Car Trouble follows a young man staggering under the weight of personal chaos, societal dysfunction, and one disaster after another—starting with his car catching fire on the freeway. Jim Crack is a fascinating character. What scene was the most interesting to write for that character?

The scene that got the ball rolling was walking down the sidewalk with my/his shirt off like at the beginning of the novel. Jim is a very personal character; he’s not me, but parts are; When I was in my early twenties, I was parking cars and working at a liquor store and had gone through a series of breakdowns, car-wise, if not mentally, including having a car breakdown on the way to get to a car that had broken down, and in the midst of being car-less, I was walking down the street with my shirt off on a hot day to my drug dealer’s house and imagined I must look like a desperate character to people driving by in their air-conditioned cars; This Jim Crack fellow was born of that, combined with having had a car burn down at an earlier point in my life on my way to a theme park where I worked (not Disneyland). Of all the stupid things I’ve done, maybe the dumbest was taking a ridiculous number and variety of guns a housemate had in his room because he owed money for rent. I drove around with them in my trunk for several weeks, during which I risked being pulled over for driving in a condition in which society prefers we not drive. I was also arrested once for stealing my car from a tow yard after a situation similar to Jim’s. I tried to build this into long-form, character-driven fiction. It was my first attempt at writing a novel, which I’m sure shows, but in trying to weave together a coherent narrative, the entire sentence-by-sentence process was interesting.

What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?

Being young and without resources while being maladapted to consumer culture underlies the main conflicts in the story. Without him realizing it exactly, Jim senses that the mechanized manner in which we live, represented especially by the automobile, is unnatural, and in certain terms, bad for the soul and the planet. Jim is a character driven to the edge of madness by the capital necessities to which we must all adapt every day or risk pushing our belongings around in a shopping cart, begging for food—which we see reflected in reality by the crisis of homelessness throughout the US. This idea is in opposition to the fantasy of Disneyland, where we find the sanitized version of the American Dream, where everyone is moral and upstanding. Against this backdrop, Jim seeks human connection, which for him comes through a VCR, while for Adam and Tink, sexuality is at odds with religious principles, and so the primate human animal desire is at odds with civilization as envisioned by Disney, Christian conservatism, and corporate America: that people grow up in happy homes with parents who love each other.

What is the next book that you are working on, and when can your fans expect it to be out?

Fans. Ha. My next book, Maineiac, is a memoir about a time when I was not much older than Jim Crack, and I was doing a lot of psychedelics and drinking too much but was in love with a good Christian woman who was a friend from high school. I followed her out to Maine, driving across America, where I got a job on a lobster boat, and tried to work up the courage to tell her how I felt while struggling with alcoholism and doubts about religion. It’s set to be released by MSI/San Juan Press near the end of August.

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