House Of Leaves
House Of Leaves
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Mark Z. Danielewski on House Of Leaves
In his own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
A dying father and a decade of rejectionThe book’s emotional origins are inseparable from a single bus trip. Danielewski wrote a long short story called ‘Redwood’ over three days on a Greyhound, then read parts of it aloud to his father, Tad Danielewski, a Polish avant-garde filmmaker who was recuperating from kidney failure. Tad’s response was to suggest his son get a job at the U.S. Postal Service. Tad died in 1993, and the decade of work that became House of Leaves followed.
The story is about a family that moves into a small house in Virginia where they discover that the inside is bigger than the outside by only a quarter of an inch. And yet that discrepancy begins to threaten everything in their family, the relationship between the man and the woman, between the children, and between the children and the parents. [paraphrased from audio]
That quarter-inch gap, the book’s central concept, arrived around the time of Tad’s death. What started as something that might be a short story, a poem, or a footnote became ten years of work.
The years between his father’s death and the book’s publication in 2000 were years of professional obscurity. He was in his twenties in Los Angeles, writing a novel no publisher had seen, on the edge of becoming the kind of person who just keeps tapping away at something no one will read. The isolation did not paralyze him; it clarified something.
I think House of Leaves was tricky, because of that, and it is reflected in the story. You get that in a character like Johnny Truant. I can identify with that. But at the same time, there was the enormous liberty of saying, ‘Fuck it, I’m gonna do what I want.’
When he describes the book’s spirit in retrospect, he reaches past craft and into mythology. The comparison is not to a writer finding his voice but to a fallen angel refusing the terms of his situation.
House of Leaves was that self-born Paradise Lost, Satan on the side of the lake, ‘I will make a heaven out of hell.’
How he wrote it
Ten years, a layout program, and a blue wordThe book took a decade and arrived as a deliberate act of synthesis rather than rupture. At the 2009 PEN World Voices Festival, Danielewski named Derrida’s Glas as a typographic influence and credited Apollinaire and Mallarmé for his experiments with color and layout. The list of literary predecessors he acknowledged is long and specific.
I see House of Leaves as a journeyman’s piece. It’s very connected to the authors I studied, whether it was Borges or Nabokov, Virginia Woolf or Sylvia Plath, whether it was Bukowski, Fuentes or Kerouac. There are all sorts of obvious predecessors to it. There’s a lot of classical stuff and litcrit in there. But for me it was a synthesis of all that.
His decade at USC studying experimental film and directing music videos did not stay in a separate compartment from the novel. The book’s central premise, a documentary that no character in the story can actually locate, is where cinema and fiction collapse into each other.
‘House of Leaves’ remediates film.
He composes inside a layout program rather than a word processor, so that typography is part of the same act as writing. The page is never formatted after the fact.
When Pantheon acquired the book, he flew to New York to oversee the typesetting personally. One of his requirements had essentially no precedent in trade publishing: every instance of the word ‘house’ had to be printed in chroma-key blue, the exact shade used in cinematic blue-screen work. The reason was precise.
Those subtle differences that you don’t notice — the shape of fonts, the colors, the pacing, the way text can get larger and smaller — amount to an extra dose of information, an extra layer of storytelling.
His sister, the musician Poe, was making her album Haunted at the same time he was writing the novel. Readers and critics have routinely described Haunted as a companion soundtrack, but he has consistently corrected that framing. The relationship between the two works was simultaneous and mutual: she read his pages and her music shifted; he heard her tracks and his writing shifted.
Some people say that ‘Haunted’ is soundtrack to ‘House of Leaves.’ That is not at all correct. It was much a progenitor, as it was an offspring. [paraphrased from audio]
The personal thread
A young man’s twenties, preserved in printHe has described his later work, particularly the multi-volume The Familiar, as expansive and collaborative by design, built to be read in community. House of Leaves was something narrower and more solitary, shaped entirely by a specific period of his life.
House of Leaves, for me, had a very personal and limited feel — much of it reflecting the experiences of a young man in his twenties, my experience in academia, the books I’d read.
Johnny Truant, the book’s frame narrator whose footnotes spiral into obsession and self-destruction, is not simply a fictional device. Danielewski drew a direct line between those years of isolation, professional rejection, and creative stubbornness and the character readers encounter at the edges of the text.
I think House of Leaves was tricky, because of that, and it is reflected in the story. You get that in a character like Johnny Truant. I can identify with that. But at the same time, there was the enormous liberty of saying, ‘Fuck it, I’m gonna do what I want.’
On craft choices
Typography as argument, not ornamentThe design of House of Leaves looks forbidding on first encounter: pages with text running vertically, footnotes that outlast the chapters they annotate, columns that force the reader to rotate the book. At the Talks at Google event, Danielewski described a different function. He argued that the unusual layout slowly teaches readers how to navigate its turns, so that by the final pages they have become fluent in a new reading language.
My interest is in how meaning is communicated via language, and I believe the shape, positioning, even the color of the language has an effect on meaning.
His resistance to the idea that typography is decorative goes back to his foundational argument about what a page does. Where a conventional novel treats white space as neutral and font as invisible, Danielewski treats both as carriers of information equal to the words themselves.
Those subtle differences that you don’t notice — the shape of fonts, the colors, the pacing, the way text can get larger and smaller — amount to an extra dose of information, an extra layer of storytelling.
At the PEN World Voices Festival in 2009, he pushed past the formal questions and landed on something more epistemological. Genre itself, he argued, offers no stable ground.
I don’t know what literature is. Genre itself is a ‘labile, malleable, amorphous thing.’
What he wants us to sit with
A house that opens outwardAfter the book came out, Danielewski watched readers build elaborate interpretive systems from its internal logic and then stay inside those systems. He found the response gratifying and, at the same time, exactly contrary to what he had wanted.
I saw people so invested in its own interior logic, that they were very satisfied to just stay within the book. Which was a great compliment, but I had no interest in writing sacred text, texts that would kind of lock one up into, you know, the world according to the book.
That reaction drove him toward his next book, Only Revolutions, which he built to be deliberately centrifugal. The house pulls inward; he was finished writing houses.
Beneath the layered narrators, the footnote-within-footnote architecture, and the typographic experiments, he has described the book’s core as something much simpler. The Penguin Random House reader’s guide records his own reduction of it.
House of Leaves, for me, had a very personal and limited feel — much of it reflecting the experiences of a young man in his twenties, my experience in academia, the books I’d read.