What's Eating Zachary German?

What’s Eating Zachary German? The story behind the tiny book that people are planning to use to define you

ZACHARY GERMAN IS sitting at a table in the back of Coffee Time.The cafe is on the corner of Bleecker Street and Bowery. Zachary has short brown hair and is wearing oversized glasses and a tie underneath a sweater. He is drinking an iced soy latte. It’s 5 o’clock.

That’s an example of the syntax of the author, dog-walker and dropout’s debut book, Eat When You Feel Sad (out Feb. 9). Annoyed yet? Or... strangely charmed?

“I kinda wanted to write about stuff I knew, like young people hanging out,” German says in a cheerful monotone. “But there are a lot of books like that... I wanted to see what would happen if I took minimalism a bit further. So I made up some rules for structure. Like if you look at the sentences, they’re all subject, predicate, maybe object. I was doing it for fun, and I just kept doing it, and it kept being fun and eventually it became a book.”

Robert, the directionless protagonist, mainly eats tofu scramble, listens to music, reads, hangs out, masturbates and walks from room to room. In case you lose track, there’s a 10-page index of the book’s cultural references in the back, from the Black Lips (they’ve “gotten consistently shittier... their career is an apt metaphor for my life”) to Organic Fruit Rolls to Snakes on a Plane.

That you are what you eat, read and consume is the definition of hipster youth culture, but Robert isn’t really hip, per se.

Standing in an American Apparel store, he realizes, “If I worked here my life would be different, or I would need to have a different life in order to work here, or something.”

He goes to work; we don’t know where— this, like where he lives, is left deliberately vague, because Robert is sort of the Everyman for a certain subculture of directionless middle-class dropouts. He goes places. People drift in and out of his life. He dates girls who wear nightgowns and breaks up with them for non-reasons and apologizes after asking them to make out.

He doesn’t talk much, but he thinks a lot:

“I’m sorry everyone else has problems. I don’t know what to do. I’m vegan.”We may not always like Robert, but we know Robert.

“He doesn’t know what he wants at all,” says German, although he notes that Robert isn’t based on him. “He’s just looking for something, and he doesn’t even know what he’s looking for. I did feel that way and maybe I still do, and it seemed like a lot of people I knew did.”

From there our conversation went something like this:

I read your blog [“Every time a police officer gets shot I throw a party”], and have to ask: Why do you hate cops so much?

I just hate them! I hate cops!

Is it because they’re a personification of state control?

Yeah, but in real life, I don’t even care... I feel like death is state control anyway, and you can’t really hate death.

People in your book don’t have run-ins with cops...

No, we’re just white, middle-class people. None of the people in my book have any problems, I don’t think. Like, there was a time when there were people in my book with problems, but I took them out.

So you dropped out of high school? You just quit?

I was a little dickwad, I wanted to do my own thing or whatever.

What was the first kind of stuff you wrote?

Melodramatic science fiction, and I wrote a really long piece about a bunch of celebrities partying on a yacht, but that didn’t really go anywhere.

You work as a dog-walker? You walk dogs every day?

Monday through Friday in Hell’s Kitchen. It’s really fun.

And is it the same dogs every day?

Yeah.We have relationships. But back to the book...

German is working on his next novel; the style will be completely different. “I don’t think there are any quotation marks, it’s all narration.The sentences are kind of flowing and painterly,” he says, his deliberately oversized glasses slipping down his nose. As for the subject matter: “Exactly the same. It’s still about hanging out. It takes off where this one left off... but on acid.”