[. . . ] He tasted like snowflakes and wine, like winter and Will and London.
There is space for a different kind of investigative reporting that's about immersion and obsessive attention to detail and deep listening.
There’s no such thing as being totally ‘found’…the fun, I think, is in the searching.
What narrative journalism does is create a language or open up a space where someone can say, "Oh, this happened to me, too. "
I tend to only be able to obsess about one thing at once, and become fully engaged in and only interested in that thing. But in the longer term, a lot of my stories also give birth to other stories.
It's been nice, actually, to keep in touch with a lot of the people and families that I've written about. Like with the kids I was just writing about from Guatemala, who survived being kidnapped and fleeing violence, it was nice to just sit down in their living room and play bingo with them, go to dinner with the family. And sometimes not thinking about it in such a mechanistic "I am now coming to report and get what I need" way, but just spending time, helps you see a more natural version of who they are too.
I try to come to my reporting as a real, whole person, not an automaton. And it's always one of the strange discomforts of the job, that you're in this very intense moment in someone's life - you're engaging with them nonstop - and then suddenly your piece is out and that's done. It always reminds me that the journalist's job isn't to be someone's friend, or their psychologist, or anything other than what we actually are. And at the end of the day, that can definitely seem like such a strange, extractive relationship.
I don't know if you've ever seen some of the Sidney Lumet movies, like Dog Day Afternoon [1975] or Network [1976]. They're real events that happen in real time, and there are all of these different characters experiencing the same thing in different parts of the movie. . . I am so bad at explaining my films. But it's in the world of finance and the world of media, and how they connect. It was a big undertaking. A big, mainstream movie, which stars Julia Roberts and George Clooney. But for me, it's really just a small story about character and people.
It is dangerous to exist in the world. To exist is to be threatened. We must live with threats.
If you allow yourself, you can become stronger in the very places that you've been broken.
It is not about sexuality that is important to most people who care, it is what we do for our community and our family, our friends and just human compassion for others that matter in the world we live in daily.