Graham Norton: Good reviews make me think ‘how sh*t did you think it would be’?

When Sgt PJ Collins, the protagonist of Graham Norton's new novel, Holding, unearths a body in Duneen, a backwater in Cork, it sets in motion a chain of events that alter his sheltered life forever. When I was asked to meet Graham in the Merrion Hotel in Dublin to interview him about Holding, I wondered if the same thing would happen to me. It's not a funny book. Not even close. It's an uncompromising, darkly comic and sometimes heartbreaking story that also happens to be the loneliest I've ever read. But then, I haven't read as many books as I would like.

I'd never interviewed someone before. In hindsight, I might have benefited from starting with someone more low-key. I didn't even know how to go about it. I began by reading the book, which apparently sets me apart from most interviewers. Graham was actually very flattered that I was able to quote from his book. I instantly felt like a swot, I read his book with a pen and notebook, to be extra vigilant and to pick up on themes and issues. My main experience of reading books has been in an educational setting so I wasn't really sure if I should talk to him about the general vision and viewpoints of Holding – loneliness and isolation – or do a comparative study with a similar text. Titles of Edna O' Brien, John B Keane and Brian Friel sprang to mind, not necessarily because they're similar to Holding but because my points of reference are limited and I already have a comparative essay on Friel and John B Keane from my junior cert so that's handy.

I was nervous about what to wear. What do you wear to meet a sassy gay icon? You know he's going to notice. I watched a few YouTube clips of The Graham Norton Show and saw that he wore a silver blazer. I called up my cousin to see if I could borrow hers. Then I tweeted Graham to tell him that I was going to be wearing a silver blazer to the interview and wouldn't it be funny if he wore the same thing.

@StefPreissner: .@grahnort I’m wearing a silver blazer to our interview tomorrow in the hope that we match. I hope you see this. I have also sent a pigeon??

He didn’t reply.

Maybe he didn’t see it.

Maybe he did and thought it pathetic.

Maybe he doesn't get to bring home his costume from The Graham Norton Show.

Take it personally

The morning of the interview, he still hadn’t replied to my tweet. And he had been tweeting Niall Horan so he had definitely been on twitter. I tried not to take it personally.

I get to The Merr. I call it The Merr now because I've interviewed Graham Norton there for The Irish Times so I have notions. I'm 30 minutes early. The man with the top hat at the door doesn't even ask me if he can help with anything because in my silver blazer I fit in so well. I take a seat and I order a coffee. I go over my notes and a butler pours my coffee for me. I'm not sure if they're called butlers or waiters, but having someone pour my coffee felt strange. I wait another five minutes before texting the PR lady I've been liaising with to tell her I have arrived. I tell her where I am sitting. And that I am wearing a silver blazer.

Sharon arrives and introduces herself. We walk to another part of the lounge and she tells me Graham is on his way. I have that feeling I had before English Paper 2. What if Patrick Kavanagh doesn't come up? My general vision and viewpoints are getting blurry. She asks me about the details of my TV show Can't Cope Won't Cope because Graham has sent her to find out the basic plot. I give her the elevator pitch and tell her breezily that it's available on the RTÉ Player.

Graham walks down a glass corridor from the breakfast room. It’s less of a top-of-the-stairs-Titanic reveal and more like an airport arrivals hall. He’s wearing a navy checkered suit with an orange tie. I have an orange bomber jacket that would have matched. Not to worry. He is warm and welcoming and I somehow feel like I’m meeting Santa. He IS real. I KNEW IT.

We sit down. Me on the couch, him on the chair. Sharon asks us if we want coffee. I look at Graham, forgetting that I have agency and an appetite of my own. He says yes. I follow suit and match his order. Graham and I make small talk about the biscuits on the table. He can’t identify their shape. They’re teacups, I tell him. They’re for having with tea. He laughs.

While I’m aware that I am in the Merr to interview a man about a book so that it sells more copies, I also have my motives. What I really want to know is how he wrote it. Maybe one day I’ll write a novel. This is my chance to get Graham Norton’s Top Tips. Like painting cheap jewellery with nail varnish to avoid skin discolouration, this is my chance to download Norton’s Life Hacks.

Did he sequester himself in a Martello tower with a typewriter by candlelight and eat only cheese until the novel was finished? No, in fact he "bagsed" free days to work on Holding whenever he had them. He spent the mornings of his writing days procrastinating with "nose-picking, dog walking and my Daily Mail sidebar of shame". He says he would have lunch and then, fuelled by chicken and celebrity gossip, he would sit at his computer for four hours or so.

Do our little dance

Graham asks me about my process and we do our little dance. Graham is a natural interviewer. And I have done more press in the past month than Kim Kardashian so I slide right into it. “I do the opposite, Graham. I do the actual writing and then get tanked up on coffee and gossip – usually generated by my unrequited tweets or enthusiastic eyebrows”. It seems there’s no hacks to be downloaded from Graham Norton. He just worked hard, no gimmicks to get this book written. I ask him outright, “Are you happy with it?”

He pauses. “Em…..” The pause is so sustained that if I were writing this interview scene into a TV show, this is where I would go to a commercial break. It’s a pause just pregnant enough to hook people so they come back with cups of tea after the break.

“I am . . . in that . . . it’s a finished book. And when I was worrying about it a friend said a very good thing to me, he said, ‘If you finish it, it is one of the best books in the world because most novels are in drawers, most novels are 20,000 words and left to rot’ so the fact that I finished it is kind of a big thing.”

Graham picks up the book and considers it for a minute. “I love the look of this book. I love how it feels. You know, it’s a first novel so when I am reading through it there are bits I am proud of.”

In my head I imagine he is speaking about my favourite part of the book, one beautiful sentence. “She felt like she needed to anchor herself to something or she might fly around the room screaming out her pain like a hysterical balloon”.

