Excerpted from Larry McCaffery's Some Other Frequency

Larry McCaffery: We've been talking about the ways you've devised structures that allow you to move freely from moment to moment. This sounds very theoretical, abstract -- but there's a sense in which I'd say this approach is very much grounded in the world I live in. Wouldn't you agree that your writing, in a sense (but a crucial sense) is actually very "realistic" -- that it represents the world around us just as "mimetically" as the nineteenth-century realist novel did for its day?

Mark Leyner: I'd say my work presents the world the way people like you and I actually live in it, the way we receive and perceive it. That myth of narrative life, with all that implies, is something you'd think would have been jettisoned a long time ago. We live from instant to instant, with things constantly changing, kaleidoscopic. Our cultural matrix intensifies the whole natural process of information appearing in front of us and then disappearing. So you see huge headlines in the New York Post and Daily News announcing portentous things that you think everyone in the world must be reading about. But then they're gone the next day. Or you get up in the morning after having this strange dream, and then you're facing the pink and white tile in your bathroom. And then you go eat your strange breakfast cereal and you read the back of the cereal box, while the TV is blaring out another text and maybe your children are telling you some other kind of story. And all the while this white noise is filtering in from outside your window. The point is that our days are very fragmented, with a million things happening, affecting our perceptions, that have completely arbitrary relationships to one another.