Epp: Okay. Was that the process by which you taught yourself how boys see girls, the difference between what you're seeing and what's really there, and all that?

Gilmour: I didn't care. All I cared about was: do I desire her, and can I fuck her? Period. End of story. Only in the last five or six years have I come to the conclusion that if you can't hang out with her, it's not worth pursuing. But before that, I was only interested in that first bit: do I desire her, and can I get her? Didn't care if she was what she appeared to be, didn't care about anything else.

Epp: So any life lessons you may have learned along the way were just incidental?

Gilmour: Well...I believed that being sexually thrilled was the most important human experience there is. I'm still not convinced that it's not. That was my goal, to have that experience. And all that other stuff—love, friendship, family—was just gravy. What I wanted was the sensation of pleasure. It's not for everyone, and my books aren't for everyone, and I'm not for everyone, but that's really what it was all about for me, the gratification of an appetite for sensation.

Epp: Because Holly was such a cipher, and the few things we learned about her like where she went to school and what her parents did was just trivia that didn't matter, the reader just wanted to fast forward through it and get to the good stuff. I almost got the impression that there was more value in viewing Holly not as a real person—because she didn't work that well as a real person, and Bix was the only person who got a fair shot in that book—but as a metaphor for something else, something that Bix is searching for, something that's missing, and I was interested in the way you use sex as a metaphor in your books for something else.

Gilmour: I certainly don't do that. And actually, you should have another look at How Boys See Girls before our next chat, because there's a lot more there than people get the first time through. She's fucked-up, but she's not a blank, and her conversations, her dialogue, is very indicative. You know, there's a rule about writing good dialogue, that is should be like an iceberg. You only see the top part, but good dialogue suggests this whole underpresence. If you look at Holly's dialogue carefully—and I constructed her dialogue very carefully—there is a lot said about Holly by implication. She's not a blank, she's not a non-person, and she's not a cipher. She's actually a real person. The problem is that she's an object of desire. An object of desire has very strict borders. Let me put it this way: when you have a sexual desire like that for someone, it's like you cast a hot laser beam right at the part of them that you want. But that laser beam doesn't cast any illumination on the rest of their character, and that's why the portrait of Holly is as rarefied as it is. I wrote her character very carefully. It was based on a real human being. I'm always very careful to base characters on real human beings, otherwise you end up with a stereotype. You don't ever, ever, start with an idea and build it into a person, you start with a person and then you get what you need. I'm not sure if you'll have time, but if you look at How Boys See Girls again, you will discover that there's more to Holly than you saw the first time through. It's the same with Back On Tuesday . There's a lot more to Back On Tuesday than meets the eye. The first time people read it, they go, “Yeah, this is just like a fucking diary. This guy whipped it off in an hour and a half,” and that's not the case. I ran into a professor of German literature a few years ago and he said, “You know, I just grabbed that first novel of yours the other day and read it again, and there's actually a lot in it!” I said, “Well, yeah , there is a lot in it.” The problem is the way it's written. It's a fast read, so people just think it came out like a sitting down at the bar and saying, “Hey, have I got a fucking story for you. Blam, here it is.” If you don't read my books a second time, you don't really get them.

Epp: You didn't have to get defensive about me calling Holly a cipher because—

Gilmour: No no, I'm not getting defensive, I'm correcting a real misunderstanding. I've had this conversation about Holly for ten years.

Epp: Well, I have read the books several times, and I did recognize there was a lot of depth to Holly. When I said she was a cipher, maybe I was just saying that I didn't really care about her that much, because the Bix parts were funnier, and I wanted to get back to the good stuff.

Gilmour: Right. But that comes back to the larger issue of how my books are read. I write these books so that they seem effortless. I write them and write them and write them so that they seem absolutely inevitable, like some guy just sat down and wrote this thing out and handed it in and published it and that's obviously not how it's done. Back On Tuesday , and Holly, those are two common misunderstandings. When that book came out in Canada , it was panned from sea to fucking sea.

Epp: Which one?

