It’s all fodder for his stories
If you graphed Seth Greenland’s writing career, it would look like an Escher drawing: Apparent dead-ends emerge as new beginnings. A novelist and television writer, Greenland has tried his hand at just about every kind of writing except poetry — which is the avocation of the protagonist of his new novel, “I Regret Everything” (Europa: 256 pp., $16). In the book, Jeremy is secretly a poet (in his real life, he’s an attorney) but after a cancer scare he begins to reconsider his decisions. Greenland moved to Los Angeles from New York with his family in 1997 after his own bout with cancer. In his Brentwood backyard, he sat down to talk about writing. How much of your own experience being diagnosed with cancer ends up being Jeremy’s experience?
Some. I had Stage 4 Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. It never recurred, and that was 20-some years ago or so. I’ve been trying to figure out how to exploit it for my writing ever since. You gotta use everything — I try to be a nose-to-tail writer, you know? How did you get started writing?
I met Richard Belzer, I’d written about him for the Soho Weekly News, and he hired me to write a radio show he was doing for WNBC [in the 1970s].… He needed gag writers. It was a great way to make money. Here’s the thing: If I had thought in my 20s I had the talent to be a novelist, I would have skipped that whole phase, I think, and just become a novelist. But it was too intimidating at that point. Having been an English major, you’re studying Faulkner and Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, and you think, man, that looks impossible, really. Whereas script writing, comparatively ... it’s a lot easier doing that than writing a great novel. When did you decide to try writing your first novel?
I came out here in ’82, and Norman Lear gave me a job writing on a show he was doing, “a.k.a. Pablo” for ABC — it was the first show about a Mexican American family and was meant to be a big thing, which it alas did not turn out to be. But it was a great opportunity; I was 27 years old and writing for a network show. [After it was canceled] I moved back to New York and was able to get work writing screenplays. But I was not getting a lot of creative satisfaction doing that and I taught myself how to be a playwright. My first play [“Jungle Rot”] was a comedy about the CIA’s attempted assassination of Patrice Lumumba. That was in 1996, shortly before you moved to L.A.
By the early oughts, I thought, I’m in my 40s now, and maybe I should write a book while I still think I have time.”... It took me six months to write the first draft [of “The Bones”]. I had a manager who was an English major at Wesleyan, so I trusted his taste. I gave it to him — he later told me, his reaction was, ‘Oh, good God, please tell me you didn’t write a novel.’ But he really liked it.
Then all of a sudden, I’m a novelist. I’m not some guy whose career in Hollywood was OK for a while and then petered out. What books do you think best capture Hollywood?
“The Player” by Michael Tolkin is a really good Hollywood novel. “The Day of the Locust” by Nathanael West holds up really well…. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Pat Hobby Stories” — he so gets the sweaty desperation of what it is to work in Hollywood. Although the trappings are different, everything else is the same. It’s just unchanged.