by Todd Grimson
I had always been interested in Nastassja Kinski - partly because of her father, and her connection with Roman Polanski, which was semi-disgusting the more I discovered about his sexual practices. And Klaus Kinski was a maniac. But in the novel I generally left the real-life Nastassja alone. My character Lisa Nova was in my conception somewhat defined by her film Girl, 10, Murders Boys, based on the true story of Mary Bell. Before I started the novel I had written a long - 50-some pages - story, embodying pretty much the beginning of the novel, but which much more explicitly featured Lisa Nova working one night at a techno Hollywood brothel employing lookalikes. The story was entitled Lisa Says Yes to a Variety of Things. After all kinds of adventures it ended with Lisa castrating someone and escaping from the grounds of the estate driving a white Jaguar, meanwhile high on designer drugs. The story was too pornographic to be published. It made some editors seriously angry at me. One said if this was the future he didn’t want to live there. I thought I was probably tapping into something cool……though it crossed my mind I might get sued. By Nastassja. When I connected this beginning with my intense, dreams about Boro the book started to write itself. I also had all kinds of thoughts about postmodernism and Cindy Sherman and her Untitled Film Stills and other pictures which I was deeply studying at the same time, thoughts about how females present themselves in roles defined by the cinema (and so on).
I’ve spent nearly half my life around Los Angeles and consider BRAND NEW CHERRY FLAVOR equal to Nathanael West’s DAY OF THE LOCUST as a portrait of L.A. Yet, while you’ve lived a lot of places, Los Angeles isn’t one of them. In fact, you’ve never even been here. How’d you draw such an inspired and accurate picture on such a large scale?
I wrote about the Los Angeles in my mind. Movies helped flesh this out, of course, but I also read a great book about the architecture of LA, as well as Kevin Starr’s various volumes comprising a history of the city. I was fascinated by the names… like Pomona, or Santa Monica, Laurel Canyon, and I tried to get some sense of how these different locales related to each other. The names held some romance for me. I studied my Thomas Guide. (This was also a period when I was first getting used to the idea of being more or less crippled by MS, plus I was poor, and I knew I would have needed my own car… plus, I was used to watching films all night while working on my book while listening to music and looking at art books, leaving them lying open so I can glance at the images now and then). Sometimes I would watch Suspiria or Cat People over and over, all night, going to sleep at 6am. The years working nightshift in the ER had changed my relation to day and night forever - and I still do most of my writing in the still of the night, when everyone around me is asleep. I thought this might be the last book I would ever write.
Is, for lack of a better term, reporting important to your unique brand of story telling?
I think I’m a good listener, and I don’t seem morally judgmental, so through the years all kinds of people have confided in me. People generally like to talk about themselves… Working in the Emergency Room for years taught me - or greatly aided my education about - how the world really works. It took a year there until, uh, I sort of lost my cherry… and really started to get it, beyond cheap “wised-up” cynicism anyone can affect. I knew about violence from the inside, as well as the outside…but I don’t really want to talk about that. Maybe in some respects such intimate knowledge is literally “unspeakable” or incommunicable…but then as a writer you try to communicate it anyway. You know how it works -and how it doesn’t work. You recognize immediately when you read something false.
What novel do you feel BRAND NEW CHERRY FLAVOR most resembles?
If any novel was in the back of my mind, strangely enough it might have been Gravity’s Rainbow, though I find most of Pynchon terribly flawed. I still think he most likely died in 1973. The”softer” comeback novels are the product of a ghostwriter who studied the superficial aspects of his style… But V., The Crying Of Lot 49, Gravity’s Rainbow - all were often quite cruel. They express a real hostility to the common reader. Just so, William Burroughs, though he’s much more limited and repetitive. I have a framed photo of Burroughs, taken in Mexico City, when he was thirty years old, right around the time he shot his wife Joan Vollmer in the head.
A Brief Biography of Todd Grimson
Todd Grimson was born in 1952 in Seattle and moved to Portland, Oregon at an early age. At the age of 22, having gone through all kinds of dead-end employment, Grimson took a civil service exam and ended up working at the VA Hospital in its surgical intensive care unit, which he found highly educational. He went on to work nightshift in the emergency room at Emanuel Hospital, where most local victims of violent crime were seen— an intense experience informing his first novel, “Within Normal Limits,” which he wrote under the mentorship of Paul Bowles, whom he had met and studied with during a summer writing workshop in Tangier, Morocco. Published in the prestigious “Vintage Contemporaries” series as a trade paperback original, “Within Normal Limits” earned Grimson critical acclaim and was the winner of the Oregon Book Award in 1988.
It was shortly before the publication of this first novel that Grimson was first diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS), an incurable, degenerative disease. However, his symptoms went away and did not reappear until the summer of 1991. Stricken suddenly, housebound and incapacitated, Grimson found himself having vivid and surreal dreams, which later became the source and literally a part of the novel, “Brand New Cherry Flavor,” which blends this phantasmagorical dreamscape with the innovation of “cinematic realism.” Critically acclaimed both in the US and in the UK, this novel was followed by “Stainless” ( to be reprinted by Schaffner Press, Feb. 2012), an urban noir vampire novel set in late 1990’s L.A.
In recent years, Grimson has been writing and publishing short fiction online under the nom de plume “I. Fontana,” appearing in such literary reviews as BOMB, Bikini Girl, Juked, New Dead Families, Lamination Colony and Spork, while working on a new novel, “sickgirl101,” a thriller which delves into the online Alt Sex underworld, exploring and exposing the darker side of contemporary sexuality as perhaps no one else has done before.
About Schaffner Press:
Founded by former literary agent Tim Schaffner in 2000, Tucson, Arizona-based Schaffner Press is an independent publisher of general trade books in the area of fiction, and non-fiction with a particular focus on mysteries, literary fiction, memoir, biography and autobiography. Its mission is to provide the general reader with works of quality that address major social issues of our time, and to inspire and challenge audiences with new thoughts, ideas and perspectives on the world.
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