Are You Full Every Night?

Written by Andrew Marshall

Posted on 11 March 2010

I’ve just finished Maggie Helwig‘s novel Between Mountains. Its protagonist is a traumatized Canadian war reporter called Daniel, whose life intertwines with a war criminal and a court translator. Liverpool-born Helwig is a fine writer. While her book hasn’t made my (mental) list of Best Books About Journalists, it contains plenty of wisdom about the trade.

This passage, with Daniel interviewing the garrulous war criminal Markovic, struck a chord. With interviewees, particularly interviewees with dirty secrets, there sometimes comes a moment when you realize they will tell you everything. It’s exhilarating. You just need to ask the right questions—and to scribble furiously while pretending you’re not.

“Daniel’s pen was scratching in his notebook,” writes Helwig, “but for the moment he made only a soft non-committal noise. It was a fine balance, how hard he could push at any given moment; and they were not far into the interview yet. Soon the momentum would start to take over; after that, he could rely on the fact that the desire of almost everyone in the world to talk about themselves was huge, insatiable, and if you let them go on talking about themselves for long enough they would tolerate, even welcome, almost any questions you might ask.”

My interviews haven’t always gone so smoothly. I once interviewed a woman who managed a Dublin nightclub owned by Bono of U2. I wasn’t interested in the story, or the club, or her. It showed.

“So,” I began, desperately searching for a question to ask, “are you full every night?”

She shot me a withering look. “What—me personally?”

3 Comments

  1. Richard Lloyd Parry says:

    “We play the old game of Confession, by which journalists earn their bread and subjects indulge their masochism. For, of course, at bottom, no subject is naive. Every hoodwinked widow, every deceived lover, every betrayed friend, every subject of writing knows on some level what is in store for him, and remains in the relationship anyway, impelled by something stronger than his reason.”

    Janet Malcolm, ‘The Journalist and the Murderer’

  2. Andrew Marshall says:

    I still remember my first experience with this in journalism; it was like popping a syringe into the vein.

  3. Andrew Marshall says:

    I must explain that the above comment is from my namesake, the former foreign editor of The Independent (UK). For an explanation of the various Andrew Marshalls, please see Andrew’s excellent blog. http://qwerty2009.wordpress.com/about/andrew-marshalls/

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