Jonathan Ames, 51, is a US novelist, confessional writer and creator of the HBO TV comedy Bored to Death starring Jason Schwartzman as a fictional Ames. His new series, Blunt Talk, with Patrick Stewart, will be screened in the US in August. His novel Wake Up, Sir, has just been published in the UK.

Why has it taken 10 years for Wake Up, Sir to be published in this country?
I don’t know why exactly. I assumed it was because I was an American who was paying homage to Wodehouse, and as I had a character named Jeeves, I thought this would be viewed as sacrilegious, an act of disrespect. But really it was an act of devotion.

Your Jeeves may be an imaginary voice in your protagonist’s head. Have you ever had an internal voice guiding you?

I did actually. It’s part of where the book came from. In the early 1990s I used to find myself on the outer edges of Times Square in very strange bars. Dark places, where dark things were happening. It was all right to be there for a little while, collecting information like an anthropologist, but if I stayed too long bad things might happen. So I would say to myself “Home, Jeeves” as if there were a Jeeves inside me that might take me home. It worked about 40% of the time.

And the 60% of the time ?

Well, if you read some of my essay collections…

Yes, you wrote the essay “I shit my pants in the south of France”. You’ve led a rich and varied life.

Or impoverished and varied.

You’ve been a model, boxer and an extra in a porn film. What was the most fun?

I was a model when I was 20. A long time ago. I remember this one job I had, it required me to lie in a pair of boxer shorts underneath three beautiful women, including Beverly Johnson, this famous model. I did 500 sit-ups the night before, but that wasn’t a very interesting job. I took the money and went to Europe and got into a fight in a bar in Paris and got my nose broken, so that was the end of my modelling career. The porn extra was a fun job. But probably the best job I ever had was driving a taxi.

You also joined the army. What happened there?

While in college I was in the army, which meant that twice a week you had to put on a uniform and march and do all sorts of things. After two years I knew I was not cut out for the military. I couldn’t march at all. I couldn’t read a map. I couldn’t fix a gun. I couldn’t do anything. So I became a conscientious objector. It was complicated but I was able to get out of the army, otherwise I probably would have been in the first Iraq war. Although maybe I would have avoided it because I was so incompetent.

Not to touch on tender territory, I was disappointed when Bored to Death was cancelled. What happened?

I don’t know – they must have had their business reasons. But they gave me a good run. Three seasons. Better than one season or no season. I say that complaining about having one’s TV show cancelled, especially on HBO, is like complaining about having caviar between your teeth.

You based Ted Danson’s character, George Christopher, partly on Christopher Hitchens. Then there’s your interest in Jeeves, and now Patrick Stewart is starring in your new series. Is there a theme of anglophilia here?

I don’t know that I was ever exactly an anglophile but in my early 20s I was seeking an identity of some kind. I went to Princeton, and to find an identity I began to dress like a young gentleman you might have found in the stories of Somerset Maugham or Evelyn Waugh. I’m Jewish so I called it religious cross-dressing. But I’ve mostly outgrown that now, although I still don’t have an identity.

You’re currently living in LA, which tends to view alcohol as problematic. As someone who wrote an autobiographical graphic novel called The Alcoholic, is it problematic for you?
When I was younger it was problematic at times because I would behave stupidly and self-destructively and was always going from explosions to total abstentions. Now, later in life, I don’t like getting too intoxicated because I don’t like the hangovers. But to be frank, I do enjoy marijuana, a more gentle drug than alcohol.

You’ve written in the past about escapades with prostitutes and smoking crack with transsexuals. Do you find that your reputation goes before you?

When I was doing all that it was pre-internet. So I would write something and I knew it would be out for a week and then disappear. Then I collected it in a book, and I thought if someone went to the trouble of reading a book they would see the context of things and maybe not judge me too terribly. There was a time when maybe women read my books after they met me, and they were disturbed. But a lot of times it was the books that made women interested in me – because they were dirty.

Will you return to confessional writing?

I guess it was a young man’s choice to write autobiographically. I’m not necessarily a narcissist. A narcissist doesn’t have a capacity for empathy, and I would hope that I have empathy. Like many artists, I looked in the mirror to find the world. If and when I’m lucky enough to get back to novels, maybe, who knows, I’d draw upon myself again.

Are you not fearful of being smothered by material success in LA and dragged, like Scott Fitzgerald and many other novelists, into the well-decorated comforts of screenwriting.

I’ve had material comfort come to me well into my middle age, but I still live in a minimal way. I don’t have much clothing or many possessions. What I like is to go out to dinner and not worry about the bill so much. At the moment it’s the path I’m on. When my luck runs out, I hope I can go back to teaching and write books, if I’m able to write.

Wake Up, Sir! is published by Pushkin Press (£8.99). Click here to buy it for £7.19