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For most people, spending time with a violent, Tabasco-guzzling Oregon anarchist, a teenage member of the Aryan Brotherhood, opera-loving lawyers whose dog fatally mauled an innocent woman and an eternally wired, drugged-out Hollywood agent would not be their idea of fun.
For Evan Wright, though, encounters with such people are so powerful he has a hard time saying goodbye.
"I feel a kind of kinship with big flaming [screw-ups]," says Wright, 43, as he sits in a cafe near his West Los Angeles office and discusses the people about whom he tends to write.
These characters of Wright's -- "exiles from the mainstream of American culture," he calls them -- reside at the center of his second book, "Hella Nation: Looking for Happy Meals in Kandahar, Rocking the Side Pipe, Wingnut's War Against the Gap, and Other Adventures With the Totally Lost Tribes of America" (Putnam: 338 pp. $25.95). It's a follow-up, of sorts, to his 2004 debut, "Generation Kill," which detailed the author's adventures while he was embedded with a Marine battalion in Iraq. (The book was made into a 2008 HBO miniseries by David Simon and Ed Burns of " The Wire.")
"Hella Nation" is a collection of pieces that initially appeared from 1997 to 2007 in, among other places, LA Weekly, Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair. It represents, Wright suggests, "a kind of autobiography." This, he goes on, is the role of the journalist -- to inhabit the lives he or she writes about. "It's a powerful experience to merge with somebody," he says, comparing it to a science-fiction story in which a brain is put into another body.
Wright is dressed in a gray T-shirt, jeans and a tan leather jacket. Big and fit but carrying a bit more height than he seems to know what to do with, he is groggy from jet lag after an unexpected trip to Japan. In contrast, perhaps, to the subjects he takes on, he's no cocky, macho risk-taker but gentle and humble -- or maybe just a little dazed.
Wright works in an area that might be called extreme journalism: adrenaline-fueled and on the edge. In other hands, this can lead to "Borat"-like excesses. Yet Wright is not only visceral but also smartly analytical: A Vassar history major, he views subcultures and fringe characters with an almost scholarly detachment.
And he gets amazing stuff from his subjects, who seem to confess everything to him. During a 1990s murder trial, such a confession was literal, and legally binding.
"Several of my editors wonder why people tell me so much," Wright says sheepishly. "I think it's because I'm from Ohio."
Wright had wanted to be a writer since he was a teenager growing up in what he calls "blue-collar, middle-class" Willoughby, outside Cleveland, a place filled with kids not unlike the Marines in "Generation Kill."
His folks were attorneys, but his friends were hillbillies; some hung velvet Elvis paintings without irony.
Inspired by Mark Twain, whose skepticism he likens to that of the Sex Pistols, Wright knew he wanted real experiences of the world rather than to lock himself in an ivy-covered fortress. When he ended up in such a fortress, at Vassar, he studied medieval and Renaissance history, and continued to write.
In the early 1990s, he moved to Los Angeles to try to break into screenwriting. His screenplays went nowhere, but in 1995, he was hired as entertainment editor at Hustler.
"I was 30, divorced and at the end of a screenwriting career that had been flatlining for several years," Wright remembers in "Hella Nation." "Not only had I failed as a writer, but I had functioned only marginally in a variety of menial, no-brainer day jobs." He was a sometime drug user and a dedicated alcoholic.
But somehow, Wright began to turn the corner while at Hustler, reviewing pornographic films and writing the starlets' "first person" life stories in Barely Legal magazine.
Then as now, he was drawn to extreme characters. "They have to be," he says, "at least antiheroes, if not true scoundrels."
A bigger turning point came in 2003, when he decided to go to Iraq for Rolling Stone, embedding with the Marines' 1st Recon Battalion.
"I studied history," Wright says flatly, "and nothing is more history-making than war." He was influenced by English writers who'd gone to the Spanish Civil War -- W.H. Auden, George Orwell -- as well as Christopher Isherwood's "Berlin Stories." The history he'd read (Herodotus, chronicles of the Crusades) was as important to him as "Apocalypse Now."
