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picture with writerly flourishes, the better. The power resides in the facts. War reporting can have that
quality, obviously, but so can other genres, and tragedy and violence aren’t necessarily part of it—just
a story that’s sufficiently taut or somber, or characters who can somehow carry it themselves, with
their eloquence or strangeness or unusually powerful presence. With other subjects, other pieces, the
main interest may lie somewhere between the writer and the subject, allowing for more commentary,
more flash, more intrusiveness. What I strive for, tonally, is just to figure out what voice will work
best on a given story. But even on the pieces that let me fool around—going on the road with an
obscure but witty punk band, say—I still want my prose to feel sturdy, and reasonably well built. I
want readers to trust me, and I’m always afraid that loose writing might squander that trust.
Do you think a lot about the sound your words make?
Too much, I’m told. But not nearly as much as I used to. There was a time when I was almost more
interested in the sound of my sentences than in whatever sense they made. Working as a journalist for
a couple of decades has pretty much knocked that out of me, and I’ve long stopped letting myself
write the kinds of rhetorical glissandos and crescendos that I still hear in my head. On balance, that’s
a good thing, I’m sure.
Do you believe the kind of journalism you practice can lead to truth?
There are “facts,” which you need to get right. And then there is the “truth,” which is a larger issue.
If there’s a question about whether individual incidents or facts are true, I think one should try to
provide the reader with all the credible versions and let him or her decide what’s true.
If I’m telling a family story, the truth as I understand it is my best, fullest, most accurate sense of
how people talk, feel, interact, and what happened. And yet my view, my understanding, of someone
else’s family is inherently terribly limited—especially when compared to the understandings of the
people in the family. So I never stop worrying that I’m not getting it right.
With political stories, including war pieces, I tend to worry less about getting the meaning of things
wrong. It’s public life and, even if my understanding is flawed, giving it my best shot at an
interpretation, at a truthful depiction, feels essentially legit. A lot of people may disagree with my
version, but that’s the nature of political life, which includes political journalism. It’s a world in
which the “truth” is the most persuasive argument—assuming, always, that nobody’s cooking the
facts.
Do you think there is something peculiarly American about the kind of literary nonfiction you
write?
There’s literary nonfiction in many countries—essays, memoirs, biographies, high-style long-form
journalism—but the kind of rigorous interest in facts, giving little or no license to embroider or preen,
is particular to this country. And of relatively recent vintage. The journalistic standards in Britain are
markedly lower. A lot of British nonfiction writers have great style, but on the whole they care less
about factual accuracy than we do.