Mondo 2000

If it’s collaborative, but also your memoir, what happens when there’s conflict of memory? When your memories of what happened are completely different than the people participating in the book?

That’s kind of the experiment. That’s something you discover in the process of writing, co-writing, or editing the book. I have no particular prejudice towards the truth. If somebody gives me a colorful story, I may run with that. I may run with some people denying that it happened, or I may choose to deny something happened that someone else thinks, or I may not.

To me, it’s not a process of journalism or a conventional memoir, but a process of trying to create a piece of literature largely out of reality — but not confined entirely to reality. It’s become a cliche, like in Kurosawa’s Rashomon, in which each character goes through the same experience but remembers it in vastly different ways.

It could be interesting to have some of that in a way that’s literary and exposes something about the human being. And also, hopefully, amusing and funny.

Kickstarter: An Open-Source History of Mondo 2000 (Audio interview and transcript)