"Frankly Speaking," The Caribbean Review of Books, 2008
The best interviews naturally have an element of surprise. They are autobiography and self-delusion, literary criticism and highbrow entertainment, hero worship and exposé, journalism and creative writing, all at the same time. We expect they will offer valuable insights into a writer’s artistic process, and we hope they will also offer gossip. We want to know how our favourite books came to be — inspirations, influences, intentions — but also what our favourite writers have for breakfast, and why their marriages collapse.
And:
Experienced interview subjects (and readers) know there is an elusive relation “between authorial character, as manifested in literary works, and the personae and personalities of writers,” as the scholar John Rodden puts it in Performing the Literary Interview: How Writers Craft Their Public Selves (2001). As his title makes clear, Rodden argues that the literary interview is best understood as a kind of performance art.
Performing the Literary Interview: How Writers Craft Their Public Selves (2001)
