Nirvana Express: Journal of a Very Brief Monkhood shares your exsperances of deciding at almost 50 years old to visit Thailand and enter a Buddhist monastery. Why was this an important book for you to write?

I am most well-known as a novelist, and my stories are set in disparate planets, or distant periods in history. I try to create or reimagine these worlds as clearly as possible, yet there are those who try to understand my work through the “biographical approach” — difficult because I’ve never been an alien, or a gender-transition slave in ancient Rome, or a civil war zombie. I still have to pull out these characters from the deepest parts of my own psyche.

I thought, for a change, I’d tell some of my own story. I’ve selected five or six things I’ve done that could be interesting to my readers. My time as a Buddhist monk was one of those things. To my surprise, Nirvana Express has been a popular book though I am not sure that its audience has much crossover with the fans of my science fiction and horror novels.

But, it’s rare for someone to undergo this experience, yet be articulate enough in any western language to be able to explain what it’s really like to people in western cultures. It’s also rare to do this while already having passed through many of life’s adventures, because becoming a monk in Thai culture is usually something that happens on the brink of adulthood, not when one is already mature. That’s why I decided to do the book.

What were some ideas that were important for you to share in this book?

As a bicultural person, I spend a lot of time explaining people’s viewpoints to each other. But in this book I’m talking about a time in which I learned many things that people who have grown up in Thailand take for granted. I never experienced these things first hand and to me many commonplace things evoked a sense of wonder. I wanted to share this.

I appreciated the candid nature with which you told your story. What was the hardest thing for you to write about?

In novels, one also writes about oneself in a way — but not directly. You’re digging things out of hidden corners of your psyche and bringing them into the foreground. You’re saying “what if” a lot, because you know that you are not your characters. In a memoir like this, there’s no filter, and readers always know if you’re not telling the truth. So yes, it’s always hard. In real life, you try to hide the blemishes, but a book like this is about the blemishes in a sense.

What is one thing you hope readers take away from your story?

Perspectives. Even in late middle age, I was seeing the world from a viewpoint I hadn’t really thought about. I wanted to share not just how different and alien this inner world seems, but also how universal the truths that I learned were and how they applied even in a life far removed from meditation and contemplation. Buddhism isn’t a “religion” if you define a religion as an organized system of relationships with a supreme being or beings, because there’s nothing being “worshipped” as such. Sometimes its view of reality is closer to that of, say, quantum physicists. At the same time, Buddhism doesn’t reject the idea of religion. What I learned most is that sometimes taking a break from the real world can help you embrace the real world with deeper tolerance, understanding and enthusiasm.

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