Michael Imperioli

RM

I want to start by talking about reading. What did your early forays into literature look like? Who were you reading? Was there anything you found yourself looking to get out of literature that you couldn’t find in film or music? As an extension, I’d be curious to know if your relationship to reading has changed over time—are you still looking to get the same experience out of literature that you got as a teen and young adult?

MI

I remember being in seventh or eighth grade when they had us read Steinbeck. I think it was a novel or a novella—The Red Pony. I hated it, I was so bored out of my mind by it. I didn’t do the assignment, and the teacher asked me in front of the class, “Why didn’t you do the homework?” And I told her, “I hate this book, I was too bored to finish the assignment.” So, she gave me The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton instead, and I loved it. I went right through it and then read all of Hinton’s other books. It was such an important experience, because that teacher could have just said, “Well, you better read the Steinbeck book and do the assignment, or else.” Instead, she went to the trouble of trying to find a way to get me interested in reading.

When I was a kid, The Catcher in the Rye was a big one, as it is for many people. There was something about that voice, I had never come across anything like that before. I mean, I hadn’t read a whole lot yet, but hearing that voice in your head—as a young person, you could just really connect with it, you could connect with the feelings that book laid out. I had never quite experienced reading something written in the first person like that before. And then I came across Candide in high school, which really blew my mind in a similar way to Catcher in the Rye. But, unlike Catcher in the Rye, Candide also introduced me to the idea of satirical writing, which was eye opening. From there, I started reading a lot of plays in the school library, and literature like Edgar Allan Poe…

RM

Theater was a big part of your life from the jump, yeah?

MI

Yeah, reading plays was really what got me interested in wanting to do something with theater or film in the first place—it was what sparked my interest in acting and writing.

RM

When you say that being exposed to that particular type of first person address at play in Catcher in the Rye for the first time sparked something, or that it introduced you to a new way of experiencing some sort of relatable interiority, what was that feeling like? What set that experience apart for you from other books you had already been exposed to?

MI

It made me feel less alone. That’s what all really great literature does, I think—what all great art does, period. When something really resonates, or when a piece of art or an artist stays with you for many years and through many different parts of your life, it makes you feel less alone in the world. I think David Foster Wallace said something to that effect once: “The function of literature is to make us feel less alone.” Kerouac said something similar about companionship, I think. Great art makes you feel as if your thoughts about the world and about yourself aren’t all that strange or wrong after all. For young people, I think it’s often musicians that do this the most. The world can be such a scary and crazy place growing up, so when you find like-minds that are able to express themselves so clearly through their art, there’s a sort of pleasure that gets added on top of the initial connection—something really special happens.

RM

Sure. I’m reminded of a Susan Sontag quip—she put it much more eloquently than I’m about to, I’m sure—that goes something to the tune of, “Art doesn’t teach you new ideas or information about the world, but it does teach you new ways to feel information that you already know.” How did coming of age in New York City, as a very particular sort of embodied cultural world, shape your relationship to literature?

MI

I had a weird entry point into New York City, because I was born in Mount Vernon and grew up there until I was 12. If you take the number 2 subway train to the last stop, you can walk to where I lived. So, I wasn’t within the city limits, but I was close—the city felt familiar. When I was twelve, we moved an hour north, but my grandparents still owned the house that I grew up in in Mount Vernon, so I never really left. I would go back all the time because I liked being there better. Once I finished high school, I moved in with my grandparents and started going into the city all the time. This was 1983. I was taking a lot of acting classes in the city, and also just wanted to spend all of my time there. I started crashing at friends’ houses, and I’d sublet friends’ places whenever they were out of town. Prior to all this I lived a very sheltered childhood. I didn’t go to shows, I wasn’t into punk—this was the late ’70s and early ’80s. I felt like I was biding my time until I finished high school. I really wanted to be here. Once I got here, I started going to acting classes all the time—I was seventeen, but a lot of the other students were in their twenties, thirties, forties, and fifties.

I didn’t wind up going to college—I was supposed to go to school up in Albany—because I went to the orientation and felt like it was just a continuation of the life I had in high school. I wanted to be in NYC. I started my first band around this time, and was also part of a group that started this experimental theater company that did stuff at places like PS122. That time in New York, in the early to mid ’80s, was really this heyday for crosspollination between different forms of art and performance, which in some ways all came out of experimental theater and punk rock. That was when I really started to learn about art and literature and music—I didn’t know a whole lot before then. I had a great acting teacher at that time, who told me, “You don’t have to go to college, but you really have to educate yourself about art.” She taught me to absorb all sorts of art, from visual art to literature to poetry.

RM

Right. That was a moment in which the boundaries between mediums seemed to be particularly blurred. This is a bit earlier, but you have Patti Smith and Television, and then later on No Wave and Bush Tetras and all of that, who are all operating with a sort of explicitly literary bent, even though they were all musicians first and foremost. Likewise, you have visual artists like David Wojnarowicz and the Pictures Generation artists around at the time, who always had one foot in language, be it text-based visual works or the actual practice of writing itself.