Immersion technique
"He had no experience covering war," says Dana Brown, Wright's Vanity Fair editor. "There were a lot of reporters who went, a lot of them bailed. His pieces were so good, and his book so good, because he just immersed himself. He's got that thing where he just keeps going."
For Evan Wright, though, encounters with such people are so powerful he has a hard time saying goodbye.
"I feel a kind of kinship with big flaming [screw-ups]," says Wright, 43, as he sits in a cafe near his West Los Angeles office and discusses the people about whom he tends to write.
These characters of Wright's -- "exiles from the mainstream of American culture," he calls them -- reside at the center of his second book, "Hella Nation: Looking for Happy Meals in Kandahar, Rocking the Side Pipe, Wingnut's War Against the Gap, and Other Adventures With the Totally Lost Tribes of America" (Putnam: 338 pp. $25.95). It's a follow-up, of sorts, to his 2004 debut, "Generation Kill," which detailed the author's adventures while he was embedded with a Marine battalion in Iraq. (The book was made into a 2008 HBO miniseries by David Simon and Ed Burns of " The Wire.")
"Hella Nation" is a collection of pieces that initially appeared from 1997 to 2007 in, among other places, LA Weekly, Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair. It represents, Wright suggests, "a kind of autobiography." This, he goes on, is the role of the journalist -- to inhabit the lives he or she writes about. "It's a powerful experience to merge with somebody," he says, comparing it to a science-fiction story in which a brain is put into another body.
Wright is dressed in a gray T-shirt, jeans and a tan leather jacket. Big and fit but carrying a bit more height than he seems to know what to do with, he is groggy from jet lag after an unexpected trip to Japan. In contrast, perhaps, to the subjects he takes on, he's no cocky, macho risk-taker but gentle and humble -- or maybe just a little dazed.
Wright works in an area that might be called extreme journalism: adrenaline-fueled and on the edge. In other hands, this can lead to "Borat"-like excesses. Yet Wright is not only visceral but also smartly analytical: A Vassar history major, he views subcultures and fringe characters with an almost scholarly detachment.
And he gets amazing stuff from his subjects, who seem to confess everything to him. During a 1990s murder trial, such a confession was literal, and legally binding.
"Several of my editors wonder why people tell me so much," Wright says sheepishly. "I think it's because I'm from Ohio."
Wright had wanted to be a writer since he was a teenager growing up in what he calls "blue-collar, middle-class" Willoughby, outside Cleveland, a place filled with kids not unlike the Marines in "Generation Kill."
His folks were attorneys, but his friends were hillbillies; some hung velvet Elvis paintings without irony.
Inspired by Mark Twain, whose skepticism he likens to that of the Sex Pistols, Wright knew he wanted real experiences of the world rather than to lock himself in an ivy-covered fortress. When he ended up in such a fortress, at Vassar, he studied medieval and Renaissance history, and continued to write.
In the early 1990s, he moved to Los Angeles to try to break into screenwriting. His screenplays went nowhere, but in 1995, he was hired as entertainment editor at Hustler.
"I was 30, divorced and at the end of a screenwriting career that had been flatlining for several years," Wright remembers in "Hella Nation." "Not only had I failed as a writer, but I had functioned only marginally in a variety of menial, no-brainer day jobs." He was a sometime drug user and a dedicated alcoholic.
But somehow, Wright began to turn the corner while at Hustler, reviewing pornographic films and writing the starlets' "first person" life stories in Barely Legal magazine.
Then as now, he was drawn to extreme characters. "They have to be," he says, "at least antiheroes, if not true scoundrels."
A bigger turning point came in 2003, when he decided to go to Iraq for Rolling Stone, embedding with the Marines' 1st Recon Battalion.
"I studied history," Wright says flatly, "and nothing is more history-making than war." He was influenced by English writers who'd gone to the Spanish Civil War -- W.H. Auden, George Orwell -- as well as Christopher Isherwood's "Berlin Stories." The history he'd read (Herodotus, chronicles of the Crusades) was as important to him as "Apocalypse Now."
Immersion technique
"He had no experience covering war," says Dana Brown, Wright's Vanity Fair editor. "There were a lot of reporters who went, a lot of them bailed. His pieces were so good, and his book so good, because he just immersed himself. He's got that thing where he just keeps going."
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