You have a novel coming out, “Holy Cow,” about a traumatized cow, a sassy turkey and a pig converting to Judaism. What was the impetus to write a book like this?
Ten years ago I had this idea come to me: If I were a cow, why wouldn’t I try to get to India? So I wrote up a treatment, and I pitched it to the only places you can pitch it, Disney and Pixar. Obviously they were wise to stay away from a story that has a pig getting circumcised in it. And then one day last year, I just thought, Well, why don’t I write out that idea?
It’s a very Jewish story. The pig in the book, Shalom, fixes the Israel-Palestine conflict. Your father was Jewish and your mother is Lutheran. How were you raised?
I was raised in New York City. I was raised on the streets. I went to a Presbyterian school. I wasn’t raised to believe in any particular god. My father was a kind of cultural Jew, I’d say. So if I have a Jewish sensibility, I think it’s more in the cultural sense.
Your character on “Californication” is a novelist. How would he blurb “Holy Cow”?
He would’ve said, “I don’t blurb, and I don’t like using blurb as a verb.”
You majored in English at Princeton, and your thesis was called “The Schizophrenic Critique of Pure Reason in Beckett’s Early Novels.” What?
You know what the alternative title for that is? “David Duchovny Is an Arrogant Idiot.”
What is it about?
Exactly. Let me try to remember. I think I was under the sway of some French Lacanian literary critics, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. To put it as simply as I can, the paper posed the question: Why is everybody striving to be a Freudian neurotic when that, actually, could be the biggest sickness of all?
Your novel also critiques industrial agriculture. Are you still a vegetarian?
I’m a very lazy vegetarian, which means I will look for the vegetarian meal, but I will also give up. I don’t think I eat red meat anymore. Let’s say no, I don’t. I’ll eat fish. I hear insects are going to be the next source of protein, and I look forward to that. I’m O.K. with killing insects.
I’m O.K. with killing them, too. I’m less sure about eating them.
What I like about insects is they enjoy horrible living conditions and filth, unlike mammals. They do. That’s what they live in. I have no problem with them living in teeming, overcrowded feces-filled environments. That’s where they want to be.
Your former “X-Files” co-star, Gillian Anderson, recently published her first novel, too. So, in a sense, did Agents Scully and Mulder end up together after all?
No. I think it’s very rare to have two writers in the household. Isn’t it? There was a rumor a couple of years ago that we were living together.
There is a lot of Mulder-Scully fan fiction, and some of it is pretty “Red Shoe Diaries,” if you know what I mean.
You’re using all my work against me. When “X-Files” was kind of in its heyday, that was the beginning of the Internet. I was very skeptical and thought, This thing will never last. My favorite was the fan fiction that had Alex Krycek, my nemesis, and me as lovers. It was beautiful.
Do you think of your work as being in the tradition of Samuel Beckett or are you more of a Gillian Anderson?
I didn’t read Gillian’s book. We just had breakfast a few days ago, and she didn’t even mention that she had one. I didn’t know. But no, I still like language a little too much to call myself Beckettian. He is very austere, and I like fooling around with words. I guess I’m more Joycean, although that’ll sound really pretentious.
Do conspiracy theorists still seek you out?
It’s been a while since somebody tried to get me information that just had to get out. I have received some letters about abductions in my day that were sad and interesting.
Are there any episodes of “The X-Files” that haunt you in particular?
Oh, no, no, just my acting in some of the early ones affects me to this day. I wish that they would be destroyed.
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