If I remember correctly, it wasn’t too long ago that you said that you’d never want to work with a band again. Now you’re part of some sort of alt-rock supergroup. What happened?

I guess when I said that, I meant that I didn’t want to be in a band that was a complete democracy all the time. I was married to those guys (in American Music Club) for 15 years, so I guess I didn’t want to be in that marriage anymore. But I have no problem being in bands. I love collaborating. It’s just a matter of getting the right person to collaborate with. Anyway, this whole tour is not about me; it’s about Tuatara and the Minus 5, and I’m just the asshole that gets onstage and brings everybody down.

Your live shows are extraordinary for how much emotion you put into each song — as if the emotions or people or whatever inspired them are still there. Do you ever find that some songs are difficult to play, that there’s too much “there” there?

It’s only when I can’t bring myself to feel them that they’re difficult. I guess I don’t have a problem with playing things live. I guess sometimes, if the crowd is no good, or the moment is kind of stupid, you feel like a fool, like you’re pissing in the wind. Otherwise no, I’m shameless. I try to perform the way I write songs, without irony, without reflecting my own cynicism too much, you know? You just do what the song asks for you to do. The song makes a demand on you, and you try to fulfill it.

You have sort of a “no request” policy, right?

Right, I mean, I like it when they do, it’s flattering … but especially tonight (in San Francisco) is going to be weird, because I’m not playing any American Music Club songs at all. I feel kind of weird about another band playing those songs.

The album you’ve made is pretty bleak.

The world is bleak.

Sure, but do you ever find yourself emboldened by progress in the world? I mean, for instance, being a gay man in San Francisco, with the progress in AIDS treatment …

Yeah, well, let’s look at that. Sure, there are some new drugs, and some of them work, for a little while. But they’re so expensive that it you have any money at all you’ll be bankrupt. Where people really have AIDS, in Africa, they’re so far away from being able to afford the drugs that they’ll never get their hands on them. I don’t know if that’s good news. I mean, it’s still there, it’s still a nasty disease. There’s still discrimination against gays and lesbians, all over the place. It’s not changed.

So external events never have an effect on your songwriting?

When I write songs, I write songs about love. That’s it. I mean, politics is like something you have to wipe after, then you flush.

After three years working solo, is it everything you’d hoped it would be?

I’m loving it. I’ll make music any way I can.

• Didion is married to John Gregory Dunne, and has been for a long time. When she says “we,” he makes “we.”
• Though she no longer writes the sort of personal-social essays that made up books like “The White Album” and “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” she still contributes journalism and critical essays to magazines like The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books.
• In person she is very small. She is also graceful, personable, warm and funny.

With “The Last Thing He Wanted,” I read that you weren’t sure how it was going to turn out until you were finished with it.

No, no I wasn’t. I wanted to do a very, very tight plot, just a single thread — you wouldn’t even see the thread and then when you pulled it at the end everything would fall into place. That was the intention there. But you would go mad if you tried to plot that closely ahead of time. So essentially what you have to do, I found, is you have to make it up every day as you go along. And then you have to play the cards you already have on the table — you have to deal with what you’ve already said. Quite often, you’ve got yourself into things that seem to lead nowhere, but if you force yourself to deal with them, that was the discipline of it.

For example, one of the first things I had started with in this book was the idea of this woman walking off a campaign. Because I’d covered some campaigns in ’88 and ’92, I wanted to use some of that sense of a campaign. So then, I didn’t know, then she would go to Miami to see her father. Then, I couldn’t figure out where she’d been. Then I decided she ought to be from Los Angeles and had been married to someone in the oil business. That kind of gave me a fresh start. But then I was having to get her from Los Angeles to being a political reporter, right? It was a really hard thing to do. It was also a lot of fun.

There were certain chapters where it does sound like you’re starting from scratch almost, when you start hearing about Elena’s dreams, for example.

Yeah, I mean, I was just sitting there wondering what I could do that day. Sometimes, also, you just feel it’s right to step back from it a little bit. Otherwise it’s going to get linear, “and then she said, and then she did…” It doesn’t keep you awake to write it.

while your fiction seems to be getting increasingly lean, your essays seem to be moving in the opposite direction.

They’re getting denser and denser. There’s a whole lot of stuff going on in a piece — you’re trying to think it through. Generally, you think about a question or a situation in a more complex way than you would make a scene. Novels are almost like music or poetry — they just come to me in simple sentences, whereas I think my pieces get more and more complex ever since I’ve started using a computer.

What do you use?

I use an IBM Thinkpad. I just use it like a typewriter, but when I started using it in 1987, I thought I won’t be able to write anymore, so I thought I’d go back to the typewriter. But you couldn’t go back to the typewriter after using the computer, so finally after about a month I got proficient enough that I could actually work on it without being distracted by it, and in fact then it started making me a whole lot more logical than I ever had been. Because the computer was so logical, it was always right, I was wrong … and the time saved.

