Here’s a short list of ground covered in the nine novels Dennis Cooper has published since 1989: Rent boy murder mysteries; haunted sex labyrinths in the French countryside; cannibalism; sexual fantasies of being flattened; violent pornography; satanism. The experimental literary icon, suffice it to say, is provocative.
Of all of Cooper’s work — which includes at least 10 books of poetry, 12 plays and theatrical works, 2 GIF novels, 2 feature length films, a graphic novel, and a sprawling blog with a rabid readership — perhaps the best known is the George Miles Cycle, a collection of five novels (Closer, Frisk, Try, Guide, and Period) in which the author dissects, reapproaches, and morphs the eponymous central character by placing him at the crux of violence, pain, and sexual fantasy. Cooper’s work is often misunderstood as sadistic, but for as brutal as it can be, there’s something irreducibly human about his writing; that brutality is often paired with yearning, obsession, and a quest to find beauty in the macabre.
Cooper last released a book via a major publisher in 2011; today, a decade later, comes I Wished, a new novel that may be his most personal and vulnerable to date. A fragmented, surreal, and devastating work, I Wished is Cooper’s attempt to memorialize George Miles — both the real-life George Miles, who Cooper befriended and fell in love with before he died by suicide at age 30, and George Miles as the literary character that Cooper has created. Partly autobiographical, the book reads like a kaleidoscopic fever dream; through fractured narrative shards, we witness the school dance where Dennis first meets George as he’s tripping on LSD, an absurd conversation between a prairie dog and James Turrell’s anthropomorphized Roden Crater, a reimagining of John Wayne Gacy’s final murder, and more. Throughout its splintered storylines, Cooper touches on the concept of the unknowable, mourning, and the innate failure of language.
One of Cooper’s literary mottos is that “confusion is the truth,” something he’s emphasized repeatedly in interviews. As one of the most enduring elements of Cooper’s work, I Wished attempts to express why Miles is so important yet ultimately indescribable to the author. Characters throughout the book are infatuated with George but cannot pinpoint why: he’s Santa Claus’ favorite child, seemingly arbitrarily; famed artist James Turrell blindly entrusts George to add finishing touches on a behemoth sculpture. Only a book this bizarre, this ambiguous, and this hallucinatory would be worthy of memorializing a figure like Miles.
From his Parisian apartment, Cooper spoke with them. about his boyhood crushes, the safety of the imagination, and music’s influence on his prose.
It's been ten years since your last novel, The Marbled Swarm. What drew you to write again, specifically about George Miles, a recurring character in your work?
I always wanted to write a book about George because he was really important to me, and also because I'd written The George Miles Cycle novels about him, but those really weren't about him. He wasn't like that at all. I wanted to memorialize him in a real way and see what would happen if I let my guard down, because I never let my emotions out much in my fiction.
The Marbled Swarm is really dense, complicated, and unemotional. I always try to start from scratch and go in a completely different direction. George is a difficult thing for me to think about. It was pretty emotional to write it; it was pretty tough.
There are funny and surreal moments throughout I Wished, but it's also incredibly sad and empathic. Why?
I was exposing myself, which was really challenging to me because I'm more of an introverted person, and to do that you have to rely on the kindness of the reader. I was trying to make sure that the book was more vulnerable and open because otherwise you'd read it and go, "Who gives a fuck?" I didn't want people to do that. It's another white guy's fucking emotional problems, who fucking cares? So I had to figure out a way so that people would actually care.
I Wished feels like an ephemeral journey that tries to communicate an indescribable connection to George. Could you speak to that theme of the unknowable?
I'm always drawn to the unknowable, it's like death or something, it's beautiful. Death is the most unknowable thing in the world, right? I like things not to be clear. In my novel The Sluts you don't really know what happens. 80% of it could be a lie, that kind of stuff really excites me. I think being confused is a natural state or something.
My motto is “confusion is the truth.” I think that you don't know most things and you'll never know most things. So many people make this weird decision that they need to know everything, so they just make up opinions about things and that becomes their truth.
