Clifford Chase’s new memoir, The Tooth Fairy, is a collection of fragments that adds up to more than the sum of its parts. Written in standalone, apparently disconnected sentences set off by white space, the book makes the reader take part in constructing its meaning. Divided into a series of chapters that focus on different periods of the author’s life -- including his slow, troubled journey to coming out, his parents’ aging and decline, and his older brother’s death from AIDS in 1989 -- the book is by turns tragic, absurd, funny, and unexpectedly moving.

BIOGRAPHILE: To start with an obvious question, how did you arrive at the distinctive visual and narrative style for the book?

CLIFFORD CHASE: Like most things I came upon it by accident. I started improvising these sentences and just putting them on the page that way -- possibly just in e-mail format at first, as that’s how you type in e-mails, gaps rather than indented paragraphs. I felt like I was plucking these sentences out of the air. There was a certain kind of flavor that I was after in writing these sentences and I knew it when I saw it or tasted it. I always keep a journal anyway, so when I thought of something I would write it down and it really was just an intuition about what kind of little moments I was looking for. I started stringing them together and was interested in what was happening in the way that they were interacting with each other, in those gaps where there were tricks of juxtaposition or leaps of free association, and the way that things can be stated purely by implication, rather than having to come right out and say certain things.

So then after I finished it and showed it to a couple of people, really everyone said, Oh, this is like Joe Brainard, who I hadn’t read. It’s a weird sort of thing; because everyone referred to him, it provided this really important confirmation for what I was doing, although I didn't read him until maybe six or seven years later into the project.

The possibilities of those gaps and those leaps began to seem sort of endless to me, and there were a lot of different ways of looking at the white space, the gap -- it seemed to have a whole array of metaphoric meaning to it. And it also just seemed to be really amenable to how I think, which goes back to the original intuition. It just felt like me in some way.

BIOG: There are moments when you direct the reader to possible meanings for the white space -- early on you say you’re hoping that the fragments will accrue meaning by being layered. And later you talk about the white space as a way of representing grief -- it’s always in the background but doesn’t get into the story overtly. So sometimes it’s about the fragments of text and sometimes it’s about the white space -- both of those have meaning.

CC: Yes, definitely.

BIOG: In the book you mention your two previous books, your memoir [The Hurry-Up Song] and your novel [Winkie]. How did this book grow out of that earlier work?

CC: I worked on this book at the same time that I was working on Winkie. Partly this book arises out of reaching an impasse in my own life -- and it occurs to me now that you could think about this white space as trying to leap over that impasse. I was in the midst of writing Winkie when I reached a personal impasse -- I went into a deep depression, really, and had to do something about it, and as I was coming out of it I began to write this second book, The Tooth Fairy, and then went back and forth between each. So it was a good way to take a break from the novel, which has some autobiographical elements, and it was a very different way to think, too. The novel is a standard narrative with standard paragraphing -- there’s invention of a different kind in the novel -- so it was nice to go to straight autobiography and also to have a clear-cut form to work with.

BIOG: When you were working on the novel and turned your attention to The Tooth Fairy, did you consciously feel like it was a different kind of writing, because it was memoir rather than fiction?

CC: Well, “consciously” is possibly too orderly a word for my process -- it’s more like points of despair and what the fuck ... moving in a different direction because I had reached an impasse of one kind or another. I’m very comfortable in autobiography, and fiction in general gives me a particular feeling of going out on a limb, creating one fictional premise after another, and I do find that harrowing and exciting at the same time. In memoir my daredevilry is more a matter of revealing things about myself, discovering things about myself that I maybe don’t want to look at or reveal.

BIOG: Even though the memoir is very personal, you have also woven through some really interesting, more public testimony, for instance when you’re writing about 9/11 and its immediate aftermath, and especially writing about the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and your brother’s story. It was a powerful reminder of how easy it is to forget what those periods were like to live through. Did you think about that question as you wrote -- whether you were telling a public story as well as a private story?

CC: Definitely. I felt so strongly opposed to the American response to 9/11 that it energized me. At first that was one of the major impasses with Winkie, because I was in the midst of writing a comic novel about terrorism and then 9/11 happened and I just thought -- this isn’t funny! So I wrote the second chapter of The Tooth Fairy through that period, and with the invasion -- well, the various things that happened after 9/11 -- I went back to work on Winkie out of sheer rage, basically, and it became a really angry comic novel about terrorism and the American response. My writing had never really had much of a politics before, but that fall I was working at Newsweek magazine in the public relations department, and so I saw the war machine at the journalistic end, which just horrified me. All of that was important in my life at the time, so it was natural to put it into The Tooth Fairy.

Then in the chapter about the 1980s, about the last five years of my brother’s life, there were two things that really helped me. One was that my editor said that politics seemed to have dropped out of the book at that point. There was no context in the original draft of that chapter -- it was just all focused on my brother’s life and what was in his journals, and there weren’t any politics in his journal. The other thing that provided a model was David France’s movie "How to Survive a Plague," about ACT UP, which was really smart about providing the context of what was going on politically around AIDS during that period, and I realized that I needed to do that in this chapter. I didn’t want to impose on my brother’s narrative, but I felt that the world must have been imposing on him in some way. Then when I started looking at the news stories from the mid to late 1980s, you know, I had totally forgotten what it was like. It was pretty eye-opening.

It was difficult emotionally to write that chapter originally, and then it was really difficult looking at those news stories again. The homophobia that was just considered normal, a valid political opinion at the time, was amazing. My brother lived in San Diego. It’s a conservative town, with a conservative newspaper, and there was a William F. Buckley column -- there was the famous one where he advocated tattooing anyone who had HIV, Holocaust-style, but tattooing your ass, that was his plan -- but there was another one that I didn’t even know about. He said that drug addicts and homosexuals who got AIDS, they weren’t going to heaven, and the reason for that was they would only get salvation if they repented of what they had done to get AIDS, and the analogy was that Hitler wasn’t going to heaven. I wish I was making it up, it was so insane. You do forget how the world has changed, and what kind of things were being said back then, so I found myself looking at the San Diego Union-Tribune’s online archive, and just crying while I was reading at my computer screen, because it was just so shocking.

BIOG: It really is so powerful to see this unfolding, and like you say, it must have had an impact even though your brother doesn’t record it in his journal, but it’s in the air.

CC: Yes, it was like reading that the air was as polluted as in Shanghai or something -- it was really, truly poisonous, the things that were being said around AIDS.

BIOG: So is there more memoir that you’re interested in writing, or are you moving back to fiction for your next book?

CC: I am working on a novel now, and there’s pretty much zero autobiographical content -- I mean, the character’s basically me, but the novel is set five hundred years ago, so it’s pure fiction. I’m definitely autobiographied out at the moment.