So the other week an author called Steve Martin did an interview about his new novel An Object of Beauty in front of a paying audience at a cultural centre in New York. The interviewer was a friend of his, and a regular arts interviewer in the New York Times magazine. They talked mostly about art and the art world, because that was the subject of the novel.
As it turned out, that’s not what the audience was interested in. Complaints made their way to the organisers. Then Martin stopped talking about art and answered a few questions about being a massive Hollywood comedy star. Maybe someone asked him what it was like on the set of Cheaper By the Dozen 2. Then a few days later everyone got refunds.
What do we want from interviews with authors? They are now central to the lives of authors, who are not so much writers as the marketers of their own books. Publishing is a notoriously chancy game. Most books will be unprofitable, but there’s hardly any knowing which ones. The modern marketing circus is the publisher’s attempt to take control of a book’s destiny, give it a little shove out of the door.
But why do we readers buy into it, and what do we actually want to talk about with authors? Most authors are not also Hollywood celebrities, so I guess we’re there because we like their books – or think they’re culturally influential, even if hateful. Are we supposed to ask them what their books mean? Maybe, what events in your own life inspired such-and-such a scene, or this and that phrase?
No author in her right mind is going to answer those kinds of questions, although it’s disturbing how many poets at readings like to go on about what they were thinking as they wrote each piece. I guess that’s just what they think punters want to hear. Proust understood that everyone gives unique meanings to the things they read, and half a century on, Barthes gave it a label: “the death of the author.”
Clearly, quite a lot of authors are alive and kicking – or at least they have publishers pulling their strings. All we can do is try to make the most of it. But that emphatically does not mean asking authors to solve all the problems that their writing throws up. Let’s treat them instead as interesting people in their own right. I want to ask someone, “what question have you never been asked that you would most like to answer?”
But then maybe writers aren’t always the interesting people we think they will be. The chef Julia Child once met one she had admired. “Writers are fine, sensitive beings, aware of the world, the inner tensions, alert, inquiring, and thoroughly superior beings. Well.” It turned out he wasn’t. “I have never been so slapped in the face by a wet fish.”
Somehow you have to be critical as well as receptive, you have to stand up for your readers (who are they?) as well as the art you’re celebrating (or not!). The world does not need more writing advice. Except maybe advice for writing interviews. Ok then, how about this for an opening question: “what do you think this interview is for?”
