{"id":23410,"date":"2025-10-03T08:13:00","date_gmt":"2025-10-03T12:13:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/?p=23410"},"modified":"2025-10-03T08:13:00","modified_gmt":"2025-10-03T12:13:00","slug":"jonathan-ames","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/the-bull-interview\/jonathan-ames\/","title":{"rendered":"Jonathan Ames"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jonathan Ames is the author of eleven books including WAKE UP, SIR!,\u00a0THE EXTRA MAN,<\/em>\u00a0and YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE, all published by Pushkin Press. He also created the hit HBO comedy BORED TO DEATH, starring Ted Danson, Zach Galifianakis and Jason Schwartzman, as well as\u00a0Blunt Talk<\/i>, starring Patrick Stewart. His thriller YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE was adapted for a major Hollywood film by Lynne Ramsay, starring Joaquin Phoenix.\u00a0KARMA DOLL is the second book in the series of Happy Doll thrillers that began with A MAN NAMED DOLL.\u00a0Jonathan lives in Los Angeles with his dog Fezzik.<\/p>\n

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FR:<\/strong> I’m going to start with YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE. It’s the first book of yours I read. I love it! At the time I picked it up, I hadn’t seen many novellas out there, not like that one. It’s dark, brutal, gory, yet it’s human, too, Did the story require such a short take, rather than a bigger canvas due to what;s going on in the book?<\/p>\n

JA:<\/strong> This is a case\u2014as it were\u2014where I wrote a story to fill a canvas of a specific size… When I first wrote the book in 2012, it was for an internet concern called Byliner. They were offering half-decent money for long-form fiction or non-fiction. I think the word count could be between ten and twenty thousand words, and so I set out to write something of that general length. Later, when the movie was coming out in 2018, an American paperback was going to be published, and I expanded the final section of the book by several thousand words, putting into action what had been told in an overview sort of way, which I had done because of the original word-count constraint. So there are two versions of the book floating about: the version that came out in 2018 and the version that appeared on the internet in 2012, which was also published in paperback in England, France, Italy and Spain… \u00a0though the English publisher later put out the longer version… . So all this to say: it wasn\u2019t the story that dictated the size, per se… \u00a0but the original canvas I was given to paint on dictated the length…<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

FR:<\/strong> I’d like to talk about Joe. Where did he come from? Did you know a person or research a person that brought you to him? Maybe Joe is the closest thing to a “good guy” one can find in the grotesque world he inhabits. Although, saving children from sex trafficking is obviously admirable, he’s brutal, makes a point by having a hammer as his weapon of choice. He’s been doing it so long he’s mentally ill or perhaps dead inside. He operates like a machine at times. Tell us about Joe?<\/p>\n

JA:<\/strong> Joe was born out of an apology I wanted to make to someone I loved, who most likely would never see that apology… \u00a0I wanted to create a character\u2014albeit quite different from me\u2014who was broken… \u00a0deeply broken… \u00a0a character who wanted to disappear from the world and be very quiet so as not to hurt others… \u00a0but who nevertheless brought pain where ever he went… \u00a0so he was birthed out of my own inner melodrama… \u00a0I also wanted to create a hero, my Jack Reacher, but someone more complex… \u00a0And I wanted to write something that wasn\u2019t funny. My tv show, BORED TO DEATH, had recently been canceled and for three years, I was told: \u201cMake it funnier. Make it funnier. Make it funnier.\u201d So this novella, YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE, was a chance not to have to be funny at all… \u00a0Also, I was deeply inspired by the whole Parker series by Richard Stark (one of Donald Westlake\u2019s pseudonymns) and wanted to write a page-turner like the Parker books… I was also inspired by some of the short, propulsive stories of David Goodis in a collection of his called Black Friday<\/em>.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

FR:<\/strong> I really enjoyed the show you created, BORED TO DEATH. For people who don’t know, what’s the difference between bringing a story to the screen Vs bringing a story to life on a keyboard for a novel? What do you prefer and why?<\/p>\n

