via Decca Aitkenhead meets author Kazuo Ishiguro | Books | The Guardian .
Ishiguro has this take on interviews:
“I’m told that in war situations when people are interrogated, you’re supposed to build up two or three layers of story about who you are and what you’re doing, so that if you’re caught by the enemy, they torture you and after 10 days you finally break, then you’re trained to come up with your second layer; and then they torture you even further until you break down into the next one. When you’re just a shrieking skull, you’re shrieking the third prepared story. That’s apparently how you’re trained to do it.
“But I’m not suggesting, by the way,” he laughs, “that I have a second or third layer. I’m just always reminded of this because of the layers; interviewers read past interviews, so when you come out with the same stuff as before they treat it like your first cover story, and they want the next layer. And after about the 90-minute mark you start to say OK, yes, it was all based on my childhood trauma!”
Is that the same process we tend to use in everyday situations? As in self-defence, as in “Oh, you’re getting too close to my inner sanctum, here, take this bone fast and chew on it and please do not go further!”