As critical acclaim and response has built up, every interview I give is a chance to puncture the myth I've created about my work and refine it.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
A myth is a lie that conceals or reveals a truth. But if it reveals even a strand of history or truth, that's what gets my adrenaline going.
Mythologies become exhausting burdens, from a writer's perspective.
Myth is an attempt to narrate a whole human experience, of which the purpose is too deep, going too deep in the blood and soul, for mental explanation or description.
There's a reason that all societies and cultures and small bands of humans engage in myth-making. Fundamentally, it is to help us understand ourselves.
You need more people to perpetuate a myth because if the people stop the myth is known to all.
Myths are wonderful tools that we've had, oh, for eons now that help us navigate the situations we find ourselves in.
In terms of the mechanics of story, myth is an intriguing one because we didn't make myth up; myth is an imprinture of the human condition.
Myths are part of our DNA. We're a civilisation with a continuous culture. The effort to modernize it keeps it alive. Readers connect with it.
We all mythologize to some degree ourselves and probably embellish. I think some of that is the desire to tell stories.
I learned that I never really know the true story of my guests' lives, that I have to content myself with knowing that when I'm interviewing somebody, I'm getting a combination of fact and truth and self-mythology and self-delusion and selective memory and faulty memory.