His parents separated when he was 14 years old, and they subsequently divorced, often leaving him and his three siblings to live with their maternal grandparents at their cattle ranch in eastern Washington.

[11] Palahniuk wrote for his local newspaper for a short while but then began working for Freightliner Trucks as a diesel mechanic, continuing until his writing career took off.

[17] After he began receiving attention from 20th Century Fox, Palahniuk was signed by actor and literary agent Edward Hibbert.

[citation needed] Three editions of the novel have been published in paperback: in 1999, in 2004 (with a new introduction by the author about the success of the film adaptation), and in 2005 (with an afterword by Palahniuk).

At that time, his father, Fred Palahniuk, had started dating a woman named Donna Fontaine, whom he had met through a personal ad under the title "Kismet".

[21] Her former boyfriend, Dale Shackelford, had previously been imprisoned for sexual abuse and had vowed to kill Fontaine as soon as he was released from prison.

[23] While on his 2003 tour to promote his novel Diary, Palahniuk read to his audiences a short story entitled "Guts", a sensational tale of accidents involving masturbation, which appears in his book Haunted.

In 2008, Palahniuk spent a week at the Clarion West Writers Workshop, instructing eighteen students about his writing methods and theory of fiction.

[27] Palahniuk has mentioned at book readings that he is working on a musical based on Fight Club with David Fincher and Trent Reznor.

[28] Edward Norton has said that he thinks it is unlikely that he and Brad Pitt, who "can't sing," would reprise their film roles in a musical.

After the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, movie studios apparently deemed the novel too controversial to film because it includes the hijacking and crashing of a civilian airplane.

While little is known about some of these projects, it is known that Jessica Biel was signed on to play the roles of both Shannon and Brandy in Invisible Monsters, which was supposed to begin filming in 2004, but as of 2010[update] was still in development.

[35][36] On September 11, 2014, the film version of Rant was announced, starring James Franco, with Pamela Romanowsky writing and directing.

[37] Palahniuk says that his writing style has been influenced by authors such as the minimalist Tom Spanbauer (whose weekly workshop Palahniuk attended in Portland from 1991 to 1996),[38] Amy Hempel, Mark Richard, Denis Johnson, Joan Didion, Thom Jones, Bret Easton Ellis and philosophers Michel Foucault, Friedrich Nietzsche and Albert Camus.

[39][40][41] In what the author refers to as a minimalistic approach, his writings include a limited vocabulary and short sentences to mimic the way that an average person telling a story would speak.

Repetitions of certain lines or phrases in the story narrative (what Palahniuk refers to as "choruses") are one of the most common characteristics of his writing style, being dispersed within most chapters of his novels.

[44] In an interview with HuffPost, Palahniuk says that "the central message of Fight Club was always about the empowerment of the individual through small, escalating challenges.

He is a regular participant in their events, including the annual Santa Rampage (a public Christmas party involving pranks and drunkenness) in Portland, Oregon.

Falsely believing that he would be outed by Valby after confidentially referring to his male partner, he openly declared his homosexuality on his website.

[51] Once Valby's article was published with no indication of Palahniuk's homosexuality (as she had promised), he publicly apologized for having unfairly smeared and excoriated her on his blog on a false pretense: "I mis-represented, because I mis-remembered, some details about Karen's private life.