MI

You have things like Patti Smith doing Same Shepard’s one-act play Cowboy Mouth, too. There were all of these off-Broadway, experimental theater events that were kind of coming out of punk rock, but also kind of coming out of the Beat scene too, and also coming out of all of this music from the ’60s. In many ways, my book The Perfume Burned His Eyes is really all about these lineages of artistic inspiration. It was very interesting to be here as a young person at that time. When I was twenty-two, I worked at a restaurant on Greenwich Avenue called Café Bruxelles—a Belgian restaurant. I was on my lunch break during a double, and I decided to check out this bookstore across the street that had all these first edition Beat books in the window. So, I walk in, and Gregory Corso is behind the counter, drinking out of this big jug of Absolut Vodka and grapefruit juice. I was like, “What the fuck is going on?” The place was called Rare Book Room—it was founded by a guy named Roger Richards, who was a friend of all the Beats and a book dealer even before he had opened the store. Then, while I’m hanging out in there, Herbert Huncke walks in…

RM

Oh wow, so you’re really getting the full spread of all the Beats in the flesh.

MI

Yeah. I had a joint, so I lit it and smoked it with them, and then I started going in there all the time, since I was working right across the street. I met Peter Orlovsky through that, and then he started coming into the restaurant all the time asking for money.

RM

[Laughs.]

MI

He was always either kind of high or kind of drunk. My bosses, who were very conservative, were always like, “That crazy guy came back, what does he want from you?” Walking around the street and seeing people like Ginsburg and Lou Reed, who lived in the Village during the ’80s not too far from me… Just seeing these titans of New York art, it was very inspiring.

RM

It was such a tightly constrained, explicitly material world at that time, right? I mean, everything’s limited to this small subset of blocks, which I have to imagine collapses the mythos surrounding these figures in a certain way.

MI

Yeah, I mean, we were just talking about that before this talk began, about how you went to…

RM

[Addressing the audience] We were chatting about a visit I made to David Wojnarowicz’s old loft a few years back, which is up not too far from here up on 12th and 2nd, if I’m remembering the cross-streets right. We should get into your novel, The Perfume Burned His Eyes, though, seeing as that’s the main event we’re here to talk about. It doesn’t have to be too belabored, but it might be helpful to provide a brief overview of the book for those here who haven’t read it yet. Would you like to do that, or should I take a shot at it?

MI

I can do it. The book is about a kid who is sixteen and living in Jackson Heights—this is 1977. Over the span of a couple of months he loses his two major male role models, his father and his grandfather. He’s a bit estranged from his father—his parents are split up—but he’s very close with his grandfather. They live a very blue-collar, neighborhood life. The kid’s mother inherits some money after the grandfather’s death that she didn’t know existed, so she decides to move her and her son to the city—they move into this posh apartment building in the east fifties. She has this aspiration to get out of middle-class life, which she feels trapped by, and she wants to provide more for her son. He ends up going to a very expensive private school. Lou Reed and his girlfriend, Rachel, are living in the same building, during a particularly crazy, drug-addled part of Lou’s life. Some of those biographical details are true—he did live on the Upper Eastside with a transgender woman named Rachel Humphreys at the time, and he was shooting a lot of speed and staying up for days at a time. It was a very fertile period for Lou, creatively speaking. The kid kind of ends up being a gopher for Lou, and Lou becomes a kind of quasi father figure to the kid, although not by Lou’s design. The kid experiences all of the tropes of young adulthood while in Lou’s orbit, like falling in love for the first time, having sex for the first time, doing drugs for the first time, going to a bar, getting a job. That’s the gist of it, really.

RM

Thanks for that. I want to talk about the writing process a bit. You’ve previously written both screenplays and teleplays—I promise this is the only time I’ll bring the show up, but, for instance, you wrote five episodes of The Sopranos. Unlike novels, there’s a certain set of built-in constraints that are automatically attached to screenwriting. There’s the whole one page equals one minute rule—you have a general sense of the amount of screen time you’re writing for, so you’re writing with a preset idea in mind of how many pages you need to churn out and thus, as a result, also a sense of about how much real estate on the page can be allotted to each specific scene. There’s no real corollary like that when it comes to writing a novel. This isn’t to say either is easier or harder, but just that there’s a comparative absence of structural constraints placed upon the novel writing process from the jump. How did you go about navigating the jump from screenwriting to writing a novel? Were there any particular constraints you placed upon the process to accommodate that formal transition?

