Interview with Pam Houston
In many of your stories, your characters come close to dying. Why do your characters get in such near proximity to death?
I think it’s playing out issues from my father, an abusive alcoholic — it’s very Psych 101, but I put myself in extreme situations where I can have control; get control back. And I write very autobiographically. In my real life, I’m always making things hard on myself. I always want to go to hard places. Like how my boyfriend and I were in Italy, and he wanted to go to Venice and I wanted to go to Naples. Or like I how I went to Cambodia last year, and it was the most dangerous place I’ve ever been to — I have been to more than sixty countries, but Cambodia is the only one where I wouldn’t go back. It’s got a real malevolent energy. But yeah, I like to be in control of my own life, my own money, my own car, because my mom never was. I used to love to tempt death in the outdoors all the time: the rivers at high water; the back country when an avalanche was only a matter of time. I haven’t put myself in those kinds of situations in a long time. But I still do things to try to get that same adrenaline rush, like reading brand new material at a reading. That’s a big adrenaline rush.
