It's a question a journalist gets asked: who have you most enjoyed interviewing? "Enjoy" isn't always the word but there was Anne Perry, born Juliet Hulme. She was 15 in 1954 when, with Pauline Parker, she murdered Parker's mother with a brick in a stocking in a Christchurch park. "Is there anybody who hasn't made mistakes thinking it was the right thing to do at the time? No. Exactly," she told me briskly. She writes murder mysteries.
Russell Brand, Paul Holmes, Zadie Smith, Barry Humphries, Don Brash, Kim Hill, John Clarke … I like the ones who mess with your head. In truth, after an hour spent in the strange intimacy of interrogation, I like them all.
Top spot: Oliver Sacks – neurologist, writer, excavator of the extremes of human fragility. Robin Williams played him in the movie of his book, Awakenings. His collection of case histories, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat – brilliant, funny - is science that demands to also be art. Stardom didn't impress some of his peers. "The man who mistook his patients for a literary career," sneered one.
In his youth he did weightlifting, rode a motorbike, took drugs, nearly self-destructed. I've been thinking about him because we broke the new stay-home habits of a pandemic and went to the movies. Oliver Sacks: His Own Life covers his work, his life and its impending extinction. There was a bad cancer prognosis in 2015. He wrote about it in the New York Times and proceeded to live, as did many of his patients, as vibrantly as circumstances allowed.
He was famously unusual. In 2007 I asked if he thought he was neurotypical. "I think there may be a hint of something atypical here and there. I wouldn't care to be more precise." The film reveals that he did the same dance with his psychiatrist. He asked whether he was schizophrenic, like his brother. "No," said the doctor. Was he merely neurotic? "No." The subject wasn't raised again.