MI

I spent a lot of time writing screenplays, and then also a couple of adaptations, as well as a lot of other stuff that never ended up getting produced. I’ve written some prose in the past that never went anywhere, and then also some plays that never got finished. But I’ve always been a big reader, and fiction in particular has always been a big love in my life. The desire to write a book kind of came out of a place of disgust and frustration. There were a couple of television series ideas that I had spent a lot of time developing with several other people, ideas that I really liked and that we were all very passionate about. Some were actual scripts, and some were less fleshed out ideas. We got to certain levels with a number of studios and networks, but never really got anywhere—we never got on the air, I should say. I got really sick of that. When you write a screenplay or a teleplay, it’s not a work unto itself. It’s a schematic, a blueprint. Once you make the actual film or show, the writing doesn’t really have a purpose anymore. If you don’t end up making the show or the film, then the writing really doesn’t have a purpose. It’s not a work of literature. It can be artful and interesting, but it’s ultimately just a map. I got really frustrated by that whole process after a while. I wanted to have control over the whole work of art, I wanted it to just be me.

With novels, you obviously need to find a publisher, but besides that there isn’t anyone there who’s going to tell you whether or not you’re allowed to actually do the thing—you can even self-publish if you want. The actual execution of the work itself is completely in your hands. I needed that freedom at that point in my life. As I mentioned, Catcher in the Rye and Candide both loomed large in my life, and I felt like they pushed me towards writing a coming-of-age story—if I was going to write a novel, that’s what it was going to be. In 2013, my middle child was sixteen and was going through various sixteen-year-old problems. I wanted to relate to him more, and I thought, “Well, if I write a story about a kid that age, maybe that would help me relate better.” It didn’t.

RM

[Laughs.]

MI

But, a story did start happening. When I started to write the novel, I was writing in third person, and I couldn’t get anywhere with it. I couldn’t find an angle in, the possibilities were too broad. It was going nowhere. Then I started writing the book as if it were a journal, like the narrator is writing from a certain point in life and looking back on this earlier period of time. From there it started taking off. At first, the story was just about this kid moving to the city and coming of age, but then, four months into the writing, Lou died. This Friday will actually be ten years to the day since Lou’s death—October 27th, 2013. I was friends with Lou for the last dozen years of his life, and he was also a huge hero of mine. When he died, it hit me on a number of levels: as an artist, as a New Yorker, as a fan, and as someone who knew him. The idea just came to me, what if the kid moves to the city and winds up in the same building as Lou? That idea really gave me momentum, as far as being able to kind of see the entire story.

RM

I want to get into greater detail about Lou in a moment. Before that though, we should maybe talk about the broader strokes of the book. As you were saying, it’s narrated from this very interior, unprocessed point of view. That said, it feels important to note that it’s not a work of autofiction.

MI

No, not at all. None of the events that happen to the narrator happened in real life. That said, it is somewhat biographical on an emotional level.

RM

You’re trying to access and map a sensation, maybe?

MI

Absolutely. The feelings and ideas that defined that moment in life.

RM

The narrator’s voice is really snotty, in this very classically adolescent way. He’s a teenage brat. How did you go about fleshing out and getting into the space of that fictionalized voice? Is the process of embodying a voice in prose different for you from the process of embodying a character while acting, or were you pulling on a similar set of schematics and rules?

MI

The voice that comes with being that age never really went away for me, in a weird way. I mean, it’s not the voice running through my head now, but it’s so accessible. That was what surprised me the most about the writing process, how easy it was to remember and access what it felt like to be that age. In some way, it’s who you are. You’re not that person anymore, but part of you is that person at the same time. Some qualities get amplified with age and some get diminished, but they’re all basically still there. From there, it’s just a question of imagination. You’re imagining a person in specific situations, which is basically what acting is, right? You’re trying to make an imaginary circumstance feel real. The lines, situation, and characters aren’t real—as an actor you’re trying to imagine what it would be like if they were. It wasn’t as if I was applying what it’s like to be an actor to the writing process, but I was very familiar with that practice of imagination.

RM

In previous interviews, you’ve spoken at length about Elaine Aiken, who was a method acting teacher out here in New York who was associated for many years with the Actor’s Studio.

MI

She’s the teacher I was referring to a little bit ago, actually.

RM

Ah, that makes sense. You’ve spoken at length elsewhere about the role she played in instilling certain practices into you early on in your career. I was particularly struck by your account of how she taught you to find a way to carve out a sense of privacy on set, even when there maybe isn’t any literal privacy available. Obviously, when you’re writing you have a bit more privacy available—it’s a much more secluded process by nature. To return to what you were saying, I was curious if there were any particular methods you employed while writing this novel to create a similar space of mental clarity? Did you find yourself needing to go to any particular lengths to create the distance necessary to sit with those memories and shape them into language?

