GQ: Doomed is written through the eyes of Madison Spencer, a wily pre-pubescent girl—why her?

** Chuck Palahniuk:** I started writing the first book—this is the second book in the series—while I was taking care of my mother, who had lung cancer, and I realized that as soon as she died both of my parents would be dead and I knew that it would take years to process my grief. I cognitively reframed it and made it about a little girl who was dead herself and was mourning her parents because they were still alive. And she could process all of her conflicted feelings about her parents the way that I was processing my own, and denying the trauma of being dead. That’s how I made this whole thing funny.

How’d you tap into her mind?

For most people, when they have children it gives them a chance to revisit the developmental changes they went through as children themselves. And it gives them a chance to kind of recognize the false lessons they learned, and ultimately the ways they didn’t develop right. In a way, having and raising a child allows you to correct aspects of your own character. And I don’t have any children, I never will, but by creating Madison, in a way, I’m able to raise a child and take this child through all these kind of free sexual awarenesses and experiences and in a way I’m able to have that corrective process in a fictional child that most of my friends have in their actual children.

**Why do a series? **

A couple reasons. First: I knew that it would take at least three books to kind of exhaust the grief I felt about losing both my parents. Second: I wanted to do something really enormously around theology, kind of reinventing the great big spiritual narrative we live by. I’m trying to create something new, some new kind of story about heaven and hell. And third is this kind of re-parenting of myself through this fictional child.

**This novel has one of the strangest, and least erotic, descriptions of a penis I’ve ever encountered—where does this imagery come from? **

Well, that’s what I love about having either a child narrator, or a narrator who is sometimes on drugs. There are different ways of having a narrator who misinterprets the situation, and that’s always so entertaining when characters get things wrong because it allows the reader to recognize the truth and feel vastly superior to the narrator. And it makes the character so endearing and sympathetic. It makes you feel so sorry for them, that they are misinterpreting the situation so wildly.