Douglas Coupland - Microserfs To All Families Are Psychotic

Microserfs To All Families Are Psychotic

In 1994, Coupland was working for the newly-formed magazine Wired. While there, Coupland wrote a short story about the life of the employees at Microsoft Corporation. This short work provided the inspiration for a novel, Microserfs. To research the culture that the novel depicted, Coupland had moved to Palo Alto, California and immersed himself in Silicon Valley life. By coincidence, Coupland released Microserfs in the same week that Microsoft released the Windows 95 operating system.

Coupland followed Microserfs with his first collection of non-fiction pieces, in 1996. Polaroids from the Dead is a manifold of stories and essays on diverse topics, including: Grateful Dead concerts; Harolding; Kurt Cobain's death; the visiting of a German reporter; and a comprehensive essay on Brentwood, California, written at the time of the O. J. Simpson murder case and the anniversary of Marilyn Monroe's death.

That same year Coupland toured Europe to promote Microserfs, but the high workload brought on fatigue and mental strain. He reportedly incorporated his experience with depression during this period into his next novel, Girlfriend in a Coma. Coupland noted that this was his last novel to be "…written as a young person, the last constructed from notebooks full of intricate observations".

In 1998, Coupland contributed the short story "Fire At The Ativan Factory" to the collection Disco 2000, and in 2000, he published Miss Wyoming.

Coupland then published his photographic paean to Vancouver, City of Glass. The book incorporates sections from Life After God and Polaroids from the Dead into a visual narrative, formed from photographs of Vancouver locations and life supplemented by stock footage mined from local newspaper archives.

Coupland's next novel, All Families Are Psychotic, tells the story of a dysfunctional family from Vancouver coming together to watch their daughter Sarah, an astronaut, launch into space.

In 2004, the dormant Saarinen-designed TWA Flight Center (now Jetblue Terminal 5) at JFK Airport briefly hosted an art exhibition called Terminal 5, curated by Rachel K. Ward and featuring the work of 18 artists including Coupland.