Count the verbs in Alexander Chee’s essay, note the absence of emotional language, and then thank Annie Dillard for her part. Chee, an essayist and fiction writer, revisits his undergraduate writing workshop with Dillard, the distinguished, Pulitzer Prize-winning nonfiction writer who died last week at 81. Chee’s account of their semester together is an affectionate portrait that doubles as a brisk craft talk; in it, he puts Dillard’s lessons through their paces, a fitting tribute to the teacher who borrowed cigarette drags from her students, chewed through caramel candies during class, and nurtured his own artistic evolution with her rules and exercises.
Narrative writing sets down details in an order that evokes the writer’s experience for the reader, she announced. This seemed obvious but also radical—no one had ever said it so plainly to us. She spoke often of “the job.” If you’re doing your job, the reader feels what you felt. You don’t have to tell the reader how to feel. No one likes to be told how to feel about something. And if you doubt that, just go ahead. Try and tell someone how to feel.
. . .
One afternoon, at her direction, we brought in our pages, scissors and tape, and told to bring several drafts of an essay, one that we struggled with over many versions.
Now cut out only the best sentences, she said. And tape them on a blank page. And then when you have that, write in around them, she said. Fill in what’s missing and make it reach for the best of what you’ve written thus far.
Four years ago, I read Roberto José Andrade Franco’s ESPN story about Tess Mata, one of the students killed in the Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, and I’ve never forgotten an image in it: a determined Tess outside in the Texas heat, aiming her softball pitches at a target on a tree in her family’s yard. That’s what Franco does so well. He creates moments that linger—about sports, Texas, loss, and identity and in-betweenness—and makes me care about the people he puts on the page.
Franco grew up on the El Paso-Juárez border. In a 2020 National Magazine Award-nominated essay that he wrote one year after the El Paso massacre, he reflects on the lifelong pull to this paradox of a place: “It’s where things make the most sense. Where it’s easy to love, even if it’s difficult to live.” I love that he writes from this borderland even when he’s somewhere else. During Mexico’s first World Cup match earlier this summer, he was in Woodburn, Oregon, a small town where Latinos make up more than 60 percent of the population and own nearly every business downtown. Residents had been shaken by last fall’s ICE raids, but they showed up to watch and celebrate. There, thousands of miles from El Paso, Franco found something familiar: a hardworking, resilient community with deep Latino roots and a fierce sense of pride.
I also credit Franco with piquing my interest in wrestling stories, including his piece on WWW star Eddie Guerrero, which also explores family and legacy. Whether he’s writing about sports heroes or ordinary people, or tracing the history of Texas or his own, Franco never fails to move me.
Below, he explains why enrolling in community college at 28 was the most meaningful journey he’s taken, tells us his favorite meal (and the ideal season to eat it), and recognizes a fellow sports writer who inspires him. When asked to name three publications he enjoys reading, he gives a shout-out to Texas Highways, a magazine we love—and it just so happens that he’s the guest editor of its October 2026 issue, focused on El Paso. After spending time with Franco here, read his feature on the city’s historic Smelter Cemetery, and then explore the rest of the magazine.
Several places, but mostly on the El Paso-Juárez border.
I was born in Chicago, but we lived in Juárez, Mexico, until I was about 6. Then we moved across the border to El Paso, Texas, before my father joined the Army. That’s when we lived in Chicago for a short time, then Colorado and Germany before we briefly returned to Juárez. I was about 13 when we moved to El Paso again.
What places feel like home?
Anywhere I hear the Spanish of the US-Mexico border. These areas are often ignored and underserved so it’s a working-class Spanish. Because of its location, some words are a mix of English and Spanish that other parts of Mexico don’t use.
Other than family members, who or what has shaped you the most?
The decade between graduating high school and enrolling at El Paso Community College. I spent most of it working in construction and bouncing around between El Paso and Phoenix, along with a few bad months in Tucson.
What is your favorite time of day?
The early morning when everyone is asleep and the sun’s yet to rise. And it’s so quiet that, almost always at the exact same time, I can hear my neighbor’s footsteps as they walk out of their home, open and close their car door, start it, and then drive away, presumably on their way to work.
What are you really good at?
Building things. I find it almost therapeutic to do some sort of work with my hands as I sweat and listen to music. I also enjoy the feeling of seeing something finished within a few hours.
What’s the best gift you’ve ever received?
I don’t remember who I got the idea from, but years ago I heard or read a suggestion to interview your children during different phases of their lives. Just take out the voice recorder and ask them basic questions. When they’re younger, you can ask about their favorite animal, color, movie, etc. As they get older, the questions can be more about their friends, hobbies, and aspirations.
