Une interview d'Harlan Ellison

[jerome]

Harlan Ellison est en interview sur le site comicbookresources. Il revient sur ses mémoires qu'il doit publier. Petit extrait :

"In May, an announcement was floated about your planned memoir, "Working Without A Net." What's the status of that book?
Harlan Ellison : Well, we're still working on the contract. I have no idea whether we're going to go forward with it or not. Probably not. The book would be with Ecco, which is an imprint of HarperCollins, they've offered a substantial amount of money but the contract is the usual New York publishing boilerplate which gives everything to them and very little to the author. Since I've been doing contracts for more than forty troubling years now, I spent three hours on their initial terms, sighed, hung my head in weariness, and sent them a counter-proposal. We'll see what happens. Not likely.

The memoir itself is, I suppose, the result of fifty years of writing introductions, articles and interlineations for all my other books. There's practically an autobiography already. Extant; disjointed, but nonetheless published. What I'll probably do is begin writing bridging material for existing pieces from a thousand different sources, over fifty years, and where a certain life experience has resulted in a short story, the short storyitself will follow; a literary-bio chronicle will be established. For instance, the first time I went to jail was in 1947 when I was arrested in Painesville, Ohio for stealing comic book pins out of Kellogg's Pep Cereal boxes. I was twelve-years-old and a big comic book buff and these were a great series of buttons. I was a kid and it was the equivalent of adolescent shoplifting I suppose. So I was dragged off to the Painesville, Ohio pokey and my Dad got me out and from that came a short story called "Free With This Box," which appeared in my book, "Gentlemen Junkie." It's a short story which is in a way, I suppose, a memoir.

And that's the way I'll do it. I'll go through my brief college career, my time in the army, going to New York to write, the various marriages, and the endless adventures and contretemps I've had. It will be a memoir in stories, a memoir with stories. A patchwork, if you will. I expect it to be as improbably snarky, and as cranky and as full of amusing well-told lies and exaggerations, and as thread-drift as my life has been."

toute l'interview est ici