When the interviewer becomes the interviewee

Unless you're a politician, no one ever teaches you how to answer questions when you're interviewed in the media. As a journalist I've been interviewing people all my adult life, but I've never before really been on the receiving end of an interview.

So since my publisher, Poolbeg, set up a series of radio interviews for me soon after my novel came out, it's given me an

enormous new-found respect for people from any and all walks of life who give interviews, particularly broadcast ones, often with very little notice, and in some cases in particularly harrowing circumstances.

I'd often wondered whether interviewees are given the questions beforehand so they have time to prepare. The answer is no, apparently. So I stumbled my way through a string of interviews, sometimes remembering a random bit of information or description that would have been a good answer to the previous question and sounding a bit mad dropping it in when that wasn't what had been asked.

Still, with luck someone somewhere might have found the interviews vaguely interesting or entertaining. I joked later that I made it up as I went along, which wasn't quite true. I had a few notes.

There was a BBC Radio Sussex one but that's no longer available to listen to again. You can listen again to two of the other interviews here.

Starts at 1:09"57 with Marissa Lucchesi: https://www.mixcloud.com/DundalkFMMixcloud/town-talk-18-08-26-1000-1200

And find out which three pieces I chose for a music-and-books show, Rhyme and Reason with Helen Dwyer:

https://www.mixcloud.com/DublinSouthFMCommunityRadio/rhyme-reason-jane-dalton-21082026