April 2002

I discovered Tod’s name on the internet, on a forum for readers and authors of mysteries. What he had to say was interesting, so I checked out his web site. As it turns out, Tod is interesting. And he had a book due out very soon. So naturally I contacted him thinking that he would do a great interview. I think I was right. Tod’s funny, intelligent and engaging. Not unlike his writing. I look forward to adding Tod Goldberg’s books to my shelves for years to come. And after reading his second, Living Dead Girl (from SOHO books), it will be hard to wait for the next from this new and promising writer. -- Jon

JON:  Your first book, Fake Liar Cheat, and your new one, Living Dead Girl, have both been getting some good reviews. For instance, one word being used is “unsettling”. We can read what others say about them, what do you have to say about them?

TOD:  Living Dead Girl is, in my most modest opinion, the best thing I’ve written up until now. It’s a far different book than Fake Liar Cheat - in both style and substance - and it’s the kind of book I generally gravitate to when I read for pleasure. Fake Liar Cheat (and, I swear, no more three word titles for me…I don’t want to be known as Mr. Three Word Title Guy) was a faster and far more comedic novel and in many ways it reflected who I was and where I was during a brief moment of my life. In short, you can tell I wrote it when I was 27.

When I set out to write my second novel, which became Living Dead Girl, my goals had changed: I wanted to write a book that challenged me, that challenged what I held true, and what ultimately touched on strong emotional ideas and instances - a novel not about a human life, but about humans life. It seemed natural, then, that my narrator would be an anthropologist and that in order to put him and his value system in flux, all that he held dear had to be placed in jeopardy: his wife, and, we learn, his child. Unsettling is a good word to describe what happens over the next 200 pages.

JON:  Do you still write a weekly column for the Las Vegas Mercury?

TOD:  I do and I really enjoy it. I love the deadline and the need, each week, to write something compelling. It’s almost like playing a role, really, because in the pages of the Mercury I’m not expected to wax about the state of publishing or the events taking place on the West Bank, I’m only required to write something that a person can read while eating a sandwich or drinking a latte and that will provide entertainment or release from their own daily grind. What occurs is that I end up telling a lot of personal stories about the dumb things I do on a regular basis. It’s like getting paid to go into therapy.

JON:  You’re not the only writer in your family, are you?

TOD:  No, they surround me! My brother Lee Goldberg is a multiple Edgar nominee, a TV producer and screenwriter, and the author of several novels and books of non-fiction.

My uncle Burl Barer is an Edgar winning (sensing a theme here?) author of numerous true crime books, novels, and the continuing stories of The Saint.

My mother, Janice Curran, was a longtime columnist herself for several newspapers in California and the author of The Statue of Liberty is Cracking Up.

Rumor has it my two elder sisters are currently writing a children’s book.

JON:  What other things have you done besides writing?

TOD:  Well, I wore the red vest that signifies employment at Wherehouse Records for a time, though that was many years ago and was done chiefly for the discount I received on CDs. Subsequent to my tenure in record sales, and after graduation from college, I worked as an account executive for a staffing service, which was a job I was notably ill suited for, but one that I generally excelled at, and then as an account executive with an advertising firm that created infomercials and other direct response materials created for the sole purpose of getting you, fair consumer, to believe at 4am that you desperately needed an Exercycle.

Since I’ve become a full-time writer, I’ve also become a teacher. I’m on the faculty of the Writers’ Program at UCLA and spend a good deal of time conducting workshops at conferences and book festivals.

JON:  You’ve written a lot of short stories also. Any chance of them being collected in one volume at some point?

TOD:  There’s a very good chance of that. At some point soon, my agent is going to go out with what we’re tentatively calling Comeback Special, a collection of my short stories that have appeared in magazines and literary journals over the last few years. Short stories are truly a passion of mine - if I could make a living just writing them, gosh, I would in a moment. What makes them fun for me is that you have to accomplish so much in a limited amount of space - 15 or 20 printed pages - and at the same time you must create compelling characters and situations. You’d think with the speed in which we all lead our lives these days that short stories would be even more popular today than ever, though it seems the converse remains true.

JON:  Your wife must have the patience of a saint to put up with the hours you must keep. Does she make it easier for you to be creative?

TOD:  It’s an interesting partnership. While my name goes on the cover of the book, Wendy’s imprint is all over the story itself - she’s my main sounding board, the person I turn to time and time again for help with the things I’m trying to write. What makes it work so well is that she understands the demands of the job, that even if I’m staring blankly into space while my computer hums along, I’m still actually working. She also inspires me to improve. I took a chance writing a book as fundamentally different from my first as I did, so before I wrote it I told her my intentions and she said, “Write the best story you can.” I think I did.

