Florida’s sardonic Carl Hiaasen is best known for his acid-tongued, politically themed, hilarious satire-cum-crime thrillers like Nature Girl, Skin Tight, and Basket Case, as well as critically heralded novels for young adults (Hoot, Flush). But how would he fare if he set his sights on the comparatively genteel landscape of world-class golf courses? The answer can be found in his newest book, The Downhill Lie, due out next month. Fans of Hiaasen’s ghoulishly absurd sensibilities — both as a novelist and as a longtime columnist for the Miami Herald — may be disappointed to find that toxic waste, rabid dogs, corrupt public officials, gleefully deviant plastic surgeons, and hair-trigger dismemberments play no role in this warm-hearted golfing memoir. They will, however, be pleased to discover that Hiaasen is as merciless in describing himself as he ever was in crafting the characters that populate his fiction. Hiaasen the golfer is shown precious little mercy from Hiaasen the author — and thank goodness for that.

After Oprah publicly stripped A Million Little Pieces author James Frey, it’s a dangerous time to publish a memoir. Let’s take this opportunity right now to detail how much of your memoir is pure hogwash.
[Laughs.] Every word in there is true as best I can remember it, unfortunate as that may be. The day-by-day journals are meticulous quotes. I carefully quoted my friends, who cringed at it all. I mutilated the backs of scorecards, napkins, any scrap of paper I could get my hands on — just typical, seat-of-the-pants journalism stuff. You scribble on anything to try to remember what you need to report. But it was weird crucifying myself. I usually save the big nails for the bad guys.

You’ve said in the past that writing is a form of therapy for you. Is writing a memoir more or less therapeutic than writing novels?
With a novel, you work out your demons, all the stuff going on in your head for whatever reasons, good or bad. I know I’m repeating a cliche there, [but] whatever frame of mind you’re in, it’s going to end up on the page when you’re writing a novel. People who say there’s no autobiographical connection to novels are full of crap. If what you’re writing’s worthwhile, your book’s going to say a lot about who you are at the time.

And I think that’s even truer when you’re writing humor, especially satire. Somewhere deep in your motivation is anger and outrage. The greatest satirists of all time have been pretty angry folks — not always angry at themselves, but at the world around them. That’s what satire is: You’re targeting something, and it helps if you’re a little angry. [Laughs.]

Downhill Lie was a lot more personal. Certainly, my personality ends up on the page, but I’m not accustomed as a novelist or a journalist to writing about my family or myself. I don’t do it in my newspaper column. The novels are obviously coming from someplace else. To write about my father after all these years, it brought back a lot of memories. It was a different process. I don’t know if therapy is the right word, but it certainly was useful and meaningful to me. I don’t know the value for most people of looking back at when you were six years old, but it was valuable to me. I found a lot of affection for my life.

One of the terrific things about The Downhill Lie is the friction that’s generated when you, with all of your cynicism and smart-aleck attitude, hit the golf course, which requires a calm, optimistic outlook.
Yeah. Exactly! [Laughs.] I think every writer is burdened in some way. The spouses and girlfriends and boyfriends of writers will tell you a writer is hard to live with. It’s not an easy gig, dealing with a writer’s psychological baggage. You’re only as good as the last thing you wrote, after all. And writers are their own worst editors, their own toughest critics. So it’s a bad combination for a writer to get into a sport that requires eternal optimism and confidence and a glass-half-full personality. Most writers don’t think there’s even a drink of water in the glass. That’s how I went into golf. It was ugly.

Ugly, and apparently addictive, too. No matter how badly you played, you couldn’t quite help yourself, could you?
I wanted to get at the addictive quality of this sport. Even after years and years of not touching a club — in fact, not even entertaining it as a possibility — I started hacking around a few years ago. All of a sudden you hit a couple of good shots, and you’re right back in it, thinking you could be a contender.

Golf is diabolical that way. The sensible side of your brain, the logic, can look at the hours you were out there and only hit one good nine-iron. Sensibly, you should go home and take up bowling. But that one good shot is enough to get you up and out there again the next morning, even though you know the pain that awaits you. That’s the human spirit — knowing there’s pain and humiliation out there, but doing it anyway.