I’ve been doing this every few months with my now 9-year-old daughter. Occasionally, I’ll listen to the first recordings from when she was 3, and I can hear how much she’s changed—from her voice and interests to the clarity of her words and thoughts. It’s like a short visit with a different version of who your child once was.
That suggestion to interview your children has been the best gift.
Describe your favorite meal.
My mom’s pozole. It’s a Mexican pork and hominy stew accompanied with radishes, cabbage, and bolillo bread. She’ll sometimes make it in late October, on the Saturday closest to my birthday. The weather will be colder by then and a college football game will be on in the background—both of those make it even better. Then a good cigar afterwards.
Sound or silence? (And if sound, what sound?)
It’s become silence. I used to write with music in the background. It almost didn’t matter what kind, and sometimes it’d be the same song on repeat for hours. That was also when I’d do most of my writing during the day and into the early evening. But now, I’ve fallen into a routine where I do most of my writing early. Sometimes I’ll wake up naturally as early as three in the morning. With that change, I now write in silence.
But maybe it’ll change back to music one day.
Where do you do your best thinking?
It just happens so there’s no specific place. And so long as I’m not on deadline, whenever I feel like I can’t think anymore I just try to do something else for that day.
I’ve gotten ideas while driving, listening to podcasts and music, or in the middle of watching a movie. I’ve even woken up during the middle of night with a thought that helps unlock something that I had been stuck on.
What journey—physical, creative, intellectual, or otherwise—has meant the most to you?
Earning an associate degree.
I was a nontraditional student who first enrolled at El Paso Community College at 28 years old. It had been about a decade since I was in school. I was full of self-doubt and worry that I was too old or not a good enough student to be there. With that, I also worried that I might be wasting my time.
But I quickly realized I was a much better student in college than I’d ever been in high school. I was motivated, disciplined, and having worked in construction for the decade before then, I had a different perspective of what college could be. Whenever I felt like complaining, I’d remind myself (as I’ll still occasionally do) that reading and writing is a lot easier than doing manual labor outdoors, especially during the summers.
I ultimately transferred and graduated from a four-year university, and later even finished a PhD program. But that associate degree was the most meaningful because it’s where I started to find outlets for my intellectual curiosities and people who encouraged me.
Where do you like to read?
I don’t have any specific place. At home it’s usually in my office, bed, or on the couch. Away from there, I’ll read while waiting. I’m an anxious flyer, so I’ve also recently found myself saving longer reads for when I’m at the airport or on a plane. It lets me focus on something else while also helping pass the time.
What’s the last rabbit hole you disappeared into?
The World Cup.
Name three publications you enjoy reading these days.
Texas Highways to read about the parts of Texas that aren’t chaotic or depressive. De Los to keep up with some of what’s happening with Latinos outside of where I live. The Good Fight to stay current with boxing.
What’s one longread that you can’t stop thinking about?
Michael Paterniti’s “The House that Thurman Munson Built.” It’s got everything that interests me as a reader and writer: tragedy, memory, and examining what athletes mean to us at different ages.
What was the last book you read?
Divided Soul: The Life of Marvin Gaye. It’s an excellent book.
What piece of nonfiction are you most proud of writing?
What’s your most reliable way to get creatively unstuck?
Go for a walk or drive. Either of those help me get away from what I’m doing without completely separating me from it.
Who’s a writer you turn to when you need some inspiration?
Wright Thompson, who I’m fortunate to call a colleague.
I’ll sometimes listen to a chapter or two from The Cost of These Dreams on audiobook before I start writing a story. Wright is among the best sports writers ever, but the story of his that I’ll most often return to is the one he wrote for The Atlantic, “His Name Was Emmett Till.” The small part where one of the main characters says he doesn’t think of the past but has a dog named Dixie is perfect.
And in first drafts, I start too many sentences with “so,” “because,” and “since.”
What’s your favorite guilty pleasure?
Watching mindless, and at times dumb, dating shows with my wife.
What superpower would you like to have?
The ability to not get distracted by my phone.
What animal or nonhuman being do you most identify with?
Stray dogs who largely mind their own business and hang out in the same general area without terrorizing it.
If you have a free solitary hour in your day, what do you typically do?
If it’s early in the day, I’ll take a nap.
What five items would you place in a time capsule?
My phone full of photos and videos, a drawing from my daughter, my box full of sports cards, my voice recorder, and a Dallas Cowboys Super Bowl XXX champions hat because I increasingly fear that’ll be the last one they’ll win.
What does your writing space look like?
I’ve turned a room in our house into my office. It has a wall-to-wall bookcase. On the opposite side of it is my desk. It has plenty of space, a filing cabinet attached to it, and a shelf for my speaker and printer. Yes, a printer. It’s nothing fancy, but practical.