Before I started working on a computer, writing a piece would be like making something up every day, taking the material and never quite knowing where you were going to go next with the material. With a computer it was less like painting and more like sculpture, where you start with a block of something and then start shaping it.

You feel like it’s just there …

It’s just there, and sometimes you’ll find yourself — you get one paragraph partly right, and then you’ll go back and work on the other part. It’s a different thing.

Your work feels like it was written by a slow writer. I mean that in the best possible way.

Over the course of several years I had false starts on this novel several times. I couldn’t get anywhere with it. Then I had this block of time last fall from the end of August until Christmas, so I just decided I would try to finish it in that period. So I went back and I started, and I did finish it about Christmas time, but that was about as fast as I could work. And a lot of it turned out to already be done in note form to hang together. So this was just running it through with the thread.

There is a character in the book named Bob Weir. Are you a Grateful Dead fan?

[laughs] No, that is where that name comes from, isn’t it? I had totally forgotten that. No, I had no idea, I knew there was something just right about that name.

Elena resembles, in certain ways, some of your other characters from some of your other novels, in that she finds herself in the middle of this huge life change, and it’s seemingly irreversible, and yet she goes with it. What does that pattern mean to you?

I don’t know, it’s nothing I want to examine too closely. Every time I do it, I think it’s brand new. It comes to me in a flash! [laughs] It would certainly make things easier if I remembered, but it’s — I guess all novels are dreams of what might happen or dreams of what you don’t want to happen. When you’re working on them, it’s very much like a dream you’re moving in. So, to some extent, obviously, the same characters are going to keep populating your dreams.

Have you ever done something like Elena does here — walked off a campaign, reinvented youself?

Not really, no. But you can see the possibility, it’s something you might be afraid of happening. It’s definitely something you don’t want to happen. I don’t want to happen. That’s what I would take from it.

I read somewhere that you identified yourself as a libertarian.

I was explaining to somebody what kind of Republican I had been. That was essentially why I had been feeling estranged from the Republican Party per se, because my whole point of view had been libertarian. I mean, I wouldn’t call it totally “on the program” libertarian.

You don’t vote the ticket?

[laugh] No … I think the attraction was that it was totally free. It was totally based on individual rights, which, as a Westerner, I was responsive to. Then I started realizing there was a lot of ambiguity in the West’s belief that it had a stronghold on rugged individualism, since basically it was created by the federal government. So I haven’t come to any hard conclusion, here.

Are you watching the campaign? What do you think of Clinton?

Well, he’s the luckiest man alive, isn’t he? He seems to be lucky, which I guess in a lot of cultures has been what people wanted. Luck had a kind of totemic power, that made you the leader.

I read your review of Bob Woodward’s “The Choice,” in The New York Review of Books. It seemed that his lengthy descriptions of his reporterly methods got under your skin.

Yes. There’s a certain kind of reporting of a book that when you’re casually reading through you think you’ve missed something, you’re not informed here, you’ve totally missed the point, there must be something more to this than meets the eye. So then I started reading “The Choice” and I had been actually following the campaign in a way until then, so I did know something about it, and I thought, what’s going on here? There’s nothing here we don’t know. And even then, I would sort of doze off every now and then and think “I must be missing this — there must be more to this than I’m finding.”

You and your husband wrote the screenplay for “Up Close and Personal.” How do you think it turned out?

Well, it turned out — from the beginning, what it was supposed to be was a vehicle for two movie stars, and that’s what it was.

You have no illusions, it seems, about the Hollywood game.

Well, if you don’t know how to play it you shouldn’t be in it. It’s always sort of amused me.

I just read an interview with Charles Schultz, the creator of Peanuts. He’s a billionaire, of course, and he was asked what his idea of success was — if he considered himself “successful.” He said something like, “Yes, because now I feel like I can go into any bookstore, and if I see a book I really like, I can buy it.” I thought that was really beautiful. Do you consider yourself successful?

I never feel particularly successful. I always feel like I’ve not quite done it right, that I ought to be doing better or something. In terms of work, I never felt that I’ve done it right. I always want to have done it differently, to have done it better, a different way, unlike Charles Schulz. So I don’t know. The one time I felt successful was when he [Schultz] put my daughter Quintana’s name in a cartoon.

I heard about him the same way most people probably do. A friend in San Francisco, who was tipped off by a friend in New York, forwarded an e-mail to me, imploring me to call the number of “some weirdo in North Carolina who reads the school lunch menus on an answering machine.” After reaching his extension on a 24-hour info line — where you can also get the weather, the temperature and sports scores — a slightly overexcited man with a high-pitched voice comes on and welcomes listeners to the home of the Lunch Menu Man.