MI

Elaine taught an exercise which she called “being private in public.” It’s an essential exercise for acting, I think. You basically create this place that has some sort of emotional resonance—a “private moment,” as she called it—which could be from your memory, or also imagined, anything really. You have to really try to see it. I mean, you’re never going to actually see it, because it’s not there, right? But like, say it’s an image of a sink: you have to really try to see the sink somehow. There’s something in making that effort to see that brings your attention deeper into the moment. From there, you can make the moment whatever it is. I mean, as actors, we tend to go towards the dramatic—the more tragic, extreme, and traumatic places. It was an exercise that I loved. Sometimes we’d do it for a really long time in Elaine’s classes, like, several hours. You’d be in this place where you’d speak things out, whatever you wanted. It could be gibberish, it could be talking to someone else. You could even create another person while you were in there. It was so exciting. During those days where we did it for a really long time, you would totally lose yourself and your sense of time. It gave you a real way to explore things.

That practice proved to be really valuable when I went on to actually start working as an actor, especially on film and television sets, where you’re there for very long stretches of time and there’s so much activity going on all around you. You’re constantly around so many other people, none of whom care about what you’re doing.

RM

[Laughs.]

MI

And for good reason! They all have their own things to do. So, you really have to take it upon yourself to find a way to access what you need to access. Having a method for accessing a sense of privacy while you’re forced to be in public is immensely valuable for an actor. In some ways, that process of delving into the moment becomes a bit instinctual if you’re acting a lot.

When it comes to writing… for a number of years, when I already knew I wanted to write fiction but didn’t know how to, I really paid attention to the writers I liked in a way that I hadn’t before. I would ask myself, “Why do I like this? Why does this book resonate the way that it does?”

RM

Who were some of the writers you were studying?

MI

My favorite is Isaac Bashevis Singer, who was a Nobel Prize winner who lived here in New York. He was from Poland, I think. He came to the US before World War II and wrote a lot of short stories. He wrote everything in Yiddish, and then his brother would translate it into English. He spoke English totally fine and could have written in English if he wanted to, but he enjoyed writing in Yiddish more—he wrote a lot of stuff for the Jewish Daily Forward. So, a lot of his short stories originally appeared in Yiddish newspapers here in New York. I first heard about him because I saw an interview with Henry Miller where he mentioned Singer. I was curious as to why Miller liked Singer so much. I started reading Singer and got absolutely hooked on his short stories, and also his novels—some stories were set in sixteenth or seventeenth century Poland, and some were set in New York in the years after the war. What I liked the most about his writing was that he brought a real sense of compassion to humanity. He understood people’s faults and failures. There is a spiritual core to his writing, but not in a didactic way. It’s almost religious at times—his father was a rabbi—and also very invested in the supernatural. Not in a hokey way though! I just found him really fascinating, his writing had a big effect on me.

RM

What were you looking to get out of studying writers like Singer? How did you go about pulling from their language? Not in the sense of like, “I’m going to transpose this directly into my own writing,” but more so in the sense of learning different methods for bending language around a narrative.

MI

I wasn’t approaching it in a heavy analytical way. There are a lot of books that I’d like to read, but that I’m just not able to penetrate. I don’t have that faculty—there are certain dense, analytical books that I just don’t have a way of connecting to. So, I had to ask myself, what is it about writers like Singer that allows everything to flow naturally? How does it match up with the flow of my mind? How are the sentences constructed? Are they long? Are they short? What type of grammar do they use? I really liked the way Kerouac wrote, too. I think Big Sur is one of the best books ever written, especially when it comes to books about addiction. What he used to say about writing is that you form a picture in your mind of whatever it is you’re writing about and you hold on to it as hard as you can—your job is to try to describe the picture you have in your mind as best as you can. For whatever reason, that idea got stuck in my head. My other favorite writer is Mary Gaitskill. She’s so tremendous, so fearless. Once again, there’s a real sense of compassion for humanity in her work, a real strength to her center.

RM

Perhaps to dovetail from that a bit, it feels like the big question here is one of form, or of structure in the broadest sense. Obviously, one of the ways in which your book conveys interiority and emotion is through the use of the first person—you have a narrator who can directly say, “This happened, and I felt this way about it.” At the same time, there’s also a lot of emotional communication taking place on the level of the book’s architecture itself. The way events are sequenced and spliced accomplishes a supplementary kind of communication that the narrator’s direct address can’t do on its own. This is maybe a bit of an aside, but what you were just saying about operating on set reminded me of an anecdote that you’ve told in other interviews about your experience working on the set of Goodfellas. You talk about how you showed up to the set where those iconic poker game scenes were shot and took a look at the way the bar was set up and said, “No, wait, it doesn’t make sense for the bar to be in this part of the room—it would be way better if we turned it this way instead so my character is facing the poker table from behind the bar.” If I’m not mistaken, you were the one who went up to Martin Scorsese and said, “We’ve gotta change this layout,” right?

MI

Yeah, I asked Martin if I could move things around.

RM

What I’m trying to get at, in a roundabout way, is that there’s this sort of parallelism there, between the architecture of a set layout and the skeletal sequencing of a novel, yeah? There’s the direct, performed expression, and then there’s the architecture which contextualizes it—the architecture helps determine the way each inflection lands.

