The Adventurous Life of William T. Vollmann, Writer

Braving dysentery in Afghanistan, battling frostbite and hallucinations at the North Pole, and surviving an attack that killed two of his friends in the Bosnian War, William T. Vollman is not your typical author. His latest novel, The Dying Grass, is the fifth installment in his Seven Dreams series, about the colonial history of North America. It takes place during the Nez Perce war, during which the famously peace-loving tribes of the Nez Perce fought back against the U.S. government’s attempts to remove them to a reservation. In one of the book’s many rave reviews, The Washington Postcalled it “the reading experience of a lifetime.”

You have written about and spent a lot of time with people at the margins of society: the homeless, prostitutes, and drug addicts. What appeals to you so much about their stories?

The more intensely people live — and often that means desperately — the more interesting their stories are, at least to me. And maybe I would enjoy being a Jane Austen, but I’m just not.

And when you’re hanging out with these people, have you always been upfront with them that you’re a writer and they’re material?

Not always. If I’m catching a freight train and I meet some hobo who’s sitting on a piece of cardboard under an overpass and we’re sharing some booze, he doesn’t really care. If I’m going to do anything substantial, yeah, I would tell people. And, ideally, I like to pay for interviews. I always think that is the ethical thing to do.

I read also that in the ’90s, during your research, you smoked crack, a lot, like a hundred times. Were you not worried about getting addicted?

People can get addicted to coffee or alcohol. I have never become an alcoholic. I can take or leave coffee. And perhaps it’s not such a stretch to take and leave other things.

Two years ago, for The Book of Dolores, you wore women’s clothing, partly to try and understand the experience of women and transgender women. What did that give you in terms of understanding that talking to trans people wouldn’t have given you?

One of the things that I got out of it was the visceral understanding of the fear that many women have when they go out alone at night. As soon as I put on high heels, breast forms, and a wig, and tottered around without my glasses, I became a target. I found it quite frightening and also quite humiliating. I ended up feeling sympathetic with the anguish and the confusion and the secrecy that envelops the lives of many trans people, especially the sex workers.