‘It kind of leaps around, but it tells a portion of my life,’ comedian tells MTV News. By Rick Marshall Patton Oswalt Photo: MTV News In “Zombie Spaceship Wasteland,” Patton Oswalt’s new essay-driven memoir, the actor/comedian argues that the question of which of those three categories we each fall under decides our destinies and the sort of people we become. Zombies simplify the world around them, Spaceships seek the new, and Wastelands … well, they destroy. For Oswalt, his own answer to that question was a long time coming, but after finishing the book, he’s now certain that he is, indeed, a Wasteland — and he’s not alone. “A lot of comedians are Wastelands,” he writes. “What is stand-up comedy except isolating specific parts of culture or humanity and holding them up against a stark, vast background to approach at an oblique angle and get laughs?” Though it’s the first novel from the geek-friendly actor, Oswalt has dabbled in writing on several occasions, including some recent work in the comic book world that had him scripting stories based on Joss Whedon’s “Firefly” universe (titled “Serenity: Float Out”). With “Zombie Spaceship Wasteland,” however, he turns the focus on himself in a series of short essays — some autobiographical, some fictional — that explore his evolution as a media consumer, creator, and, well, human being. “It kind of leaps around, but it tells a portion of my life,” he told MTV News. “Memories, to me, are more impressionistic rather than ‘This happened, then this happened, then this happened.’ If you think about it, they’re memorized differently depending on what age you were when you had them.” Regularly diverging into lengthy footnotes, off-topic asides and other digressions, “Zombie Spaceship Wasteland” doesn’t follow the conventions of standard autobiographical fare — a fact Oswalt says is a reflection of his own way of thinking and communicating, and something fans of his stand-up comedy will likely find familiar. He even goes so far as to list, at the end of each chapter, everything he did on the Internet while writing that section of the book. “That’s how I talk. When I say things, I’ll digress, so the best way to capture that was with a footnote,” he said of the lengthy notations in each essay. For Oswalt, the difficulty in bringing all the essays together wasn’t so much in finding good material, but deciding which stories to include and how to present them. In one of the longer essays, titled “Victory Tour,” Oswalt presents a diary-style account of the worst gig in his career: a 1994 stint at a comedy club outside Vancouver. In another essay, his memories of an eccentric uncle teach him something about himself and his values. “I had taken those notes so long ago,” he said of the “Victory Tour” chapter. “I didn’t know what I was going to do with them, whether I would turn them into a bit or a graphic novel or something. “The one that was the most satisfying to get down, though, was the one about my Uncle Pete,” he continued. “It got a little bit more real, and I uncovered some things about myself that I didn’t quite realize until I started writing it.” “Zombie Spaceship Wasteland” is on shelves now from Scribner Publishing. Are you a Zombie, Spaceship or Wasteland? Share your thoughts in the comments!
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Patton Oswalt Explains ‘Zombie Spaceship Wasteland’ Memoir
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