What’s the best way to conduct an interview? Is it better to make the source feel comfortable with you, or better to be antagonistic?

Yes.

The conventional wisdom holds that the nature of the source dictates the tone of the interview. If you’re interviewing a crooked city councilman, you go aggressive, but if you’re interviewing the mother of three children killed in a church fire, you go gentle.

That’s good advice, as far as it goes. But I’ll argue for something slightly more complex: You need to use the technique that fits you as well as it fits the person you’re interviewing. Example:

When I worked at The Atlanta Constitution years ago, Susan Faludi was also a reporter there. This is years before Backlash; she was, like I, a lowly general-assignment reporter. She was, however, breathtakingly good at it. She came back with incredible stories, and got people to say the damnedest things.

I haven’t seen her since then, so I don’t know if she’s still this way, but back then she was very shy, very quiet. She hid behind the long straight hair that hung in front of her eyes. We reported a story together once, and her personality didn’t change in the presence of the person we were interviewing. She hemmed and hawed and squeaked behind her hair, projecting utter harmlessness. The person we were interviewing bent over backward to please her, to build up her ego, and said remarkably candid things.

Susan wasn’t being duplicitous. She wasn’t acting. She was, however, aware of her own personality and how it could affect interviewees.

I’m different. My personality is a lot more, uh, abrasive. If I try to do the Susan Faludi thing, and cozy up to an interviewee, I come off as unctuous and repellent. I use the personality I have to elicit what I need from the people I interview. Example:

When I sat down to interview former Reagan Attorney General Ed Meese for my book Smoke and Mirrors, I told him early on, “I’m a tax-and-spend Democrat.” He laughed, understood the level on which we were going to be talking, and rose to it. Instead of making him feel comfortable, which is not my natural gear, I made him defend the things he’d done. Susan Faludi would have done it differently, and might have gotten as good an interview or better. But I had to do it my way.

When Rahm Emmanuel was on President Clinton’s White House staff, I interviewed him for a Rolling Stone piece about medical marijuana. At one point, I referred to the “medical marijuana community,” and he snorted derisively. “Medical marijuana community,” he snapped. “A bunch of people who like to get high.”

I quickly did the math inside my head. This interview was going nowhere. Emmanuel wasn’t going to give me a good explanation of administration’s resistance to medical marijuana, he was only going to belittle the other side. Useless. So I had nothing to lose.

“Fuck you,” I said. Emmanel’s eyes grew wide and he sat up straight behind his desk. Lord knows Emmanuel wasn’t offended by my language; he’s famous for it. He’d simply never encountered a reporter who’s bitten back that way. “We’re talking about sick people here who are looking for relief,” I said. He laughed. The rules of the interview had changed. It had become interesting. And he got real.

Susan Faludi couldn’t, or wouldn’t, have done that. Which isn’t to say she wouldn’t have gotten an interview out of Emmanel that was as good or better than mine. The point is, you need to know who you are before you can go out and find out who other people are. This is a theme to which I’ll return often. The first step in becoming a writer is knowing oneself, which may require a lot of slow walks with your hands in your pockets, kicking a pebble, and may require outside help. If you’re not working from a solid core, you’re standing on sand.