Thomas had something to sell, so he gave an interview. Unfortunately, he was very badly prepared.
The golden rule of giving an interview is that you should never give an interview. Then they all ask personal questions, and before you know it you have answered them. That’s only polite, but the instinct is that you think the interviewer is human, and it isn’t. He/she is a hundred thousand people, or whatever the viewing, listening or reading figures of the medium in question may be. So you should only do something like this when you have something to wear. I have, and that’s why I was on that radio program, namely to promote my new book, so that it sells like crazy. Yes, Jesus, the publisher has not taken the language errors out of all those columns for nothing and rammed through them with a staple.
The trick is to be well prepared, with a rehearsed story, so that you don’t say all kinds of things that you think afterwards: what the fuck did I just say? Unfortunately I was very badly prepared as I had been quite busy that day. I should have been more silent and thought long, but those are two things I’m bad at. I quickly fill silences with chatter. I was silent to an interviewer once. He asked something personal that I’d rather not answer, and then he said, “Well, then don’t say anything.” Then he made me sweat for a full minute in front of an open mic, on live radio, the asshole. I won’t name names, but it starts with an F and rhymes with Tank van der Wende.
Anyway, I had nothing but the truth in my pocket when I sat down in the studio, and then I was also exhausted and then my filter is more like a broken filter bag where all the mess runs out unhindered. And then an interviewer is genuinely interested in everything that comes out of your mouth. Such a person looks at you with wide eyes and thinks you are super, super fascinating. Then your ego is stroked, oiled and massaged with a happy ending. Then try to remain distant and businesslike.
Just to be clear: this interviewer was really good and sweet, and didn’t try to corner me in any way. It was my own fault that we started extrapolating from my columns to my childhood, fears, ADHD, insecurities and other things that I would rather direct, reformulate, dress elegantly, let it mature and then look at it again before I would. to broadcast. But for an interviewer, things like that are much more interesting than my preferences for hyphens and capitalization (resp. as little as possible and as often as possible), and once on the talking chair I find it difficult to climb off again, so that it is difficult for the unsuspecting listener may have seemed as if he had tuned in to a drugged through psychiatric patient on his first therapy session.
Well, that’s what I thought when I walked out of the studio, and that must have been not that bad. While waiting for the train, I checked Twitter. People thought it was a nice interview. The word ‘candid’ struck me a little too often.
‘Doe maar Lekker’ recently published by Thomas van Luyn, a collection of his best columns.