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oth fictional and real, are entitled to their own destinies, that is, nothing needs to be neat and tidy in
storytelling. It’s not how life works.
I also look for stories that surprise me. Unpredictability is especially important given the kinds of
topics—like race and poverty— that I write on. People aren’t inclined to read articles, let alone
books, about such well-traveled subjects, and so my challenge is to figure out how to engage readers.
What is your thought process as you decide whether to pursue a story?
I ask myself a series of questions: Are these people I want to spend time with? Is it a place I want
to spend time in? Is there a larger point I can draw from it? Is it a book, or an article? Are these
issues engaging enough to wrestle with for two months, or for two years?
What kinds of people do you most like writing about?
People who have never been interviewed before and who’ve never dealt with the press. It’s a
privilege to be let into people’s lives, and I’m continually astonished at how generous people can be,
with their time, with their emotions, with their stories. I especially like writing about children and
teenagers, in large part because they look at the world with such a fresh perspective. But they’re also
very tough to write about. The temptation is to be facile and to fall into all those hoary clichés about
how kids “say the darnedest things.” Most reporters don’t take children seriously. They’re too often
used as means to telling a story rather than the story itself. They’re our most vulnerable, and I think
how we come to view them defines us as a culture. We’re conflicted about how we think of children
and of childhood. Young enough to execute or to try in adult court, but not old enough to drink, or to
drive, or to marry. I guess I also cherish their existential nature. They live in the moment. They lack
the self-consciousness of adults. And, man, they’re fun to be around. Which counts for a lot.
Children are not terribly reflective, so getting to know them well, getting information from them can
be difficult. I remember when I was first reporting There Are No Children Here, I’d ask Lafeyette and
Pharoah (the two main characters), “What did you guys do yesterday? ” And they’d just shrug their
shoulders. I thought, “Oh, no! How the hell am I going to pull this off?” They didn’t have a good sense
of time. They didn’t know precisely when something had happened to them, or even what had
happened. And my questions were so general that they didn’t even know how to begin to answer
them.
How did you solve this problem?
I learned how to ask them questions, how to jog their memories, how to avoid the open-ended
questions. What I discovered was that if I interviewed the adults in their lives (who did have a sense
of when events took place) before I talked with Lafeyette and Pharoah, I’d get the information I
needed in order to ask the children more precise questions. After that, whenever I interviewed
Lafeyette and Pharoah, I found I could ask them about events that took place three days—or even three
months—ago, and they’d remember every detail as if it happened earlier that day.
What kinds of people do you least like writing about?