On the wall above the desk is a dry-erase board where I’ll write reminders and a few words that are story ideas. Once those ideas become a story, I have a corkboard, on the wall to the left of where I sit, for the three-by-five cards I use to outline and organize sections. Above the corkboard are reminders of what I need to focus on when I write. Below it is a calendar for deadlines and travel dates. To the right of where I sit is a small couch. The walls have framed boxing fight posters, work of local artists, photos of my wife and daughter, and random things that mean something to me, like mini football helmets from the University of Texas-El Paso.
Roberto José Andrade Franco is a feature writer with ESPN and aWriter-at-Large with Texas Highways. His work has been anthologized four times in The Year’s Best Sports Writing and nominated for the National Magazine Award. He’s also a four-time finalist for the Dan Jenkins Medal for Excellence in Sportswriting.
Wendell Berry, who died this week at the age of 92, published dozens of books of poetry, fiction, and essays, any of which might make for meaningful connection with Berry’s ideas about place and how we engage with it. But this conversation with Amanda Petrusich, which bloomed from a personal correspondence between the two writers, feels like an especially vital tribute to Berry. Here, his decades of thought on sustainability and its human limits find gloriously vivid expression; after all, place shapes our voices, too. Throughout, Berry is luminous and pithy and discerning: “We’re alive only in some place in particular.” “Every generation is a bridge between something that’s past and something that’s coming.” “Our conversation is worth more right now than either one of us thinking separately.” The last is a perfect sentiment for any dialogue, including those on the page.
Part of manners used to be to say to somebody you just met, “Where you from?” And I quit asking it, because so many people say they’re from everywhere or nowhere. I’ll tell you a little bit of my history that may be pertinent. My mother was born and grew up in Port Royal, my father about four miles south. Both of their families had lived here since about the beginning of the nineteenth century. When I came to teach at the University of Kentucky, Tanya and I thought we would live in Lexington, and we would have “a country place.” And we hardly had laid our hands to this house, which needed some preservation work, when we realized, we’re not going to have a country place; we’re going to live here. And so we have. We bought this home and twelve acres in the fall of 1964, and moved in, in the midst of renovations, in the summer of 1965. That put our children here, and now we’ve got grandchildren who are at home here. That comes from a decision that we made to be here, and to be here permanently.
I was sad last fall when I read and recommended Jaya Saxena’s final story for Eater. Saxena is a food writer the Longreads editors have followed for years, and a journalist I’ve always counted on for food writing that both informs and entertains; she goes deep on aspects of cuisine, dining, the restaurant industry, and food culture in a way that’s relatable and unpretentious. (She’s also the series editor of The Best AmericanFood and Travel Writing anthology; you can preorder the 2026 edition now.) So I was glad to hear, earlier this year, that Saxena and other former Eater writers were cooking up something new.
That something is Ravenous, a worker-owned, subscriber-supported food and culture site founded by Saxena, Amy McCarthy, Ashok Selvam, Courtney E. Smith, and Frances Dumlao. The five journalists are “sick and tired of the conversation around food being reduced to AI-generated pablum, ‘best of’ lists, and influencer-driven trends,” and are building a home for the kind of thoughtful, curious reporting that’s become harder to publish in a broken media landscape. Or, as they put it: food media with teeth.
Next week, Ravenous launches a monthlong fundraiser, so now is the perfect time to support the site. Seven dollars a month, or $70 a year, gets you access to everything they publish; higher-tier plans come with more perks. (Sign up for the Regular plan—$25 a month, or $250 a year—and you get to give the Ravenous raven a nickname, which they include in their Sunday newsletters.)
If anyone can build a publication around engaging, relevant food reporting and storytelling, it’s Saxena and this crew. Have a look around Ravenous and consider subscribing. But be warned: Don’t browse when you’re hungry.
I was born and raised in New York City, and aside from a brief stint in New Orleans for college, I’m still here. Except now I’m over in Queens instead of my hometown of Manhattan.
What places feel like home?
Aside from my actual apartment and the one I grew up in: Various NYC beaches, the backyard of my local bar, a punk show, Ray’s Pizza & Bagel Cafe on St. Mark’s Place, and one specific rock in Central Park.
Other than family members, who or what has shaped you the most?
For high school I went to a Quaker school in Manhattan, and though I don’t consider myself religious in any way, Quaker values began shaping my future politics then. It’s where I first started learning about the value of consensus-based community decision making, and given that this was in the early 2000s, anti-war and anti-violence politics. I even remember a teacher making the case that cars should be banned in Manhattan. It was a big influence on my politics and value systems.
What is your favorite time of day?
To work, right after I wake up, around 8 a.m., when my mind hasn’t filled with the noise of the day. Otherwise, early evening when it’s still light out, and everything is just beginning.
What are you really good at?
Untangling necklaces.
What’s the best gift you’ve ever received?