JA:<\/strong> Ultimately, I prefer prose-writing to screenplay-writing, mostly, I guess, because I began my writing career as a novelist and my great love is books. I love film and tv, also, but books are my lifeline and have been since I was a kid. That said, writing for television and film is a hell of lot of fun but also very stressful. You have constant deadlines, need to please tons of people, and you get a million notes… And with screenwriting, you have to be so quick and precise… each page equals a minute of screen time. Somehow it works that way. And each page costs a lot of money to film. So you have to be smart with it all and entertaining… it\u2019s very gestural… in a very brief scene, you need to convey so much… with prose, you create the whole dream for the reader… with screenplays, you\u2019re putting down enough details for a crew to assemble the dream, from the wardrobe to the location to the casting and so on… And you can\u2019t\u2014unless you use voice-over, which can be clunky\u2014express what a character is privately thinking… you have to show everything\u2014as in show rather than tell\u2014which is fine, but books give you greater freedom… and it\u2019s why so much great film and tv comes from books… it lays the groundwork and then the film-makers and showrunners can visually tell the story, usually by distilling it… just showing the action and the consequences of action…<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been very fortunate to get to do both, prose-writing and screenwriting… being on set and witnessing what you wrote come to life three-dimensionally can be very gratifying… just as holding one\u2019s finished book is also gratifying… something has been made… .we humans like to make things… we like to share our curiosity, our fears, our hopes… It\u2019s like graffiti or carving one\u2019s initials into a tree: a way to say, \u201cI was here… \u201d But then we have to let it all go… We are here and then we\u2019re not… It all rushes by so fast… Emily\u2019s speech in \u201cOur Town\u201d sums it all up… to paraphrase, she asks: \u201cDo humans ever realize how beautiful life is every single moment?\u201d<\/p>\n

And the \u2018stage manager\u2019 in the play says, \u201cNo. Well, a few saints and poets maybe.\u201d<\/p>\n

Well, that was a tangent.<\/p>\n

But one thing about books vs filmed stories: each reader creates their own movie, their own version of the dream, whereas with the filmed story, everyone sees the same presentation of the story… for example, everyone who read the book YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE cast their own Joe, as it were, visualized their own Joe… but for the people who see the film, there\u2019s only one Joe, which was a great Joe, by the way… but it\u2019s kind of cool with books to collaborate with the reader, to give them enough details so that they can generate a dream in their mind as they read… that the reader is the film-crew and collaborator… as well as audience.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

FR:<\/strong> The question I ask everyone. Obviously being an author, you grew up with a love of reading and I bet you still love to read now. I’m always fascinated by what authors people like reading, which is often different from the genres they write in. You write crime, memoir, comedy, etc. Who are three to five authors you loved to read growing up, and maybe three or four authors out there towing the line that you enjoy reading.<\/p>\n

JA:<\/strong> In the seventh grade, my English teacher, Mr. Petersen, sensed that I loved to read, and he gave me two books to read on my own, separate from the class: Tarzan<\/em>, by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and The Hobbit<\/em> by Tolkien. Those two authors became my favorites in the middle school years, along with Isaac Asimov. I read like eighteen Tarzan books\u2014I still have them\u2014and I read everything by Tolkien, except for The Silmarillio<\/em>n, and I still have the editions of those Tolkien books, as well… I also read all of Asimov\u2019s Foundation books, which I\u2019m currently rereading and which hold up quite well, and I love the current television series… \u00a0In high school, I discovered Kurt Vonnegut, Hunter Thompson (I was the editor of the school paper and modeled my reporting after him), and Jack Kerouac.<\/p>\n

Current favorites of the last few years, who are still alive: Bernard Cornwell (his Arthur series and his Last Kingdom series) and Michael Connelly (Bosch, Ballard, Lincoln Lawyer<\/em>).<\/p>\n

When I was more of a \u2018comedic\u2019 novelist, my big role model was P.G. Wodehouse. My third novel, WAKE UP, SIR!<\/em>,<\/em> was an utter and complete homage to Wodehouse. My second novel, THE EXTRA MAN<\/em>, was also comedic and its inspirations were wide-ranging: The Magic Mountain, A Confederacy of Dunces, Don Quixote<\/em>….<\/p>\n

When I was writing comedic essays in the late 90\u2019s for a throw-away newspaper, which I collected into four books, my main inspiration was Bukowski\u2019s non-fiction work.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

FR:<\/strong> I loved your novel A MAN NAMED DOLL. Happy is a loner, outside his dog. He smokes dope, (which you know isn’t a big deal and never was to me but I still remember a time when it was considered a gateway into everything evil, which makes me laugh.) Happy is moody and dry, he doesn’t like being around other people so much, at least that’s how he made me feel. He’s in Los Angeles but I feel a lot of north east coast humor in the character. Tell the readers about Happy, what’s he like? Where is he going? What makes him work?<\/p>\n