Gilmour: How Boys See Girls . It did really well in the States. It got a full page in the Sunday New York Times, it got a page in People magazine, but up here they just hated it, from sea to fucking sea. On my book tour, I was having interviewers cancel left and right. Like, “We don't want to talk to this guy. This is a fucking creep who's written a creepy book.” And they kept saying, “But Holly's not a real person.” And I'd say, “No no, she's a person he wants to fuck , so that's all he's interested in, that's all he's talking about. Get it?” I had a soft spot for the real girl that I based Holly on. I thought that she was...interesting. Fucked-up, but interesting. Blocked, too. I found she was a blocked person.

Epp: Blocked meaning repressed?

Gilmour: But not by her own personality, just kind of constipated in how she expressed herself. She had a kind of paralyzing self-consciousness. In spite of the fact that she was one of the most beautiful women I'd ever seen in my life, I think that she had the self-esteem of a true pipsqueak. I think she really thought that she was a small-time, ineffectual, uninteresting young woman. Because she felt that she didn't have anything that compelling to say, she was constantly losing the courage to finish her sentences. And this has nothing to do with it, but the girl Holly was based on wrote me a letter years later. She'd found the book, recognized herself, and wrote me a letter. I never responded to it because, as Henry Miller said, ‘If you want to kill a woman, turn her into literature,' and it was over for me by the time I'd finished the book. But every time I read Holly's dialogue—and I don't go and pull my books down off of the shelf very often—I think, there's a lot here. Even when Bix takes her to the top of the CN Tower, and after looking around at the view for awhile she says, “After awhile it's just like looking at television.” To this day I think that's an extraordinarily interesting piece of dialogue.

Epp: That reminds me of when Emma, the girl from Sparrow Nights , was in the hospital bed recovering from her operation, and she has that one line where she says that she now realizes that there's a soul living inside of her body. And it's just a single sentence that takes only a moment to read, and the reader and protagonist are both tempted to ignore it so they can get back to the good stuff, but obviously that one line has a lot of weight. It made it clear that Emma did have a story of her own, but Darius the narrator just wasn't that interested in the parts of Emma's story that didn't revolve around him. And that's the difference between good dialogue and bad dialogue, the old cliche about show, don't tell.

Gilmour: Absolutely. Emma has this whole depth to her that he isn't interested in, doesn't pay attention to, and can barely remember. She has a soul, and what a mind-blowing thing to say when all the guy cares about is jacking off into her clothes in the laundry basket. And dialogue is very important for me. I spend a lot of time writing it, and I'm really careful with it. I don't have a single throwaway line, ever. “Would you like to sit down?” “Please pass the sugar.” “Thanks very much.” There's none of that stuff. My dialogue is really important, as important as any piece of prose in the whole thing.

Epp: You can understand where this reader confusion you were talking about comes from, when Holly is admittedly primarily an object of desire, and there's a difference between a subject and an object, and it's pretty hard to give fair dramatic weight to an object.

Gilmour: Yes it is, and I don't do that, and I don't want to. If you read Chekhov's ‘Portrait Of A Lady With A Lapdog,' there's almost no description of her at all. It's almost a generic description of a woman. And that's because she's the object of a guy's desire. She's just a chick from somewhere in Russia who's on holidays an this guy wants to fuck her and then three-quarters of the way through the story he finds that he's actually falling in love with her, and he can still barely observe anything about her! There's practically no physical description and no dialogue from that girl at all. People say Holly's not a fully fleshed-out character—well of course she's not, because she's the object of a guy's desire. I'M the star of the show. The book is about MY feelings, it's not about her feelings. She is someone I desire, so the only things we need to know about her are the things that I, as the person who desires her, notice. So, the thing about the running shoes with Emma, that's one of those weird exotic details that you notice about a woman you want to sleep with. It's not important. You have to be sexually interested in a woman to notice that kind of thing. It's not a revelatory detail about her, exactly, but it's a revelatory detail about the narrator because running shoes on the feet of a woman you want to sleep with have a kind of magic to them. While, in the real world, to people who don't desire her, they're completely banal.