One year my wife bought me a Cameo of the cow from First Cow, whose handler fed her a treat in my honor. The video is one of my most prized possessions.
Describe your favorite meal.
Of course as a food writer this is tripping me up, because are we talking about a single great meal I’ve experienced, or a dish I could eat every day? If it’s the former, it’s the time my wife and I walked into a random seafood counter in Valencia, Spain, and spent the night eating sardines in garlic oil and sparkling wine from ceramic cups. If it’s the latter, my mom’s mac and cheese.
Sound or silence? (And if sound, what sound?)
I’m a city kid, so too much silence scares me. I need the background noise of people on the street to get anything done.
Where do you do your best thinking?
In the shower or walking around listening to music.
What journey—physical, creative, intellectual, or otherwise—has meant the most to you?
In 2018, my wife and I traveled with my dad to his hometown in India. It was the first time he had been back since before I was born, and being able to experience that with him was so important. We also ate absolutely the best kebab I’ve ever had in my life. Maybe I should have put that as my favorite meal.
Where do you like to read?
On the subway.
What’s the last rabbit hole you disappeared into?
My friend recently introduced me to the case of Judy Smith, a woman who went missing during a trip to Philadelphia and was discovered murdered in the woods outside Asheville, North Carolina. I have now spent a lot of time reading conspiracies about what happened to her.
Name three publications you enjoy reading these days.
Defector has fantastic culture coverage, I love every issue Cake Zine puts out, and some of the best money I’ve spent recently is on the monthly print issue of The Onion.
What’s one longread that you can’t stop thinking about?
This piece in The New Yorker by Lauren Collins about El Mordjene, an Algerian hazelnut spread that white French people are being very racist about. It’s just such a good exploration of how something innocuous becomes the center of a culture war. I was also thrilled to find the spread at an Egyptian grocer in my neighborhood, and sorry white French people, it is better than Nutella.
What was the last book you read?
I had somehow never read Interview With the Vampire by Anne Rice, but after watching the TV series my friends and I decided to read it together.
What piece of nonfiction are you most proud of writing?
“The Food That Makes You Gay,” for Eater. I had editors that really trusted me to follow my instincts, and I managed to thread together some things I had an inkling were related. I’m also just glad I could get a full throated defense of bodily autonomy and the right to change one’s body in a piece that started out talking about straight men being afraid to eat bananas in public.
What’s your most reliable way to get creatively unstuck?
Walk away from the computer. I just need to do something else, anything else, for a while.
Who’s a writer you turn to when you need some inspiration?
Reading just about anything will definitely help me, but I love Helen Rosner’s food writing. And I tend to listen to a lot of music when I need inspiration, so as far as lyricists go, probably Aimee Mann, Fiona Apple, Joni Mitchell, Prince, and Paul Simon.
What words do you overuse?
I write pretty conversationally, so I sprinkle in a lot of “just” and “of course” and “perhaps” that I usually have to go back and delete.
What’s your favorite guilty pleasure?
I am a firm believer that there is no such thing as a “guilty” pleasure (unless it’s like, continuing to read Harry Potter after J.K. Rowling has made it clear that doing so supports her transphobic work). No one should feel guilty about doing something that brings them joy. But in terms of indulgences that make little sense to others, I love a Hershey’s Cookies ‘N’ Creme bar.
What superpower would you like to have?
Generously, the power to instantly heal others. Selfishly, the power to have three cocktails and sleep through the night.
What animal or nonhuman being do you most identify with?
Any time I see a photo of a magpie standing on its nest made of shiny, pretty things, that’s me.
If you have a free solitary hour in your day, what do you typically do?
Unfortunately, I’m probably looking on my phone. I have a very dumb “project” where I am trying to train my Instagram algorithm to show me the absolute worst videos out there. But I am trying to get better about doing things like taking a walk to the river, or practicing a new hobby (my latest one is trying to learn some card tricks).
What five items would you place in a time capsule?
A copy of The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, a bootleg Knicks champion shirt, a fortune teller fish, a bottle of 4711 cologne, and a DVD of Velvet Goldmine.
What does your writing space look like?
You should know for this photo I am standing directly against my bed, which my cats sit on all day and scream at me from. You should also know half the time I’m not even here, and instead writing with my laptop on the couch.
Jaya Saxena is an IACP Award-winning, James Beard Award-nominated writer and editor, and a lifelong New Yorker. She enjoys covering the intersections of food and immigration, business, history, policy, queerness, and just about every way we use food to say something about ourselves. She is the series editor for The Best American Food and Travel Writing. Her work has appeared in Eater, Slate, Gourmet, GQ, The New York Times, Defector, and more. You can email her at jaya@weareravenous.com.
