The Minnesota music scene has also been a huge influence, and working at The Electric Fetus was like going to graduate school for me. I was exposed to so much new music while I was there; a lot of music that I probably wouldn't have heard otherwise. In the early-eighties, I mostly worked in the warehouse downstairs, and the guys in the warehouse mostly played punk. I'd heard local bands like The Replacements and Husker Du, but these guys were into The Minutemen, Black Flag, The Meat Puppets, Minor Threat, Big Black, Mission of Burma, and tons of bands that I'd never heard of. Then we'd all meet at First Avenue & 7th Street Entry at night to see the bands we'd been listening to during the day; and we got guest list spots and comp tickets for everything since we were Fetus employees.

The older guys tended to work at the retail counter upstairs, and a lot of them listened mostly to jazz, blues, soul, and more rootsy rock. They gave me recommendations on records by John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Ornette Coleman, Mingus, Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, and a lot of older musicians. I didn't realize it at the time, but I was getting an intergenerational education on music, and I loved all of it. It made perfect sense to go from hearing Monk upstairs to hearing The Minutemen downstairs.

The book is basically an autobiography. Was it weird thinking about writing an autobiography despite not being famous? Don't most writers write a novel instead? What made you choose that form?

The book falls into a subgenre of autobiography, memoir, and memoirs about ordinary/non-famous people have become more and more common in the last couple of decades. One of the pioneers of the non-famous-person memoir is St. Paul writer, Patricia Hampl, who teaches in the U of M Creative Writing Program. Her groundbreaking memoir, A Romantic Education, influenced and inspired me early in the process, as did Virgin Time, a memoir in which she explores her Catholic upbringing. As I read memoirs such as This Boy's Life by Tobias Wolff, A Walker in the City by Alfred Kazin, and The Liars Club by Mary Karr, I felt less weird about writing a memoir. When Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes shot to the top of the bestseller lists in the late-90s, I sensed more pop culture acceptance of the genre. A lot of people who would have been writing 1st book autobiographical novels in the past are now writing memoirs. Still, I sometimes feel funny when I tell people that my book is a memoir, not a novel.

But why is this book a memoir and not a novel? Some of the stories in the book, as I said earlier, began as fiction, but I realized early on that this needed to be a memoir. The book is, in many ways, a story of personal transformation, and I didn't want to invent fictional self to inhabit. I also think the book contains a dimension of cultural history, and memoir is a great genre in which to explore connections between the personal and the historical.

Another reason I wrote it as memoir is I didn't want the more bizarre parts of the book to be read as sensational metaphors. Much of my evangelical experience seems sensational to me now, but that was the nature of the experience. The metaphors are organic, not invented. A bat flies into a camp chapel and an evangelist rebukes it as Satan. A youth group kid becomes obsessed with the book of Revelation starts to believe that he is The Antichrist. These things really happened, and I wanted them to be grounded in the literal realm.