MI

Definitely. It took a while for me to discover that there’s this certain limitless potential for fiction, especially when it comes to the form of the novel. There are no rules. There’s one big section in the book where there are two big events happening in the kid’s life—the chapters alternate back and forth between these two events. Even though they happen at different moments in the kid’s life, I realized that it made more sense to place them right next to each other. I got to this point in the writing process where I realized I was allowed to abandon any sense of a linear, chronological timeline. I also became really fascinated with the concept of the chapter, or with what happens in the breaks between chapters. So much can happen between chapter one and chapter two. It’s a lot like film editing, actually. You’re ending chapter one on this sentence, and then you’re starting chapter two on this other sentence, right? When you edit a film, you put one shot next to another and they become this third thing, you know? Two different emotional qualities, two different narrative moments. They can be tonally different, but when you place them alongside one another you’re able to access this third tone that is distinct from the tone of either individual chapter, even if it’s a product of their two respective tones. Learning how to play with form in that way really unlocked something for me during the writing process.

RM

I was specifically thinking of that exact two-event sequence when I asked you that last question, actually! Each opening fragment in that stretch of chapters begins with very plainspoken, almost ambiguous language—the lack of detail or heavy stylization forces the reader to take a few moments to reorient themselves. That juxtaposition allows for this certain delirious bleed between emotional registers—you’re never able to think of just the event currently unfolding, you’re forced to weigh them hand in hand.

But! To return to my earlier promise, I want to talk a bit more about Lou Reed, since he’s such a central figure in this novel. I know you’ve talked about your relationship with Lou at length in other interviews, so we don’t need to dwell too long on it, but it might be helpful to hear you give a brief timeline of your relationship with him, as well as an account of what his work has meant to you over the years.

MI

I was a late bloomer when it came to learning about art and music. From the jump, I was just completely drawn to Lou’s music and lyrics and life story. I used to see him walking around the city, but I was never courageous enough to say anything to him. Actually, that’s not true, I did talk to him once, way before I officially met him many years later. I got cast in a movie called I Shot Andy Warhol, and I was playing Ondine. Actually, that’s his book right there! [Points to book on bookshelf next to stage.]

RM

Woah, serendipitous!

MI

That book, A by Andy Warhol, is actually just a long monologue by Ondine. He would take a lot of speed and talk and talk and talk, so Andy taped him one day and turned that recording into a book. He was a mailman from the Bronx who somehow fell in with the Andy Warhol scene and who was known for talking incessantly.He was one of the stars of Chelsea Girls too—he plays the Pope in that movie, I think.

Right around the time I got cast for that role, I went to a Knicks game and saw Lou Reed. I was like, “Oh, now I have an icebreaker.” The problem was that Lou was furious that they were making a movie about Valerie Solanas. She shot Andy Warhol—she almost killed Lou’s best friend, basically. I went up to him and said, “Hi, my name’s Michael, I’m actor and I got cast in this movie called I Shot Andy Warhol—I know you’re not a big fan of it.” He goes, “I think it’s despicable that they’re making a movie about that psychotic bitch.” And I was like, “Yeah, yeah, I know what you’re saying, but I’m actually playing a friend of yours, Ondine.” All he said was, “Good luck,” and then he turned away.

RM

[Laughs.]

MI

I felt so embarrassed. This was all on the escalator at Madison Square Garden. He kind of pulled away from me, and then he looked over his shoulder once or twice. As I was walking out, he grabbed me, put his arm around me and said, “Listen, do your homework, work hard and just remember one thing: Ondine was very, very funny.” That dynamic is something I tried to capture in the book. He could be very nasty—even after he got off drugs in his later life, he could be very prickly, or even worse. When he was still doing drugs, he was shooting something called Desoxyn, which is what they used to give people who were having heart attacks. He was doing that and staying up for days on end. You can be really nasty when you’re living like that. I mean, I didn’t know him at that point in his life though. So, even though he could be mean, there were also these moments where he would soften. That night at the Kicks game, he had this look of like, “Ah, this clueless kid who’s going to play Ondine doesn’t know what he’s in for.” There was something to that push and pull that stayed with me. Years later, when The Sopranos was on television, I went to see him in concert and his publicist introduced us, which is how we became real friends. I never told him about our earlier run in though!

RM

You stayed in touch with him throughout the rest of his life, right?

MI

Yeah, up until he died. Towards the end of his life, he was writing this book about meditation, and he wrote to me asking for a quote about meditation to use for the book. I wrote something back, and then the last email I got from him was his response to my quote, which came a few weeks before he died. His response was only two words: “very succinct”.

RM

[Laughs.]

MI

He would sign all of his emails with a pseudonym: Dr. Oliver Hummingbird. You knew it was Lou if you got a message from Dr. Hummingbird.

