If you’re a reader of New York Magazine or nymag.com, you may know Alexa Tsoulis-Reay as the writer of “What It’s Like to Date a Horse” and “My Wife and I Are (Both) Pregnant.” Alexa began working at the magazine in early 2011 as a fact-checker, a few months before I started, which is lucky for me, because she’s been my guiding light for the entire time I’ve been on staff. Earlier this year, she was promoted to senior writer, and has since expanded on the incredible interview work she’s done in her “What It’s Like” series for Science of Us, becoming a sort of as-told-to maven and in-house oral historian, contributing across the site and the magazine. We talked about her life one recent weekend.
The No. 1 question I get asked is how you find your sources. Everyone wants to know.
Well, you don’t want to tell people how to find sources, but you want to be helpful. Read tabloids and local newspapers, and troll the internet and the streets. Read the headlines in every single newspaper. Well, maybe not the National Enquirer… but like the Post, the Daily News, and local newspapers from around the world. I set Google alerts for whatever things interest me.
You have a lot of Google alerts. Do you have Google-alert stress? A lot of them are old. I really don’t know how to turn them off. It’s just daily detritus I deal with. I get excited when I check my email and I think I have all these messages but then it’s just my useless Google alerts.
Do you go looking for subjects or do you come across subjects and they intrigue you?
Usually I get an idea and go on a hunt. Though sometimes people give me ideas that I wouldn’t have thought of. You know it’s a good idea if your initial thought is, Oh, I can immediately think of five things that I really want to know about that, and they can’t be answered in a sentence. You can always tell if you get to four and you’re struggling.
How much anxiety do you have leading up to interviews?
There’s so much anticipation. I hate it. But then it’s fine as soon as I dial the number and say hello. I’m going to use a dumb cliché, but it’s like getting into the swimming pool: It’s fine once you’re in there, but it’s a death march getting in. Interviewing people on the phone is difficult. I way prefer in-person conversations. It’s hard work when you only have your voice to get someone to relate to you. And … it’s draining!
And there’s a lot of skill involved with getting them to be honest. You’re excellent at it.
I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that I don’t have an American accent.
I remember when I worked in call centers in England, people couldn’t class me, so they were always nice, like they were to Scottish people. Scottish people are kind of outside of class with their accents, so they all sound “nice,” whereas anyone else had a discernibly posh or Cockney accent, or you could tell where they’re from. So their bias would feed into how they would respond. I mean, some would react violently against me and treat me like some aristocratic person from hell, especially when I spelled out my name and it has a hyphen in it.
How long do you talk with your subjects?
It really depends on how skilled the person is at telling their own story. Sometimes you can tell that someone has really amazing experience and insight, but they can’t put it into words. It’s like they have so much amazing material but they can’t form a narrative, and they just keep throwing stuff at you and can’t follow your lead or answer your questions. And sometimes it’s just perfect; it’s a really great conversation. It always takes at least three calls.
If I’ve learned anything from five years of being close with you, it’s that everyone wants to talk about themselves, ultimately.
Yes. They do. It’s so interesting — there are those who are able to and those who don’t have the ability to tell their own story, or they do but not in a way that’s real; they’re still representing themselves and not being honest. There’s also such a generational divide: Younger people tend to be way more used to talking about themselves, whereas older people can be more confessional because they relish the option to speak about their experience and often don’t have anyone else to talk to, or may not have grown up in such a confessional culture.
Are your interview skills innate or learned?
As a child, I was always taught to question things. My dad and my mother
were both migrants: They moved to Australia when they were kids. Then
we moved to New Zealand when I was a baby. Mom became a feminist in deep
’80s Auckland. She did a masters course at the university there and she
started reading feminist theory, and then she started working for a
feminist magazine and joined a feminist collective. Since we had no
extended family and both my parents worked full-time, they relied on
their childless friends to look after us. My older sister and I were
pretty wild — I think we could sense that these caregivers would let us
get away with blue murder. One of my fondest memories is when our
favorite lesbian couple took us on a day trip to an island and let my
sister bring home a dead penguin in her schoolbag. I can still see my
dad’s face as he got a shovel and buried the stiff, stinky old penguin
in the backyard, humoring my bizarre sister’s needs.
So anyway, we were all navigating this strange little country that none of us felt at home in. My parents were questioning everything around them, so I grew up with that. And both my parents are pretty critical. We moved to England when I was 7, so I was always contrasting experiences. I went to this really intense public school in Kings Cross in London, and everyone was so different — there was no normal. I was always aware of different experiences and I never felt like I was as interesting as the people around me.
