Tattoo interviews

Beginning in March, over a month before Tattoo was published, I have done twenty-three interviews about the book: ten podcasts, eight radio, three print, one TV, and one webinar. Starting out, I was incredibly stressed about doing the interviews, especially the live ones that wouldn’t allow for editing out my glitches or incidental barks from Jack, my dog. As time went on, I grew more comfortable with the process.  Most of the interviewers asked similar questions, so I pretty much had ready-made responses. I agreed to do the interviews because I really want the book to be widely read, not for any royalties I might receive as these will be donated to Alzheimer’s disease research, but rather to get the message out that the time to recognize and manage Alzheimer’s disease is in the early stages, even before cognitive impairment has begun.

I think I am done now with interviews.  The last one was on October 8 and was certainly the most elaborate. This was a TV interview for CBS Sunday Morning recorded in our home in Portland.  A local production crew set up lights, a boom microphone, and two TV cameras in our living room. I was speaking to the interviewer in New York who appeared by Zoom on a laptop in front of me, but all of the visual and audio was recorded by the TV cameras and sound equipment.  I am told that the end result will look almost like we are in the same room. We’ll see when it airs in a couple of months.

My first interview was completely different but memorable in its own way.  I was interviewed by Rita Rubin, a writer for JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association), and the result was printed in that journal.  I was astounded at the response from other physicians.  Over 29,000 read the interview online, and many contacted me by email. This is a link to that article.  If you have trouble making the link work, you can email me and I will send you a PDF.

The most stressful interviews were two live, call-in radio shows. As you might imagine, listener questions were sometimes out of left field and really hard for me to respond to on the fly. Most exotic? No doubt it was a live English-language radio show in Dubai. Most surprising?  This was one I almost turned down.  The interviewer had asked to reschedule, and this had followed a couple of days after a very early time slot from a British interview got rescheduled at the last minute.  So I wasn’t feeling very tolerant of change.  I told Lois I was going to cancel.  She Googled the interviewer and told me I should take it. Boy, was she right. Mary Elizabeth Williams has long been a writer for Salon.com. While in her thirties, she was diagnosed with stage 4 metastatic melanoma, a diagnosis that was at the time a death sentence.  She volunteered for a phase 1 trial of a then new combination immunotherapy and became one of the first (maybe even the first) patients to survive this disease.  As far as I know, she is still in remission and going strong.  She wrote a fascinating memoir about her experiences that I read over the weekend before our interview. Our conversation was great! We compared notes about being in clinical trials and how discussions about cancer and Alzheimer’s disease are often suppressed by unnecessary stigma.  It was a really interesting interview. Most enjoyable interview? This would probably go to the Big Biology podcast with biology professors Art Woods of University of Montana and Marty Martin of University of South Florida. This was truly a conversation as these guys knew a lot more than I about some of the esoteric genetics and ethnobiology of Alzheimer’s.  It reminded me of Friday afternoons in graduate school when all of the grad students in our physiology department headed for a local pub in Atlanta to drink a couple of beers and propose hypotheses to explain the important questions of life, such as why do our fingers and toes wrinkle after a long bath? There wasn’t any internet or smart phones back then in the 1970s, let alone Google, and I’m not sure that anyone really knew the answer at the time.

All in all, my interview season was a little stressful at times but engaging and intellectually stimulating.  I think I’ll miss it, but now I have more time to get on with the rest of my life.