So I found other ways to define what I did. I found other ideals to strive for: honesty, openness, empathy. I left the newspaper and wrote for magazines, and I was coasting along, feeling pretty smug, as if I’d figured out something important for myself, when I made a sudden turn that took me off the map and into the land of literary nonfiction. Here was a kind of writing that demanded involvement in a way that challenged everything I thought I knew about the writer - subject relationship. To write literary nonfiction, you had to insert yourself into people’s lives -- and stay there for long stretches of time. You had to find your way into their heads, understand their psyches, make sense of their lives when maybe they hadn’t. You had to settle in. You had to be there: Tracy Kidder sitting in a fifth grade classroom every day, five days a week for an entire school year to write Among Schoolchildren; Edward Humes spending long months in a neonatal intensive care unit to write Baby ER; Jane Kramer in her shiny, pointy-toed boots riding shotgun in pick-up trucks all over west Texas to find The Last Cowboy. Involving myself in people’s lives like this meant actually forming relationships with them. They were no longer interview subjects, viewed however empathetically. They weren’t people to whom I could say good-bye at the end of a few hours or a few days. They were people I was trying to understand on a much deeper level, people I ended up caring about. These relationships might even become friendships -- and then I faced the almost impossible task of writing about friends. But if we were friends, how could I ever be sure that when they told me these things about themselves, when they opened up and offered their insights, that they remembered I was not just a sympathetic listener but a writer using their life to craft a narrative? What if they forgot? What if we spent so much time together, became such a part of each other’s lives that they thought they were talking to an old friend? What did I do then? Would using the material betray a friendship? Would not using it betray the story? I thought about this a lot after Arianne called me from the airport. We talked for a long time that night and for several hours over the course of the next few days as she sorted out her anger and decided her future. What she was going through was personally painful. It was also, simultaneously, great copy. One half of me listened as a friend; the other half listened as a writer. Neither half was sure what to do. It felt so necessary to my story. It also felt private, a conversation between friends. This would be tough. There was the loyalty I felt to Arianne as a friend. I wanted to do nothing to hurt her or make her publicly vulnerable or endanger her tenuous relationship with her coach and teammates. But I also had loyalty to the story. I was trying hard to tell what I saw as the truth about what it meant to be a female and an athlete, and this crisis of Arianne’s spoke directly to that. I had to admit, though, that there might be darker motives lurking in there too: blood lust for a good story, self-concern for building a reputation. And then there were the readers. I owed them an honest, no-holds-barred story, didn’t I? When they picked up my book, they were trusting me to take them into a world they didn’t know and make it knowable. Would I serve my readers by obscuring part of that world?