A writer's life: Eric Schlosser
(Filed: 12/05/2003)

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2003/05/25/bosch.xml

William Leith talks to an author who tells us things we would rather not know

Eric Schlosser is renowned for writing Fast Food Nation, a book that tells us, comprehensively, that the American fast-food industry is absolutely disgusting. Even the workers, he discovered, are treated like animals, and, worse, "there is shit in the meat". The animals themselves, Schlosser asserts, are treated with horrible cruelty: he went to see for himself. He shakes my hand and sits down, a fit-looking 43-year-old in jeans and a tweed jacket, the neutral uniform of a man who interviews people from all social classes.

He is holding a copy of his latest book, Reefer Madness, in case he needs to refer to the text. In the end, he opens it only once, to show me the density of his notes and appendices; Schlosser may be a reporter, but he approaches his work like an academic. In this new book, which is beautifully researched and carefully written, he reports on three of the vast underground economies in America – marijuana, pornography and, oddly, strawberries. He discovers that strawberries are covered in chemicals, that millions of Americans grow marijuana, that tens of millions smoke it, and that Americans are ravenous for porn, possibly because they are outwardly prim. Schlosser, a liberal, hints that taboo might be the engine of the skin-flicks, peep shows and lap dances that Americans consume with the same greed that they scoff their faecal hamburgers.

What Schlosser does, as a writer, is tell us things we already suspect to be true, but don't dare think about in too much detail. "I feel that a lot of what I write about," he tells me, "is what people on some level don't want to hear about." For instance, that most marijuana growers in America are ordinary Midwestern farmers. And that dope dealers sometimes spend more time in jail for their crimes than murderers and rapists. And that migrant agricultural workers, the sort of people who pick the hundreds of millions of strawberries eaten in America every year, have a life expectancy of 49 years.

In his books, Schlosser tells Americans that their unseemly habits and abusive working practices are more widespread than they might suspect. But Schlosser himself is clean-cut and studious, the image of the history professor he might have become. He deals in facts, rather than emotions, and appears in his writing as a neutral observer. "My interest in marijuana," he tells me, "is absolutely nothing to do with any personal drug use. For me it's interesting as a way of looking at how we've dealt with non-conformists in the past 20 years. I don't really care about marijuana. I'm a consumer of much more dangerous drugs." When I ask him what he means by this, he says, "gin, beer, and wine".

He is not a naturally self-promoting writer. "I have no interest in the celebrity aspect," he says. "All that matters is what's on the page, and the biography, or the celebrity, or any of that sort of thing, is bullshit. I don't want to insult great biographers, but I don't really read literary biographies. I read the book. Some of the writers I've met who are great writers are appalling people, and I wish I'd never met them." Naturally, he won't tell me which writers he is talking about.

"I always wanted to write," says Schlosser. He grew up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where his father, Herbert Schlosser, was the chairman of the NBC television network. Eric studied American history at Princeton, and did postgraduate research on British history at Oriel, Oxford. "I thought about being an academic and teaching history," he says. "I tried to be a playwright. I came close, but no cigar. I didn't succeed. And I failed at being a novelist." For a while, he worked in the film industry in New York, writing scripts. "It looked as though I was going to have some success," he says, "but I became completely disillusioned."

He didn't start writing non-fiction professionally until his early thirties, and this was the result of "an incredibly fortuitous fluke". Schlosser had an idea for an article on homosexuals in the military, which he sent to The Atlantic magazine. It didn't want the piece, but gave him another journalistic assignment – writing about the New York City bomb squad after the 1993 World Trade Centre bombing.

It was at this point that he developed his working method, which has three distinct stages. Schlosser has a deep vein of self-discipline; like many writers, he depends on strict, almost ritualistic personal habits. He's married with two children, but writes in an office, to keep his home life separate from his work. "I start in the library," he tells me. "At this point I generally know nothing. I knew nothing about marijuana; I knew nothing about farm workers. It's a clean slate. Then I read as widely as I can. I don't meet anybody, I don't talk to anybody, until I've already done a large amount of reading on the subject. Then I go out into the field and see these things for myself. Then I go into the office and come up with some sort of structure." Only then does he start the actual writing.

Schlosser says he's influenced by writers such as Norman Mailer, Hunter Thompson and one of his Princeton professors, John McPhee, all of whom have tried to turn factual material into novelistic, page-turning books. Might he ever return to writing fiction? A wistful look comes into Schlosser's eyes. "Being a writer at all," he says, "is a highly irrational ambition, but writing plays, I think, is even more so. It's extremely hard to do, and extremely hard to be produced. But I still think about returning to fiction and returning to the theatre." He ponders for a moment. "As a writer," he says, "I think that some of the fiction I wrote should just be put away for good." Thinking about his unpublished novel, he says: "Maybe I shouldn't talk about it because I should just burn it." Since writing the novel, he tells me, "I've worked very hard to have a simpler, calmer style in which the facts and the people emerge on their own."

Schlosser's next book will be about the American prison system – like fast food, pornography, illegal migrant workers, and marijuana, a huge growth area. He started visiting prisons while researching sex and drugs; these days, after spending some self-imposed jail time, he repairs to his office, which, he says, feels like a prison itself, with barred windows and razor wire protecting the outside wall.

"It's a room of my own," he says. "It's a mess. You know, sometimes I have paranoid thoughts about companies or government agencies I'm writing about getting into my office. I have all sorts of sources I need to protect. One of the things that consoles me is that someone could come into my office and there is no way they would find them. In my writing, I try to be organised and systematic, but in my office, it's just anarchy. I really need to clean it up."