72395873289

Once you’ve struck on a story, how do you decide whom to interview? How do you find
characters?
A lot of it is serendipitous. To be honest, when I met Lafeyette and Pharoah, I didn’t think to myself,
“Boy, these kids are representative of thousands of others.” I was doing a Wall Street Journal piece
about violence in the inner city, and I wanted to write about it through the eyes of a child.
What I do in a community like that is find an institution that is respected in the neighborhood. So I
spent three weeks hanging out at the local Boys and Girls Club. I went three or four afternoons each
week to hang out, play basketball, and shoot pool with the kids. I didn’t take any notes, although I did
tell them I was a reporter and wanted to write a story about their community. The toughest thing was
convincing them I wasn’t a cop.
What were you looking for in these kids?
It was simple. I wanted to find a kid I connected to, a kid with whom I identified with on some
level.
What about Lafeyette and Pharoah did you identify with?
With Lafeyette, I identified with his sense of responsibility. Dutiful. Too much so. That describes
me as a kid. And that was Lafeyette’s problem, as well. Pharoah, on the other hand, struck me as
terribly vulnerable, a boy who so much wanted to belong, to be connected, to be liked. That’s how I
think of myself, as someone who wants to belong, the only difference being that I can never quite
figure out what it is I want to belong to.
How have your ideas about empathy influenced your choice of characters?
I wrestled with how to open There Are No Children Here. The obvious place to begin would have
been with a moment of violence. It’s what astonished me. It would have startled readers, as well. But
I ultimately chose to open it with a fairly benign scene of the boys hunting for garter snakes on nearby
railroad tracks. Looking back on it, I was looking for ways to create empathy with my characters. As
kids, we all looked for places of refuge, and so readers, I hoped, could immediately see some of
themselves in Lafeyette and Pharoah.
In a New York Times Magazine piece about a jury in a death penalty trial [“In the Face of Death,”
July 6, 2003], I wrote the story from the viewpoint of the jurors, and so I had to remind myself
throughout the piece that I couldn’t introduce anything—like what the defendant was feeling—that the
jurors weren’t privy too. I wanted to put the reader in the shoes of those jurors, for them to hear what
they heard, to see what they saw.
When I was reporting The Other Side of the River, I interviewed a former police officer who was
an out-and-out racist. He was filled with venom for African Americans, and would have made an
easy target. He was incidental to the plot, so whether I used him or not was clearly a judgment call. I
chose not to. I feared that if I did it would have made it easy on my white readers; it would have been