RM

What sort of stakes were at play for you with writing about someone you knew personally? Was there any added sense of responsibility you felt you had to weigh? Maybe I’m off with this, but I imagine that when you’re acting, even if you’re playing a real person—like Ondine—it’s still a bit more of a transparently subjective interpretation. Like, it’s not Ondine, it’s Michael’s spin on Ondine—it’s Ondine transposed into the alternate context of your body and your performance, transposed onto the literal limits of who you are as a separate person. To go back to your earlier point about what sets writing a novel apart from writing for the screen, there’s a greater level of authorial control over exactly how each character is perceived that enters the picture with fiction. You can dictate exactly how they are—your body, your voice, and your persona aren’t quite as directly or visibly implicated in the representation. How did you go about weighing that increased level of control while writing about Lou?

MI

Ok, well, first off, I never would have written any of it if he was still alive.

RM

[Laughs.]

MI

No way, not a chance. I had a lot of respect, admiration, and affection for him. There are nasty moments, and there are difficult moments, and I wanted to portray those parts—I wanted it to be true to who he was and what he was like. But, I wanted it to also clearly come from a place of deep love for him. I had to get a lawyer, because I use some of Lou’s lyrics in the book and wasn’t sure if that would totally fly. The lawyer said to me, “Basically, if you’re famous and you’re dead, you have no privacy rights.” So, I was like, “Well, that’s good—that covers me!” [Laughs.] I did a lot of research on him—not just for the book, but also just out of a general interest in him. I went through lots of interviews, biographies, photographs, and recordings. There’s a two-disc live record of his that I became obsessed with called Take No Prisoners, which was recorded at The Bottom Line in ’78, I think. Half of the recording is just him talking to the audience. It’s a really interesting slice of his life—he was still using a lot of different drugs at the time, but it offers a really vivid picture of where his head was at that particular time. Some of the versions of those songs are incredible. He’s so passionate, and the renditions are so powerful—there are great versions of “Coney Island Baby” and “Berlin” on there, as well as other songs like “Pale Blue Eyes” and “Satellite of Love.” It’s a great record. To your question though, to be honest, as an actor, I really don’t like playing people who were real. When you’re acting, it’s such a subjective thing, it’s hard to connect and go as deep when you’re trying to match someone who was alive at one point. I really prefer playing people who never existed.

RM

Did the difficulty of representing a real person disappear for you while writing the novel?

MI

Definitely. When you’re playing someone who’s real, there are so many limitations that enter the picture—there’s no way to ever fully express what they were like. When actors are able to do it well, it’s kind of amazing, even miraculous. Personally though, I’d rather not try. Writing, however, felt different, because you’re able to go in and really pick and choose exactly which parts of a life interest you, you’re able to shape it a bit more selectively. Does that make sense?

RM

Sure. You also have more freedom to redact the pieces of their life that don’t interest you—you’re not held to the same standard of showing them in their ostensible entirety.

MI

I can’t stand most biopics, especially ones about musicians. It’s hard to do a good job of capturing a big chunk of someone’s life or career. I really like that Gus Van Sant movie Last Days—the one about the last three days of Kurt Cobain’s life. It’s a movie, so it’s not totally biographical, but there’s something so beautiful about it.There’s another one I like by Christopher Münch called The Hours and the Times. It came out in the early ’90s I think and is only sixty-five minutes long. It’s about a weekend John Lennon and Brian Epstein spent together in Barcelona right before The Beatles became the biggest band in the world. They were already on the charts in England and had a following, but they weren’t super famous yet. The movie takes place over just a couple of days, and the actor who plays John Lennon, the great Ian Hart, is so good. Those are the exceptions when it comes to biopics for me. If you’re going to tell a story about a famous person, especially a musician, I often think the best way to do it is to constrain yourself to a very small slice of their life.

RM

To riff on that a bit, why did you choose to write about the particular moment in Lou’s life that you did? It’s a somewhat odd, or maybe idiosyncratic, moment in his biography. It’s after all of his early career success, but also more immediately after Metal Machine Music, which many people at the time believed to be this sort of career suicide moment for Lou—he was washed up in the public eye. He’s at the height of his drug use, he’s living on the Upper East Side in this posh apartment—a far cry from the Downtown bohemian image often ascribed to him. He’s writing a lot of music still, much of which would make it on to his later “second wind” records, but you still set the narrative before his ostensible return to form in the later ’70s and early ’80s. What drew you to this version of Lou?

MI

I had been reading a lot about what his life was like at the time, when he was doing speed and staying up for days and all of that. He was living with a transgender girlfriend—which, if you know his work, shouldn’t seem surprising—but he was also living in this fancy compound on the Upper East Side, which, once again, if you know his work, should make you think like, “What the fuck?” I mean, I think he was living on the same block as Greta Garbo or something like that. He lived most of his life in the Village. He lived above Stonewall for a number of years, and then later on West 11th Street up until his death. By contrast, that Upper East Side apartment is very buttoned down, very posh. It’s a doorman building. I just kept on thinking like, what the hell did his neighbors think of him? You know, seeing this guy who has been up for days, not showering, coming and going all hours of the night dressed in leather with a bleached head of hair. I just found that image to be really strange and interesting.

