Roddy Bottum on Reliving the Past, Coming Out in the '90s, and the Poetics of Cameron Winter

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Today's installment features another returning guest: Roddy Bottum of the legendary Faith No More as well as the currently active Man on Man (the latest album of which he previously appeared on the newsletter to talk about). Roddy's got a memoir that just came out, The Royal We, and it's a fascinatingly told and immersive trip through his own personal history as well as a document of his days growing up as a young queer punk in San Francisco. I was more than happy to have Roddy on the newsletter again, and it was a really great conversation that added depth to my understanding of excellent book. Check it out:

As far as the writing style, talk to me about what you were going for with this memoir. Tonally, it's doing something different from other memoirs.
I don't really read a lot of memoirs. I knew when I started writing that I didn't want to be what I'd seen—the autobiographies at airports that have pictures in the middle of them. I didn't want to do that, so I leaned as urgently in the other direction as I could. I wanted to be prose-y and personal with it. It was fun, because it was a really interesting personal process to go through, writing the book.

What was the impetus for writing the book?
I just started writing. I'd always considered myself a writer, but I hadn't written a whole lot. My friend JD, when we were in the thick of COVID, she said to me, "Have you been doing your morning pages?" I didn't really know what that was, but she said it, and immediately I knew what she meant: "I should be getting up and writing every day." For some weird reason, I started doing exactly that until the book was finished.

When I start things, sometimes I just get this insane follow-through. I started swimming years ago, and I can't stop. The writing worked the same way. It was this habit that I got into on a daily basis, and I just did it every day until I had a full book. Sometimes, that's the way to do it.

As a reader, where does your general taste lie?
I end up reading a lot of books written by women. I'm reading this one right now by Zoe Dubno called Happiness and Love. It's starting Nabokov's Glory. I listen to lyrics a lot lately, too. Did you listen to that band Geese yet?

I have listened to them, yeah. I like that new record. I think it sounds very good.
It's good, right? That singer, he has a solo record that's so good. The poetry, his lyrics are so great.

Honestly, I've been a little taken aback by how much people have connected with both of those records.
Me too. It's like when the White Stripes came along—I couldn't believe that many people would listen to it, and they got so popular. I feel that way about Geese, too. They're so weird, and so many people love them. It's really fun.

You talked about how you didn't want this book to come across as an airport memoir, and as a result you withhold information in a really interesting way at times. There's a specific point in the book where you talk about Faith No More being on tour with Red Hot Chili Peppers, but you never mention them by name—you only offer a few context clues. It's a very informal way of telling the story, and I'm curious as to why you were drawn to embracing that.
It just feels like the opposite of bragging, to me. When people brag—dropping famous names and stuff—there's nothing less appealing, you know? So the opposite of that is almost like an anonymous tale. If those names, famous or not, can be presented in a narrative way that's sparkly, fun, and driving, then I feel like that's enough. I don't have to say the last names. Also, it's kind of funny. I wanted to just lett the oddness of the stories and the characters speak for themselves.

A lot of this book centers around relationships, and how people have entered and exited your life. What have you learned about yourself over the years in terms of your relationships with others, and how have you used those lessons to improve other relationships?
Larry. [Laughs] Doing press for this—questions like that are so intensely personal, you know? I mean, you write a memoir, and it's so intense. Everything is about you. I reveal so much in this book, and it's so personal that it remains this really intense experience that I'm going through. It started when I read for the audiobook a couple of weeks ago. Just doing that—having to narrate what I'd written, putting a little emotion into the words—was like getting hit by a truck over and over. But I'm just musing a sentiment. It's such a weird, crazy, personal place to go in dealing with these questions.

Anyway, relationships, I've always just sort of clung to my earliest ones. My best friends are a family that I grew up with on my block. The younger sister, I've known since the day she was born. My three sisters are in my life for sure. In my relationship realm, I have a real devoted, loyal thing going on. That speaks a lot to me. That's what I've learned from my relationships. The long-sustenance ones are the ones that work.

