Why are most author interviews disappointing?
On the impossibility of an adequate writer portrait
Hello again,
For those of you who are new, what follows is one of my occasional thoughts about the writing and publishing process. I send these every now and then in between my monthly listings.
If you’re only interested in hearing about writing opportunities, then don’t fear. You have only a week to wait for the next one, and several listed last month are still open for entries.
And now onto my question for the day: Why are so many author interviews disappointing?
A few hours after reading the now-infamous Wired profile of Brandon Sanderson, I was traipsing around Brussels in the rain, shuttling between various meet-the-author events.
Perhaps because the profile was fresh on my mind, I found myself as interested in what the interviewers had to say as what the authors did. And more importantly, I was in a critical mood. Were these the best questions to ask the writer? Did they really listen to the responses? Did the interviewer act as a good enough representative of the audience, and if not, did they at least leave space for the audience themselves to ask questions?
Sometimes I come away from reading or attending interviews with authors elated and inspired, full of fresh determination and ideas. More often, I end up disappointed. Or rather nonplussed — in both of the word's contradictory senses.
Where do author interviews go wrong?
Here’s my working theory. Author interviews are often one of three things: a) boring b) too focused on the writer’s life as an explanation for their work c) about the interviewer, not the author.
It’s the latter I think most would pick as their criticism of the Brandon Sanderson profile. For those who haven’t read it, writer Jason Kehe goes on a mission to understand why so many people adore the works of a fantasy writer who, by his own admission, is not a terribly good writer (at sentence level). The result is an odd account of the reporter striving and failing to find a story.
I don’t wish to re-litigate the piece here. But I will say that I found it slightly less cruel than others did (oddly the parts I found most distasteful were the insults to Utah’s food scene). I read into it a level of self-awareness on behalf of the reporter. My husband read it and immediately compared it to a piece he and I both love, David Foster Wallace’s ‘Up Simba’, an article about John McCain in which he famously does not get to speak to John McCain. Here he is reading from it on This American Life.
While I don’t think Kehe has achieved anything DFW-worthy, I do think that there’s merit in writing about your own failure to understand a phenomenon. I was a defender of Ella Corey-Wright’s piece in The Fence that did the same of the Sally Rooney hype (an important difference being that Corey-Wright never spoke to Rooney, let alone stayed overnight in her home, before taking any swipes at her in print).
Making a piece about yourself, then, can work. It is certainly one way to avoid the interview being boring. But it can also disappoint a reader who loves — or hates! — an author’s work and was hoping to find out something about them.
This failure is, I find, much worse in a live interview setting. You know the kind. When the chair of what is supposed to be a meet-the-author event can’t help but interject themselves, and sometimes even a plug for their own book, into the discussion. But that is a rather obvious point, so let’s move on.
The paint-by-numbers author interview
I would say that my first critique – that author interviews can be boring – is the most common reason why they are often disappointing. But, much as all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way, there are myriad ways to produce a dull author interview.
One is to trot a list of previously published titles, taking up half an article with what amounts to a Wikipedia page. In the signing queue over the weekend, I asked Max Porter how he finds being interviewed, and he said one issue is that as your body of work grows, it dominates the conversation. You have to find some way to position your latest output in the context of the back catalogue. This sounds like it would make it difficult to say anything fresh.
Another way to produce something boring is to ask only a string of zeitgeist-inflected questions in the search for hot takes. I understand the impulse to do this, because something else lacking from many author interviews is any kind of news line, and by asking them to comment on some hot-button topic, you can instantly get one. But if that’s the sum total of the interview, it feels like a missed opportunity to push the cultural conversation forward. You aren’t really looking for anything new, only addenda to other people’s thoughts.
You could also bore the audience by conducting the interview as ordained by the new book’s marketing campaign, sticking to the points that the author and their publicist want to get across. This is why I don’t usually enjoy podcast interviews with authors. Unless the host has a specific angle for the show — I like Writer’s Routine because it has just such a clear focus — then it’s going to sound the same as every other interview.
What all of these approaches have in common, I suspect, is that they are more likely a result of time constraints, rather than any lack of curiosity on the part of the interviewer. Most will take place in the space of an hour, whether that’s because of the format, or because that’s all the time a reporter has for a piece that there is vanishingly little budget for. I would wager that part of the outrage about the Brandon Sanderson piece was that it was a rare opportunity for the interviewer to spend days speaking to and observing someone in person. Both interviewers and authors alike don’t get that chance very often.
The biographical obsession
When I was reading the Brandon Sanderson profile, I was reminded of this gem of a documentary that I watched recently.
In Margaret Atwood: Once In August, filmmaker Michael Rubbo goes to stay with the legendary Canadian writer and her family on an island in the wilderness. It’s a fascinating film for many reasons. First it captures this beautiful footage of the writer and her family in this idyllic setting, a place that feels familiar from parts of her writing. But it also shows the filmmaker trying to find a solid link between Atwood’s life and her works, and failing.
The YouTube comments are quite critical of Rubbo in his single-mindedness, and indeed it is frustrating watching him question her over and over, looking to find the chink in this lovely life she is leading. In particular, he seems unable to understand how she could have written all these terrible parent characters when her own parents seem like perfectly sweet people – thereby ignoring the long history of literature that uses absent and failing parents as engines of plot. I mean, read a Jane Austen. Dickens. Roald Dahl.