RM

Throughout the book, there’s this recurrent notion that art provides a sort of narrative structure for making sense of the more brutish and disorienting aspects of life. Your use of the coming-of-age trope really foregrounded this for me. As the narrator’s life progresses, the romance of youth—or, to put it another way, the rosy-tinted impression that everything in life is destined to resolve in a clear cut, cathartic manner—seems to drain out of him. He’s forced to contend with this fundamental absence or negation that’s baked into life itself—there is no romantic catharsis, there is no objective clarity. Art, for him—Lou’s art, specifically—becomes a type of subjective, emotionally driven vehicle for making sense of things in the absence of objective meaning. I hope this isn’t too broad of a question, but I was curious if you think of art as having a sort of truth-telling function? Do you view art as something which helps us make sense of the world, or is that concept not of much interest to you?

MI

Absolutely, one hundred percent. As for the kid in the book, you don’t end up finding out what happens to him or who he grows up to be, but you’re left with the sense that he has a certain artistic sensibility. He sees that in Lou too, even though it’s sometimes hard for him to be with Lou and to see Lou at such a difficult point in his life. There’s this scene where Lou breaks up with Rachel and he’s really suffering—he’s in a lot of pain, both from the drugs and from the burden of heartbreak. Yet, he’s also able to write this really beautiful song at the same time, in the midst of all this pain. The kid sees that. He learns through Lou that the creative act, whatever shape it might take, is this ballast that can help carry him through his own suffering. He learns that through osmosis, really, especially towards the end when he reads…

RM

The lyrics to “The Blue Mask”?

MI

Yes! Exactly. Lou kind of hires the kid. He meets Lou because he’s working at a diner down the street and ends up delivering food to Lou’s apartment. Lou asks the kid if he takes dictation, and ends up vaguely hiring him to dictate this play or opera or musical that he’s writing. Which was kind of true—Lou was supposed to turn “Walk on the Wild Side” into this type of rock opera, but he never got around to it. In reality, though, Lou mostly wants the kid around because he can’t stand being alone. Lou’s art becomes this kind of, I don’t know…

RM

North star, maybe? It gives the narrator a way to articulate desires that otherwise feel opaque, or beyond the reach of language, yeah?

MI

Yeah. I tried to convey this idea that the kid isn’t able to even consider the possibility of being an artist prior to meeting Lou. When I finished high school, the idea of being an actor seemed so inconceivable. I didn’t know any actors, my family didn’t know any actors. The idea that you could do that seemed very distant and impossible They always say, “You gotta know somebody”—which is also not true, to be clear. Either way, we didn’t know anybody. Unless you have a vision of what that life looks like, it seems so impossible.

RM

I’ve got one more question, and then we can turn it over to audience questions for a bit. I want to return to something you said towards the start of our conversation, which is that you wrote this book as a bildungsroman, set in the narrative perspective of an adolescent, around the time that your kids were going through similar growing pains—or, around the time that they were starting to experience the same life experiences that the narrator faces. How has fatherhood informed your approach to writing?

MI

Being a father made me really appreciate my parents a lot. When you’re a kid, you often go through times where you really resent your parents and don’t want to be around them. I mean, some people obviously have very negative and abusive relationships with their parents, which is a separate thing—I’m not talking about that kind of resentment. Becoming a parent made me really appreciate everything that my parents did for me. Especially my father, because I became a father, right? Being able to look at what he was doing and compare it to what I was doing really allowed me to forgive a lot of things that I had held onto. My parents are still alive—they’re in their ’80s—but I no longer hold any resentments, they’ve all been released. I think learning to let go in that way changes your relationship to writing. I mean, you can try to hold onto resentments and write from that point of view, which many people do, and which can be very interesting. But, learning to let go allowed me this sort of freedom to revisit the past without getting too caught up in or overwhelmed by it.

Audience

Was there anything early on in particular, when you were a teenager, that motivated you creatively?

MI

Yeah. I was driven by feelings of inadequacy and insecurity. At that age, I often felt that nothing I did would ever be enough. I was never enough. I think a lot of adolescents feel that. It’s a very common feeling, and it’s a heartbreaking one—it’s really, really heartbreaking. When you see that feeling reflected in your own children, it inspires you to try to somehow reconnect with that feeling and help them. I don’t like looking back at the past—I’ve been told that’s a very Aries trait. [Laughs.] I like to look forward; I can’t sit backwards on a train without getting sick. But occasionally, those feelings do come back. They’re always there in the background, but it’s a rare thing for me to remember them and feel compelled to do something with them.