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At one time, Rachel Hartigan edited The Washington Post’s Book World. During a 12-year stint as a writer, reporter, and editor with National Geographic, she covered everything from the genetics of persimmon trees to the long road to women’s suffrage.
She spoke with Brendan O’Meara, host of The Creative Nonfiction Podcast, about being a self-taught writer, how being open to opportunity can change your career, and how editing others can help you improve your own writing.
This conversation has been edited for pacing and flow.
—Krista Stevens
Brendan: What did your career look like in your head at the start, and how did that change?
Rachel: I was not a kid with a clear version of what I wanted to do. I really like to read, to write, and to learn things. My parents were quite aggravated with me because they had spent a lot of money to educate me. I tried being a paralegal at a legal publishing company and then at the Nevada State Legislature. I was probably lounging on the sofa when my dad came in and slapped a Harper’s Magazine on me and said, “There are internships there. You should apply to that.” OK, it’s in New York. I have friends in New York, so that’s what I did, and somehow I got it. My career has not been a straight path; it’s been a lot of happenstance where I somehow get a job and figure out how to do it once I’m there. People come to me with plans and say, “I’m going to do this, this, and this,” but that’s not my mindset. I wish I was more like that. My career is always a surprise to me.
Brendan: With pursuing something a bit squishy, like writing, how did you deal with the pressure of expectation and the burden to prove yourself to your peers and your parents?
Rachel: My parents weren’t too bad; I was harder on myself because I never went to journalism school. I have always felt like an apprentice, like I’m still figuring it out. It’s only recently that I feel like I know how to do this. I know how to structure something. I know how to get a reader going, but I never felt like I had the right credentials. One reason I’ve gone back and forth with writing and editing—and I feel like each one has helped the other—is because it’s much easier to spot the weaknesses in somebody else’s draft than in mine. Sometimes it’s harder to do with your own prose.
Brendan: An apt metaphor, be it someone else’s work or your own, is looking under the hood like a mechanic to see how things are working, whether everything’s moving as it should. How do you revisit text or analyze work that inspires you, so you can learn from it and apply it to your own work?
Rachel: I have a copy of David Grann’s The Lost City of Z where I wrote down what each paragraph was doing, and what each chapter was doing, trying to figure out how he balanced telling a historical tale—the story of those who were looking for Percy Fawcett—as well as his own story. I used to do that with features I liked, or if I was assigned a feature and I had no idea how to go about it, I would look at similar ones, whether from my colleagues or from other publications, and break down the structure. It gets you over the hump of the blank page because you don’t have to worry about how you start your masterpiece. You’re just like, nope, this is what this paragraph has to do.
Brendan: How have you cultivated that sense of voice over your writing career?
Rachel: I’ve been a journalist for a very long time. Clarity has always been a priority, especially at National Geographic. When I was writing scientific stories, some of them had to be really, really short. It’s front-of-book for the magazine, and it’s almost like writing poetry because every word has to count. If you’re doing something complicated, you have to think about how the reader is taking it in. Is this clear to the reader? Is the reader going to want to read the next paragraph? Where is the momentum? I’m thinking about that a lot. I’m trying to remember that I’m in partnership with a reader, and they need to understand what I’m writing about.
Brendan: How do you approach interviewing as a skill and as a craft?
Rachel: I always have my questions, but I’m not an aggressive interviewer. I like to let people talk, and I like to use people’s own words in my writing. I like to hear people’s voices, so I am probably a minimalist interviewer, though I wouldn’t say a minimalist reporter. But for instance, when I went on expeditions to Nikumaroro—an island where some think Amelia Earhart died as a castaway—I felt like I was a spy and an eavesdropper. I would interview people and ask them what they were doing, but mostly I was trying to watch and listen and see how people were doing, and I hoped they would forget I’m there.
Brendan: I love what you said at the start of your book, about being bored with your job working on tiny morsels for the magazine, bored with your marriage to another deskbound journalist, and most of all, bored of yourself. Take us to that moment, this middle-age malaise, this boredom.
Rachel: I was in my little cubicle writing and editing for the front-of-book, which was fairly routine. I knew what was happening: This week and the next was writing, and the next week was editing. My son was in school, so there was his school routine, and I just didn’t know what I wanted to do next. The writing and editing for the front-of-book had become pretty easy, and I felt somewhat underemployed. But here I am again at my desk, and literally, one of the editors at Nat Geo, Glenn Oeland, stopped me in the hallway and said, “We have a berth on this ship going out to an island in the Pacific. Do you want to go?” And I said yes, and I really had no idea where I was going.
