 Walking the Talk Author interviews are ubiquitous in the online literary world. Nearly every website and blog has them, and publicists and authors pursue them with avidity. If you want to know about an author or her latest book, there is a good chance that you’ll be able to find at least one interview. But I have a complaint about them. They tend to be more about the book than the author, and when they are about the author they are about how and why the author wrote the book. In other words, they read more like a publicity piece and less like a personal visit with the author. And I think that is a serious loss to readers. Before BiblioBuffet became a reality, I freelanced as the books editor for my local weekly newspaper. In the three years I was there, I was privileged to interview several well-known authors in my area. My favorite interviewee by far was Pico Iyer, a master writer and as I discovered a gracious man and generous host. He had a new book coming out, and I requested an interview though his publicist. On the day of the interview, scheduled for 2:00 pm, I was distressed to learn that somehow I had lost his address and phone number. Frantic searching did not turn it up. I was nearly hysterical; it’s not as if I could just call 411 and ask for it. Then I remembered that he was due to appear at our local university, and I contacted the man in charge of the events. He and I knew each other from previous interactions, but my request for Iyer’s home address was met with suspicion until I explained the reasons—and gave him my word of honor that, yes, I did have an interview appointment. I raced out to the car. Iyer lives in a home on one of Santa Barbara’s hillsides—he had come very close to losing it in the Painted Cave fire in the early 1990s—and as I drove up the winding old road looking for a home with the description I remembered from the misplaced directions I tried to calm my pounding heart. Despite all that I arrived early, about thirty minutes early, too early to knock on the door. So I parked on the side of the road across from the mailbox and started to go over my notes. It wasn’t even ten minutes later than a lovely woman I took to be his mother came down the driveway to the mailbox. She looked over at me with a slightly quizzical look. I smiled at her and tried to slink down a bit in the seat. I didn’t want her to think I was a stalker. Fifteen minutes later I drove up the steep driveway and parked. The photographer arrived a minute or two later, and together we knocked on the front door. The same woman answered, and I found my face growing red as I tried to explain that I had been too early, that I was not stalking her son, and that I was here for the interview. She laughed, softly and gently. Iyer came out to greet us casually dressed in a white shirt and khaki pants. He apologized for the “mess” in the house, especially the kitchen. (A few boxes were about.) We went into his office. It was a simple room, a desk, a couple of chairs, a large suitcase, half-packed, in the corner. No flowers, no knickknacks marred the clean, simple design. He explained that the reason for the suitcase was that he was scheduled to return to Japan where he lived half the year with the woman he has since married. Their place was so small that he literally lived out of the suitcase, having no closet. So all he could take was what he could pack. It was the first physical hint of his belief about living. I found him fascinating and my questions flowed, all notes and ideas forgotten. I simply followed my host’s answers by delving deeper into his philosophies about writing, living, Japan and America, reading. I was astounded to discover that though he used e-mail he had never been on the Internet. And when his mother’s cat showed up to join the group, he told me the story of the night he and the cat barely escaped being burned in the Painted Cave fire, of how he drove them out on that tiny mountain road with the fire roaring up on three sides of them. An hour or so into the interview, when I began questioning him about his own reading, he asked if I would like to see his bedroom. The room was very large, square-shaped, with massive windows on two sides that showed the entire coastline of Santa Barbara and beyond. One wall had a built-in closet and the bed, a queen with plain white sheets and a comforter, pulled up neatly but not formally. There was no headboard and no pillows beyond the standard sleeping one. No pictures were on the walls. It was clearly a reflection of the Japanese heritage he loves so much. Two walls (one of them shared windows with the shelves) held many of his books. The ceiling-high shelves were built in with cabinets underneath, their doors neatly closed. The shelves were jammed: books and papers jostled for space. It was obvious that Iyer was a reader, not a collector. Editions didn’t matter. Papers, bound and unbound mingled easily. Some of the books and papers had become colored with age, and this patina was beautifully set off by the dark golden wood-paneling on the walls. No photographs or flower vases or mementos interrupted the sense of literacy that spilled out. This was a reader’s room. He then led us out to another room, this one separated from the house. It was another reading room, and the shelves here were low and white with windows looking out over the city below. No lights were installed; it was a daytime reading room. I couldn’t see any loose paper here, but again books were the focus. It was unfortunate that my word count limited what I could say about the physical space because to me it represented so much of what I wrote about Iyer. His home was the same as his writing—rich but sparse, passionate about simplicity. I met not just the writer but the man behind the writing. Today, were I to do that again, I would incorporate so much of what I saw. Because how he lives and how he works is part of his writing. It can’t help but be so. But the ease of interviews through e-mail has for the most part taken away that personalization. The interviewer rarely digs deep into the author as a person, and almost never gets to visit the author in her or his home. To see the real author, to linger in their place of writing, to drink in the books upon their shelves, to meet their cat, to see their research or even their computer is to get a glimpse of the person who creates the books we love to read. Whenever I sit down with one of Iyer’s books I recall his home, the bookshelves and suitcase, his voice, and his stories. They make his writing even more personal. But that experience need not be limited to the interviewer; readers too benefit by “seeing” those things if the interview is well written. Alas, those experiences are disappearing. As the online world expands so does the realm of interview possibilities. We can interview authors from all over the world, but the intimate touch that infuses a personal interview is falling away. We learn about the new book, but that is all we learn about. Even the ever-increasing social networking doesn’t make up for it because those are composed of things authors are willing to put out there with the primary purpose of selling their books. We rarely have someone who can see (and tell us) about a man who wouldn’t leave a mountain of fire until he had his mother’s beloved cat in his arms. And because of that we readers are not quite as rich as we once were.Upcoming Book Festivals: Location: Columbia, South Carolina Location: Honolulu, Hawaii The Pub House: Imaging Books & Reading: Of Interest: Until next week, read well, read often and read on!
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