Thursday, June 25, 2009

Michelle Hewitson on Phil Goff

In the 20 June Weekend Herald Michelle Hewitson interviewed Labour leader Phil Goff. Dim-Post isn’t impressed. He complains that the interview was “inane gibberish”:
bafflingly conducted by the newspaper’s TV reviewer instead of someone on the political desk. The article is so poorly written it is virtually incomprehensible.
Dim-Post lives in Wellington and probably isn’t a regular reader of the Weekend Herald, so doesn’t realise that Hewitson’s interviews are there every Saturday on the back page of the A section. Lucky him, he gets the Post-Dominion so is spared her weekly, weakly unsuccessful attempts at writing like Lynn Barber.

Barber uses the first person a lot, but that’s OK because she is interesting. Hewitson also uses the first person a lot.

In her 1730-word interview with Goff she uses the first-person pronoun 142 times (56 instances of I, 31 of I’m/I’d, 44 of me and 11 of my).

I did the maths: 8.2% of the words in this interview are about Michelle Hewitson.

Solipsist, moi?

2 comments:

Danyl said...

Ah, it makes sense to learn she's writing 'in the manner of' some other, more successful writer. I wondered if it was an homage to Brett Easton Ellis, or maybe ever James Joyce. I kept expecting her interview to end:

'and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.'

Stephen Stratford said...

Yes, she could conceivably have been channelling Molly Bloom. Or possibly George Harrison's (not quite as good as Ulysses) song "I Me Mine". Except she does it every week.