After giving us one of the books of 2018 with boxer travelogue Don't Skip Out on Me, American writer Willy Vlautin is back in Ireland for the Dalkey Book Festival. We talk to the Richmond Fontaine frontman-turned-author about his craft, and how he hopes people will find a friend in his work.
I've always used books and records to keep me from drowning.
They're my friends. I look at them like little saints on the wall that I look to for hope and just friendship.
There are two books that have got me through life in certain ways.
Fat City [by Leonard Gardner, published in 1969], and there's a writer out of Montana called James Welch, who wrote a book called The Death of Jim Loney [published in 1979], which is all about loneliness, really.
I'd always wanted to write a kind of boxing novel.
And so I looked at those books, Fat City and The Death of Jim Loney, and wrote my version. I set Don't Skip Out on Me in Nevada as a dedication and a homage to a great Nevada writer named Robert Laxalt. Not a lot of people have heard of him, but it was important for me to think about him when I was working on the book.
All of these guys have been helpful to me and their books have been friends to me.
I didn't know any of these guys, but they gave me the confidence to write Don't Skip Out on Me.
I was really interested in identity, and how people are so transitory in America too.
You might live in a different town from your brother. You might live in a different town from your parents. You live in a different town from your sister. And they all live in different towns. So you can isolate yourself.
With me, as a kid, I was always hoping I was a part of something.
I had my mom and my brother. You're always hoping, 'God, I wish I was from a big family. I wish I was from, like, a big Irish family and we had a construction company. Or we had a business. And they liked me. I could get thrown in jail and they'd still take me in! And I'd have a place to go on the weekends because my uncle would have a little beach house'. I was always dreaming about that stuff and, obviously, I didn't have any of it.
When I was thinking of the main character, Horace, in Don't Skip Out on Me, I was thinking of a kid who, like me, has no cultural identity.
He's part Native American - he's probably like 30 per cent Native American - but he looks Native American, which means he also kind of looks Mexican. The music he loves is 'white people music' - 'angry men music' like Pantera and Slayer. Horace was an amateur boxer because he was beat up a lot because he was a metalhead. Not so much because he was Native American, but because he had long hair. And so he became a boxer because his grandmother's boyfriend was a boxer and taught him and he liked it. He liked hitting, but he didn't mind getting hit.
Horace thinks, 'I'm going to move to a big city, change my identity and then I'll fit in'.
He decides, 'I look Mexican'. Mexican boxers in the US are seen as the toughest, never back down, true warriors, machismo - all that stuff. Horace says, 'That's the kind of guy I want to be. Once I'm Mexican I'll be tough and I won't be scared and I'll have a community'. But you can't do that.
The main idea of the book is: don't skip out on me.
Horace's folks abandoned him. And they broke him. It's so easy to break a kid, but it's so hard to fix them once they're broken.
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To get those scars off you? I don't really know if you ever can.
If you really work hard on yourself, and you got a certain kind of personality, and a certain kind of DNA, and a certain kind of blood that goes through you, maybe you can overcome anything. But most people? The burdens they carry? If they get too many burdens as a kid it's hard. So it's that idea of Don't Skip Out on Me: it's so easy to break people and so hard to fix them. So please, don't break them in the first place.
I like the idea that I want to work really hard on my books.
When you're in a band and you're touring - a working band - you don't want to let the band down, so you work really hard writing songs. I always write a lot of tunes, hoping that the band would stick together. I'm a sad sack and I don't write pop tunes, but I wanted to do right by them - the best I could for my dented little head. In the book world, I don't think about anything except that, hopefully, I can keep writing books on a level where I have enough confidence. If you start getting beat up by it, or it's not going your way... I never had much confidence.
Everybody's got their burdens - whatever they may be.
I don't know if they're burdens or just who you are - tattoos of you that you can't get rid of. I guess one of mine would be confidence and the other would be - like this book - loneliness. This book is about loneliness and the effects of loneliness - the inability even when people are trying to make you 'unlonely' to accept it. If this book made somebody feel at least comfortable that they are lonely too, that would be everything.
Willy Vlautin will be at the Dalkey Book Festival for "a special evening in story" on Thursday June 14 at 9:15pm. The Dalkey Book Festival runs from June 14-17. For more, see: dalkeybookfestival.org. Don't Skip Out on Me is published by Faber & Faber.
