Chuck Palahniuk upon the death of a patient to whom he had grown attached. Palahniuk began writing fiction in his mid-30s. By his account, he started writing while attending workshops for writers that were hosted by Tom Spanbauer, which he attended to meet new friends. Spanbauer largely inspired Palahniuk's minimalistic writing style. When he attempted to publish his novel, "Invisible Monsters", publishers rejected it for being too disturbing. This led him to work on his most famous novel, "Fight Club", which he wrote as an attempt to disturb the publisher even more for rejecting him. Palahniuk wrote this story in his spare
Lullaby (Palahniuk novel) these segments as a way to set up his "hidden gun" and as a means to foreshadow where the story is going. His present seems disconnected from the past that he narrates throughout the rest of the novel. The final chapter concludes in the present, providing the puzzle-piece that strings together all the events and makes sense out of the backstory and their current workings searching for "phenomenons". In 1999 Chuck's father, Fred Palahniuk, began dating an Idaho woman named Donna Fontaine. Fontaine had recently put her ex-husband Dale Shackleford in prison for sexual abuse. Shackleford had vowed to kill