PB: Do you follow pop culture? You don't write about it much in your books....
DS: I'm just reluctant to write about it and name names. I just think about that book ten years from now, and people will think, "What was that show?" If there were all these references to Cheers in there, you'd look at it and think, "Cheers?" But if you describe a television show about a woman who's trying her hardest not to practice witchcraft, that sounds a lot more interesting than the television program.
PB: Do you think of yourself as funny?
DS: No. Everyone in my family is funnier than me. Except my dad...he's not funny.
PB: Do you ever laugh out loud at stuff you write?
DS: [My sister] Amy and I did a play this winter in New York, and Amy's character is sort of an Amish woman, but we don't say Amish. She's a Squeamish woman. She lives in this pre-industrial community and she leaves and goes out into the world for the first time. At one point, she's in a doctor's office. Never been to a doctor's office. And we see this screen, the doctor's screen. And Amy comes from behind the screen and hands the doctor a cup. And the doctor says, "Oh, Liz, I'm sorry. When I said for you to go to the bathroom, I meant for you to urinate." And I laughed out loud when I wrote that, just the image of somebody defecating into a little paper cup.
PB: Sometimes your toilet humor doesn't go over well with National Public Radio. In Me Talk Pretty One Day, in the story "Big Boy," you write about boldly announcing to a dinner party that you are going to the bathroom and then finding a giant, unflushable turd in the toilet. Then someone else is waiting outside, and you don't want to take the blame. But National Public Radio wouldn't let you read that one on-air....
DS: I tried for three times to get that by them. Once I wrote it as a poem. There was one line in there that was pretty good. Shoot, I don't remember. "Flush." It rhymed with the word "flush." I was listening to the radio the other day, and some doctor who was in the Arctic referred to some compressed tank of feces as an "enormous fudgesicle." And I thought, that was on NPR. But it was a local show.
PB: "True Detective" is one of the sickest, funniest stories in Naked, particularly the part where you try to figure out which family member was using the bath towels to wipe their ass. But at the end of the story, we still don't know. Did you ever discover who was soiling the bath towels?
