Gaiman got his start as a journalist-for-hire, in England. He didn’t go to college. His first book was a Duran Duran biography he finished in three months, using a clip file from the BBC; next, he wrote a biography of Douglas Adams, in the style of Douglas Adams....
The pivotal fact of Gaiman’s childhood is one that appears nowhere in his fiction and is periodically removed from his Wikipedia page by the site’s editors. When he was five, his family moved to East Grinstead, the center of English Scientology, where his parents began taking Dianetics classes. His father, a real-estate developer, and his mother, a pharmacist, founded a vitamin shop, G & G Foods, which is still operational. (According to its Web site, it supplies the Human Detoxification Programme, a course of vitamins, supplements, and other alleged purification techniques, which Scientology offers at disaster sites like Chernobyl and Ground Zero.) In the seventies, his father, who died last year, began working in Scientology’s public-relations wing and over time rose high in the organization. Gaiman has two younger sisters, both still active in Scientology; one of them works for the church in Los Angeles, and the other helps run the family businesses.
At times, Scientology proved awkward for the Gaiman children. According to Lizzy Calcioli, the sister who stayed in England, “Most of our social activities were involved with Scientology or our Jewish family. It would get very confusing when people would ask my religion as a kid. I’d say, ‘I’m a Jewish Scientologist.’ ” Gaiman says that he was blocked from entering a boys’ school because of his father’s position and had to remain at the school he’d been attending, the only boy left in a classroom full of girls. These days, Gaiman tends to avoid questions about his faith, but says he is not a Scientologist. Like Judaism, Scientology is the religion of his family, and he feels some solidarity with them. “I will stand with groups when I feel like they’re being properly persecuted,” he told me.
Having been brought up in two traditions, Gaiman is flexible in his devotions. “I’m terribly good at believing things, but I’m really good at believing things when I need them,” he said. “Which in my case tends to be if I’m writing about them.” If he had not been a writer, he says, he would have wanted to design religions. “I’d have a little shop, and people would phone up or come into the shop and they’d say, ‘I’d like a religion,’ ” he said. “And I’d say, ‘Cool, O.K. Where do you stand on guilt, and how do you want to fund it? And would you like sort of a belief in the universe as a huge beneficent organ? Or would you like something more complex?’ And they’d say, ‘Oh, we’d like God to be really big on guilt.’ And I’d say, ‘O.K., how does Wednesday sound to you as a sacred day?’ ”....
Stephin Merritt says that Gaiman “wants to make bigger and bigger productions until finally they’re big enough to live in.” Shaped by the fanciful side of his imagination—the part of him that can refer to things as “derelicty”—his surroundings at home almost qualify. For nearly twenty years, he has lived in a rural outpost in Wisconsin. His house is a brick Queen Anne from the eighteen-eighties, with a shingled turret and a porch; a shaggy creeper covers its back half like a shrugged-off winter coat. Inside, the house is divided into Dog and Cat, the latter the domain of five cats, including a white one named Princess and a blind one that lives in the attic. Dog belongs to an eighty-pound white German shepherd that Gaiman picked up on the side of the road and named Cabal, after King Arthur’s hound. There is a garden, full of bearded irises and wild strawberries, and, near a stream in the woods, a clearing with four beehives painted lavender, yellow, green, and red. At the bottom of the garden is a wooden gazebo, where Gaiman goes to read and write. The handyman who helps maintain the property is burly, and missing several teeth; he goes by the name Woodsman Hans. (This is also his Twitter handle; everyone in Gaiman’s entourage, including the person who helps him tend the bees, tweets.) Gaiman’s assistant Lorraine—purple hair extensions, the fiddle player in a Celtic band—responds to Quiche. One room of the house is furnished completely with sofas and cushions in the shape of sushi rolls. There is elderflower cordial in the fridge....
Comics, science fiction, and fantasy conventions are nowadays something of a hardship for Gaiman—“like being a maggoty log at a woodpecker convention,” he says....
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