But once again I felt some more sympathy with the interviewer than other commentators. To me, Rubbo is in on his own defeat. Like Kehe, he has made a record of his own failure to fully understand his subject. At one point he even hands his camera over to the Atwoods, who promptly mock his strained efforts by putting a paper bag over Margaret’s head and asking each other faux-seriously: Who is this woman?
Anyway, this brings me back to my second critique, which was that author interviews are often overly obsessed with tying the writer’s biography to their work.
It is a completely understandable impulse. I’ve done it myself. When I spoke to Elizabeth Macneal about her shift from City worker to full-time potter and then best-selling novelist, I couldn’t help but see a parallel to the women in her novels who break out of the restricted options of the Victorian era by pursuing some form of artistic fulfilment.
She acknowledged that there was definitely a parallel. But she also identified that the theme is much broader than her own life. “It’s a rags-to-riches tale. I think novelists are very interested in changes of circumstances and what that can lead people to do.”
I think there is a way to acknowledge the experiences that might have shaped a writer’s outlook, including direct inspiration from a real-life events, while also respecting their imaginations.
There is an attitude that borders on believing that authors must surely be copying everything from their own lives, and that if they don’t admit it, they must be doing it subconsciously, processing it in fiction as they would in a dream.
Other than how reductive this is, there is a major problem with that approach: It doesn’t take into account the fact that people with seemingly uninteresting lives can have interesting thoughts.
Some interviews find authors leading decidedly routine lives. In fact, it only gets worse as they get more successful, and are able to write full-time. Their daily life consists of sitting at a desk (or on the sofa, in Sanderson’s case) interspersed with family life, and promoting their latest book. All the while, the characters and settings and events might be raging quietly in their brain. But you won’t see any evidence of this invisible alchemy until the finished product is in your hands.
Maybe I’m the problem
Over 1,000 words into me listing all the possible things you could do wrong in an author interview, perhaps you’re thinking: well how do you do a perfect interview then, genius? And the answer is I’m not entirely sure. I know what I would like to see more of, but I’m not sure this would match up with what would satisfy you, or anyone else.
This speaks also to a broader issue, which is that when I read or listen to an author interview, I am coming to it as a writer. Yes I’m a reader too, but if I am hearing from the person behind a book, I fully have my aspiring author hat on, and am keeping an ear out for any wisdom I can use.
That means what I want is as much practical information as possible. I want to know their routine, I want to know their family situation, I want to know how they made the shift to full-time writing.
I particularly want to know all this from people who have more recently become professional authors, whose circumstances match up more closely to the current conditions of publishing. Ideally, I’d love to hear authors talk more about money.
On top of that, I want to know all their funny little habits. Their Didion-leaves-her-drafts-in-the-freezer tidbits. They don’t even have to be conspicuously eccentric. Maybe they have a spreadsheet tracking their novel progress, maybe they finish every day in the middle of a sentence so they can pick up there again tomorrow. I want these the way people who watch fridge restock TikToks want to know what brand of salad spinner the creator uses. Despite my better judgement, I secretly think that this little bit of wisdom is going to be the one that finally helps me get my life together, and unlocks the next level in my own writing.
In all honesty, I’ve always imagined this is how most people approach author interviews. Surely everyone in the room is also thinking about how what’s being said applies to their own writing ambitions? It’s only in writing this post that I’ve realised that might not be the case. There are readers who do just want to hear from the person behind the book.
What we all have in common, in my opinion, is a desire to know the writer a little. Not just to know about them but to feel like we are acquainted a little better with this mind that produced a book we consider good, or important, or interesting.
And maybe that’s the fundamental difficulty. This is a parasocial interaction. As both a reader and an aspiring writer, what I want is not to sit in the audience: I want to sit in a pub with this person and talk to them myself.
Let’s not forget as well that writers often write because they need to express something, and they can’t do it in speech.
What’s more, authors can now have direct interaction with their fans if they want — writers like Sanderson have active conversations with readers through the internet, and have no need of an intermediary.
Having said all that, I think it’s still worth trying to do a good interview. A good interview, in my view, should be a few things. It should push the author to go beyond their usual talking points, asking them to say something new that will get people talking. It should be grounded in material reality, putting them and their work in the context of the current publishing climate and getting them to engage in questions about the future of writing as a profession. And it should tell us something about their lives while respecting their imagination.
What do you think, and do you have any favourite author interviews? Let me know in the comments.
I loved reading your perspective on author interviews. I interview mainly emerging authors for a small women’s press (Yellow Arrow Publishing!) whose chapbooks we publish, and I’m always wondering how to make them more interesting. I ask about their life and work, but less about how they make time for their writing and the financials behind it, but could incorporate more of that in the future as you said that’s something you’re very interested in and I’m sure fellow writers would be too.
An interview I read recently that I enjoyed was an old Paris Review interview with Tobias Wolff. I’d be curious as to what you’d make of it. The interviewer is a bit too brief with his questions at points, but he does listen to Tobias and Tobias’ answers are interesting.
Thanks for the thoughts! 😊
Excellent piece. I haven't read many author interviews, but I feel like your post synthesizes why I don't usually bother with them. I tend to find them boring or reductive, overly trying to tie the author's life to their work. It's a very interesting point that the issue may be on the side of the interviewer trying too hard to insert their own assumptions into the piece, and a successful recount of this would be pointing out whether or not they failed in that mission (self-awareness, as you say). I also really like your point of how what audiences are really wanting from these interviews is that engagement in a parasocial relationship - I've often wanted to grab a drink with my favorite writers and get to pick their brain.