How David Duchovny Became an Accomplished Novelist

How David Duchovny Became an Accomplished Novelist

The former star of ‘The X-Files’ has his fourth book in just six years out next week, ‘Truly Like Lightning’


David Duchovny, photographed at his home in New York City, Jan. 11. Axel Dupeux for The Wall Street Journal

By Emily Bobrow
Jan. 29, 2021 11:59 am ET

A lifetime ago, before he starred in “The X-Files” or “Californication,” before his fame as a heartthrob or experiments as a film director, David Duchovny planned to be a writer. As an English literature grad student at Yale in the 1980s, he figured he would make a living as a professor and scribble in his free time. He tinkered with poetry and dabbled in prose, writing a novel that a publisher liked but said needed work. He ground away at a dissertation and started writing plays but sensed that he needed time onstage to hone his ear for dialogue. He tried out for some campus productions, and what began as a lark became a revelation. “I got swept away,” Mr. Duchovny, 60, says over the phone from his home in Malibu, Calif.

After years of academic solitude, acting was a relief, he explains. He enjoyed collaborating with others and finding a more emotional, more vulnerable side of himself. The “athletic, high-wire” nature of performance recalled his time on sports teams (he played basketball at Princeton, from which he graduated in 1982) and drove home how much he had missed “passing the ball around.” Giving life to words on a page felt hard, but it was also fun, whereas pursuing a Ph.D. wasn’t fun at all. To the surprise of those who knew him as shy, soft-spoken and bookish, Mr. Duchovny decided to abandon his dissertation and “keep pushing” at acting. He left that first novel in a drawer.

But a funny thing has happened recently: David Duchovny has become a novelist.

In a mere six years, he has released four novels, all positively reviewed. His latest, “Truly Like Lightning,” out Feb. 2, concerns a large family of devout Mormons—three wives, 10 children and one zealous patriarch, a former pill-popping Hollywood stunt man—who must defend their unconventional, off-the-grid lifestyle and valuable land in the California desert against the rapacious schemes of a young developer. Part family drama, part corporate satire, part philosophical inquiry into the appeal and limits of faith, the novel considers the challenges of reconciling religious belief with the vices and depredations of the 21st century. Kirkus Reviews praised his “characteristically nimble prose” and “the complicated humanity of his multifarious cast.”

‘I don’t want to be falsely humble. This is an ambitious novel for me.’

“I don’t want to be falsely humble. This is an ambitious novel for me,” says Mr. Duchovny. Although he isn’t religious himself (his Jewish father and Scottish mother raised him in Manhattan to believe mainly in books), he writes compellingly about theism and sympathetically about Mormonism, which he finds fascinating for being so “quintessentially American.” He quotes the late Harold Bloom, his former professor at Yale, who famously described Joseph Smith, the 19th-century founder of Mormonism, as “an authentic religious genius” for his blend of Christian scripture and American can-do spirit.

“It couldn’t be more American for someone to get up there and say, ‘As man now is, God once was; as God now is, man may be,’” says Mr. Duchovny, citing Mormon doctrine. He says that writing about a religion that believes in the potential for miracles in our time was a way to write about the pluck and hubris of the U.S. itself.


Mr. Duchovny and his co-star, Gillian Anderson, in the hit series ‘The X-Files,’ 1996.
Photo: Getty Images

Mr. Duchovny is still acting. He lent some star power to “The Craft: Legacy,” a horror film that came out last year; reprised his role as FBI Special Agent Fox Mulder in a reboot of “The X-Files” in 2016 and 2018; and led a period crime drama called “Aquarius” that lasted two seasons before NBC pulled the plug in 2016. He has also been finding his voice as a singer-songwriter, putting out two albums (“Hell or Highwater” in 2015; “Every Third Thought” in 2018). He is at work on a third.

Mr. Duchovny explains that the stories began as ideas for films or shows that never got off the ground. Perhaps, he figured, they should be novels instead. “Then I wouldn’t have to ask for a bunch of money to make them,” he says. “I could just sit on my ass for nothing and do it.” (His debut as a film writer and director, “House of D,” bombed in 2004, despite a cast including Téa Leoni, Erykah Badu and Robin Williams. ) The timing was right for writing books, he adds, because he wanted to spend more time in New York with his two children as they finished high school. (Both are from his marriage with Ms. Leoni; they divorced in 2014.)


Mr. Duchovny says that his work as an actor sharpened his sense for how to move a plot along.
Photo: Axel Dupeux for The Wall Street Journal

Mr. Duchovny started with a light concept that he had pitched as an animated feature about animals who seek refuge overseas to save their hides (a cow sets her sights on India; a pig seeks the safety of dietary laws in Israel). This antic fable became “Holy Cow” (2015), his bestselling debut novel. “I thought, ‘Well, this is satisfying and artistically enriching for me. I want to continue to do it,’” he says.

He chased that first book with two other wry and observant novels, “Bucky F—ing Dent” (2016) and “Miss Subways” (2018). Mr. Duchovny usually rises at dawn to write in the mornings, but the thrill of a story will sometimes wake him in the middle of the night. “It’s a great feeling,” he says. His work as an actor sharpened his sense for how to move a plot along, and his time on stage helped him nail the rhythms of speech after all.

He used to worry that he “didn’t have the goods” to take the risks of solo creation. (One of the charms of collaboration, he notes, is that blame gets shared.) But time, that cruel messenger in Hollywood, can also deliver unexpected gifts. “I had many of these ideas a while ago, but I don’t think I would have been able to execute them as well as I think I have,” he says. He tried writing “Truly Like Lightning” as a script around a decade ago but “didn’t get anywhere. Maybe I wasn’t ready.”

Like his late father, who wrote his first novel at 73, Mr. Duchovny suspects that age and experience have made him a better writer—“or maybe not a better writer. A better thinker, maybe.” Or perhaps, he says, he is simply better able to embrace the wisdom of his hero, Samuel Beckett, that bard of noble drudgery (“Fail again. Fail better.”). “Everything I do will always fall short of its potential,” Mr. Duchovny says. That is the “frustrating but glorious” nature of writing, acting or anything in which perfection is elusive. “You cannot win,” he says. “But you can try.”

Appeared in the January 30, 2021, print edition as 'David Duchovny.'


The Wall Street Journal

Cool new photos though I don't like his grey beard. lol

Thanks for 'em, Jade.