JON:  The feelings that Paul Luden experiences in Living Dead Girl are pretty intense at times. How did you get your self into this mind set?

TOD:  Writing in first person helped, because I had to immediately put myself in the mindset of a man who’s teetering on the edge, imagining how someone with Paul’s background in anthropology and medicine might react to situations beyond his scope of expertise, which for him meant dealing with emotions instead of science. I also drank a lot of Starbucks and listened to depressing music, which is like driving a racecar in rush hour traffic. All of which went a long way towards crafting the hallucinatory nature of book that I thought was needed to pull off some of the larger story points.

JON:  Can you talk about how you came on the title for the book?

TOD:  I wish I could say that it came to me in a dream or that I’d always wanted to title my second book Living Dead Girl, but the truth is much more mundane. I’d written a short story - and not a very good one, actually - that I’d titled Living Dead Girl (it had to do with a guy who does a favor for a friend, which involves burying a child he’s killed and then the ramifications therein and thereof and, well, it wasn’t very good…).

One day my wife Wendy was filing away some of my papers and she put what was then my untitled novel pages into the file marked Living Dead Girl and when I saw that I thought, hmmm, well, that is interesting…Then, I found out it was also the title of a Rob Zombie song and I thought, well, this could just be the working title. When I sent the complete manuscript to my agent Jennie she said, “Oh, great title!” and I said, “Well, I’m thinking of calling it Gone.” Wendy and Jennie vetoed that and the rest is history.

JON:  Who are some of your favorite writers?

TOD:  There are so many writers I admire that its hard to narrow down my favorites…but since you asked, I’ll break them down genre lines: Richard Ford is my favorite author of all time, any genre, but particularly of literary fiction. He’s a writer who’s work has influenced mine and who’s voice I really marvel at. He creates characters that are interesting (and frequently amazing) out of the fabric of everyday life, making the mundane the very stuff of drama.

I really enjoy John Irving (especially A Prayer for Owen Meany) and, by extension a Canadian writer who influenced him, Robertson Davies.

There’s a new writer whose first collection of literary fiction is coming out next year named Mary Yukari Waters who is remarkable. In a few years, you’ll be hearing her name in the same breath as Alice Walker and Amy Tan.

I also have great affinity for Tim O’Brien (The Things They Carried is one of my top 5 favorite books), Sherman Alexie, Susan Straight, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

In crime fiction - which means, well, stuff where people die - I think Scott Phillips is perhaps the best thing to happen in many, many years. The Ice Harvest knocked me out and The Walkaway, his new book, is even better. He writes with such clarity, and humor, that I often sit back and think, Wow, this is a person who’s on the top of his game in every sentence. I’m also a fan of Daniel Woodrell, who is under appreciated. The guy should be selling millions.

Jake Arnott, who wrote The Long Firm and He Kills Coppers is brilliant - a wonderful storyteller who somehow manages to coax humanity out of the worst kinds of people - as is David Benioff. My perennial favorites include Elmore Leonard, Stephen Hunter, and Dennis Lehane.

JON:  Paul Luden and his wife seem to be exact opposites, yet they did indeed at some point love each other a lot. Do you think opposites attract?

TOD:  I think Paul and his wife Molly were more alike than they knew and perhaps that’s what doomed them, because I do believe opposites attract, and, in fact create longer and more fruitful relationships. Every relationship needs a ying and a yang. If you have two people who are exactly alike eventually they repel each other by having the same qualities - it’s the differences that create passion, the chance to learn about someone different from yourself.

JON:  If you could transform yourself into a pro athlete, what sport would you play?

TOD:  “Playing 1st base for the Oakland Athletics, he’s a 5’10 lefthander from California State University Northridge, Tod Goldberg!” (Deafening cheers, women throwing underwear, small children clamoring for my signature.)

JON:  What’s the toughest thing about being a writer?

TOD:  The solitude. To be successful, you need to hunker away for hours at a time, immersed in a world that exists solely in your mind. For me, a naturally gregarious person, I often miss the dynamics of an office where there are other people fighting the same fight all around you. Of course, I don’t miss my cubicle, secret Santa’s, traffic, my boss, my assistant, or any of the actual work I did. I also don’t miss pretending to care about my clients, because I never did. I had to remind myself of their names before I called them or else I’d be sitting on the phone completely lost. Teaching helps, certainly, and being friends with other writers does as well. Every thing else about being a writer is pretty cool, especially waking up at noon and hanging out with Puff Daddy.

JON:  Are there any boundaries you won’t cross in your writing? I know some people won’t kill dogs or kids off in their books.

