You’ve immersed yourself in the lives of nurses, teenage street gang members, police officers, judges, grieving parents. How do you find your way into these communities?
That depends on the subject, and the project. Every one has been different. I think in general it’s important to begin slowly, to become a presence that isn’t threatening to your surroundings, to be an observer but not an intrusive one, to ease into this world. Because people in a juvenile court or a neonatal intensive care unit aren’t used to having observers there.
So the first days or weeks may be modestly productive in terms of getting material for a book — but very productive in terms of laying the groundwork for being a functioning presence in the place, and privy to the actual workings of an environment.
How do you balance the roles of “insider” (as one who’s spending a great deal of time in a place and is getting to know his characters intimately) and “outsider” (as one who must impose analysis from the outside, who must determine “what’s really going on here,” and who must adhere to standards of journalistic objectivity)?
To reduce it to a sound bite: You have to get inside, but you’re not an insider. I see these as two different things.
You never really lose the outsider feeling. No matter how much time you spend in a place, you are still ultimately an outsider. They may come to appreciate your presence there, or tolerate it, and you may come to understand what’s going on much better than the average person. But there is still a certain distance between you and what you’re covering, and rightly so. If there’s no barrier, then I don’t think that you can do your job as a journalist, as a writer and an observer.
Being sensitive and taking care not to betray their trust while you’re being true to the story and maintaining your integrity as a writer and keeping this barrier between the observer and the observed intact — it’s a great big juggling act. And it’s hard, because there will be pressures put upon you to take sides, or to take a certain point of view, by the people you’re writing about. You have to resist those pressures.
You have a talent for presenting a variety of perspectives, capturing the viewpoint of the accused person as well as the D.A. What are the challenges of maintaining “objectivity” in a situation where you are engaging so intimately with your subjects?
Most essential, I think, is being fair — fair to your subjects and fair to the story you’re telling. That’s what I strive for. The people trust you with these intimate moments in their lives; I don’t think that requires you to compromise telling the story as truthfully as you’re able to do it. Of course, truth is in the eye of the beholder. But I can honestly say, I don’t feel that at any time I’ve gotten so close to someone I’ve written about that I’ve felt I was compromising my journalistic integrity. I always feel what I was able to write did justice to the story. At the same time, I tried to stay very aware that the people I was writing about were going to be reading this, and they had in one way or another been very damaged by the experience [I was writing about]. Telling the story as you see it doesn’t mean that you can’t be sensitive to the impact those words are going to have on the individuals who populate the story. It’s a balancing act, but I don’t think it’s an impossible one.
Your books effectively bring to life scenes that you were not witness to, often seamlessly melding interior monologue with narrative. What does it take to assure you that you really “know enough” to do this?
Sometimes, it’s pretty simple: You interview the participants in a conversation and ask them to recall what was said. If they’re willing to do so, and if you can get some agreement on what was said, then it’s pretty straightforward. Can you be absolutely certain, when you have two sources who both agree that the same things were said, that those were the things that were actually said? Well, you weren’t there. Most reporting is not done by directly observing events — it’s done by talking to people who observed events. In that sense, it’s no different than writing a police news story:
Where it gets dicey is if you have conversations that you want to include in the form of dialogue in which the participants are not in agreement about what was said. Then you have a problem. You have to figure out what to do with it: Not use it? Go with one version? Use material from both versions? Find what they can agree on and use that? Maybe there are more than two people present, maybe there are four people, and three of them say one thing. You have to make those weighing decisions about what’s credible and what’s not.
With inner dialogue you’re relying on people’s memory of what they were thinking. But as long as they’re clear about it and you feel they’re credible, that’s fine with me.
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