Tell me more about your parents.
I was raised at home by my dad from when I was 3 to when I was 5; both my parents worked, but his job was more flexible. So we were close growing up: He honored my first period with a trip to Real Groovy Records, where I was allowed to get whatever I wanted. I got Hole’s Live Through This.
When I was growing up he researched cults, freaks, and the lives of rural workers in the U.K. My mom made low-budget feature films before becoming a film teacher. And she worked in women’s refuges and did documentary work to supplement their income. Mom is a bit like me; she has changed careers many times and I guess I always saw that growing up — it’s okay to find a job that makes you happy when you are in your 30s, or 40s, or 50s, or 60s … especially if you get bored easily.
You have an interesting history academically. Tell me about it.
I was not academic when I was growing up, but after a strangely dedicated year I decided I was done with school and went to university when I was 16. In retrospect, that was a little young. I got into media, cultural studies, and women’s studies (as it was called back then) and gave up my dream of being an actress. When I was a kid I auditioned for Anna Paquin’s role in The Piano and experienced my first bout of jealousy when I saw her get that Oscar. I would have not worn a beret. Anyway, I decided I was going to make films like my mother. Then the reality of the industry brought me to my senses, and I went behind the scenes doing ethnography.
I was obsessed with audience-oriented theory, which is the idea that we bring meaning to media texts, and analyzing them in isolation as if they are containers of ideology is bullshit. That essentially allowed me to celebrate the power of popular culture and listen to what people do with media rather than focus on what media does to us. So I did an honors degree in cultural studies (about mixed-ethnicity teens on why they related to American shows like Full House or Seventh Heaven so much more than local content). After that, I moved to London and worked as a pornography regulator, and then I went back to Australia and the dumb old academy and did a research masters about the way that young girls respond to feminist moral panic about their use of the internet and the way that celebrities like the Olsens, Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, etcetera, are more companions than “role models,” as the panicked discourse would have had us believe.
Then I decided I needed to get the fuck out of the closed world of dust and books and write for a mainstream audience, so I moved to New York and studied journalism at NYU.
Let’s talk about that regulatory work.
I worked in the U.K. as a pornography regulator; I was an investigator there, so I was basically interviewing and busting fraudsters. Then in Australia I worked as a taxicab regulator, which was interrogating taxicab drivers, essentially. Oh my God, I’ve been interrogating people my whole life!
How much did the regulatory jobs affect you? You have such great stories.
My favorite is when I had to listen to a 90-year-old woman have phone
sex, or when I got a dude 10,000 pounds refunded for “sexting” a fake
woman on a “dating” text app.
I think that job just showed me this side of life I could never have seen otherwise, and I guess that’s what’s compelling about journalism.
When you start an interview, do you start with easy questions? No, I always start with a ramble and get them to ramble back. I never do small talk, it’s weird.
People ask me all the time if subjects make you uncomfortable, but I think you’re the least judgmental person I’ve ever met in that sense. If you’re uncomfortable, you don’t have a tell.
Well, maybe that’s true. I think if your tendency to deal with being uncomfortable is to make someone else feel comfortable, maybe it seems that way. But if you don’t feel uncomfortable, then your interview doesn’t go well. Every single subject makes me feel uncomfortable. I feed off the nerves and the adrenaline. I see it as a challenge to put someone at ease. I am obsessed with the art of building rapport.
What subjects interest you most?
I’m not interested in people who aren’t insecure. But most people are
insecure, right? Who have you ever met who’s not completely insecure?
And hearing about everyone’s upbringing is interesting. I guess I am a
little obsessed with tracing the origins of anxiety and depression. I
grew up in a culture that tended not to medicalize sadness or fear, and
it has been interesting to see how that has changed over the years. I’m
fascinated by the way that people carry the weight of their childhood
with them their whole lives.
Who are your role models?
I admire my grandmother for working seven days a week and raising five
daughters in a country where she did not speak the language and had no
support from her “husband.” To think of her on a boat [migrating from
Greece to Australia] for months with a tiny baby and a gaggle of little
girls breaks my heart: My grandfather gambled all their money away on
the boat and when they landed they had to live in a rooming house. It
would have been such a loss of pride. I admire anyone who supports young
women, or men; anyone who does not let jealousy get in the way of
community or common good; and anyone who has really, really hot legs.