A Chat with Tony Tulathimutte

Get Rejected, it's the first Chat Pile of 2025!

I’d be lying if I said I had always loved Tony Tulathimutte’s work. Frankly, I knew of him as a writer that people I’d heard of liked. I was familiar with his CRIT online writing class and his tweets. That feels demeaning to admit but also, many such cases.

Last year, ahead of the publication of his linked story collection Rejection, I started hearing about some infamous readings Tony was giving, excerpts from the book that were sending audiences into hysterics. I eventually got a copy and was immediately overcome with jealousy. It’s one thing to quietly pore over something shocking and transgressive in isolation. It’s another to hear such a thing read aloud before a responsive audience.

The only comparison I can imagine is when Miranda July, at the very first Believer magazine festival in Vegas in 2017, read an unpublished short story about a woman entering into a sexual relationship with her dog. I still think about that reading often the way I will continue to think about many moments in Rejection. Thanks for doing this, Tony!

How are you feeling after Rejection's enthusiastic reception?

I am tapering off 20 years of using Benadryl as a sleep aid so I'm tired and congested. Plus I have a tummy ache that I caused myself. As for the response to the book specifically, I don't think anyone would mistake it for the work of a satisfiable person, but I'm glad and surprised that people seem to be enjoying it. I'm still forced to be me however.

Are people talking about it on Reddit? Rejection put me in the mindset of being on Reddit¹ in a way that made me cringe and also nod my head.

I am making it my business not to know. I think the snake is perfectly capable of eating its own tail without my supervision. Actually someone on my publicity team once floated the idea of posting the story "Our Dope Future" to Reddit as a kind of hoax, an idea I shot down with a shoulder-mounted FIM-92 Stinger missile.

I'm curious if your diet has changed since your Grub Street piece. Maybe that's too personal but I found that chunk of your life both relatable and jarring, like Rejection.

It's been a recent goal of mine to eat more normally, both because I'm getting into fitness in general and because the nolens volens eating shit is just not going to fly in middle age. I started tracking my food with an app earlier this year, which my friends tell me is going to give me an eating disorder, and I reply, "Is it a disorder, or is it an abundance of order?," and they reply, "Tony—that is an eating disorder." Nonetheless my macros are immacrolate now, and I'm eating more Greek yogurt, savory oatmeal, and beans. Unrelated but check out this vegetarian sausage my roommate left out on the counter:

With your fiction, there's both an incredibly controlled sense of style and this tense feeling that anything could happen, often from sentence to sentence. I hate asking writers about their influences, but maybe a better question is how you arrived at this kind of prose. Is what I'm saying an overdetermination or is this something you're striving for intentionally?

I think a handful of writers start right off with a very distinctive voice, but most have work for years with great deliberation to hit on something that sounds like them, so what comes off as spontaneous is actually the product of going over the same fucking lines hundreds of times. So the writing voice that ends up identified with you is not yours in the sense that it's inborn or natural, but that it represents your ideal of what good writing sounds like. In any case I think a scrupulous avoidance of cliche and unnecessary words and a consistent desire to surprise are a good starting point for anyone, eventually taste, disposition, and commitment to character and situation take care of the rest.

How often are you online?

More or less constantly except mornings when I'm writing. But I also think of "being online" as a metaphysical state akin to Heidegger's "das Man" or the barn scene from White Noise, that sort of internalized collective gaze that can override your own thoughts and perceptions. So when your lasagna arrives at a restaurant and you think "This will make a great post" and start anticipating how people will react to it, to the point where you're experiencing their imagined reactions more than you are experiencing the lasagna in your mouth, even if you don't have your phone out, that to me is a form of "being online." Of course this predates the internet but the internet has made it much harder to avoid and resist, and in that sense I don't think anyone who's regularly online can fully log off without some concerted detox.

What have you been listening to lately, whether music or podcasts or a third thing?

While working I listen to video game soundtracks, mostly 90s Squaresoft RPGs and some others. Musically I have been 4-10 years behind the curve since about 2013 so I'm still listening mostly to PC Music and 100 gecs. Plus I've been getting into this podcast called "White Noise 8 Hours - Deep Relaxation." And I finally got around to listening to my own audiobook, which gave me a stress hive on my lip but it's very very interesting to hear a delivery different from what you'd imagined.

Do you feel like an image of you has accreted in people's minds since you started publishing your work widely?

If it has, I do not want to know about it. Fortunately I think I'm at the midlist level where people are more interested in the book than the guy who wrote it. As soon as the balance tips, the reading of your work starts to get filtered through your reputation, which can only be a liability unless it's somehow incorporated into the work. There's no bigger Faustian bargain than hype. Then again in Goethe's version Faust gets to go to heaven anyway so who knows.

Favorite sentence?

"Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental."

1. Rejection has since been named r/books’s Best Short Story Collection of 2024