Nine Books About Your Life:James Nulick

In our Nine Books About Your Life series, authors are invited to talk about nine types of books that have had an impact on their lives. Their responses give us a glimpse into their relationships with their books and other people’s books. In this installment, we speak with James Nulick, author of the forthcoming Plastic Soul.

First Book

The first book I remember actively reading was The Mouse and the Motorcycle by Beverly Cleary. I say active because it wasn’t boring nonsense my teachers were forcing down my throat—it was a book I wanted to read. I was likely nine or ten. I had read other books, of course, but this was by choice. It felt dangerous and exciting, riding on Keith’s motorcycle with Ralph, traveling down dark hotel hallways at night, loading an aspirin into an ambulance to save a young man. It was my first exposure to American magic realism.      

Most Cherished Book
Are you familiar with trepanation? Drilling a small hole in your head to remain permanently high? Babies are naturally trepanned—their fontanelles—but then the skull closes, and most psychedelically-dreaming babies become boring adults. That’s what school is all about! I own an extremely rare object, a book by Dr. Bart Huges (pronounced WHO guess) called The Book with the Hole, translated by Joe Mellen and Amanda Feilding. It’s Dr. Huges’ autobiography. Wikipedia calls him a librarian, out of contempt or laziness, because he was refused a medical degree due to his advocacy of LSD research. Again, decisions made by boring adults. But he’ll always be a Dr. in my mind, a metaphysician of the highest order. And what a trippy autobiography it is! The book has a hole drilled right through the middle of it, from front cover to back. It’s signed by Huges, I would guess, to someone named John Simon. No idea. I’d been searching for it for twenty years, ever since I’d done research on Huges for my first novel, Distemper. Huges supplies background hum for Distemper, a flawed novel I no longer recognize as my own. A bookseller friend of mine in Minneapolis, a gentleman named Kevin Sell, who runs The Rare Book Sleuth, tracked it down for me. The previous owner was in the Netherlands. It’s the most expensive book I own. Let’s just say I could pay a month’s rent with it—in Seattle. A young man who is working on a doctoral degree in England asked me to scan it, but I don’t own a flatbed scanner, and they are quite expensive. A good one costs five hundred dollars.

Most Perplexing Book
Time’s Arrow by Martin Amis. I tried reading it when I was twenty-two, during my last year of university. It wasn’t assigned reading—I was reading it for fun. I just didn’t get it. I speak English, as the English do, but perhaps Time’s Arrow is too British. I’m sure the fault is all mine—it is their language, after all.  

Life-changing Book
When I was nineteen, in 1989, I read William T. Vollmann’s The Rainbow Stories, and it blew my mind. It spoke to me because I’d never read about down-and-outs like me before, especially in a shiny new hardcover book. Nowhere else had I encountered hookers, junkies, street people, and weird mechanical engineers in such an engagingly alive, mysterious narrative. Not that I was a hooker or a junkie when I was nineteen. I was a salvage lot urchin. I grew up in my father’s wrecking yard. Having met a lot of people on the periphery, the people in Vollmann’s beautiful book felt real to me, and for that, I will forever be grateful to Bill and his big, lovely book. I’ve lived all over the place, from the East Coast to the West Coast, including a few flyover places in-between, and still have the original copy I purchased from B. Dalton when I was nineteen. I’ve lost many things during countless moves over the years, but my old hardcover copy of The Rainbow Stories is still with me.       

Most Underrated Book
I was about twenty-five when I read Steve Weiner’s excellent debut novel The Museum of Love, the hagiography of a twelve-year-old French-Canadian boy named Jean-Michel Verhaeren. Imagine the lives of the saints filtered through a queer lens. Otherworldly in the best way, the novel opens with Jean-Michel’s father, a prison guard, taking Jean-Michel to see an (imaginary?) museum constructed in Ed Gein’s living room, the painted bodies of assorted women dangling from wires suspended over their heads. It’s either Ed Gein’s living room or the dollhouse vault of Jean-Michel’s skull. Our hero is a peripatetic, weird gay kid, and I loved being on the road with him as he navigated the weirdness that is the new world. Track this book down, read it, and know you are in the hands of a master storyteller. Oh, and the antlered jacket art is by The Brothers Quay. Have I convinced you?       

A Surprising Book
After I read The Mouse and the Motorcycle, aged ten, I moved towards a weirder, darker America, carried on by the currents in my dark child’s heart. Please keep in mind I had witnessed people’s bodies blown open in car accidents—my father had a towing contract with the City of Phoenix Police Department—and so it was a very old, well-traveled ten years. Haunted Houses, by Larry Kettelkamp, published by William Morrow in 1969, the year before I was born. I have a signed hardcover copy. But before all that, I checked out the school library copy many times. I read about the fates of Katherine Howard and Anne Boleyn, Elke Sommer’s encounter with a middle-aged poltergeist in her Beverly Hills home in 1964, how psychically distressed teenage girls can unintentionally upset objects in houses with their lightning flash moods, and, of course, reading about the granddaddy of all haunted houses, Borley Rectory. I was enraptured, fascinated, and left my body several times while turning its pages into the night, its sentences burned into my synapses. It is one of the rare books I have read more than once… perhaps a dozen times? Proof that a sentence, whether good or bad, once written, once read, is imprinted on the mind eternally, recalled at will forty years later.

Your Most Recent Book
My most recent book is Boycrush, an illustrated book for young adults published by Anxiety Press. Boycrush is about a young man trying to figure out who he is.

Your Next Book
My next book is a speculative fiction novel called Plastic Soul. I’ve been working on it for the past eighteen months, which is difficult to do when one has a full-time job. I used to wake up early and write for two hours before work. That’s how I wrote my novels Valencia and The Moon Down to Earth. But I was much younger then—I can’t do that anymore. I get little sleep as it is. I work on Plastic Soul after work and on weekends. Valencia and The Moon Down to Earth are day novels, whereas Plastic Soul is a night novel, which makes sense as it contains a lot of darkness. It’s a hallucinatory rumination on human cloning, death, and plastic surgery, told from four different points of view—a clone, a physician, and two adults who have adopted clones of themselves. It’s technically four small novels compressed into one large novel, linked by a common thread—death, decay, and the human body. It’s a cyclical novel—I loathe linear novels. But don’t worry, it’s a real novel, it even has a plot.

Plug a Book
You know when you start reading a book, and you think oh my god, this book is awesome? Well, obviously, that is quite rare, especially at my age, but it happened recently when I started reading The Baudelaire Fractal by Lisa Robertson. I immediately knew I was going to love it. It’s a novel that reads like poetry. I think she was a poet first, then a novelist, which is exactly how I came into the world—I was a poet first. It’s a novel about a young woman finding her way in the world, primarily through books and fabric. I love how Robertson discusses garments. We take clothes for granted, yet they define who we are—the clothes we drape over our body define our body. Roberston inherently knows this, as do I. One of the characters in Plastic Soul is a fashion-conscious female neurosurgeon who appreciates how a nice minaudière accentuates the fabric draped over the body. Sometimes, we must witness beauty to appreciate our own. Woolen skirts, sturdy shoes, and plastic hairbands (Robertson, page 114). A novel that can open our eyes to a new mode of thinking, a color we’ve never seen before, is a small miracle. I recommend the Coach House Books edition of The Baudelaire Fractal because it has raised lettering on the front cover. I’m a sucker for small, beautifully elegant details.