Has someone ever made you feel as if you were the most interesting person in the world? Though most of us are neither Joe Exotic nor Raven Leilani, we enjoy, now and again, indulging in the fantasy that we might someday join their number, that we’re one lucky break away from real recognition—an It Girl in the making, an influencer on the rise, an undiscovered genius vibrating in the wings.
The ability to make other people feel interesting belongs to the same kingdom as the ability to tell stories. I’ve met raconteurs, too, but their magic trick is more obvious. The Storyteller holds you in thrall, spinning yarn on the the knife’s edge of credibility. I’m thinking of an acquaintance who seems to live in a telenovela, always with a semi-legal caper, near-death experience, or absurdist breakup to share as she works her way through her pack of Marlboro Reds. She is a Storyteller because she can convince me, for a few breathless minutes at a time, that she is the main character. While her math may not always add up (Wait a minute, I thought you said that the cop went home with the meth-dealing performance artist?), my skepticism never outweighs my entertainment.
The Interlocutor, meanwhile, casts Main Character Syndrome upon you like a spell. Intoxicated by their attention, your fallback anecdote, secret grudge, or bland trauma suddenly become worthy of analysis, laughter, and commiseration. You find yourself revealing more than you ever though you would, confident in the Interlocutor’s thoughtful but unobtrusive goodwill. Is it authentic? It doesn’t matter. “My only advantage as a reporter,” wrote Joan Didion, whose death last week prompted a bunch of her quotes to recycle their way through through Twitter again, “is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests.” What makes a good Interlocutor? You never see them coming and they leave without a trace.
We all have Interlocutors, of various levels of skill, in our lives. They are the historians, the gossips, the nurturers, the middle children, the conflict-averse, the fawners who’ve figured out how to hide in plain sight. I’ve no wish to pathologize—some people are simply curious—but I’m fascinated by the Interlocutor-type who wants none of my fascination, who strives not just to redirect attention from themself, but to control it entirely, rationing it out like a key-ringed steward. Appraising both subject and audience with learned perspicacity, in total control—or so they like to think—this Interlocutor-type only seems averse to the spotlight. They actually quite like it, provided that they’re running the board.
If I sound critical, it’s only because, as a writer, I’m deeply envious of the Interlocutor’s power to expose others while disclosing nothing of themself. Tempted by the discursive immediacy of online, I sometimes succumb to the fantasy of writerly tease-and-denial: that I am controlling my readers, rather than interesting them, being in conversation with them, or telling them a story. But then I remember that I am here to communicate, not to obscure. As someone who writes for a living, I must do my best to prevent this transactionalism from seeping into my art. Just because we must work within the attention economy doesn’t mean we need be defined by it.
Nevertheless, there’s much to be learned from the Interlocutor as artist and artisan. At its best, this rare and pleasurable talent pinpoints the narrative ore in a continent of content. This DAVID series will feature my favorite interviewers as a dissection of the interview as mode, craft, and object d’art: How does the Interlocutor convince1 their audience and their subject that the latter is the most interesting person in the world?
David tweets at @k8bushofficial. Preorder their second novel, X (Catapult, 2022), here.
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David Davis 37, Part 1