Illinois Times interviews columnist Amy Alkon on her career, methodology and the scourge of rude behavior

Every week, Amy Alkon provides IT readers with her spin on romantic problems in her syndicated column The Advice Goddess. The column, which received the first place award for commentary last month from the LA Press Club, can sometimes be as much a sounding board for Alkon’s brassy personality as a forum for practical advice and it’s safe to say that nobody is likely to mistake Amy for standard advice bearers such as Dear Abby or Ann Landers. She sometimes comes off as ferocious and opinionated, with an occasionally abrasive sense of humor that can leave readers smarting.

Although her work appears throughout the country in more than 100 alternative weekly papers, those bastions of liberalism, Alkon’s approach can sometimes be surprisingly traditional: She tends to favor standard gender roles, for instance, and often evinces a “tough love” approach to dispensing her advice.

In November of last year, Alkon, who was born in 1964, published her first book, I See Rude People: One Woman’s Battle to Beat Some Manners Into Impolite Society (McGraw-Hill, 2009). As the title suggests, the book takes the form of a crusade against all types of rude behavior, from people who talk loudly on cell phones in public to parents who allow their children to run rampant. Typically for Alkon, she is not content to simply describe examples of the problem: the book is brimming with scientifically-based theories explaining why she thinks rudeness prevails in the first place as well as step-by-step instructions on exactly how readers can fight back against the rude people they encounter. In one particularly riveting section, Alkon describes how, when the LAPD failed to apprehend the thief who stole her car (a pink 1966 Rambler), she took the matter into her own hands and through a combination of persistence and coincidence managed to track down the thief herself.

We recently cornered Amy and asked her to answer a few questions about herself for a change – and in the process discovered what happens when an Advice Goddess turns her gaze inward.