The Daily Swarm

17Dots:

This is probably an obligatory opener, but it’s impossible to avoid: The first chapter of the book is devoted to your contention that your experience as a journalist has basically convinced you that interviews are not real conversations in any meaningful sense of the word. The good, or well-crafted, ones may read like two people sitting around talking, but it’s an inherently artificial situation, and so nothing anyone else can really be interpreted as true. I tend to think of them in terms of the original definition of cinéma vérité, which is that they produce their own kind of reality, what the ethnographic filmmaker Jean Rouch, who coined the term, referred to as “the truth of cinema, not the cinema of truth.” Has confronting the fact that interviews can’t be normal conversations had an effect on doing press for this book?

I think it probably affects the person interviewing me more, because I think they have this assumption that because I wrote this piece about the interview process, it’s going to make our interaction more complex. For me, it’s actually in a way made it more straightforward. I guess that essay’s sort of the culmination of having interviewed people for maybe 15 years, and then having spent 5 to 10 years being interviewed a lot. I guess I’ve become comfortable with the idea that none of this is real, and that we’re not quite in the Matrix but it’s close, and that all the things we’re doing are constructions: the way you’re asking questions, the way I’m answering them, the idea that this is going to be published, the premise that somehow this is only happening because I wrote a book. We wouldn’t have this conversation a year ago or two years from now. So because all of these things are at the forefront of my consciousness, now, it actually sort of makes doing interviews easier.