Actor, artist, author, and all-around scholar James Franco writes a mean story—and we mean that in the best way
Even over the phone, you can tell that this is a sweetheart of a guy. Talking late into the night from Los Angeles, James Franco comes across as being so friendly, laid-back, and loquacious that it’s hard to fathom the fact that he’s also a nimble-minded, über-creative, 24/7-type multitasker. Ever since his breakout days on the single-season cult television series Freaks and Geeks, Franco—unlike Daniel Desario, his class-cutting slacker character on that show—has been going places, setting the bar high for himself, then higher.
He has taken roles in both commercial and indie movies (Spider-Man, Milk, Pineapple Express, Eat Pray Love, Howl) and currently plays an artist/serial killer named Franco on the television soap opera General Hospital—as part of an art project of his. Last summer, he had his first solo art show, “The Dangerous Book Four Boys”—comprising videos, photos, random scribblings, and a taxidermied cat—at New York City’s Clocktower Gallery. A short film based on a poem by Spencer Reece that Franco directed while a graduate student at New York University was scheduled to be shown in October at the Hamptons International Film Festival. Plus, he’s a grad student in English and Film Studies at Yale University, and he’s working on “a lot of other stuff.”
But tonight, he’s talking about his debut book of coming-of-age stories, Palo Alto, just out from Scribner, which he admits took him six years to finish. “I’d been working on them for a while,” he says. “I was aware that there’s a lot of material out there that deals with this age group. A lot of it is depicted in a way that the writer makes appealing enough but doesn’t own in a certain way—doesn’t own certain kinds of acting-out behaviors. I was given a lot just by being born where I was, but adolescence is a hard period in anyone’s life. It took time to figure out how to group the Palo Alto stories in a way that gives an overall impression that’s focused and intense.”
Divided into two sections and linked across the high school years, the stories are raw and funny-sad, and they capture with perfect pitch the impossible exhilaration, the inevitable downbeat-ness, and the pure confusion of being an adolescent. While working on them, Franco maintained a busy film-shooting schedule and obtained an MFA from CUNY’s Brooklyn College while also taking creative-writing courses at Columbia University’s MFA program and studying film-making at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, working along the way with such literary lights as Michael Cunningham, Mona Simpson, Amy Hempel, and UCLA’s Ian R. Wilson.
At 32, Franco is winsome, handsome, and a short sleeper whose voice is energetic and slightly husky. He’s an avid reader who has proved to be a talented storyteller with this set of tales conjuring his eponymous California hometown. The stories link up to illuminate a group of teenagers and preteens whose lives, and hormones, are in a period of crazy, dangerous flux. Says Franco, “I was drawn to write about this age group because high school is a time of great change and great confusion. Your hometown is your whole world. It’s there before you understand that there’s a bigger world and understand your place in it. Each area of town has significance. There’s a side of Palo Alto you wouldn’t think of first that isn’t about Stanford [the university where Franco’s parents met] or Steve Jobs or bookstores. [The Palo Alto years] allowed me as a writer to create heightened situations about awakening to sexuality, acting out, getting in trouble. My childhood city resonates in a different way from other cities [I’ve lived in]. I have a real love for that town.”
Franco strongly identifies with his teen years, as well. “I like this age group because teenagers don’t have all the answers,” he says. “That allowed me to put some mystery in the stories, make some things elusive, maybe put larger themes in there that add a certain vitality, moments when the reader can enter the deeper interior world of the characters. There are a lot of situations in the stories the characters don’t quite know how to get out of. Hopefully that intensity, that chaos pulls you in.”
The half hour allotted for our interview has long passed as Franco relaxes into lively, engaged shop talk about the real-life stories behind the connected narratives that make up Palo Alto. He remembers the high school guy who seemed bent on self-destruction, who had the kind of suicidal streak that can be read by teenage peers as cool bravado and by parents and teachers as loser braggadocio. Franco says he was fascinated by this guy and took his hellbent gestalt, his wild essence, and transformed it into two of the book’s recurring main characters, Ryan and Michael. “Jack-O,” first published in Esquire magazine, is the book’s final story, and it bookends the opener, “Halloween.” In “Jack-O,” Michael sits in his grandfather’s old Cadillac with his friend Joe out in front of a school office: “We sit here because it’s dark, and there are no lights outside this building. We’re stopped for no reason except that the night is still going and we’re drunk, and who wants to go home, ever, and this spot is as good as any to just sit in the shadows and let life slow.”
Franco has a flair for creating these stopped moments that lift a story from its specific setting into a universal place, so that particular meanings resonate out from themselves and redouble their effect. In “Halloween,” Ryan drunkenly muses, “Everyone pretends to be normal and be your friend, but underneath everyone is living some other life you don’t know about, and if only we had a camera on us at all times we could go and watch each other’s tapes and find out what each of us was really like.”
Franco takes an epigraph from Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past to frame his stories that reads, in part: “In later life we look at things in a more practical way, in full conformity with the rest of society, but adolescence is the only period in which we learn anything.”
I ask Franco to comment on how this powerful sentiment references both these stories and his own life experience. “One of my teachers told me that you have to be ashamed of the world you know in order to write about it,” he replies. “Proust was saying something similar. We have a lot of untamed feelings that as we grow up become more socialized, killing off those feelings. In the book, I was trying to own those extreme feelings, to get that sense. I looked at [writing the book] as a way to examine my own actions through the prism of these characters. To me, those characters were very much alive.”
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