That’s Hollinghurst, not Hollingworth
Quite an exciting day–I did a phone interview with Alan Hollinghurst for Blue magazine. This has been on the cards for literally months so I’d had time to work myself into a pitch of near-hysterical nervousness. I’ve always been absolutely terrified of the idea of doing a proper interview, and this was in fact to be my first ever. Naturally it helped that my first victim was someone low-profile whom I had no wish whatsoever to impress, rather than, say, a Booker Prize winner whose writing I have loved extravagantly for many years…Oh well, of course the fact that he is who he is was the reason I had to overcome my nerves and do it! (The publicist did rather rub it in when she left a message on my mobile saying “I’m just ringing to confirm your interview with Booker Prize Winner Alan Hollinghurst”!)
Anyway, it all went fine, Hollinghurst was absolutely lovely, it was obvious that this was approximately his 645,783rd interview about The Line of Beauty but that was helpful in itself, I just needed to manage to blurt my questions out and he would launch into a magnificent spiel. Topics canvassed included sex (this is for Blue after all), gay writing, Henry James, Thatcherism (and Blairism), secret gay places in London, the excellence of the closet as a narrative device, beind adapted by Andrew Davies, and opera (although my questioning on the last topic was rather lazily limited to “seen anything good lately?” The new Covent Garden Ring cycle is a bit iffy, though, apparently.)
All in all, I’m relieved that I didn’t make a total fool of myself–or at least if I did Hollinghurst was polite enough not to say so, indeed generous enough to thank me for asking some interesting questions, which I confess gave me a thrill. I’m glad in retrospect that I scrapped my planned lead in question: “Certain bloggers have described your prose style as ‘mimsy and precious’. Your response?”
(You’ll be able to read the story in a few months’ time; I’m sure you’re all regular readers of Blue, yes?)