Epp: That's the important question: when you're describing something, are you choosing your details as precisely and as economically as you can? Many writers seem afraid to leave anything out, now that many readers are spoiled by the majority of modern novels that are just big for their own sake, and—

Gilmour: --and overwritten. They're all overwritten. I mean even the best writers are unreadable because their books are so overwritten. Have you ever tried to read really good writers like Philip Roth or John Updike or John Irving or, God forbid, Norman Mailer? Those fucking books should be cut by a third! They're horribly overwritten. I have to say most Canadian novels are too. I like my stuff lean and I like to get to the point.

Epp: I read an interview with Stephen King where he was asked, ‘You've said your favourite novel is The Haunting Of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, which is barely 200 pages, so why are all your novels 800 pages?' And he answered, ‘You know the old saying, Less is more? In America , more is more.'

Gilmour: I don't believe that, and I don't believe he believes that, either. I think he is a very very talented writer. Unfortunately, he has one enormous artistic shortcoming: he can't shut the fuck up. And it's hurt him. It offends him that he's not taken seriously by literary writers. If you look at his very interesting book on writing, it's very short and a lot of the books at the back that he recommends are very short novels...I just read Ian McKewen's Amsterdam , it's 160, 175 pages and it gets right to the point...The great tragedy about Stephen King--well, tragedy may be too lofty a word when talking about Stephen King—is that he's not had the balls, just once, to say, “Hey. I'm going to write an 800 page book, and then I'm going to boil this motherfucker down to 175 pages and I don't care what happens to it.” And then he could write something really great. Here's a guy who loves The Great Gatsby and ends up writing 900 pages. I tried to read one of his books recently, just because I like him so much, Something-bones or Bone-head or something, and after 240 pages, I thought okay, there's the story, that's enough for me. And there was like, 600 pages left! And I thought, ‘Ohhh, no. You're not getting any more of my life.' My latest novel is 145 pages. They're just getting shorter and leaner and more efficient.

Epp: This flaw you describe may be not so much an artistic shortcoming as it is a reaction to a marketplace—

Gilmour: I don't agree. I really don't agree. I think he is an artist, and I think he has a serious artistic shortcoming, I really do. I don't think he's a hack. I don't think he thinks like that. I think he writes the way he writes because that's the way he writes, in the same way that van Gogh painted the way he painted because that was the way he painted. King is the most successful writer in the history of literature; he doesn't need the money. He needs literary respectability, and for some reason, artistically, there's something in him that just can't do it.

Epp: I think it's possible that partially due to his popularity and the template for popular novels that he helped establish, readers have been trained to think that a book that weighs more is a better value than a lighter one, and that's why most books now are so long.

Gilmour: Sure, and that's fine if you need to make a bestseller, but Stephen King doesn't need to make a bestseller.

Epp: People love just the fact that it'll take them longer to read, it'll provide them with an entertainment of longer duration, so it's a better value. People are trained to pick up the book that has some weight to it, just like people prefer a bigger watermelon, or something.

Gilmour: My girlfriend said the same thing. When Sparrow Nights came out, it got great reviews in Canada and in the States, and I said to her, “I don't understand why it isn't selling more copies.” She said, “It's too thin.” I said, “Get serious!” She said, “No man, I mean it. You're asking people to pay 33 bucks for this book, when they can get another book for 33 bucks that's several pounds heavier and an inch or two thicker. Most people are going to choose the fat one.” I thought she was bullshitting me!

Epp: If it's any consolation, the people who do like your books, that's why they like them. A friend of mine who's reading Back On Tuesday right now just commented on the fact that he doesn't know what Gene's hair colour is, or anything like that, and he really appreciated it, because he doesn't give a crap about those kinds of details.

Gilmour: I don't either. But you know, literary tastes change. I do believe that, down the road, there will be an exhaustion with fat overwritten American novels, and there will be an appetite for leaner gruel. I honestly believe that. I mean, I don't go to bed at night praying for it, but literary tastes change, and those books are so appallingly overwritten that I think people's tastes will change and they'll say, “No. This isn't what I want. I want it short and hot.”

