Neil Gaiman Interview (page 3)

MF: Well, getting back to your books, I find it interesting the levels on which a novel affects me. American Gods, for instance, gave me a new perspective of course on the numbers and varieties of Gods out there and kind of gave me this impression that I was walking among them while I was reading it and then afterwards. But then on a more mundane level, it made me want to do coin tricks.

Neil Gaiman: Good! I'm really pleased. Most people say it made them want to go see The House on the Rock or the biggest ball of twine in Minnesota or whatever.

Part of the fun for me of doing Neverwhere was writing a book that you knew that anyone who'd read it and then went to London was going to see London slightly differently. It wouldn't quite be the same place. It would give it a little magic. And I wanted to give a little magic to America.

I'm so glad you wanted to do coin tricks. That was part of the fun for me. I knew that coin tricks were going to run all the way through American Gods, and when I started writing it I went and bought Bobo's Modern Coin Magic, and would sit there trying to do a reverse French drop for hours after hours and actually got to the point where I was competent. I don't think I was ever good, but I was competent. I figured that when I went on a signing tour, people would probably say to me a lot, "Can you do a coin trick?" But nobody did.

But then once American Gods was done, I stopped playing with coins which was terrible because now when I see a coin and want to do a classic palm or a back palm or whatever, all I can do now is a technical thing known as "dropping the coin ineptly."

MF: Well, your children must have enjoyed the coin tricks while you were doing them.

Neil Gaiman: I think they did. Or at least being well brought up, they liked to give me the impression that they did. It may just have been one of those terrible embarrassing things parents do.

MF: Are you an embarrassing father?

Neil Gaiman: Yeah, but every father is embarrassing. It just comes with the territory. I have a daughter that is so embarrassed by me that in order to not embarrass her if I'm taking her to school, I have to turn off the music in the car before the door opens so that the kids cannot hear whatever it was that was playing because, "Oh my God Dad, that is so embarrassing."

MF: How old is your youngest daughter, now?

Neil Gaiman: She's 11. It was pretty wonderful when she was seven, nothing I did was embarrassing. Suddenly she turned eight, and suddenly everything I did was embarrassing to her.

MF: My eldest is eight, and I'll continue under the delusion that I'm not yet embarrassing to her.

Neil Gaiman: Oh, you have roughly half an hour to go! It's round about nine that this sudden sort of Oh-My-Godness kicks in, and you start noticing them doing things like trying to pretend that they're not with you.

MF: I would think your children must find it incredibly cool to have a popular novelist father.

Neil Gaiman: I think they do, but what's considered really cool, I think, is not that I'm a popular novelist, and it wasn't particularly cool that I was a comics writer. But what is incredibly cool is that I write kids' books. Because that is cool... unless it's embarrassing.

MF: I would imagine by now your older kids must have read American Gods?

Neil Gaiman: Yes, I think they've both read American Gods. My son's read Sandman, but my daughter's proudly not read Sandman because she finds it easier when confronted with fans of mine to simply say that she's not read it.

Having said that, of course, she found herself at college recently doing a course on the graphic novel. She said, "It was really weird, Dad, because all these people I know were being talked about like they were gods or something."