JA:<\/strong> DOLL, in many ways, is a synthesis between my two strains: the utter hardboiled approach of YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE and my earlier comedic, first-person fiction work. The Doll books are meant to be gripping page-turners, but there\u2019s also humor. Unlike YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE, the Doll books are written in the first-person, and you really get to hear what Doll is thinking, which is often, I guess, somewhat amusing. He\u2019s a flawed nut with a good heart, and he\u2019s not bad in a fight. As he says, he\u2019s easy to hit but hard to put down. He\u2019s become my Reacher, rather than Joe from YWNRH… How he came about is sort of interesting. I was asked to write a short story for a Lee Child-edited anthology (speaking of Reacher!), The Nicotine Chronicles<\/em>, where one was to write a crime story that involved, in some way, cigarettes. So I wrote ten pages about this guy Doll, a detective, and a friend of his asking for a kidney, because he\u2019s smoked himself out of both kidneys and needs a transplant… And about ten, twelve pages in, the length of the assignment, I realized, I had something that could go longer than a short story, and so I put it aside and wrote a story called \u201cDeathbed Vigil,\u201d which a wonderful artist, Karl Stevens, is hoping to turn into a graphic novel….<\/p>\n

After I finished \u201cVigil,\u201d I picked Doll back up and wrote the first book in about five months, that was the summer of 2019 into the fall. Since then I\u2019ve written two more, THE WHEEL OF DOLL and KARMA DOLL. I started a fourth one but put it aside for a number of reasons but want to continue the series soon. In the meantime, I have a new third-person, hardboiled novella coming out next year, A PAST WITHOUT PICTURES. It will be published by Mysterious Press, and I see it as a companion piece to YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE. It features a female protagonist, a LAPD homicide detective…<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

FR:<\/strong> The books of yours that I have read fall into the hardboiled, noir. Are you a fan of noir? Books and films? I think you use noir, hard boiled (whatever label the kids wanna use) as a vehicle to tell a bigger story. Sure, your books are page turners, fast paced, but they also say something underneath about society, which for me, sucks me into the stories. There’s both entertainment, but there’s also something larger going on in there. Elaborate?<\/p>\n

JA:<\/strong> I\u2019m a big fan of noir. Noir fiction, anyway. I\u2019m not an aficionado of the films, but I have enjoyed many of them. My crime inspirations are (the usual suspects as it were): Hammett, Chandler, MacDonald, Thompson, Stark and Goodis. I\u2019ve read others, of course, but those are the ones whose prose and stories, I am most inspired by. I like the shape that detective novels provide me, like the shape of a certain kind of vase or a poet writing a specific kind of poem, like a sestina or a villanelle or a sonnet or what-have-you… The detective vase is in the shape of the protagonist searching for a definitive answer to a mystery, if it was a poem you could call it a who-dun-it… like a haiku… But while working within that detective form, playing with the convention of the detective on a case (like Oedipus, one of the very first detectives in literature), I end up, like all authors, writing about life and the difficulties of the human condition, how confusing it all is… and those difficulties arise from internal conflicts as well as societal ills and structures… something like that…<\/p>\n

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FR:<\/strong>\u00a0 Short story writer and poet, Raymond Carver, talked about how after he finished a collection he’d stop writing for six months. He said that “it was as if he’d never been a writer at all.” How do you approach this? Are you like Carver in a sense? Or are there always stories in your head moving around? I often ignore plots when I’m reading a story even if I know they are there floating around in the novel. I’m far more invested in characters and what they bring to the page. Are your characters always in your head chatting up the night? Or do you get to the place where it shuts off?<\/p>\n

JA:<\/strong> At the start of my writing life, there were long gaps between books, between novels… My first book, I PASS LIKE NIGHT, came out in 1989, but then I had a bad case of second novelitis and didn\u2019t publish my second book, THE EXTRA MAN, until 1998, nine years later… I do remember when I finished I PASS LIKE NIGHT that there was a relief to no longer have to be with that narrator, but that also I would miss him… this other voice in my head…<\/p>\n

