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introduce me to others in the field. I do all my preliminary interviews on the telephone. I put on my
headset and ask for permission to take notes, which I do on my computer.
During this process, I’m also testing my passion for the topic. Given all the frustrations of
journalism, you have to be somewhat out of your mind to embark on any book. So the only good
reason is that you are obsessed with the story and the subject.
Do you ever stumble on the fact that a story has been in front of you all along?
I’ve never simply stumbled on a story that turns out to have been in front of me. I wish I could do it
that way, but the opposite is actually the case. I’ve had a number of great stories sitting in front of me
—stories that other journalists recognized were great, and wrote themselves.
For example, Sylvia Nasser wrote A Beautiful Mind, a wonderful book about the Nobel Prize–
winning economist, John Nash. Now I was aware of John Nash during the time I was a graduate
student at Princeton, and I even had a number of encounters with him. It’s a story I could have tackled
if I had been as alert as Sylvia is. Duh.
Another example is Jonathan Harr’s A Civil Action, which was about an enormous lawsuit against
W. R. Grace. My father was a managing partner at the law firm that defended Grace, and I spent my
high school years listening to him talk about what a fascinating case it was. But it never occurred to
me to write a book about it— duh again.
Do you prefer long-term pieces or short ones?
I like doing both. I used to write a lot of “Talk of the Town” pieces for The New Yorker. They were
deeply satisfying because I could go in, do it quickly, and get out. In October 1987, I was at the New
York Stock Exchange when the market crashed. I wrote a “Talk” piece about a monk in orange robes
whom I found praying in the visitors’ gallery. He told me, “Our master teaches us that we are to pray
in the most dangerous places, and right now the New York Stock Exchange is the most dangerous
place anywhere. As the Dow goes down, I can feel my dharma going up.”
You’ve written fiction and nonfiction. When you have an idea for a story, how do you decide in
which genre to render it?
I decided to write The Cobra Event as a novel in order to solve a very specific journalistic
problem. I became interested in biological weapons while writing The Hot Zone, and I realized that
there was something very important about them that the scientific community was trying its damnedest
to ignore. But the weapons experts I needed to talk to wouldn’t go on the record because their
positions in the government were too sensitive.
But once I decided to write a novel about biological weapons, they were delighted to tell me
everything I needed to know, from how FBI agents dress and get along with their families, to the
scientific work they did on bioterrorism. These conversations pretty much ended, however, when a
high-ranking FBI official became aware of my research for the novel and sent a memo out forbidding