He is supposed to be reading the daily schedule for that week’s hot lunches, but all I can say is that what he is doing here, while ostensibly listing various combinations of ham and cheese, baked potatoes, hoagies and fruity gelatin, is so shocking and deranged and unnatural, so completely unrelated to the task at hand, that a listener is paralyzed by terror and seized by uncontrollable laughter. His voice, sounding like a cross between a crazed Ross Perot, a dying loon and someone deep in the throes of passion, swings and loops around each syllable, stretching out words and sounds without concern for the fact that one can scarcely understand what he’s talking about — the actual contents of the menu quickly become immaterial. It’s odd and scary and utterly hilarious, and by the time he got to “green peas,” which he drags out for 10-12 seconds, sounding more like “greeeeeeeeeeeen peeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeazah” I was choking, breathless. I couldn’t see, with tears streaming down my face, my head resting on my desk for lack of muscle control.

Though I have tried, it is impossible to adequately describe. I offer you a small sampling of Lunch Menu Man magic, but for the full effect I implore you to stop reading and right now pick up the phone and call 704-377-4444, extension 1955. Please do it now. Yes, now. Please. Stop reading and do it. You will thank me.

I trust that you have now experienced the terrifying beauty of the Lunch Menu Man, and are wiping away the tears and/or changing your pants. You are no doubt wanting to know more about this person, looking perhaps for some reassurance that he is incarcerated or in a padded room, where he will be unable to do harm to you and your loved ones.

No such luck. The Lunch Menu Man is a free man.

The Lunch Menu Man is David Price, a 34-year-old former car salesman who for the past year has been reading the Charlotte, North Carolina school lunch menus for a local voice mail system. Wanting to know everything about him, I call him for an interview and when he promptly calls me back, he sounds like a normal person. In fact, he seems downright nice — kind and polite and seemingly concerned with keeping kids in school and well-fed. He says he is married and has three young children. But just when I am ready to believe in his normalcy, when I start feeling like the existence of the Lunch Menu Man is a perfectly regular thing, I come to my senses. I was talking to a grown man who reads, like a raving madman, children’s lunch menus — and makes a living doing it. How? Why?

It all started over a year ago, when he decided to give up the car sales business to take a 9-to-5 job, so he would have more time to spend with his kids. He got a job selling ads for the Concord Tribune, where part of his duties included reading movie listings, obituaries and the school district’s lunch menu into a 24-hour information line operated by the newspaper. He found the job unbearably boring, and while he knew that with the obituaries he “couldn’t really do much to spice it up,” he felt that with the lunch menu, he might be able to go out on a limb to make it more interesting. With only 200 people calling the menu line a month, he said to himself, “What’s the harm?”

With no prior experience as a professional lunatic, he simply began reading the standard menu as if he were in the deepest depths of delusional DT’s. He claims that there was no source for his method, that he had never before been institutionalized, that it was based on “pure whim.”

Pointing to just how sick our society has become, something clicked, word got around, and in the first month the menu line’s load jumped from 200 to 5200 calls. He knew he was onto something, but his burgeoning popularity came not without the power struggles, obstacles and jealousy familiar to any genius. His wife urged him to read the menus like a sane person — she was afraid he was “being smart” and would get fired. Her fears were oddly prophetic.

Soon after, his boss at the Tribune, wanting to rein him in — no doubt envious of the imminent stardom of his protigi — gave him an ultimatum: either he would be a newspaper ad salesman or he would be the Lunch Menu Man. Price considered his life, his past and future and the tantalizing possibilities ahead. The choice was easy, Price recalls.
“I said, ‘Lunch Menu Man.’”

He was let go, but in no time a larger newspaper, the Charlotte Observer, picked up Price’s Lunch Menu Man, recognizing what the smaller minds at the Concord Tribune simply couldn’t see: that something big was happening. In no time his lunch menu extension was averaging 18,000 listeners a month, and Price was getting e-mail from Japan, fan mail from England and Australia, and calls from “Good Morning America,” People magazine, Jay Leno and the “Late Show with David Letterman.”

He now reads the lunch menus for school districts in Tennessee, Michigan and Minnesota, with plans in the works for Alaska, Indiana and Oregon. The popularity of his voicemail lunch menu reading shows no signs of abating, and his empire is growing.

He has a web site (http://www.charlotte.com/ads/menuman), where he also reads a collection of haikus about SPAM (“SPAM-kus”). He has Lunch Menu Man T-shirts (704-377-4444, extension 1952). He makes personal appearances, mostly at grade schools, where he talks about staying in school. And he was recently contracted by an elevator company to make recorded messages — “Fifth floor, please step out,” etc. — to be thrust onto unsuspecting passengers. Eerie, no?

If there were any doubt in one’s mind about just how alarming a phenomenon the Lunch Menu Man represents, consider this: A radio station in Tennessee recently flew Price out for a public appearance, where fans came with their answering machines so he could record outgoing messages for them.

The world had its first voicemail groupies, and Armageddon inches ever closer.