When I started at Nat Geo, I had been a book review editor at the The Washington Post, which is a very desk-bound job. I had no idea what I was doing, so I said yes to things, which up until that point wasn’t anything hugely dramatic. So this was the biggest yes. I realized it wasn’t just a yes that I had to say, but I also had to get buy-in from my then-husband and my son, who was 12 at the time. I had to think about all the details involved in going to a place like this. I had never been on a ship; I had never been anywhere tropical. But once I got on the ship, I focused on doing the story, and it felt like a huge weight fell off my shoulders, even though I was very seasick at first. But once the preparation is over, you immerse yourself in the story and the people, trying to figure out the dynamics of what you need to find out. It’s such a flow state.
My career has not been a straight path; it’s been a lot of happenstance where I somehow get a job and figure out how to do it once I’m there.
Brendan: And as you’re reporting and tackling the project at large, it can be overwhelming to think about the scope of it. Thinking: This is going to be a book. How do I even do that? In what way did this book stretch you?
Rachel: I did two expeditions, one looking for Amelia Earhart’s bones, and the other with Robert Ballard, who is the man who found the Titanic, looking for her plane in the waters around the island. So it was fairly clear what the stories were. But once I got back from the second expedition and started thinking about doing a book on it, I was really struggling. For one thing, we never found anything. We still don’t know what happened to her. So, is there really a book here? And if there is a book, how do I write about all these different things? At least four narratives needed to be tackled. I could have just written a book that theorized what happened to her. I was frustrated when writing news stories because it was mostly about the search for her, not as much about Earhart herself. I didn’t know that much about her beyond what we learn in elementary school: a groundbreaking aviator disappears. I really wanted something that incorporated more of her biography. So that would be one narrative. But then there’s all the theories and the people who pursued them, and it’s all very involved. I had a hard time figuring out how to braid all those strands together.
Brendan: You came up with a three-part structure: captured, castaway, and sank. How did you arrive at three “deaths of Amelia” as the scaffolding to weave these stories around?
Rachel: It was challenging to figure out how to approach each theory, how to lay it out in a way that wouldn’t be utterly baffling to the reader. The first way I tried was utterly baffling to my editor, so I had to have another go. I was trying to do it almost chronologically, which involved all the theories all at once, and it would have been very difficult. So instead, I decided to alternate between the biography chapters and one theory at a time, starting from the least likely to the most likely. I don’t advocate for any one theory in the book, but part of the reason I wanted to start with the least likely is that it’s also the most exciting.
Brendan: You mention that there have been solid biographies written about Earhart. I imagine that as you were looking to sell this book, you were wondering about what can be said that hasn’t already been said? How did you approach selling a new book on Amelia Earhart?
Rachel: In my darkest moments, I’m like, who needs this book? I don’t know. There had been some good biographies, and a lot of the different searchers had written books arguing for what they think happened. There hadn’t really been a book that combined it all, and there hadn’t been a book that contextualized the searches. I think that’s what helped sell the book.
Brendan: I love the first third of the book or so. You write that she wanted a life of purpose and she couldn’t imagine finding it in a purely domestic existence. What do you think she was so, almost at ease, with bucking societal norms of the time?
Rachel: I think she was interested in what was new, in new experiences, in new technology; having a life where things basically stayed the same just would have been the end of her. I just don’t think she would have been able to handle that. She had an unstable childhood, but her parents did well. They had two girls, and when the girls wanted a BB gun, they got a BB gun. Her mom sewed them rompers so that they could actually play rather than being constricted in dresses. She was raised to be herself, basically, and I think she never learned how to shut that down, which is wonderful. She was always looking for what she could do beyond what was expected of her, you know, how can I be what I want to be when society expects me to be a certain way? It’s a question that we all still struggle with. And she was pretty eloquent about wanting people to be able to do what they wanted.
Award-winning New Yorker writer Rachel Aviv recently published a collection of essays about the relationships between mothers and daughters. She talked to Lucy McKeon about her longstanding interest in stories about families and about revisiting old topics through new lenses:
LM
You write in the preface about your own experience of this. Not only in your relationship to your own mother, which I want to ask you about, but you describe revisiting some of these stories, years after first reporting and writing them, now as a more experienced writer, and a mother yourself. Through new insight, and in some cases encountering details you’d previously overlooked, you decided to make some revisions. I wonder how it felt to look back on this work by a younger version of yourself.
RA
I think I was most surprised by how one’s curiosity changes—by the moments where I realized I had failed to be curious. And where my present-day self would have identified a particular episode or trauma as foundational, I had breezed past it [back then]. It was about age, it was about being a different kind of writer, maybe. I kept noticing that I had omitted lost babies or dead babies—in three different stories. It fundamentally wasn’t registering to me as a significant life event. Those are some of the things that I felt newly attentive to, that I couldn’t just leave be. I felt I needed to address [them].
Sam Roberts | Longreads | August 11, 2026 | 4,862 words (20 minutes)
This is an excerpt from Are They Dead Yet? by Sam Roberts, which was published on August 11, 2026, by Bloomsbury Publishing, Inc.
