In Conversation: On The Nicotine Chronicles

Michael Imperioli is best known for his starring role as Christopher Moltisanti in the acclaimed TV series The Sopranos, which earned him an Emmy Award. He also wrote five episodes of the show and was co-screenwriter of the film Summer of Sam, directed by Spike Lee. Imperioli has appeared in six of Lee’s films and has also acted in films by Martin Scorsese, Abel Ferrara, Walter Hill, Peter Jackson, and the Hughes Brothers. The Perfume Burned His Eyes is his first novel. In The Perfume Burned His Eyes (Akashic Books) Michael Imperioli gives voice to Matthew, a seventeen-year-old boy living in Jackson Heights, Queens, in 1976. After his father and grandfather die, his mother uses her inheritance to uproot Matthew and herself to a posh apartment building in Manhattan. It’s three miles away from his boyhood home, but a world apart. He then befriends rock icon Lou Reed (the title of the book alludes to a line in Reed’s “Romeo Had Juliette”), who lives in the same building and becomes an unorthodox father figure to Matthew. The novel begins, two years after the story begins, and concludes three days after Lou Reed’s death, in 2013, with Matthew in his fifties. In a starred review Booklist called it ” atmospheric coming-of-age story” and noted “Imperioli can definitely write, and he gets high marks for the verisimilitude and empathy that he evokes in this fine crossover novel.”

Lee Child was fired and out of work when he hatched a harebrained scheme to write a best-selling novel, thus saving his family from ruin. Killing Floor launched the New York Times #1 best-selling Jack Reacher series. The series has spawned two feature films and an upcoming Amazon Prime Video series. The Nicotine Chronicles (Akashic Books) features 16 stories about our smoking habit by contributors including Child, Joyce Carol Oates, Jonathan Ames, Eric Bogosian, Achy Obejas, and Michael Imperioli. The problem, argues Lee, is not nicotine, which he says is “naturally present in potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants,” but the delivery system. Burning dried tobacco leaves and inhaling the smoke gets nicotine in your brain in seconds, according to Child, “doing good in all its various ways. Unfortunately, the rest of the smoke doesn’t do good. To get the good, we risk the bad. Or we prohibit ourselves the good, for fear of the bad? Which approach makes more sense?” Publishers Weekly noted that “The most successful entries delve bone-deep into addiction…These writers capture the mental gymnastics behind the characters’ bad decisions, and the joy such bad decisions can bring.”