By Steve Almond

My friend insists that her interest in the program is purely anthropological. But I happen to know that she spent a good portion of her adolescence listening to Eighties hair metal bands and dreaming about bedding dudes like Bret Michaels and even working, briefly, as a waitress in a topless bar. She comes by her obsession naturally, is my point.

The longer I read and write, the more I come to view obsession as the essential engine of literature. I am not suggesting that my wife, er, friend should write a novel about House of Rock. (The series is, by her own description, a kind of pulp novel already--histrionic, predictable, crushingly squalid.) What I’m suggesting is that her allegiance to the program identifies essential fears and desires within her, ones which embarrass her quite robustly and therefore belong in the novel she hopes to write.

To take this a step further: I’m not interested in writing that isn’t obsessive. Who is? We’re all drama queens in the end. We all come to stories with two basic questions: Who do I care about? And What do they care about? As long as our hero, or heroine, cares deeply about something (i.e. is obsessed), and as long as they’re willing to tell us their own twisted version of the truth, we’ll come along for the ride.

Don’t believe me? Let me call to the stand my star witness, Humbert Humbert. How many millions of readers have tracked his unwholesome adventure over the years? Are these people who – if provided a plot outline--would choose to spend a dozen hours with Monsieur Humbert? No.

What they’re connecting to (in most cases) isn’t his particular lust for nymphets, but his pathological state of desire. Because we have all felt the same shameful tremors. We have all played victim to the unstoppable gallop of our hearts.

I recognize that my citations to date--Bret Michaels, Humbert Humbert--are veering in the direction of the tawdry here. Fine. Consider Kazuo Ishiguro’s brilliant The Remains of the Day. The action here is so muted it barely ever rises above a whisper. Our hero Stevens, a proper British butler, cannot admit to his desire for Miss Kenton, the prim housekeeper. Instead, the force of its repression becomes obsessive. By the end, both leads appear ready to explode, and the reader right along with them.

Or consider a non-fiction book such as Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Part of what makes it so much fun to read is Pollan’s obsessive relationship to food--its moral and practical role in our lives. His preoccupation is infectious. You cannot emerge from reading that book without developing a dark fascination with corn syrup. Just as you can’t read Calvin Trillin’s piquant food writing without your tongue and stomach going into riot. The great tragedy of the commercial arts--and in particular Hollywood--is that its practitioners refuse to recognize the tremendous entertainment value of obsession. Instead, they try to use non-stop stimulation (all those high-speed chases and explosions and fake boobs) to keep the audience enthralled. The result is stupefaction, not identification.

But look: our best art implicates us. It induces us to experience the intensity of feeling that is absent from the rest of our lives. It unleashes the closet obsessive in all of us.

I used to spend hours trying to explain this to my students at Boston College, who were forever confusing emotional evasion with literary restraint. To the stubborn ones, I often issued an order that I received years ago, from an elderly writer who had suffered my own wretched early burps of prose. The only thing that matters is the thing you can’t stop thinking about, he told me. Dress it up how ever you like, son, but tell me the goddamn truth.