John Jeremiah Sullivan: I don’t know. I can sometimes dread the idea of it, just purely out of social anxiety. But when I actually get around people, the reasons that I wanted to interview them in the first place take over. And it switches into this more autistic-y mode of just being very into some aspect of what they know and wanting to get it out of them. Once that takes over, I don’t care about how they see me. I’m just trying to accomplish a task: of getting them to say what I want to know. At that point it becomes fun. And they relax, because they’re like, “I know what this transaction is about.”

RM: Do you feel spent afterward?

JJS: Yeah. It can be weirdly physically exhausting, actually, because you’re turning yourself inside out a little bit. You’re just completely sublimating yourself.

RM: Do you remember the first interview you ever conducted?

JJS: I was about to say it was for the high school paper, but I think maybe it was a little earlier than that. Sixth grade? I think they sent us out to interview somebody in the community. I interviewed one of my neighbors….You know my dad was a reporter, and I grew up spending a lot of time just following him around, and he always had a notepad, the exact same kind—the long one that fits in your hand so that you can just [mimes flipping the pages up over a spiral-binding on top]. You don’t see them as much anymore. But I grew up watching him just fill that with notes. So it seemed like a pretty natural way of being in the world.

RM: What type of notebook do you use?

JJS: I’m really inconsistent about it. I just always have one. Sometimes I use those fancy Moleskine ones. A lot of times, for some reason, I enjoy buying the small colored ones from pharmacies and stuff. But my favorite kind of notebooks are the big ones that they sell at art stores, that are like 8 ½ by 11 with just plain white pages, and the hard manila covers. And you can treat it almost like a laptop, because it gives you some space to work on.