Tucker Max on empathy, assholery and getting older

​Tucker Max is living the dream. Since his early twenties, the author of Assholes Finish First has been getting blackout drunk, chasing women and generally indulging every hedonistic whim toward the end of compiling the stories of his wild and often shockingly hilarious exploits (one ends in him covered in his own feces, for example) into book form.

He hit on that formula with 2006's I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, which has been on the New York Times bestseller list since its release, and now he's doing it again. In advance of his book signing tonight at the Tattered Cover, Westword caught up with Max to talk Assholes, empathy versus narcissism, and growing up and out of it.

Westword: Is Assholes Finish First going to be basically in the same narrative vein as I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, like a collection of stories?
Tucker Max: It's almost exactly the same. It's a collection of stories just like Beer in Hell. The thing that's a little bit different about Assholes Finish First -- because it's the same voice, same style, same subject matter -- what's a little bit different is, the second half of Assholes Finish First is what I call the "post-fame sex stories." It's sort of a collection of stories that do have kind of an underlying theme, and the theme is just sort of how weird and different it is when girls come to you. Like, you know, when you're just a normal guy, even if you have good game, you've got to go out and pick up girls. Once you become famous -- or infamous, or whatever -- then you get girls who start coming to you to hook up. And I still got into all sorts of weird, crazy situations, but they were just different. And so that's sort of the theme of the second half of the book.

WW: That's interesting, because it seems from what you've written before that you enjoy the chase, or the challenge of winning girls over by being a dick, right? But when girls are approaching you because you're famous, that kind of changes the dynamic. Do you miss the chase?
TM: Yeah, that's a good question, and, I mean, it's different. In some ways it's better, man. I'd be a liar if I said there's nothing good about girls coming to me to hook up [laughs]. Like of course, there's an obvious benefit to that. But then, on the other hand, you're right, man, hooking up does lose some of what made it fun, which is kind of the challenge and the game and the interaction with somebody else. You know, everything in life is a trade-off, and the issue that I explore is what's good about it and what's bad about it.

WW: I want to talk about this persona that you've cultivated, which is basically "I'm the world's biggest asshole."
TM: Well, I don't think I'm the world's biggest. There are other guys who are bigger assholes than me. I'm a big one who writes about it.

WW: That's fair. I wonder, though, how you came to fall into that kind of role, like "I'm a dick and this what I do."
TM: Well, I didn't just take an identity and then go fit it. I just kind of was who I was, and it's just about... You know, I say "asshole" in the title of the book, but there's lots of ways to use "asshole." The way I use it is just to say, "I'm going to do what I want, the way I want, and I'm not going to change up my style to please somebody who says I need to be a certain way that I don't want to be."

So that sort of devil-may-care, I'm-going-to-do-what-I-want-without-regard-to-the-consequences thing, a lot of people perceive that as asshole-ish, so I'm like, okay, fine, call me an asshole. You know, I'm going to be who I am. And the title is a play on the aphorism "Nice guys finish last," you know. So I just thought Assholes Finish First was a cool-sounding title, and nobody's used it before, so let's use it.