Amérique du Sud, septembre 2005, série L, LV1: Bill Bryson, Notes from a Big Country, 1998, Black Swan édition, 1999.

« Sujet 2 ♦ Amérique du Sud, septembre 2005, série L, LVI Ten years ago this month I got a phone call from an American publisher telling me that they had just bought one of my books and were going to send me on a three-week, sixteen-city publicity tour.

"We're going to make you a media star," he said brightly.

s "But l've never been on TV, 11 I protested in mild panic.

"Oh.

it's easy.

You'll love it," he said with the blithe assurance of someone who doesn't have to do it himself.

"No, 1'11 be terrible," I insisted.

"I have no personality." "Don't worry, we'II give you a personality.

We're going to Hy you to New York for a course of media training." 10 My heart sank.

Ali this had a bad feeling about it.

For the first rime since I accidentally set fire to a neighbour's garage in 1961,1 began to think seriously about the possibility of plastic surgery and a new life in Central America.

So I Hew to New York and, as it turned out, the media training was less of an ordeal than I had feared.

I was put in the hands of a kindly, patient man named Bill Parkhurst, who sat with me for 1s two days in a windowless studio somewhere in Manhattan and put me through an endless series of mock interviews.

He would say things like: "oK, now we're going to do a three-minute interview with a guy who hasn't looked at your book until 10 seconds ago and doesn't know whether it's a cookery book or a book on prison reform.

Also, this guy is a tad stupid and will interrupt you frequently.

OK, let's 20 go." He would click his stopwatch and we would do a three-minute interview.

Then we would do it again.

And again.

And so it went for two days.

By the afternoon of the second day I was having to push my tongue back in my mouth with my fingers.

"Now you know what you'II feel like by the second day of your tour," Parkhurst observed cheerfully.

25 "What's it like after twenty-one days?" I asked.

Parkhurst smiled.

"You'll love it." Amazingly he was nearly right.

Book tours are actually kind of fun.

You get to stay in nice hotels, you are driven everywhere in big silver cars, you are treated as if you are much more important than you are, you can eat steak three rimes a day at someone else's expense, and you get to talk 30 endlessly about yourself for weeks at a stretch.

Is this a dream corne true or what? lt was an entirely new world for me.

As you will recall if you have been committing these columns to memory, when I was growing up my father always took us to the cheapest motels imaginable -the sort of places that made the Bates Motel in Psycho look sophisticated and well-appointed - so this was a gratifyingly novel experience.

I had never before stayed in a really fancy hotel, never. »