First Person

My Four Minutes

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By James M. Lang

My alarm went off at 4:15 a.m. -- not even the dimmest glimmer of light in the sky. I got up and walked around the bed to turn off my wife's alarm (set for 4:17 a.m., in case mine malfunctioned) and stumbled into the shower. In the darkness of the spare bedroom, I dressed in the orange shirt and tie my wife had picked out for me the evening before.

Don't eat or drink anything before a morning television appearance, a writer friend had advised me, but I was hungry and thirsty when I came downstairs. I had a banana and a glass of water. Then I resumed what I had been doing for the past three days: pacing and talking to myself.

This was the morning of my network-television debut, on the Fox Morning News show in Boston. My first book was going to be the subject of a four-minute interview at 7:40 a.m., prime time for the morning news. Hundreds of thousands of New Englanders would see my face on their television screens as they scurried around their kitchens toasting bagels and pouring coffee into their Thermoses.

That my book was making an appearance on network television news five months after its publication was an unusual development, one that had nothing to do with all of the promotional work I described in my previous article on my adventures in trade publishing.

It had everything to do, instead, with the misfortunes of another human being: The mayor of Boston had been diagnosed with Crohn's disease, an illness that I shared with him and that I had written about in my first memoir. The Friday morning after the mayor's diagnosis was announced, my publisher called to let me know about the news program's interest in the book; a few hours later, I was slotted in for Monday morning.

While I paced around the house, and during the hourlong drive to the studio, I asked myself question after question about my illness, about my story, and about the book. And when I say "asked myself," I mean out loud. I talked out my answers until I felt comfortable with the phrases and sentences I wanted to use in the interview.

I had one answer I rehearsed continually, in response to a question I hoped I would be asked about what advice I would give to the newly diagnosed. "Accept the presence of the disease in your life," I would tell this hypothetical unfortunate. "Once you do that, you can learn to live successfully with it."

Occasionally, at a random moment during the drive, I would stop talking and my heart would seize up; I would start talking again as quickly as possible, fighting off the rising panic. I tried to remind myself, over and over, that this was a terrific opportunity for me to sell my books, not an ordeal to fear. And the broadcast only reached half of New England; it wasn't as if I were appearing with Katie Couric on NBC's Today show.

At the Fox25 studio I passed through two security checks and was led by the producer into a waiting room, where she handed me a printout of the interviewer's introduction and reviewed with me a list of the questions the news anchor would be asking me.

Those questions, to my great relief, were mostly drawn from the media kit I had helped the publisher develop; I had written the questions myself, so I was more than capable of answering them. The questions focused primarily on my experiences and on the book. And I was pleased to see the final question I had hoped for: "What advice would you give to a person who has just been diagnosed with the disease?"

The producer left me alone in the waiting room, where I resumed my pacing and talking to myself, honing my answers to the questions I now knew I would be asked.

She returned for me at 7:30. The sun was rising on a beautiful day; I could see it clearly through the massive, semicircular wall of windows in the studio. In the middle of the room I noted the desk where the morning news anchors sat, and stationed all around the desk I saw a wide variety of cameras, lights, and people.

The producer led me along the side of the room, and then down the hallway into an elevator. We went up one floor, and then out onto a terrace that overlooked the studio room. Against the railing of that terrace were two chairs; pointing at those chairs were two massive cameras with teleprompters.

It had been clear to me, during my few minutes with her in the waiting room, that the producer had done her research. She had read the press kit we provided her, and used the media questions we had written for that kit in the list of questions she handed to me.

The anchor, by contrast, knew as much about me and the book as she could have learned in the 10 seconds it took her to walk from her desk up the stairs to the terrace. She greeted me with a smile, introduced herself, and sat down. She glanced over the material the producer had given her, and then asked me a few basic factual questions about Crohn's disease, including one about the source of the disease's name.

"I'll ask you that one on-air," she said. OK, I thought. Easy enough. I hoped that she could fit that in with all the other questions.

Someone standing next to the camera counted down and then the anchor began reading her introduction on live television. She asked me the first question, the answer to which I had rehearsed a half-dozen times in the waiting room. I was nervous, and my voice felt a little wobbly to me, but I answered it without stumbling. I prepared for the next question on the list.

She didn't ask it. Instead, she asked me a question about whether public awareness of the disease had increased in recent years, because of increased awareness of the need for colonoscopy screenings. I assumed she was referring to Katie Couric's famous on-air colonscopy, and so I mentioned it.

As I was offering that response, I felt the interviewer's gaze intensify a bit, and I realized at that moment that I was praising the virtues of the female star on a rival morning show.

But my anchor didn't blink an eye. She asked me a general question about the disease's symptoms. She followed that up with a question about my own symptoms when I was first diagnosed. I waited for her to return to the list of questions about my book, the ones I had practically memorized.

Over the course of the next three minutes, she asked me questions about the disease's name, about the role that diet plays in the disease, and about what had happened to the mayor. The questions were almost entirely factual; they could have easily -- and probably more competently -- been answered by a medical doctor, one who had no personal experience with the disease.

I felt comfortable answering her questions because I had spent the day before shoring up my knowledge base about the disease -- and factual questions, of course, are much easier to answer than questions about why you spent a year and a half of your life writing a book about your struggle with a chronic illness.

When she made a longish comment about the mayor, and then said something vague about managing the disease, I knew my four minutes were coming to a close. Seeing now that we were not going to get to a single one of the questions or answers I had rehearsed, I used the comment to make the point I had wanted to make about accepting and living successfully with the disease. It was truncated, but at least I had made it.

Afterward, on the drive back to my house, my disappointment at the focus on the disease, rather than on my book, gave way to understanding -- albeit slightly disappointed understanding. Most people in the television audience, after all, would not have known much about the disease. The anchor clearly knew nothing about it, so she was asking the questions that anyone unfamiliar with the disease might have asked.

The lesson I learned from the experience was one that a fellow writer had warned me about, but that I had been too nervous to follow during the actual interview.

If you want to promote your book (or your name, or your event, or your college), she had told me, you have to take control of the interview. It's no different than redirecting a student's comment in class when you aren't getting the answer you need to move the discussion in a more fruitful direction.

When I got that tip, I was reminded of a piece of advice my dissertation director gave me while I was preparing for my oral defense: The key to a successful defense is not answering the questions they ask you, but figuring out how to give them the answers you have prepared, no matter what questions they ask.

The same, I understand now, is true of television or radio interviews. If they aren't soliciting the answers you've rehearsed, you have to find a way to solicit the questions you want them to ask. I followed the interviewer's lead and went where she led me; what I should have been doing was using my answers to lead her in the direction I wanted to go.

Easier said than done, of course. If another interview comes along in the next few weeks, I may be able to apply that lesson and take control of an interview. Practice makes better, if not perfect. But if months or years go by before I have the chance to practice those skills again, I probably will get just as nervous as I was the last time and end up letting the reporter control things.

So all I can hope for is that some other famous person with my disease will announce it to the public soon, and then my book will become a hot property on the national level.

If it happens, I'll be ready. Give me a call, Katie. I promise I won't mention Fox News in the interview.