, and what’s in store in her next book. This partial transcript of their conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Isaac Butler: I imagine many of our listeners first encountered your writing in the form of your celebrity profiles. The process of your writing them is foregrounded in many of those profiles. How did you happen upon that meta-technique, and how have you refined it over the years?It’s a thing that I am known for, and it’s mostly treated as a good thing, but I categorize it as a bad thing.
When you’re writing about a person, one of the problems you encounter is that the reason the person is worthy of being profiled is not necessarily because they are good at talking about what they do. That’s where the writer comes in. I realized it’s notjob to make my story good. So I wrote a story about what I would have asked her if she’d been awake and what I think she would have said.
The other reason for that device is that I grew up reading celebrity profiles, and I hated most of them. The ones I didn’t hate all have the same quality, which was that the writer was not in bed with the subject. It’s very easy to become so dazzled by a celebrity that by the time you write it, it’s me and the subject doing something for your benefit, the reader. Like. But that’s not what a profile should be, because I’m not friends with that person.
When you’re writing a profile, are you pitching your editor and then the Times is pitching their team? Is their team pitching the Times, and the Times is assigning you? How does this stuff get worked out?
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