Is that your life’s philosophy, or is that limited to the golf course?
I don’t think I have a life’s philosophy that’s worth repeating. Working in the newspaper business one’s entire adult life doesn’t necessarily give one the rosiest outlook. You go through life always with a certain skepticism about everything, but you can’t go into any of it with low expectations. Even if you’re covering the political race, you can’t go in there with low expectations. Even if you’re covering the Miami Dolphins, you can’t go there with low expectations. You have to be open to being seduced so you can do your job.

With golf, you get seduced quickly, and if you had a life philosophy, golf would shred it and reassemble it — quickly. I was reduced, almost daily, to thinking only one thing: I’m going to nudge this little white ball into that hole over there.

That said, I think a good, patient golfer is most likely a pretty happy person. If you can be well-adjusted on the golf course, and keep a steady and stable outlook, you can probably be okay anywhere.

I couldn’t help but appreciate the irony that in The Downhill Lie you apologize to PETA for hacking at a few frogs with your golf club, but you didn’t need to say you’re sorry for dropping a man into a wood chipper in Skin Tight, one of your novels.
I know I’ll get some flak over the frogs, even with the apology. But I had to make a split-second decision when it came to those frogs. My wife and kids were in the house, and these frogs were coming in. I’d do it again in a second.

It’s very difficult now to write a satirical piece of fiction that isn’t eclipsed by real-life events and real-life absurdity. One of the great challenges of doing what I do in the year 2008 is figuring out how to stay ahead of the great curve of absurdity of real life. You read the strangest stories and you get sad because someone actually did that stupid thing for real before you could make it up and use it in your novel. After they’ve done it, you can’t really use it anymore. Once upon a time, if you thought of something strange enough, you had gold. But today, reality is more bizarre than the imagination. Even mine. I don’t know how I’m going to stay funnier than real life.

When I first came to your books about ten years ago, they were so outlandish, so garish, so hilarious, I figured someone must have dropped Carl Hiaasen on his head. Today, it feels like someone dropped the entire planet on its head.
Well, I’m not well, that’s for sure. [Laughs.] My poor mother, God bless her, she’s very proud of what I’ve accomplished. But I also know deep down she’s highly concerned about me. That’s why she thought golfing was a good thing for me. It struck her as almost normal. Her little boy had taken up a pastime that was socially acceptable.

You once said that as soon as you have a guy with a pit bull on his arm for half your book, as you have, “you’ve pretty much left Updike territory.” Where do you think you stand in the literary landscape?
I don’t know. I’m very grateful to have the fans that I have. They’re very loyal, and they’re obviously as sick as I am, and I say thank you God for that. But what I’m trying to do, even with the kids’ novels, is reach people who really care about the world. Most of my readers get that I’m not just trying to be funny. I’m actually writing about stuff that ticks me off. The kids especially get that. The letters I get from kids are astonishing. For a certifiably committed cynic like me to get letters from kids who want to know what they can do to get out there and help stop global warming or preserve their local parks, it blows me away. When I was in sixth or seventh grade, to tell you the truth, I don’t think I had any political awareness at all until John Kennedy was assassinated. That’s when my generation’s world got turned upside down. But kids today are really plugged in. They care. And it reminds me of the reason I write, even if I have to be a little less cynical to admit that.

So much of Downhill Lie feels like a valentine to your old man and a big hug to your own fatherhood. What do you think your father would make of you today?
I know he would be extremely proud. When he passed away, I had done a couple of books as a ghost writer, but nobody knew my name. I was a newspaperman, and he was proud of me even then. I think we would have spirited debates over politics, because I’m about 180 degrees from where he was. And I don’t know how some of my humor would fly. [Laughs.] But he’s the one that bought me my first typewriter when I was six years old. I think he’d be happy to know I’m using it still. I think he’d be highly pleased, too, to know that I’m out there on the golf course. Maybe he wouldn’t like my swing so much, but he’d be happy I was still trying.

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J. Rentilly writes about film, music, literature, and pop culture. He lives in Los Angeles.