And I think there was a similar experience after finishing, THE EXTRA MAN… that I would be saying good bye to this person who had been in my mind for years… This isn\u2019t directly answering your question… but sort of… Also, after the first book, there was a total sense for years of not knowing how to write… I had produced that first book out of some feral instinct of what a novel could be but then had a total crisis of confidence, which lasted years and had to learn anew what it meant to write a book… and that happened after the second novel, as well, but to a slightly lesser degree, and after the third as well… In fact, after the third novel, I gave up writing novels for years… Now with the Doll books, writing a series, there\u2019s less a feeling of starting from scratch… which is perhaps the benefit of the convention of the detective novel… I don\u2019t have to reinvent the shape of the wheel each time… with my early works of fiction, each book had a completely novel shape, as it were, even though I was mimicking Wodehouse and others….<\/p>\n

There was also a long phase in my writing life, between my second and third novels, where I was writing a lot of essays for the NY Press<\/em>, a throw-away newspaper… And that form was so much easier than a novel: my word count for the essays was 1,200 words… that I could sustain…<\/p>\n

So for many years, I wasn\u2019t writing prolonged works of fiction and managed to put all those essays into four collections, which came out every two years or so, starting in 2000… but I stopped that sort of autobiographical writing in the early 2000\u2019s… I began to repeat myself and the work grew shticky… .oh, well… on we go… then my third novel, WAKE UP, SIR!, came out in 2004 and after that I didn\u2019t write another novel until YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE in 2012, but I filled those years writing a ton of television scripts, which were sort of like essays, in that they were short forms… bursts of amusement… not the long opera of a novel that has to be sustained…<\/p>\n

Anyway, I\u2019m all over the place with this answer, but what the hell… The Doll books, the first three, all flowed, one after the other… KARMA DOLL picks up twelve hours after the end of The WHEEL OF DOLL… but now I\u2019m in a new cycle with Doll and need to find a new story for him… anyway… part of the writing process is never being quite sure if you are doing it \u2018right\u2019… but you have to manage that anxiety and soldier forward… and as I\u2019ve gotten older, I do love to sit at my desk and play with sentences. When I was younger, I was more interested in life than writing and sitting down was harder… now I prefer to be alone at my desk, playing with my Doll, as it were….<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

FR:<\/strong> You’ve written comic memoirs. And although I see dry humor in HAPPY DOLL in abundance, that’s fiction. How does it differ from writing comedy from your own personal life? Personally, I find comedy the hardest thing to write. It’ll pop up on its own when I’m not thinking about it. Like if I’m using dialogue from Boston where I am originally from, it comes out funny, but to sit and try to write comedy to make others laugh is a whole different ball game. Tell the readers about your approach to writing comedy?<\/p>\n

JA:<\/strong> I sort of answered this a little above… Oddly, I\u2019ve never “intended” to be funny but when I\u2019m \u201chonest\u201d it makes people laugh… the way we make each other laugh when we tell our friends are embarrassing stories… and I guess maybe that\u2019s the key: back then I was sharing my embarrassing stories, my embarrassing takes on things… And I was the object of the humor, not others… but also a lot of it was what you would now call TMI… but that was what Bukowski was doing in the 60\u2019s and 70\u2019s, and in the 80\u2019s and 90\u2019s, when I was reading him, I loved his stuff…. He also had a column in a throw-way paper back in the late 60\u2019s and early 70\u2019s, like I did in the 90\u2019s, and he created this fictional persona of Hank Chinaski, but sometimes it was just him, not Chinaski, and the two were so closely linked… and so I was telling my stories in a kind of brutally honest Chinaski\/Bukowski style… also, in my comedic novels, I was very influenced by the comedic rhythms of Wodehouse\u2019s dialogue and also the silliness of his stories and so that was a big influence as well, comedically… and A Confederacy of Dunces<\/em> was very much about a larger than life character and I wanted to achieve that, somewhat, in my novel, THE EXTRA MAN… eccentrics make one laugh…<\/p>\n

BONUS QUESTION:<\/strong><\/p>\n

FR:<\/strong> I read online you are a boxing fan. I, too, am a big fan of boxing. You go to a match, Hagler Vs Sugar Ray (Hagler won, ha!) and you bring along Happy Doll and Joe to the match. Drinks and treats are on you. What do you get for yourself, and what do you buy Happy and Joe?<\/p>\n

JA:<\/strong> Since we\u2019re all at a boxing match, I think we\u2019d have some nice, cool beers, hopefully good-tasting ones, not thin-tasting-watery ballpark beers. Maybe afterwards, we\u2019d get a decadent steak dinner, my treat, though I always feel a little guilty eating meat, but I do try to thank the cow who gave its life for sustaining me, helping me, and before we started the meal, as a kind of grace, I\u2019d thank Joe and Doll for being good friends to me.<\/p>\n