Epp: I've always liked Steps by Jerzy Kosinksi, and it's only 110 pages. And if I read one of these 800-page bestsellers, I'd forget it almost as soon as I'd finished it, but I was still thinking about Steps for a long time after I finished it, and I guess that's a kind of value, too.

Gilmour: You bet. Have you read War and Peace ? War and Peace is so great, man. It's so fucking great, you can't believe it. If you're ever going to read a 1500-page book, it's the only one in the world. It changed my reading experience. I saw the world differently after reading it. I read it when I was about your age, and I just finished reading it for the third time, and pound for pound, line for line, paragraph for paragraph, it delivers more truth and more punch than anything I've ever read. It's great, it's exciting, it's romantic, it's everything. My first ex-wife gave me a copy of it, and I took it to Jamaica with me. I had no real intention of reading it. I had a terrible overproof hangover the first morning I was there, because the first thing I would do when I would go to Jamaica , invariably, was get incredibly drunk. Do speed, drink overproof, do downers, and just really blow my mind. I woke up the next morning feeling really rocky. You've never had a hangover until you've had an overproof hangover. You pour that stuff on the table, and it really does explode when you light it. I was lying on my side and I started reading War and Peace . I remember thinking, about two or three pages in, ‘Fuck, this is really good! And this is really true. This is how human beings really are.' I was so knocked out by it that two or three days later I actually stopped some tourist on the street, held up the book and said, “Have you ever read this fucking thing? This is the most unbelievable book I've ever read in my life!” When you first read Tolstoy you can't believe it's actually truer than life. It's not only true, it's truer than the life you're having right now. It's more vivid than your own life. It's very hard to believe how good it is. I just read it again for the third time, and the same thing happened to me. I was upstairs with a hangover, there was nothing else to read, I pulled the book down, read the whole 1500-page book. There's a character in the book who's a long-suffering and rather plain daughter of a rather tyrannical man. Her whole had been spent putting off her own pleasures to accommodate someone else's. And toward the end of the book she has this moment where a man that she liked has, once again, lost interest in her. And she has this interior monologue where she says, essentially, why don't I ever get what I want? Why do other people get what they want? Why can't I ever get any of the things I want in my life? For some reason, that moment still really gets to me. I actually burst into tears reading that. It was the most moving bit of prose I'd ever read in my life. When I read the book again, about five years later, I burst into tears at exactly the same moment again, and when I finished the book again three months ago, the same thing happened. Tolstoy is not afraid to break your heart, and he knows how to do it. But with Tolstoy, the elevator doesn't just go down; it can go up, too. There's a scene where a young count and his prospective girlfriend are taking a sleigh ride across the fields in the middle of winter. The stars are out, the moon is out, and there's a flirtation between these two people that ends in a kiss and is just an exhilarating piece of literature. It makes you so happy and so thrilled to read it, it's as if it actually happened to you in your own life. There's something about Tolstoy that makes you feel as if what's at stake for the characters is at stake for you. In The Death Of Ivan Ilyich , there's a very odd moment of extraordinary tenderness, where this rather dumb peasant is the only one who can understand this mysterious and undiagnosable illness of Ivan's. Everyone else thinks it's psychosomatic and they're tired of hearing about it. Ivan is up every night, moaning and groaning in pain. His serf, the house idiot, is the only one who knows enough to come into his room and put Ivan's legs up on his own shoulders. If Ivan's legs are raised to a certain level, the pain stops. There's one scene where Ivan actually goes to sleep, with his legs up like that. It's the first comfort he's known in days. He wakes up near morning, and he sees the peasant is still there, and he's still allowed Ivan Ilyich's legs to remain on his shoulders, and he's actually fallen asleep himself. And it's a gesture of such human warmth, such kindness, that you can feel Tolstoy take your heart and squeeze it. I think Tolstoy is, more than any other writer I've ever read, a writer who affects me physically . He can really hurt me and he can really delight me, but in a very physical way.