Men's Journal

Interviewed by Jonathan Miles

Every novelist inhabits his characters, but T.C. Boyle may be the first to inhabit one of his characters’ houses. That home, near Santa Barbara, California, in which Boyle (The Road to Wellville) has lived for 16 years, was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, the charismatic and mercurial subject of The Women, an intricate novel in which Boyle explores Wright via the stories of four women — wives and mistresses — who loved him. We spoke with the author from his home, which turns 100 years old this year.

MJ: What, besides waking up in his house every day, drew you to Wright?

TCB: This is the third novel I’ve written about great egomaniacs of the 20th century. These characters fascinate me because of their narcissism. They’re almost psychopathic; they don’t care about anybody except as we fit into their designs. I write about these characters as cautionary tales because that’s also the way novelists are.

A novelist often finds his characters take on lives of their own. Are there issues when that character is a real-life figure?

When I was a student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, older writers would come to talk, and they would always say that. And I used to think: What bullshit. But in fact something very much like that does happen. So I do feel constrained by the historical verisimilitude. But the joy is that I find odd bits of history that are so bizarre because they’re true. I want to dramatize those bits for the fun of it, to give them to the audience to let them experience the kind of joy that I discovered. That said, it is fiction, so I could have Frank Lloyd Wright run over by a locomotive when he’s eight years old if I wanted to.

What was his allure to these women?

He was irresistible, a force all his own. Like Kinsey and Kellogg, he was a guru and a master. Masters need acolytes. He was extremely persuasive and always got what he wanted. He loved constant embroilment in his life; he couldn’t really work unless he was being sued or appearing on the front page of the paper for various scandals or being pursued by bill collectors. Maybe, for him, the further gone the chaos, the more comfortable he felt sitting down at the drawing table. I can’t do my work unless I have no worries and everything is very placid. I’m the only American writer in history who has only had one wife. I’d still have the same dog except he died. Same agent, same publisher. My best friend I’ve known since I was three. And this is very important to me, this stability in such a chaotic, crazy world.

Many writers rehash old themes, but you don’t stay in one place. Why is that?

I’ve been fortunate in that, for me, anything can be a story. I don’t follow the advice “Write what you know.” No, write what you don’t know and find something out. Anything that interests me can become a book. Ever since I moved into this house I’ve wanted to become an expert on Frank Lloyd Wright. But I was simply a guy living in his house. So I decided to explore him. It’s limitless what you can write about.

It’s certainly more fun to write about what you don’t know than what you do.

It’s a perfect match for me since I really don’t know anything.

Did you discover any similarities between novelists and architects?

The obvious metaphor is that we’re both building houses. But the architect has a plan, whereas most fiction writers don’t have a plan. It’s like building a house, but the plan is jerry-built as you go along, and you have to hope that the structural idea is sound. It’s mostly discovered as it happens.

This article originally appeared in the February 2009 issue of Men’s Journal.