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there was an autopsy, and one Saturday morning he called to say that there was an autopsy scheduled
in thirty minutes. I rushed over to the hospital and watched the whole thing: the assistant cutting and
opening the body, the pathologist using a bread knife to slice organ samples. When the pathologist cut
the skull and lifted the brain out, she handed it to me. It was a soft, gelatinous blob. And the smell
during the autopsy was profound. The contents of the large intestine stink, and the freshly cut human
flesh smelled, I must say, a little like raw pork. Experiencing that autopsy myself made the scene in
The Cobra Event incredibly real and accurate.
How would you describe your reportorial stance?
I’m gentle and nonconfrontational. I’m generally admiring and I’m always respectful. My goal is to
capture this human being, to “immortalize” the person in prose. For many of the people I’m writing
about, this may be the only time in their entire life that their work will be handled with respect and
detail by an author who knows what he is doing. I take that responsibility very seriously.
How do you conceive of your role as a reporter?
I go back to the historian Thucydides, who was originally an Athenian general during the early
stages of the Peloponnesian War. General Thucydides lost a battle to the Spartans and was nearly
executed for it. He fled to Sparta, where he interviewed Spartan generals about the war. In the
opening passages of Peloponnesian War he writes something like, “Believing that these events were
important and worthy of narration, I chose to write them down, not just for this time but for future ages
. . .” He identified events of his day as worthy of being immortalized in the form of narrative history.
In a way, I’m writing history. The people I’ve written about are all going to die, but there will always
be a record of what they achieved. The little threads of human existence are like feeder-streams in the
great watershed of history.
Once you’re ready to begin interviewing, how do you decide who to talk to?
I suppose I think about the people I’ll interview in the same way a playwright thinks about how his
characters will fit together onstage. It’s like a play by Pirandello, in which the actors take over the
drama and act on their own—except that it’s real, not a play, and they do act on their own.
As for the kinds of characters I look for, I like polymaths, people who have hugely diverse, eclectic
minds. For example, James Gunn can build complicated telescopes and instruments from spare parts
and do Einstein’s equations of general relativity in his sleep. Or characters like Eugene Shoemaker,
who is a geologist who looks at the sky! I love paradox. Or Ken Iverson in American Steel, who is a
CEO of a Fortune 500 company whose office is in a shabby mall, who flies coach, and who answers
his own phone because his secretary is too busy!
I look for characters who embody the paradoxical interaction between the public figure, who has
very important public responsibilities, and the private person who is dealing with the mundane reality
of American life.
How do you begin an interview?