My father was murdered 15 years ago. [He was shot by his partner’s ex-boyfriend]. I used to say something profound and sensitive when asked about it, but it’s more muddy now. Today I feel a huge amount of sympathy for my dad, because I am turning into him.

There hasn’t been an edgy book, like American Psycho, for decades. People don’t want to be associated with something politically incorrect because the backlash is so immediate online. They play safer because of that.

My parents’ divorce left me unable to be around conflict. They were so tense and unpleasant when they were together that there was a sense of impending violence. With Fight Club I was reacclimatising to the idea of violence, but even then I had to structure it with rules and consensual agreements.

Pornography is the giant thing in the internet age that nobody will talk about. It’s a big secret that is generating so much traffic, at the leading edge of the new Wild West. It is a pure, nonverbal example of a commodified experience; books are another example. Commodified formulae for a fake sense of immediacy.

My siblings and I joke about how well we’ve turned out. We’ve achieved remarkable things considering the squalor of growing up [in a mobile home in Burbank, Washington]; how poor we were. I needed to leave the chaos of my childhood and achieve a life where I was not subject to other people’s upsets.

I try to achieve high-culture effects through low-culture methods. I’m fascinated by low fiction that generates a physical response: disgusts the reader, makes them hungry or sexually aroused.

When I left college I worked as a mechanic. Blue-collar jobs gave me a freedom to approach writing as a pastime, as opposed to needing money or a career. For me it was a mistress: pure pleasure.

Almost my entire circle of friends died of Aids during the 80s. I worked in a hospice watching people die of opportunistic infections. I had a factory job, but the fact that I wasn’t dying like these people made me feel fantastic.

I feel guilty and creepy that my moments of greatest joy come when I’m alone. When I am writing something will be revealed to me that wasn’t planned, and I experience these epiphanies.

Friends can be thrilled that their story was used in my fiction, but angry at being depicted in nonfiction. They are afraid of losing their sense of privacy.

You could say it’s inertia that has kept me with my partner for 20 years. I pour all my chaos and upset into my books so my home life can stay on an even kilter.

I have been called a nihilist, but I would describe myself as a romantic. I’m always looking for narratives that bring people together. I like my books to have a wedding at the end, rather than a death.

Beautiful You by Chuck Palahniuk is published by Jonathan Cape on 6 November (£16.99). To order a copy for £13.59, click on the link above or call 0330 333 6846