‘Generation Kill’ Author Evan Wright’s Immersion in War, Porn, and Anarchy
Toby Warner, Flavorwire: Generation Kill chronicled Evan Wright’s experience reporting as an embedded journalist in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. His original Rolling Stone articles won him a National Magazine Award, and the resulting book was spun off into an HBO series. But Wright’s writing career didn’t begin with war reporting, and Hella Nation attests to this.
It’s a collection of the best of his long-form journalism, comprising thoughtful and immersive portraits of individuals and communities who have seceded from the normal. Hella Nation is stuffed with dispatches from weird America: neo-Nazi conventions, anarchist riots, porn sets, and the living rooms of professional skateboarders. Wright spoke with our sister publication Boldtype about journalism, voyeurism, and his taste for insanity.
Boldtype: In your essay on Porn Valley, you write that you had the feeling of “being in a group of people deliberately and methodically engaged in acts of insanity.” That could describe a lot of these articles, which take readers into alternate worlds with their own rules. What draws you to these kinds of stories?
Evan Wright: I’m always interested in discovering the inner logic that guides people who do things that outwardly seem puzzling, insane, or reprehensible. My personal motivation perhaps stems from the nagging suspicion that some of my own thought is as illogical and blind as my subjects’.
