ARIANNE CALLED ME ON THE PHONE from SeaTac Airport where she was waiting to catch a shuttle flight to Portland. She had just been suspended from the University of Oregon basketball team and sent home in the middle of a road trip. She was alone and angry and confused. She needed to talk to someone, to an understanding friend who knew her, who knew what basketball meant to her, who knew about her edgy relationship with her coach, a friend who could listen and sympathize and advise, someone she could trust. So she called me. The only thing was, I wasn’t a friend. Or rather, I was a friend, but I was also, simultaneously, a writer writing a book in which Arianne was a main character. She was my subject. Her crisis was my plot. Our relationship began with and revolved around the book, Full Court Press. I met her when I met all the players on the team I was to follow for what turned out to be a pivotal season in their and their coach’s lives. I spent time with all the key players on the team, took them to lunch, sipped tea on the raggedy sofas in their student apartments, watched them from the sidelines at seven a.m. Saturday practices, ate at training table with them, went on road trips with them, met their parents. I liked them all, respected them for their discipline and their strength, the way they approached problems, their focus, their drive. But from the beginning, I was drawn to Arianne. I had been a loner growing up, and she had too. Solitude had taught us both self-reliance. We talked easily. We connected in a special way. We sought each other out. But always, underneath our conversation was the subtext: She was a loner who needed a friend. I was a writer who needed a story. It was both a natural -- and a truly uncomfortable – relationship. This is not how I was taught it was supposed to be. In the classrooms of Medill School of Journalism and in the newsroom of a northern California paper, I was drilled in the mechanics of neutrality, initiated into the cult of objectivity. People were sources of information, I was told. You interviewed them. You took notes. You left. If you had to ask a personal question or intervene in their lives during a time of crisis, well, that was all part of the job. You softened your voice, nodded sympathetically, went back to the office to write the story and forgot about them. Even back then, I don’t think I quite bought it. I never understood how a writer could be detached from her subject -- or why she would want to be. I had chosen to be a writer because I felt deeply about the world, because I cared about issues and people and places. It seemed to me that joining the cult of objectivity meant that I had to pretend I wasn’t me or at least pretend that who I was didn’t matter. It’s not that I ever thought I should be part of the story or even present in the story. But I did see myself as a very particular filter through which the story flowed. I was the one, after all, who put the frame around the story. I was the one who tried to make sense of what I saw and heard. How could I feign detachment and neutrality in this process? I was not a physician trained to look at the disease and not the patient. I was not a scientist conducting a double-blind experiment. I was a writer in and of the world, dealing with real people and real issues, with relationships and emotions, with people’s lives. This cult of objectivity didn’t make much sense to me then, and now, after two decades of writing, it makes even less.