One friendship you mention near the end of the book is with Patty Schemel, whose memoir I also found to be extremely powerful and moving. You mentioned in the book that she was basically the first queer musician that you had formed a close relationship with at the time.
Patty is one of those people that I've known for a super long time. That's the basis of where we come from—we've been together for a long time, and that longevity is an intense thing. She tells me the funniest things. She's someone that I laugh with more than anyone. It's fun to have a friend for that long. I knew who she was before I met her—she was playing drums with Courtney, because I was friends with Courtney. But when we met downstairs in this weird European festival place, we just knew immediately that we were going to be friends because we were here, working in music—and that's exactly what happened. That was a long, long time ago, and she's still in my life and she's still so funny.

You mentioned earlier the difficulty of writing a book that's so intimate and intense. There's a quote in the book that I thought was really interesting while you're talking about dealing with heroin addiction. You say, "The timeline gets fuzzy when you're doing your best to forget." I'm curious to hear you talk more about how it felt to dig in to your past like this.
I don't really feel trauma from what I've written. When I was telling you before about getting overwhelmed by the emotion of it, it's containable and something I just deal with. But it definitely does bring the past into the spectrum in an intense way. Right now, I'm living in the past—but that's kind of cool. I find myself always referencing my past, especially in the past couple weeks since the book is coming out. Even when I wrote the book, these weird narratives became apparent to me—getting high to ease the strain of not being open about my sexuality and then getting able to come out of the closet. Those two storylines in my life converged as I was writing them down, and it was therapeutic in a crazy way and gave me an odd perspective—and it's still like that now, honestly. There's things that are in my history that I've been thinking about lately that I'm noticing. Just being in Paris right now, I've been here so many times, and it becomes about all the memories of what Paris has been in my life.

Something I found very striking in the book was when you talk about giving the interview to The Advocate in which you come out, and having it be this situation where there's a measure of relief that comes with having it published—but, you also make it clear that your struggle is very far from being over at that point. I'm curious to hear you reflect on that era of your life, especially considering how coming out now is seemingly very different from how it was back then.
It was a while ago for me, but it's an intense time in a person's life when you're making that statement to yourself and others—coming out of a place where you're able to talk openly about being gay. So much of it is about the aftermath. It was really awesome that I was able to do that and connect to this whole spectrum of queer kids, who would come to me after shows and hug me and thank me. It felt like this thing was extended that hadn't been, and it was super powerful for me.

Now, it's a different scenario. I think kids are in a much better place to come out and be themselves at an early age. I wonder, sometimes, if my story even relates to kids today. It's an interesting conundrum, but it's historical. I'm just gonna feel great about it. But in terms of where the world was when I came out, it feels like the world is a much better place for gays right now, and I'm not sure why. Generally, I feel good, in a gay sense, in this world. There's seldom places where I'll go that I feel uncomfortable. I think we're doing a lot better.

So much of this book is about your early life in San Francisco, but you currently live in NYC. What's your relationship to SF at this point?
I go back to the Bay Area. I usually go to Berkeley because my sister lives there with her kids, which is so funny. As an angry, gothy punk rock kid in my 20s, Berkeley was the last place I'd ever go to. I'd never leave San Francisco. I was such a snob. I thought Berkeley was all hippies. Now, when I go to the Bay Area, certain specific neighborhoods are exactly the same—the Tenderloin, the 14th Street Mission BART station, the 24th Street Mission BART station. Those three places came to mind, for whatever reason. But the rest of the city is nuts now. There's a lot more strollers and tech bros.

Talk to me about your Sasquatch opera that's mentioned in the author bio at the end of the book.
I wrote it a couple years ago. It took a long time to get through. It's a love story about Sasquatch and a woman in the forest. It's an insane story, but I really love it and I'm proud of it. I turned it into an opera a couple of years ago and showcased it in New York City, and then I took it to Edinburgh for 30 performances in a row, which was insane and felt really good. But opera is a very expensive thing to produce, and it was hard to get it off the ground. So now I'm like, "I should turn that into a musical." It's a super dark fairy tale kind of musical—but it's about Sasquatch.

What is it about Sasquatch that draws you in?
It's the character, more than anything. The characters that speak most to me are Frankenstein's monster, King Kong, the Elephant Man, the Beast from Beauty and the Beast. Nothing touches me more than a scary monster with intellect and a heart of gold.