PRINTBehaving Badly
Esquire writer gets Deviant
Courtesy of Grove Press, Black Cat
April 10, 2008 | 12:00 a.m. CST
In his office, a pool house behind his San Diego home, freelance journalist Mike Sager writes the foreword for an upcoming book and finishes up an e-mail before beginning our interview. Later in the day he will meet with Fran Drescher to work on a profile he is writing about her for AARP The Magazine. But right now, Sager is on the other side of the microphone, fielding questions about his first novel, Deviant Behavior. The novel, which will be available April 11, follows journalist Jonathan Seede in Washington, D.C., where Sager once lived and worked. While working on a freelance story, he finds himself chest-deep in the mucky world of prostitutes, users and runaways in this sin-filled city. It’s a story about morals, purpose and what one man decides to do when he finds himself in over his head.
Vox: Who are your influences?
MS: Tom Wolfe and the New Journalists. Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson and more than any of them, Gay Talese. His writing, but with Hunter Thompson’s energy and Tom Wolfe’s sort of anthropology, but with a more accepting sort of voice. I always felt like Tom Wolfe was there in his white suit and not getting dirty. I like to feel that I’m sitting down on the lawn or around the campfire, breathing in the soot with everyone else.
Vox: Why did you make the jump from magazines to writing novels?
MS: I’ve always wanted to write, but I had nothing to say. For around 30 years, I went out and wrote other people’s stories. I’ve never loved being a reporter; I’ve become good at it because I needed stuff to write about. So the joy of being able to stay home, live my own life and not live my life at the beck and call of others is liberating.
Vox: How have your previous books and personal experiences helped you in writing this novel?
MS: I’m not the same person that I would have been if my life had taken another path. I lived in a sheltered Jewish community in Baltimore County, and everybody that lived around me was basically a saint. That could have been my life. But by becoming a journalist, I was exposed to all this other stuff, and I couldn’t have written any of this without all of that. I would be a lawyer living in suburban Maryland somewhere.
Vox: This novel is very dark and gritty. Why did you choose the material?
MS: That’s my area of fascination. I’ve always been able to look into the maw of evil and deal with it with a sense of humor — I find the heart within people, and you go in kind of expecting one thing and coming out with something else. Even though I’m seen as kind of an edgy
person, the story that I end up writing for 311 pages is a very conventional tale with heroes and a happy ending for some and not so happy for others. We love that stuff; we like sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll. We can do them vicariously at least.
Vox: What’s next on your agenda? Any articles or other books in the works?
MS: In October, I have another collection called Wounded Warriors, which is what I think is my greatest hits. They are all my drug stories: when I lived with a crack gang, heroin doers, the first meth story from Hawaii when they called it ice, pit bulls, all this great, hardcore stuff.