Tuck Everlasting is a cautionary tale about a family of the same surname who, by inadvertently discovering the proverbial Fountain of Youth, is forced to reconcile with eternity. When I was assigned to write the obituary of the book’s author, Natalie Babbitt, I wondered whether she had continued pondering immortality herself. It turned out she had. Not surprisingly, her own take on eternal life echoed that of the fictional family patriarch, Angus Tuck. “I think that living forever would be a terrible thing,” I quoted her as saying in her Times obituary. “It would be boring, sad and lonely.” Babbitt died when she was 84. But Tuck and her other novels endure as Babbitt’s legacy for readers. So does my obituary, which in 2016 revealed her motivation to become an author: She was inspired to write Tuck, she said, when her four-year-old daughter woke from a nap crying because she was scared of dying. Babbitt had intended to become an illustrator, not an author, but pivoted after taking one writing course in college. She had enrolled because her husband hoped to become a novelist and she wanted to understand the challenges he faced.
Back at the Daily News, obituaries weren’t the best way to achieve immortality. We mostly ran one-paragraph squibs for members of the paper’s family, of printers, pressmen, and their immediate relatives. Instead, like most tabloids, the News thrived on the reported details of murders, assassinations, and suicides. Few news stories generated more of a sensation than death in all its dimensions. No less an authority once defined “news” than the ancient newspaper deliverer—a beloved man known as Bo Gee, who was decades too old to be described as a newsboy—weaving up Second Avenue with a wire shopping cart brimming with Chinese-language newspapers, calling out the headlines as he delivered the papers to Chinese bars and restaurants on Manhattan’s East Side. He began his route in Chinatown, where the papers were printed. Subscribers on Manhattan’s Upper East Side were often a day or two behind the headlines because the last stop on his evening route depended largely on the number of drinks he had finagled from bartenders along the way before he was too wobbly to walk any farther. When a colleague of mine, the columnist Jimmy Breslin (who described him as “a small, thirsty man”), asked him which headlines sold the most papers, he responded unhesitatingly. He didn’t need a public opinion poll or a focus group of readers or a real-time digital analysis of clickbait: Two were surefire circulation boosters. One was war! The other: big guy dies!
Taken separately, obits constitute an individual’s legacy. In aggregate, they can capture the social and cultural currency of an era. Which people are worth remembering? Which values are worth celebrating? How do we measure success and failure, good and evil, achievement and defeat, social rank and professional standing? How many of the one hundred thousand people now immortalized in the periodically printed historical compilation Who Was Who were deemed worthy of obituaries at the time of their death? How many of the more than 33,000 contemporary notables included in the latest editions of Who’s Who will get obituaries when they die? (That the titles of those reference books don’t include question marks suggests that the listings themselves are indisputable, a questionable supposition when the price of inclusion by some publishers seems to be for the “whos” to buy at least one copy of the book. An entry for Michael Fowler Cullis, a former British diplomat, describes his recreation as “writing obituaries for friends.”)
People want to be remembered, and we want to remember them, or, at least, we do. “Obituaries commemorate a life at the point where it is completed by death. Yet the completion is also depletion, in the sense that the life is constructed as meaningful precisely at the point where it stops,” Professor Clare Brant, who teaches literature and culture at Kings College London, has written. “They act as the first version of a biography—sometimes the only one, although Wikipedia has closed the gap with each life story seemingly waiting for a death sentence.” But as valuable as Wikipedia can be, the New York Public Library notes, “Obituaries provide an important tool to researchers by offering biographical information on individuals that may not be readily available elsewhere. In many cases, the obituary supplies the only biographical data extant on a person.” Philip Sutton, a genealogy librarian at the library, told Legacy.com, the self-proclaimed world’s largest commercial provider of online memorials and guest books, that obituaries may reveal the married name of a daughter identified years earlier in the census only by her maiden name; that by identifying an immigrant’s specific birthplace, obituaries can also invigorate research on a family’s roots.
Obituaries are a reminder that when you die, someone else gets the last word on your legacy—or, at least, the first of the last words.
Especially in small towns and midsize cities, local newspaper obituaries bond one generation to the next. By recalling where the deceased went to school and whom they married and who survived them, those obits provide the frames that form a moving picture of continuity, a narrative of cohesion. They describe whether, and how, the departed outpaced their parents in personal and professional achievement, their legacy to contemporary readers, and the promise of their progenitors—grandchildren or great-grandchildren who are still blank slates with the potential to add to the story.
