In October of 2021, Brent Spiner released his first book, Fan Fiction: A Mem-Noir. Back in April, I had the chance to get caught up with him to discuss the book, his favorite films, and even his character in Star Trek: Picard season 2, who had, at that point, only appeared in two episodes.

Why not simply write a memoir, rather than a fictional story inspired by real people and events?

Writing a memoir was never something I really wanted to do. I had a really nice literary agent come to me and say, “Hey, we’d be interested in having you write a memoir.” And I told them I didn’t really want to do a memoir because my life, although it’s interesting to me, I don’t know how interesting the breadth of my life is for other people. I mean, it’s not that unusual a life, other than I got to be an actor and work with some really great people.

But then I said, I have a story that I’d like to write, and I can weave in some true things about my life, but I’d rather put it in the context of this black comic quasi-thriller.

So, this was a story you’d been thinking about, and the agent approaching you was just the trigger?

Yeah. And even then, I really didn’t expect to write it, but the pandemic happened, and I had a lot of time on my hands. I teamed up with a woman named Jeanne Darst, who is a wonderful writer. We had crossed paths before, because she had written for Blunt Talk, the series that Patrick [Stewart] starred in, that I did a few episodes of.

I actually had dinner with Jonathan Ames, who’s a fantastic novelist and television writer, and I asked him to have dinner with me and let me pitch this story to him, and he said, “You’ve got to write this book.” And then he recommended Jeanne, and ironically, so did the literary agent. And we met and we got along really well, and I appreciated her sense of humor, and she mine. So, she helped me a lot on the book. She sort of guided me and kept me on track. Certainly, her words are in the book, but primarily she was an inspiration to me.

So, we wrote a treatment and the agent pitched it to a number of publishers, and St. Martin’s Press wanted to do it, and I didn’t have a choice at that point.

It’s clear from reading Fan Fiction that you’re a fan of film noir. What are some of your favorite noir films, and did you use any of them as inspiration for the book?

I tried to drop in as many [film noir references] as I could. They’re subtle sometimes. There’s a little bit of Dressed to Kill in there, and all kinds of little twists and turns that I put in because they were inspired by the films, basically.

I mention Laura. I’m in the video store and they’re playing it on the screen. Laura is one of my favorites, for a lot of reasons. I’m a big Dana Andrews fan. I think he’s an underrated talent, who is always good. He’s just better than you ever imagine he’s going to be. And the music is so great in Laura. Famously, the music was so popular that Johnny Mercer wrote lyrics to it later, and they released it after the film was out. The lyrics are never in the film, but that beautiful, haunting theme is there.

I love all of those things, like The Glass Key and the one with Alan Ladd and Robert Preston and Veronica Lake [This Gun for Hire]. What’s interesting about that film was, second choice for the role was DeForest Kelley, and he would have had a whole different career had he gotten that part.

Fan Fiction opens with you receiving a package with a pig’s penis in it. I’m going to assume that you never received a pig penis in the mail, but have you ever experienced any scary fan incidents?

Not really “scary,” but unusual fan experiences. You know, there’s that story in the book about somebody being on my roof and taking a tile. Well, that really happened. I mean, not like that, exactly. I fictionalized the fact that somebody stole a tile from my roof.

In general, the fans have been really sweet, and I have no complaints about Star Trek fans. They’re the most devoted [fans]. It’s enviable to have fans like that. I haven’t had many negative experiences with the fans.

There are a number of fans in the book. While things could easily go from making them a part of the joke to making them the butt of the joke, that never happens. How do you walk that fine line?

I’m a fan, too. I really do think fandom is something we all participate in. I mean, everybody, every actor I know, every person I know, there’s somebody they admire, and they are enchanted by and overwhelmed by being in their company. Part of the point of the book was that everybody’s a fan, and everyone in the book is a fan in some way.

There were some things in the book that were based on fact, even though they didn’t happen the way they happened in the book, necessarily. I did meet Gregory Peck once in my life, but not quite in that fashion. [An embarrassing incident in a men’s room.]

That sequence came in late. I put it in the book later, because I said, “There’s something missing here, and what’s missing is me being a fan.” And I said, “I really think that’s important,” because I really am a huge fan. Part of the reason, and the richest part of having been in show business, and why I wanted to be in the “big game” is because I wanted to rub shoulders with people I admired. I’ve been lucky I’ve gotten to meet so many amazing people!

And that’s what made it just a phenomenal career for me. Not just what I got to play, but who I got to play with, including my buddies on Star Trek.

There’s a lot of dream imagery in Fan Fiction. Do you have vivid dreams?

I’ll tell you what, I dream so much that I look forward to going to sleep at night, just to wonder, “Where am I going tonight?” When I wake up and I can’t remember, I’m so disappointed because I know I was someplace interesting. I think dreams are one of the most interesting things about humans. Some people think of dreams as a real reflection of what their lives are, where they’ve been, the people they know. But then all these other people show up in your dreams that you’ve never met before, that your mind just made up. And they have names and faces. Who are they???

I just think dreams are fascinating. I remember having a dream one time, and my oldest friend was in the dream with me. I was talking to him, and I went, “Wait a minute. This is a dream.” And he turned to somebody else and said, “He knows. He knows,” and they said, “Wake him up!” And I woke up!

Are you as neurotic as you claim to be in the book?

