AD: One alcoholic helping another, right?
JS: Absolutely. That shit is like some crazy healing magic… At some point when this guy was lamenting to me about how hard it all is, being in recovery and living with someone who’s suffering the torments of the damned from the very same stuff you’re recovering from and not being able to help them because they’re just not ready to throw in the towel or whatever, and how terribly frustrating that is, I was just tempted to tell him to read Narcisa… I dunno, I just got the feeling that it would help him and comfort him somehow, at least on the level of letting him know that he’s really not alone in this kind of shit. We all go there… it’s life, it’s the human condition. And while we were talking there, I just felt this incredible bond with this guy… and I guess that bond I felt was the thing you just called the universally relatable dynamic…
This is basically about humanity and its struggles, about human relations and the power of love and our human interdependency and interaction to heal and reveal our own deepest secrets to us, all our fears, traumas, hopes and dreams and all sorts of essencially human things that these two characters are dealing with in this book, about the way we all ultimately act as therapists and healers for each other in the course of our relationships with one another, even our most fucked up relationships — especially our most fucked up relationships, cuz nothing happens without a reason…
So in that sense it’s sort of about the laws of attraction and the transcendent nature of the human spirit in interaction with other spirits and how we all need each other in order to see ourselves… At least that was always my basic intent while writing it and contemplating what made these two characters tick….
And it really is my sincere hope that Narcisa will speak to people and serve them on that kind of a deep gut level and let them see themselves, even through the crooked looking glass of a teenage crack whore and her codependent gypsy partner in crime… cuz it’s not so much about them, per se as it is about the essencially human dynamic that emerges through their twisted, fucked up relationship.
At the end of the day, Cigano and Narcisa are you and me and the guys down the street. On some levels, even if somebody never smoked crack or fell in love with psychotic crack whores in Rio de Janeiro or whatver, on that deeper human level, everybody’s been there… so I just hope that some of the universal truths expressed in the book’s handling of these characters and all their crazy ups and downs can ultimately transcend their particular stories and whatever particular characterization or label or make or model and be able to just sorta reach into people’s hearts on a deeper level and help them take that fearless, unflinching look into their own soul’s heart of darkness, just like they did for me while I was writing about all this shit.
That is the power of myth, I believe. All roads lead us inward and all roads eventually lead to our enlightenment. I really do believe that… And I hope to have been able to express the essence of that concept a little through my telling of this particular little fairy tale or horror story or whatever…