And before the meal, we\u2019d enjoy the fight like crazy. Two of the greatest of all time and perfect foils for each other… .though, as I\u2019ve gotten older, it\u2019s harder to watch boxing matches knowing what we know now about brain injuries, which, actually, we knew back then… all those old boxers punch-drunk and slurring and dying early deaths… But Marvelous and Sugar Ray, I remember watching them on television… they were both so formidable… Sugar Ray with his speed and sneaky power, like chop, chop, chop, and then boom, and Hagler, with his ferocity and lefty stance… a juggernaut, like a smaller Tyson (young Tyson)…<\/p>\n

I used to go to professional fights but haven\u2019t for a long time now… I went to Memphis to see Tyson and Lewis and wrote about it for the NY Press<\/em>, in an essay titled: \u201cEverybody Dies in Memphis,\u201d alluding to MLK and Elvis and, in a way, Tyson… that was his last big shot… I saw Joe Calzaghe in the Garden when he was at his peak… I saw Sergio Martinez knock out Paul Williams in Atlantic City with such a devastating blow; it was pretty scary to witness… it looked like Williams was dead… and later he got paralyzed in a motorcycle accident… I saw Pacquiao fight Timothy Bradley in Vegas and it was pretty disappointing fight… mediocre action and Pacquiao got ripped off… too many fights end in rip-offs… makes it hard on the fan…<\/p>\n

I had two boxing matches, myself, stunt fights, fighting as \u201cThe Herring Wonder.\u201d The first fight, I got my ass kicked in a four-round fight, three-minutes per round, against a guy, \u201cThe Impact Addict,\u201d who was twenty-five pounds heavier than me. It was wild night, in 1999. There was a bunch of loony undercards\u2014too much to go into\u2014and the whole thing was called \u201cBox Opera.\u201d We fought in front of six-hundred people… I trained for three months at Gleasons to get ready… only to get the shit kicked out of me… I broke my nose training and then got it rebroken in the second round of the fight… In fact, I was fighting with a broken nose, but we couldn\u2019t postpone the fight, we had sold tickets and only had the venue for that one night… My paper, NY Press<\/em>, ran full-page ads for the fight and helped sponsor the evening, along with Pseudo.com, which was an early web company and it actually broadcast the fight on the internet\u2014over telephone lines\u2014and what you could see was a little bit larger than a postage stamp. The guy who started Pseudo, Josh Harris, a real eccentric, was the subject of the documentary, We Live in Public. The NY Times<\/em> actually ran a picture of the fight the day after… it was quite the spectacle… I wrote about it in my column\u2014actually several columns\u2014and later collected the columns in my essay books…<\/p>\n

My second fight was in 2007… and I \u201cwon\u201d that one…. It was against a gentlemanly Canadian writer, Craig Davidson, who was looking to promote his novel, The Fighter<\/em>. He also outweighed me by a good twenty pounds, but I had improved since my first fight, my defense was much better, and I was able to land more blows… though I didn\u2019t enjoy hurting him… I saw him wince with pain when I jabbed him good and I felt bad… He was a gentleman, it wasn\u2019t a vicious fight like the first one, though he, nevertheless, tried to get me good and at one point, he had my arms pinned and could have hit me with an illegal blow, but I saw him choose not to… My other opponent, in 1999, was looking to crush me the whole time; he pinned my arm and smacked my head like seven times in a row… my facial memory has never been the same, can\u2019t retain people\u2019s faces… To my opponent\u2019s credit, in that first fight, he let me ride the last round, knowing that I was concussed and fucked up and we just sort of danced… I did get him good in the second round and this sheet of blood shot out of his nose… which was sort of wild to see…<\/p>\n

Anyway, the second fight was a proper amateur fight: three two-minute rounds, and I didn\u2019t get my nose broken… Well, I went on a ramble there… sorry!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I wanted to create a character who was broken… \u00a0deeply broken… \u00a0a character who wanted to disappear from the world and be very quiet so as not to hurt others… \u00a0but who nevertheless brought pain where ever he went.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":182,"featured_media":23411,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[232],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23410","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-bull-interview","writer-frank-reardon"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23410","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/182"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23410"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23410\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23412,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23410\/revisions\/23412"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23411"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23410"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23410"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23410"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}