Some people would say I am, I guess. But no. The “me” in the book is not really me. I did a web series called Fresh Hell, and I play myself in that, too, and that’s not really me. I did a short a few years ago called Brentwood that’s also not really me. It’s now become trendy to be “meta,” as they say, and play yourself. But I’ve done it so many times. I played myself in an episode of Joey. And the writers asked me, “What do you want your character to be?” And I said, “Just make him really awful.”

In every case, they’re different takes on who I am, and none of them are really me. There’s some piece of me in all of them.

It takes a lot of courage as an actor to present yourself as “awful” or “neurotic” in a book or on TV. You run the risk of people believing that’s who you are.

Well, some people did. Every now and then there’d be a comment [about Fan Fiction], “What a jerk he is!” or that I was a misogynist. I didn’t see that at all. I’d love to meet face-to-face someone who’d say that to me, because I’d love to say, “Give me an example.” I mean, also, I was writing with a very progressive woman who would not have let me get away with anything like that.

I was writing about a younger version of myself, and that was really fun, too, to kind of get into my head of what I was like 35 years ago. So, that was the “me” then, anyway, but not really the “me” then, but closer to the “me” then than I am now.

One of the characters in Fan Fiction is Sol Mintz, your stepfather. Was he as abusive in real life as he is in the book?

Yeah, he was. At the end of the book, in a dream, I forgive him. He did have an aneurism, and the pressure that put on his brain may have been what created that sort of anger and fury that was in him. I think he was, believe it or not, well-intentioned. It wasn’t just to be mean or just to be violent. I think he thought he was, like a lot of fathers at that time, doing what you do with boys. You discipline them. Discipline is everything, and he kind of overdid it. I mean, we [Spiner and his brother, Ron] had ridiculous punishments, that I don’t even get into in the book. We couldn’t talk to anybody, see anybody, talk on the phone, pick up the phone. We couldn’t do anything. But he had gone to military school, and I think he brought a lot of that into relationships with him. I don’t think he was a bad guy; I just think he was misguided.

Have you forgiven him?

Yeah, I think I have. I was about 15 or 16 when he died. My mother wasn’t married to him any longer at that point. But I wonder what our relationship would have been if I was an adult, and able to give him a piece of my mind. I would have forgiven him. There were times, even after my mother left him, that I felt sorry for him.

Fan Fiction is largely a dark comedy, featuring many types of humor. What’s your favorite type of humor?

I wouldn’t say I have a favorite because I just like all kinds of comedy. I’m actually reading the Buster Keaton biography right now. As far as film comedy goes, my favorites are the silent guys. I mean, Keaton and Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy. As I said in the book, if somebody doesn’t like Laurel and Hardy, I can’t trust them completely.

I worshipped people like Peter Sellers and Alec Guinness, and I thought, “That’s what I want to do, is what they’re doing. Try to play as many characters as I can. And there was a period in my High School years where it was people like Jack Lemmon and Dick van Dyke and people like that. And I got to meet them and work with them. But you know, I’m appreciative of anyone who can find humor in the world.

Some actors just go to the set, play their part, and then go home. You seem to be not just an actor, but a “storyteller,” which comes through in your book, and also in your performances and a couple of albums you’ve released. What interests you about storytelling?

You know, some of us just never lose the “kid” in ourselves. When we’re little, we all play at being other things and let our imaginations go wild. And some of us just never get over that. That’s sort of the category I fit into. I just never got over the fun that I had as a kid, pretending to be somebody else.

In Star Trek: Picard season 2, you play Adam Soong, the earliest Soong ancestor we’ve met to date, who is basically a contemporary of us. Is there a different way you need to think about playing a present-day character as opposed to one who is alive hundreds of years in the future?

I don’t think so. I mean, acting is acting. You just try to find nuggets of truth where you can and try to make it believable. Most of it depends on how good the writing is. We’ve had some really great writers on our show, so that always makes the job easier. You just try to illuminate as best you can what they put on the page.

The Soongs are obsessed with cloning and eugenics, and eventually cybernetics. They tend to consider their creations to be their children rather than their flesh-and-blood kids. What is it about them that makes them want to create their progeny artificially, as opposed to the natural way?

They’re all scientists, for one thing, and they’re all narcissists, for another. In every case, they sacrifice the best part of life for their own legacy. In many cases, that’s all it’s about. Their creations are their children, but their children are their creations. I think in the case of Adam Soong, particularly, his child is his project, and that’s what’s primary to him. And I think all the way up to Noonien Soong, really, they’re all his projects. They’re like any narcissist. They can love [their children] to a certain degree, but it’s really how it reflects on them. How it makes them look.

Noonien created Data, and after his failures with Lore and B4, his success with Data is particularly satisfying because it’s his achievement that’s satisfying. What he’s done, and not so much what Data does.

Does Adam have a natural child?

They’ve never answered that question, and they probably never will. But I did have an idea, and I told [Executive Producer] Akiva Goldsman and he went, “I don’t ever want you to say that again.”

It’s basically this: we’ve met Picard’s [ancestor, Renée, played by Penelope Mitchell]. If Soong impregnated Renée, in the future that would mean [Noonien] Soong and Data and Picard were actually related. But it was too much.

If you’ll excuse me, I have to go write some fan fiction now…

If you’d like to read the rest of my interview with Brent Spiner, in which we discuss Sherlock Holmes, Star Trek: The Next Generation, and whether he prefers Holmes or Dixon Hill, pick up a copy of the Summer 2022 issue of Sherlock Holmes Magazine, out now.