Playboy.com: What's going to piss people off most in Choke?
Chuck Palahniuk: [Laughs] There's always going to be something that goes too far. In Fight Club, the book, when Marla first had sex with Jack, and they're laying in bed, I thought, "What is the most romantic thing she could say, the most sentimental thing?" And that is, "I want to have your baby." So I thought, "What would Marla say?" So Marla, at that point, says, "I want to have your abortion." I thought that's going way too far, that'll get cut by the editor, but it got published. It became the most notorious line in the whole book. Every book has to have some line that's like a lightning rod. And I think that with Choke, it is, "Parenthood is the opiate of the masses." That is going to piss people off.
PB: What was it like sitting in on sex addiction meetings?
CP: It's funny. Everybody's so hangdog and sad. But the stories are just remarkable and sort of absurdly funny. Once in a while, someone would see the humor in how they lived their life. Pretty soon the whole room would be roaring with laughter about the absurdity of people who stop on the way to work and get ten blow jobs in a public bathroom. It was always an incredible release when people started laughing.
PB: Did you ever have to speak in any of those meetings?
CP: Actually I didn't. I don't know what I would even have talked about. Jerking off when I was 15?
PB: You also met a sex therapist who helped you with this book. What did she teach you about sex addiction?
CP: How people anesthetize themselves [with sex]. For many people, the only way that they can fall asleep is to have constant intense, anonymous, recreational sex. Or at least fantasies about it, in order to fall asleep. These things that we think of as exciting are almost like Ritalin for other people, a thing that calms them down.
PB: Any difference between male and female sex addicts?