What is the truth? Why does the truth matter in a fictional story?
Well, it's emotionally true. The emotion is all very honest and very true.
Most of the characters in I Wished are trapped in their loneliness. They’re disconnected and have one-sided relationships. Why is loneliness so prevalent?
The inability to connect is in my books a lot. I think that language is a lie. When you speak, you're censoring yourself. Language takes what you really feel and you have to organize it into this form that already exists. You're never really able to communicate what you really think or feel because language is simply inadequate. And if you're emotional, it's especially difficult.
It's strange because I'm not actually a very lonely person. But that is somewhere in me and this book just tapped into that. Thinking about George brings that out of me. I must've felt really lonely when I was with him because he was incapable of connecting. I wanted to know that I was important to him.
When you write about George’s band, you tap into the seemingly romantic connection that bandmates can have. Is that insight from your music journalist past?
I think it's more about fantasizing about what rock bands were like when I was young. I thought Richard Lloyd of Television was so cute and I was like, "do he and Tom Verlaine fuck?" It was just me fantasizing: you're in a band and then you have sex with each other all the time.
I have known some people in bands who have secret repressed feelings. This guy who's the lead singer in a pretty big band wrote me an email once and was pouring his heart out about how much he was in love with his guitarist and asking me for my advice. I don't know whatever happened.
You describe a sexual fantasy with John Wayne Gacy in which you reimagine the murder of his final victim. In your work there is often a link between sex and murder. What drives that?
I'm going to get back into the unknowable again. When I was a teenager, there were a lot of serial killers in Los Angeles and I was completely fascinated by a guy who killed some teenage boys and dumped them not too far from my house when I was growing up. I went up there with a friend and we camped out. I was getting all into “communing” with them. I don't know why It just seemed to come out of nowhere. When I read Marquis De Sade, I was like, "Oh, you can write about this."
I just don't know because I'm not at all like that. I'm a totally nice guy and I've always been very clear about what the imagination is and what real life is. I know that line very well so I just let my imagination go anywhere it wants to go and then my writing comes out of that. I don't have any fear that this means something terrible about me. There's nothing traumatic. I got hit on the head with an ax when I was 11 years old and almost died, but it wasn't sexual or emotional for me, it was just a drag.
You compared writing to mixing a song in your conversation with Richard Hawkins for Interview. Can you expand on that?
I hate boring, mainstream literary fiction. I don't hate it, it just doesn't interest me and I don't know how to write it and I don't read it and I don't want to. I'm always thinking, “how do I finish this if I'm not going to follow the rules?” Since I listen to so much music it was like, "how does an engineer finish a track with the artist? They mix this up and this down and they find the right levels.” With writing it's, “where is the emotion? Is the comedy high or is the comedy low?”
I think of music as being super charismatic and writing normally isn’t because you're still thinking about characters and plot. I try to make it so that you don't just go, "I want to know what happens next." You're going like, "This is strange, what is this? What is this going to turn into?"
Your work is contemporary in the sense that it breaks rules, but it goes on these classical ornate tangents that are very poetic. Do people often tell you that your work is difficult to understand?
There's always people who are confused. They say, “This is pretentious crap.” To me, I Wished is so clear and it's so emotional – you cannot win.
Growing up, there was the avant-garde in music. People who were cool listened to wild, daring stuff. You don't really get that anymore. I can't think of anyone who's really daring who's very successful. It's true with books and it's certainly true with movies. Now people think The Lighthouse is God coming to earth. No, it's a fucking horror movie that uses a lot of Instagram effects.
You don't think there are daring things in contemporary pop culture?
There is a conservatism and fear that I don't relate to. The world sucks, absolutely, but that's what art's for. You go on an adventure, you're completely safe. You can just go off on this wild journey and you're never going to get hurt and you can learn shit. It's like when people used to take LSD all the time. I took LSD because I wanted the world to be more complicated and interesting than it was. Maybe it's an age thing or something, but I don't understand why people are afraid of adventures.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
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