It's tricky, interviewing unreliable narrators.
Geoff Dyer is one of those writers who chafes at the constraints of non-fiction, forever warning his readers not to take anything he writes at face value.
He's at it again in the foreword to White Sands, his latest essay collection: "This book is a mixture of fiction and non-fiction. What's the difference? Well, in fiction stuff can be made up or altered."
He volunteers that the wife in this collection is called Jessica, though his wife's real name is Rebecca. "But Jessica is there in the non-fiction too. The main point is that the book does not demand to be read according to how far from a presumed dividing line – a line separating certain forms and the expectations they engender – it is assumed to stand."
Ok, this is fine, especially for a collection of travel writing, a genre that has always required a suspension of disbelief.
But for a reporter interviewing Dyer, it's a little more challenging. I'd lose my job if I made stuff up.
For example, this interview would read a lot better if I said I had interviewed Dyer on Venice Beach, near the Los Angeles home he shares with his real-life wife, a curator.
I could borrow a passage from White Sands where he looks on wistfully at acrobats throwing circus yoga moves on the grass.
"Obviously I can't join in," he writes. "I'm as strong and supple as a pane of thin glass, I've got too many ailments – left shoulder, left elbow and left wrist, in fact the whole left arm – and I'm too old. But if I'd been here 10 years earlier I would have joined in."
Instead, we're talking via Skype, his long, thin face not quite fitting in the screen, cut off at the forehead, silhouetted in bright Californian afternoon sunlight, his still-Cambridge accent occasionally distorted by wavering Wi-Fi bandwidth.
But I need to know – when is he lying to me? What won't he fake?
"I have certain rules," he says. "One of the ones I really have, as a point of honour nobody can come out of anything I write looking worse than me. That eliminates a whole area of grievances.
"I feel I can distort things and make things up if it really makes no difference except to the aesthetic experience of the story. I'm allowed to put in quotation marks and have myself saying things that I wish I'd said at the time if I'd been wittier or quicker on my feet."
Has he ever written about a place he hasn't visited?
"I think I wouldn't. Not out of some kind of adherence to reportorial principles but because of my limitations as a writer. I would be incapable of doing that, it would be a question of limitation rather than principle, rather than doing that."
Some of the great charms of this collection are the notes of tedium and exasperation. So much travel writing makes the trip sound so much better than it could have been. Dyer is capable of making boredom and disappointment engrossing rather than churlish.
He had originally wanted to name the book after the Gauguin painting that inspired his opening essay: Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?
Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? Paul Gauguin Photo: Museum of Fine Arts Boston
It's the story of what should have been an idyllic gig – he was dispatched to French Polynesia to write about Gauguin for the centenary of Gauguin's death. There are deluxe rooms in luxury hotels and ocean views so perfect they seem "manicured", flights to remote islands, afternoons under swaying palms.
And yet the whole trip proves to run along "an itinerary so wretched that I was bracing myself for some climatic letdown, for disappointment of such purity that I would not even realise it was being experienced".
Nobody who read this story would ever want to go.
"I certainly noticed as I was putting these things together that disappointment was a theme running through it," Dyer admits.
"I hope I redeem the theme of disappointment in that passage where I talk about my capacity of being disappointed which shows that I haven't come to some sort of resignation … that I'm still full of hope and optimism, which is a precondition for being disappointed."
Always wary of sounding like a travel writer, Dyer is "so reluctant to use the word 'transcendent' …" and yet, he says, "every piece [in the collection] except for the Svalbard story, ends with some major peak experiences."
Yes, the Svalbard story, Northern Dark, is a hoot, a riposte from the title onwards of anyone with romantic visions of the Northern Lights beyond the Arctic Circle.
White Sands is Dyer's 14th book and his second collection of travel-ish stories, a rare repetition for a wilfully unclassifiable writer whose output includes four novels, two essay collections and book-length meditations on jazz, photography, the Somme and the Tarkovsky film, Zona.
He submitted that book, Zona – part memoir, part film studies – while avoiding a commission to write on tennis, a game he still plays several times a week and on which he can talk at some length.
The first travel book was Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It, an enduring best-seller built on dissolute charm, an elegant style and generous servings of seedy fun in places such as Thailand, New Orleans, Libya.
This latest collection is inspired by the more sober travel of an established writer, an author people will actually pay to visit them.
"The travel I was doing before, these trips were much more under their own steam," he says. "A lot more of the travel I do now is on book tours. Typically that doesn't yield up the sort of adventure or misadventure … It doesn't generate the stuff out of which writing can emerge."
And yet one of the best pieces is Forbidden City, which is set up as a dreary and dutiful book festival tour of Beijing. Instead, in what is best supposed to be a fictional interlude, this "Geoff Dyer" ends up in a story sticky with unrealised sexual tension when a tour guide proves both attractive and rebellious.
"Mornings like this prove that you really have to be mad ever to kill yourself," he writes, when he realises how much his day has exceeded expectations. "Contemplate it by all means but never commit to it. Life can improve beyond recognition in the space of a moment."
The collection finishes in Los Angeles, another city writers aren't supposed to love, but that Dyer adores when he moves there.
The final essay, first printed in London Review of Books, is an account of the stroke he suffered shortly after moving to California at the start of 2014.
It's a very deliberate, almost forensic account, written in the voice of someone puzzling over sudden shifts in their fate.
"That was the thing about all this: it was a brain thing, and I loved my brain and the way it had been going about its business so gamely for more than half a century."
Eighteen months later, there's a little more distance, although he notes, in passing, that he is now 57, roughly the "same age as Prince".
"Until this [stroke] happened, you get in a car in Los Angeles or anywhere, or you get on your bike, and you know there's a chance there might be a crash so you put your seatbelt on and you maybe wear a bike helmet. But what you don't expect is to be walking across your hallway and for the floor to collapse beneath you," he says.
"For a while I had that feeling, 'God anything could happen at any moment without any warning at all'. "
At one point in the interview, I ask if I can rely on the many scholarly footnotes he's provided with the book.
"Oh you can trust them," he says and then breaks off: "I'm now worrying that you're some sort of cross examiner, and you've spotted something …"
Just asking.
"If anything I've over-footnoted," he says. "So the bit where I say [to the doctor] 'I even take the skin off chicken', just to make sure people get the gag, I provide a note at the end to show it's a joke from Point Break."
White Sands is published by Text at $32.99.
