Happy birthday, Chuck Palahniuk!

Our friend actor-writer Shea Vitartas got to The Writer’s Almanac today before me and emailed me with this head-up: Today is the birthday of novelist Chuck Palahniuk, author of “The Fight Club.” Per The Writer’s Almanac:

After college, he worked as an assembly line mechanic for Freightliner. He wrote a novel, Invisible Monsters, but publishers rejected it for being too disturbing.

One weekend, he went camping with friends and got in a fight with some people at the campground. He went to work on Monday with his face totally bashed in, and it took months to heal completely; but the whole time, everyone at work pretended not to notice. That experience inspired him to write a novel. He said, “People didn’t ask me what had happened. I think they were afraid of the answer. I realized that if you looked bad enough, people would not want to know what you did in your spare time.” So he wrote a novel about an anonymous yuppie protagonist who gets sick of his safe life and starts a club where men fight each other in order to feel something. Chuck Palahniuk purposely made it even darker and more disturbing than his first novel just to affront the publishers who had rejected Invisible Monsters. He said, “I thought, Well, they wouldn’t buy it, but at least they wouldn’t forget it.” But in fact, they did buy it — and in 1996, the novel Fight Club was published.

The nameless narrator of Fight Club repeats this mantra: “Deliver me from Swedish furniture. Deliver me from clever art. May I never be complete. May I never be content. May I never be perfect.”

Shea tells me he’s part of the “Fight Club Movie Cult.” That made me curious, so I bumped around the Internet seeing what’s out there. Some links here, here, and here.

What are your favorite lines of dialogue from The Fight Club? My favorite side is here.

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