“Listen, I’ve done a thousand of these interviews. What I’m about to say, I am saying because I like you and I think you need to hear it.”

“Ok.”

“You ask me if I’ve ever had my heart broken. How would you answer that question?”

“I don’t know. I suppose I would say yes, and probably tell the story. The most interesting one, anyway.”

“Do you think I would find that story interesting?”

“No, but that’s why I’m interviewing you - you are you, and I think celebrity makes everything interesting, even when it’s mundane, because people like to find out celebrities are like them.”

“Of course, but are you writing for that audience? I don’t want to talk to those people. If I am the one being interviewed, I am the one talking to people. I want them to give a shit, and I can’t tell a story they won’t give a shit about. Have you ever told a boring story? You get half way through and you know it’s boring, but you’re committed, so you finish it and it turns out exactly as you expected only worse because you told the second half self-consciously. I am tired of being put in this position by interviewers, and I think you know it’s wrong too. You are a smart man. You should stop.”

“I should stop interviewing?”

“If that is what it takes. But no, you should not stop interviewing, you should stop asking questions you don’t want to know the answer to. Who are you asking these questions for? I don’t believe you care whether I’ve ever had my heart broken. What’s more, I think you can understand that everyone’s answer to that question would be essentially the same.”

“How do you mean?”

“How about this: imagine for a moment that I keep this photograph in my wallet, of a beautiful woman. And when the typical interviewer asks me this ridiculous question, I pull out this photo and I tell a beautiful story about the most stunning, kind, gentle woman that ever lived, and this story ends with a tragically short but excruciatingly painful battle with pancreatic cancer. My story, it has more words than the one the teenage boy tells about the girl who broke up with him because he didn’t have a car. But it is the same story because it is the truest heartbreak either of us has ever known. It is the worst version of the story of lost love that we could tell.”

“But clearly one of these stories will have more impact-“

“On who? On someone who lost his young wife to cancer? On the teenage boy’s mother? Listen. You are spinning your wheels trying to expose things about me that will make people forget things about themselves. And on some of them it will work, but the ones I want to reach - the ones you should want to reach - they understand that we feel nothing until we feel something, and the fact that I can take a dump in a box and someone will find a way to mass market it does not make the story of my worst heartbreak any more valid than the poor boy whose greatest love was lost over the lack of a silly material possession. So you ask me if I’ve ever been heartbroken? Brother, I invented heartbreak. So did you. Write that down.”