Becoming her own character

Before she went on the air, the producer warned her backstage not to give the honest answer. 

When asked the obvious question, she said, with an ingratiating smile, “You just had to be there.”

The host laughed, tapped his cue cards on his desk, and then pressed, “Can you tell us the parts you remember?”

She exhaled, closed her eyes, nodded her head forward, and paused for a second, like she wasn’t going to budge.

Then she leaned back in her chair, rocked forward, brought her hands together in a silent clap, and said, “Okay. I don’t really like to talk about it, but when I was a little girl ...”

And then she started with the lies: getting them hooked, taking them up, dropping them down, and tying it all together in the end—the same way she wrote her stories.