Finding What Makes Your Heart Beat: An Interview With Kyle Minor, Author of Praying Drunk

Kyle Minor’s newest collection of short stories, Praying Drunk, was released earlier this month and has already garnered the attention of some of literature’s most well-respected voices—Publisher’s Weekly, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Harper’s, the Atlantic, the Boston Globe and the Chicago Tribune, among many others. Despite their wildly varying landscapes—including Florida, Ohio, Kentucky, and Haiti, to name a few—Minor’s stories all exist in conversation with one another, each contemplating the truth in the stories, as Didion famously wrote, we tell ourselves to live. In the first sentence of his opening and perhaps most gripping story, “The Trouble of Where We Begin” (available as an excerpt online through literary journal Gulf Coast), Minor addresses this question head-on, writing, “We begin with the trouble, but where does the trouble begin? My uncle takes a pistol and blows his brains out,” before spiraling into his uncle’s life narrative and the narrative of the human race. Of his daring collection, author Daniel Handler (also known as Lemony Snicket) has said, “I finished this book with my heart pounding and grateful, my coffee cold and my smile wide and crying like a baby.” Minor and I sat down to chat about the nature of truth, transition, and what went into his newest collection.

Hi, Kyle. Thanks for making time to chat despite what I trust is a hectic schedule. I’m curious: what first attracted you to writing—and reading—and at what age? Does language play a large role in your earliest memories?
Early on, it was The Chronicles of Narnia, Island of the Blue Dolphins, Horton Hears a Who. It’s crazy to think about it now–all those books are written for children, and almost every single one of them has a genocide or threatened genocide at the center of the plot. And of course the King James Bible, and that was the same kind of thing—the armies marching seven times around the city walls, and when the trumpet blows you go inside and slaughter everyone inside. These are some of my earliest memories as a reader, and I guess it was the first step toward being a writer, because you know how it is with stories: If it’s bad for life, it’s good for the story.

In nearly every piece I’ve read from you, landscape and the tension it creates seems to be at the forefront, or is, at the very least, an underlying source of internal conflict. Can you talk a little bit about your own upbringing and what effect you feel that geography had on you?
I grew up in West Palm Beach, which in some ways isn’t a place at all. Everyone is from someplace else. On TV, you’d see the people across the bridge, on the island of Palm Beach, at the Breakers or at Mar-a-Lago, making deals, shopping for three hundred dollar dresses, playing golf. My people were the ones brought in to service the money—wellpoint foremen, air conditioning mechanics, railroad inspectors, sheet metal men. They were from the South, with all the baggage of history and culture that came with it, and then I went to school with all the kids whose parents were from New York or Boston and went skiing in the Alps on spring break. The neighborhood was rapidly filling with immigrants recently fled from Cuba or Guatemala or Haiti, and why didn’t our family have everybody over for dinner and partake in all those riches? The whole world is like that now, isn’t it? I guess it was good training for the 21st century.

What does your writing space look like? Your reading space? Do you find you do both in the same physical location, and do you find they occupy the same sort of mental space?
For the last two years, I have lived mostly on the road. I’ve been sleeping in luxury hotel rooms and fleabag motel rooms and on airplanes and in gas station parking lots and only occasionally at home. So I take what I can get, these days. A shockingly large proportion of my recent pages were written in a truck stop McDonald’s in Marion, Indiana, a place that is halfway between a lot of other places, and which has the virtue of offering free WiFi. They know me there, but they’re wary, and they don’t ask too many questions. Sometimes I sit there and try to imagine who I am to them—drug dealer? Small-time pimp? Trust fund baby managing his stock portfolio?

I’ve read in previous interviews that occasionally, like most adaptable writers, you’ve received criticism for your particular depiction of truth, whether in fiction or nonfiction. Can you talk a little bit about how you transition as a writer of both genres? What influence, if any, did that question have on this collection?
Usually people get angry when they think you’re telling the community’s secrets, or when you’re telling the story but you’re telling your version instead of the version they prefer. Well, we all have our own versions, and even those versions are changing through time. Stories are inherently subjective. You can take the facts and line them up to mean almost anything. There’s nothing to be done about it. For me, the rule is: If I’m writing nonfiction, I try not to make things up, and if I’m writing fiction, I have utmost freedom to make things up. Nonfiction can be put in a fictional frame and become fiction, but probably not the other way around.

Any advice for aspiring writers who might feel as though they don’t yet have a home in literature or writing?
Figure out what it is that makes your heart beat hard, what keeps you awake at night, what you don’t want to face, what shames you, what haunts you. That’s your source of power. That’s your material.

What first attracted you to reading? And at what age?