I first came across Anthony Swofford’s work when I read Jarhead, his spare and powerful memoir based on his time as a Marine sniper during the first Gulf War. Later I became entranced with his fiction, editing some of his shorter work for an anthology. When Swofford lived in the Bay Area we would sometimes play poker together. I would wait until he got drunk and then I would take his money. For the record, I needed it more than he did. Now Swofford lives in New York. I’ve been waiting years to read his novel. The wait for me and the other fans of his work has finally come to an end with the publication of his first novel, Exit A. We spoke while sharing beers and tacos in many different bars over a long night on the Lower East Side.

—Stephen Elliott

ANTHONY SWOFFORD: Anything can be rejected. I wouldn’t be surprised if some people would have said, “Oh yeah, Swofford got lucky with Jarhead because not everybody goes to the Marine Corps and there’s a war, but let’s see if he can write a novel.” I was happy about the novel being accepted. I needed this novel to be my next book. In many ways that has more to do with not wanting to be identified as a military writer as much as not wanting to be identified as a memoirist. And yeah, I think you have to write novels to be a writer in America, or anywhere in the Western world.

BLVR: A few years ago we were at a party, or maybe it was a poker game, and I remember I introduced you to someone. Probably that dope fiend Andy Miller. Anyway, I introduced you as a memoirist. You corrected me. You said, “Novelist.” So now, with the publication of Exit A, people will most likely do that, classify you as a novelist.

AS: I don’t know that I necessarily want to be categorized as a novelist, either.

BLVR: You can’t keep changing your mind.

AS: You know, I intend to publish a book of poems. How I write something depends on the what of it. The memoir was the right form for writing about my time in the Marine Corps, for the first Gulf War. It was the best way for me to write it. In this case, with Exit A, I was excited about these different characters inhabiting all these new places. In the end, the novel is much more expansive than the memoir. The memoir form is limited by one’s lived life, rendered with language and tone and pacing and all of...