Emmanuel Olunkwa

How many false starts did you have as an actor?

MI

I started studying acting right after high school, when I was 17. I used to buy the trade newspaper, which listed lots of auditions, mostly for off-Broadway plays and NYU films, but also occasionally for Hollywood films. I was trying to get work, so I would send headshots to agents all the time. This was back in the day before there was a lot of security in corporate buildings, so you could just walk into agents’ offices with a headshot. I got thrown out of an agent’s office once for doing that. [Laughter.] He said, “Get out of here, what the hell do you think I’m gonna do with you?” All I had at that time was a headshot and a resume full of lies. I would go to calls for plays that didn’t pay, where the auditions would be from like, say, ten in the morning to six at night on a Saturday. You’d get there and wait in line with one hundred other people who were there to do a monologue and audition. That would be your whole Saturday—and then you wouldn’t get the part, usually. I finally got a play, and before it opened there was an article written about it in the New York Times, mostly because the play was based on a real person’s life. It got some attention. I was in a lead role, and I got fired after opening weekend. It was devastating.

Emmanuel Olunkwa

How old were you?

MI

I was 21. That was the first moment where I thought, “Well, maybe I really can’t do this acting thing.” I didn’t know how to take direction. Most of the work I was doing in class was with one other scene partner—occasionally a student would direct a scene, but most of the time you were just trying to play off the partner you were paired with. I also didn’t study voice or anything like that, so I didn’t know how to project while still sounding truthful, which is so important to theater acting. I knew how to be truthful, because that’s what I had been studying, but I didn’t know how to make it big enough to carry across the stage. Or maybe I was afraid to do it. I also just didn’t respect the director. [Laughter.] He had come from a television background—really episodic television—and didn’t understand theater. Anyways, it all culminated in me getting fired, which devastated me. Around that time, me and some of the other students started meeting up outside of class and working together. There was a school not too far from where we are right now—Charas/El Bohio on East 9th Street was a neighborhood organization and squatted community center from 1979-2001—where you could rent rehearsal spaces. We did a lot of improv—not comedy improv, but like, acting improv. It kind of verged on being performance art at times, lots of dramatic scenes and stuff. Eventually, probably a year or so after that, we became a formal theater company. One of the students in our company, Tom Gilroy, started writing plays—he’s now an independent filmmaker. We started producing his stuff and learning the ropes of producing and directing, which really helped me a lot.

Emmanuel Olunkwa

How old were you when everything took off?

MI

Took off? Well, it was weird, because I started doing little parts in films when I was 22. And then I got the part in Goodfellas when I was 23. But I was still working in restaurants until I was like, I don’t know, 26 or so? I was in the restaurant industry for about nine years. Sometimes I would go off for a bit for bigger jobs. One time, when I was 25, I went down to North Carolina for a couple months, and was so excited to be away on location for a long time. But then I came back, and it was right back to the restaurant or bar or wherever I was working at the time—it’s expensive to live here, even back then, and I simply wasn’t making enough money from movies. But then, once I started making a living…

Emmanuel Olunkwa

When was that?

MI

I was 26 or 27, which is still relatively young. I didn’t have a lot of patience though. I thought I’d start acting school at 17 and be on television three months later, but it obviously doesn’t work that way.

Audience

I haven’t read the book yet, but it sounds like the book is largely about a younger person finding a mirror figure, or a primal scene of inspiration, which is Lou Reed. Who was your Lou Reed?

MI

Well, Lou Reed was kind of my Lou Reed. [Laughter.] I had a vicarious relationship to him when I was younger, because I didn’t know him yet. My teachers were also big influences—Elaine Aiken, who Ryan mentioned earlier, was the most important. She sat me down one time and said to me, “You’re not just going to be an actor, you’re going to have other roles in this business, you’re going to do other things too.” I wasn’t doing anything else at the time besides acting, but she somehow saw that in me long before I could. She was more so a mentor than a teacher for me. Sometimes she’d take a couple of us to the Met to take in other types of art. I remember there was a special exhibition there of very important Impressionist art—Picasso, Vann Gogh, Modigliani, Soutine, and so on—on loan from the Hermitage, which she took us to see—this was back during the Cold War, so getting the chance to see those works in America was a big deal. Me and a couple of the other students snuck into the bathroom to smoke hash before seeing the exhibit. Actually, one of the guys I smoked that hash with was also in The Sopranos, John Ventimiglia—he played Artie Buco, the chef. [Laughter.] We were in Elaine’s class together, so I’ve known him since I was 17. It was me, John, Tom Gilroy, and one or two other students. She walked us through the exhibit and tried to explain point of view and all of these other artistic concepts, which I knew nothing about. Her generosity in moments like that has always stuck with me. I tried to capture some of that in the book, and I also try to approach all my work with that sense of generosity in mind.