After a shorted pause, Graham adds.

“But hopefully if I write another book, it’ll be better.”

Then a life imitating art thing happens me. I expected this interview to be funny. I expected the book to be funny. Neither are. But what they lack in giggles they make up for in what appears to be genuine honesty and a keen understanding of the human condition. How’s that for a vision and viewpoint.

Graham clarifies what could have been misconstrued as disappointment. “I’m not apologising for it. I wanted to write a ‘popular piece of fiction’, something accessible, that was an easy read. I mean, I think it was always going to be an easy read, because I don’t think I can write a difficult read.”

I tell Graham that I found parts of Holding difficult. I ask him if this lonely, isolated story was bursting to come out of him forever, or if he had a different book in mind when he opened Microsoft Word to start.

"Somewhere in the back of my mind the novel I was going to write was somewhere between The Bell Jar and Postcards from the Edge.

I smile politely and nod, hoping he doesn’t ask me if I’ve read either of those books. He didn’t. But if he had, my answer was going to be ‘I’ve read the titles of both’.

Personal demons purged

He goes on to explain that he always thought he would write “a kind of smutty smart urban thing” but that two things happened. The first is that he wrote two memoirs and got all of his personal demons purged in those and secondly, he says “ I became 52 before I wrote the book and that’s not the novel you write at 52, it turns out. Those aren’t the things that interest you at 52.”

So naturally I ask him if this loneliness and isolation is something that interests him. He says “kind of”.

This was the point I realised that I'm probably a terrible interviewer. Based on my experience of being interviewed for Can't Cope Won't Cope I know how uncomfortable someone can get when a journalist delves into the darker corners of their personalities. I can tell there's something there. So instead of digging in for the headline quote, I leave it.

“Do you read reviews, Graham?”

“I do, yeah”

“Which ones do you think are the most astute?”

“The really lovely ones, the really glowing ones, you kind of think... God! How sh*t did you think this book was going to be? And it hadn’t struck me, but I realised that was way to my advantage, that people assumed this book was going to be terrible. So the fact that it’s alright, elevated it in their minds to something quite good. It’s the slightly sniffy ones, of course, that I think are accurate. You’d be a weird person if you kind of sat back and said of your own work ‘Well, this is VERY good.’ So when people go ‘this bit’s good, that bit’s bad’ you think that’s a fair review.”

Graham leans over at this point and admires my handwriting. I tell him the truth. I tell him I wrote my notes out again very neatly because I anticipated this very situation where he would see it. He smiles as me as you might smile at a group of school children waving at you from the back of a bus while you’re driving.

Solving loneliness

I tell him that I don’t want to psychoanalyse him based on his characters, because I hate when people do that to me with the TV show, but just as there are aspects of me in my characters, there has to be some of the loneliness of Duneen in him. I ask him if that sort of loneliness is something that can be solved with fibre broadband. Words like Facebook, Twitter and Tinder get bandied around. I ask him if he still dabbles in Tinder and if he’s still looking for The One.

“Very little on Tinder now. And I don’t know if I am. A friend of mine, years ago, he had been single for a long time and someone said to him, do you enjoy being single and he said ‘Well apparently I do’. I think I’m maybe in that mode. Where, possibly, I prefer being single because if I didn’t, it’s odd that I’m single so long.”

I pause and become a terrible interviewer again. I hate the feeling of exploiting a man’s personal life, remembering the feeling from just days before where I’d been in an interview and things had gone into a weird personal space I wished they hadn’t. My mind, in its awkwardness, jumps through the words writer, novel, single, lonely, loneliness, cats, dogs, DOGS. I REMEMBER HE HAS DOGS.

“And, Graham, one of your dogs . . . is dying or sick or . . .”

Great save Stefanie, draw attention to his dying companion. Graham quickly corrects me.

“He’s old, he’s not ill. He’s fine.”

Sharon comes to tell us we have just a few more minutes. I ask Graham if he will sign my copy of the book. Again he picks it up as though it’s a very delicate thing. I ask him if he’s going to write another.

“I want to. I mean, no one has asked me to. But this one has sold, so presumably someone will go ‘Go on have another one’.”

I tell him I’ve heard it’s been optioned for TV adaptation. He responds frankly.

“As far as I know, every book that was ever written has been optioned by somebody. Just in case.”

I ask him if he would be interested in writing the script adaptation, if it came to it.

“I’ve gotten all the pleasure I’m going to get out of this book. My pleasure was sitting alone in my house with this book. I hope the book continues to give pleasure to other people but I’m donedy done. I’ve had it. I’ve sucked that thing dry. I’ve had my fun.”

Graham and I share a smile. I tell him I tweeted him to tell him what I was wearing. I feign disappointment that he didn’t respond. Except between you and me, I wasn’t feigning. He tells me he’s ‘not good’ at twitter but he likes my blazer. I tell him I borrowed it just for him. He thinks that’s sweet.

So, in the book, this sleepy town in Cork is just going through the motions until bones are unearthed and everything is open to change. It struck me that this book might be the ‘bones’ in Graham Norton’s life. Everything could change for him now, if he wants that. He has proven himself an admirable and capable writer, which is a credit that gets tacked on to the end of a long list of skills.

I hover around the reception of The Merr. The man with the top hat smiles accommodatingly at me. I approach him as he takes shelter from the rain and the government buildings.

“Am I meant to pay or...?”

“Were you staying here?”

“No, no I was interviewing Graham Norton but I had coffees”

“I’m sure someone else will sort it. Was he funny?”

“No. But he was brilliant.”

Graham tweeted me that night to say it was nice to meet me.

He still hasn’t followed me.

Holding by Graham Norton is published by Hachette and is out now