Even though you've written 13 novels, the one best remembered surely is Fight Club, because of the film starring Brad Pitt and Ed Norton. Would you still be writing if that hadn't happened?

I would, but possibly not so often. I might find a publisher for every second or third book but Fight Club has given me a huge readership. Everyone advised me all the way through development that it could not be produced. So I'm as thrilled as anybody at the fact it did work.

Rather than your usual homeland settings of the Portland/Seattle area, your latest, Damned, is set a little further afield – in Hell. And you write in the voice of a 13-year-old girl. An easy job?

It sucked. It was absolutely a misery because I was writing the book while taking care of my mother who was dying of cancer. On her medication she became much more herself as a child; a child I never would have known. I was playing in effect the role of parent. It was a terrible time and perhaps that's why Madison's such a glib person. She's covering up a bunch of horrible circumstances and pain.

I thought Madison, your antiheroine, was more resilient than glib.

Well, yes, maybe. I needed to express somehow my grief at having then lost both of my parents [Palahniuk's father, Fred, and his girlfriend were murdered in 1999 by her ex-husband] and I knew that would not make a very entertaining or particularly funny book, so I inverted the situation and made it this very plucky dead child, who could mourn her parents while they were still on Earth – but still she could miss them.

Congratulations, incidentally, on recently being added to the Turkish state's list of "suspect authors", along with such luminaries as Philip Roth and the Marquis de Sade. Did you know?

I didn't, but thank you. My first reaction is… well, damn. I won't be going to Turkey any time soon…

In Hell, the film that always plays is The English Patient. Do you hate it that much?

It's just one of those films, that and The Piano, that I felt utterly shut out of. The whole culture seems to love those films and yet I'll never get it!

Your influences are Dante in this one, and I see you and Bret Easton Ellis are mutual fans; he's just compared you to Don DeLillo. Who else?

If you take my stuff apart, you'll find my choruses of repetitions are picked up almost verbatim from Kurt Vonnegut, and my distanced fracture quality is all from Amy Hempel, who's probably my favourite writer.

A story told by one of the dead: it's a fascinating idea, but a smallish genre. Why have so relatively few books been written on this premise?

It's a very old style, the innocent ending up in terrible circumstances; I've just gone further. We have it in various guises – The Shawshank Redemption; or Judy Blume's Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret, which I used as almost a model for this. Although in that Margaret ends up not in Hell literally, just moved out to the suburbs.

Had you begun to like your fierce misfits of dead characters by the end?

There's a moment in every book when the book turns and it surprises me. The moment I realised that the autodialler – you'll recall that many jobs in Hell involve cold-calling living people through an autodialler – was going to put Madison in touch with her parents by accident, I was just stunned. I was moved. The plot seemed to do something I hadn't anticipated and from that part to the end was nothing but surprises for me.

In your Hell, many of the pits and ravines are revolting rather than terrifying. Hills of finger clippings and toe scurf, lakes of semen. People have fainted at readings of your works. Was there anywhere you thought of going and decided no, that's too grim?

No. No. The thing that is too much is the Swamp of Partial Birth Abortions. I knew that everyone had to hold it in such disdain that none of the characters could actually go there, just refer to it. Although Hitler does end up there. Even in Hell, some bits are worse. But those bodily functions… when you think about the nature of hospitals and sick rooms and that very visceral task I was going through every day for two years – this was my way of denying the drama I was going through, the shit and blood and urine and vomit. If you expand it to unmanageable proportions, you almost reduce it to manageable ones.

Do you actually believe in Hell?

I believe in something. But I don't believe that anything can hold a grudge for long enough to condemn its creation to eternal punishment. Nobody can hold a grudge that long, even God. Oh, maybe the Turks…

The last three words in Damned are "To Be Continued". Over how many books?

I wanted to pattern it after Dante's Divine Comedy, so Madison will end up in purgatory in the next book and the one after that she'll end up with some kind of salvation. Though no one normally reading Dante gets to the third part, Paradiso; it's just too heavy.

Though Madison is tragically pudgy, her celebrity parents are jetsetters who roam the world adopting poor children. Anyone actionably specific?

I do love that word actionably. No, it's an amalgam. But part of Madison's disdain is the natural disdain a 13-year-old would feel for her parents. She's in the process of having to separate from her parents. I think it allowed me to do the same with my parents, that undercurrent of resentment on my part for these people who I perceive as abandoning me, even though I'm now 49.

Could you imagine this being filmed?

I don't give that any consideration. If anything I try to write something that would be more difficult to film. I tend to see film as competition and would like instead to do what books do best.

It was a fast read, I just barrelled along: took me about six hours. Presumably inverse to the amount of work put in?

Absolutely. It took two and a half years, my longest book ever. Fight Club was about a six-week book.

Damned is published by Jonathan Cape