TOD:  No, there really aren’t, as long as it is germane to the story. I’ll say this: there were scenes in Living Dead Girl that ended up on the cutting room floor because they were too extreme and because I thought (well, under full disclosure, my agent, my wife, and my editor thought) they moved the book in directions I might later regret. If a dog needs to die to move a story forward, you’ve gotta kill Spot (as my two cocker spaniels run from beneath my feet…). If a child needs to die, a child needs to die. (I can’t imagine Stephen Dobyns Church of the Dead Girls without, you know, the dead girls.) I can’t imagine I’d ever write a rape scene or need to. Often, the most awful and taboo things are most powerful when they are alluded to; thus allowing the reader to create the event in their own mind, which makes it all the more frightening.

JON:  Are you working on the next book? Can you talk about it yet?

TOD:  I’m more than half way through my next novel. It’s a sequel to Fake Liar Cheat called Still Fakin’ It…okay, that’s a lie. I am half way through a new novel about two old friends who end up in a very bad situation. There’s a casino involved. And a pink bus. That’s all I’m saying.

JON:  What is the writing process like for you? Do you work set hours at it, or when the voices talk to you?

TOD:  I work five days a week on writing and I have to be told to stop or else I’ll stay up all night long. I’m constantly re-workings, hoping to get every thing as perfect as possible. I love to write, honestly, so if I’m not told to eat dinner, sleep, bathe, all that good stuff, I might very well forget.

JON:  Did you do a lot of research on dissociative diseases? How much work do you put into research in general?

TOD:  I did do a good amount of research on dissociate diseases in order to portray Paul as succinctly as possible, but most of it really came from talking to my friend Steve Nitch who is a doctor of neuropsychology. I did far more research on theories of anthropology (I enjoy reading anthropology, so it was no chore at all for me) and medical history regarding a certain form of tumor that appears in the book. The problem with research is that you often have all of this information you feel compelled to share and no real place to put it. I had to really modulate how much science invaded the story of a guy looking for his missing wife.

JON:  Are there advantages to writing in the first person?

TOD:  There are quite a few. The biggest for me is that it’s the one I feel most comfortable writing in. I had a professor in college, who shall remain nameless, who told me I’d never be successful writing only in first person and that I should just give it up. Well, she was wrong and I haven’t seen any of her books on the shelves…but, enough about my petty vendettas. First person gives you immediate entry into a character and his or her worldview. You don’t have to fill in a ton of back story because, if done correctly, the back story is going to filter through the mind of the narrator anyway, and your story begins quickly. I also find, in the writing of it, that it’s easier for me to get into the head of the character and make decisions about what kind of person I’m writing about.

JON:  Is there any one great thing you would like to do before you die many many years from now?

TOD:  My dreams are pretty, well, un-great. I’d like to throw out the first pitch of a baseball game. In full uniform. For the Oakland A’s. Assuming they aren’t contracted and have a uniform that makes me look both shapely and athletic…

JON:  What’s your favorite movie?

TOD:  This is like the favorite writers question, except harder to answer and the chances of alienating a friend by listing or not listing them is reduced significantly. Hmmm. Well. Okay. How about: Out of Sight, Repo Man, When Harry Met Sally, Shawshank Redemption, Godfather 1 & 2, Forrest Gump, and all of the original Pink Panther movies.

JON:  Do you think having a website helps people discover your work? Is it a tool worth using?

TOD:  I think it’s a great way for readers and writers to connect. TodGoldberg.com (a shameless plug) gets a lot of hits everyday and people send me all sorts of interesting emails (“You suck!” “You’re great!” “How do I get published?” “How did you ever get published?!?”). Plus, its an easy way for readers to learn a bit more about their favorite writers than what’s printed on the book jacket.

JON:  What sort of things inspire your writing?

TOD:  It could be anything. I usually start with a character and build out from there. What would this person do in a give situation? What does this person care about? What does this person want from life? I like to explore the darker side of everyday life, the things we as people think about but never want to contemplate too thoroughly. I wrote a short story not too long ago that appeared in Pedestal Magazine about how this guy reacted when he learned that his brother was a murderer, and that came simply from watching the news one night and wondering what it would feel like if my own brother was on trial for killing someone. One main theme that I keep returning to, it seems, is the idea of mental decay. What occurs when you stop thinking and your world tips upside down from the consequences.

JON:  What is the one thing that is always in the refrigerator at the Goldberg house?

TOD:  Toll House Slice-n-Bake chocolate chip cookie dough. The advances in pre-made cookie dough are staggering. No home is complete without a tube of the stuff.