To me, obituaries evoke the heartrending backstories of the characters in Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town, the unfulfilled promise of Joe Crowell, who got a scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and graduated first in his class: “Goin’ to be a great engineer, Joe was. But the war broke out and he died in France. All that education for nothing.” Emily is dead, too, but so consumed by nostalgia—before being persuaded that “live people don’t understand, do they?”—that she descends from the town’s cemetery and wants to return to her past life in Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, until the Stage Manager reminds her, “You not only live it but you watch yourself living it. And as you watch it, you see the thing that they, down there, never know. You see the future. You know what’s going to happen afterwards.” “When I think of an obituary, it’s as objective as journalism can be, a story on someone’s life,” Holly Shreve Gilbert, a journalism instructor at Oakland University who was the interim president of the Funeral Consumers Information Society, told Molly Birnbaum of Atlas Obscura. But “hyper-local journalism is dying, and so is the obituary of the local person.” Gilbert added, “Now, if it’s on Legacy.com or Facebook or a blog, we’re basically whitewashing everyone’s lives. We’re all happy. Everyone is happy.”
Well, not everyone.
Obituaries are a reminder that when you die, someone else gets the last word on your legacy—or, at least, the first of the last words. And for all the beloved and respected and cherished and valued that punctuate paid obituaries, don’t forget that families can try to perpetuate irreverent descriptions unilaterally to settle scores when one is no longer in a position to retaliate or respond. In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Malcolm declaims of the repentant Thane of Cawdor, who was executed for treason, “Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it.” If the Thane got the benefit of ambiguity, Florence Harrelson of Chelsea, Maine, had no such luck when she died in 2024 and her daughter, Christina Novak, placed a paid obituary in the Kennebec Journal. Wasting no words, the four-line obit read that the 65-year-old Henderson died “without family by her side due to burnt bridges and a wake of destruction left in her path.” It continued, “Florence did not want an obituary or anyone including family to know she died. That’s because even in death, she wanted those she terrorized to still be living in fear looking over their shoulders. So, this isn’t so much an obituary but more of a public service announcement.”
In 2023, Gayle Harvey Heckman took the trouble to announce the death of her mother, Linda Lernal Stull, in her Michigan hometown newspaper, the Three Rivers Commercial-News, even though they hadn’t spoken in 24 years. “As a mother, Lernal was violent, hateful and cruel,” Heckman wrote. “She physically, mentally, emotionally, verbally and financially abused Gayle.” After going into excruciating detail, the obituary concluded, “Gayle and her family forgive Lernal and hope that she has found peace. They also hope to find peace within themselves. Lernal will not be missed by Gayle or her family. They all understand that the world is a much better place without her.”
Blunt isn’t always bad. If writing can be a cathartic, it can also offer an object lesson. In 2015, a nine-hundred-word paid obituary in Maine’s Bangor Daily News (down-easters seem less inhibited about publicly evaluating their kin) began, “Coleen Sheran Singer (born Coleen Sheran Clark) would have turned 33 this August 31, but she died in Lewiston in an unsuspecting suburban professional couple’s home of a heroin overdose on the morning of December 25, 2014.” The obit was written by Singer’s former husband. It detailed her considerable assets—intellectually gifted, creative, and spirited—without concealing her hefty baggage as a woman who was addicted and suffering from borderline behavioral disorder. Brent Singer attributed the life his former wife led to her broken childhood home but blamed her death on Maine’s governor for denying her access to the methadone clinic she had relied on to stay straight.
In 2008, the Casper Star-Tribune in Wyoming reported that Jim Adams died at 53. Weary of soppy obituaries of patients who had courageously struggled against one disease or another until the bitter end, Adams went through his son to provide an unvarnished premortem verdict on his abbreviated life. And he had no compunctions about belatedly exercising personal responsibility and admitting that he lost his battle for less inspiring reasons entirely: “It was primarily as a result of being stubborn and not following doctor’s orders or maybe for just living life a little too hard for better than five decades.” He did lament, however, that he “was sadly deprived of his final wish, which was to be run over by a beer truck on the way to the liquor store to buy booze for a date.”
In 2019, the family of Joe Heller (not that one) playfully celebrated his life in the Hartford Courant. They described him as “a frequent shopper at the Essex Dump” who “left his family with a house full of crap, 300 pounds of birdseed and dead houseplants.” Heller was so practiced a consummate napper that “there wasn’t an occasion too formal or an event too dour that Joe didn’t interrupt with his apnea and voluminous snoring.” The obituary added, “The family is seeking donations to offset the expense of publishing an exceedingly long obituary which would have really pissed Joe off.” (It then appealed generously for contributions to the Seabee Memorial Scholarship Association.)
The Hellers weren’t kidding. Those paid “obits” aren’t cheap. The New York Times doesn’t accept paid obituaries, but their paid death notices, depending on the edition and the day, cost about $1,000 for a bare-bones nine lines of type and $50 for each additional line, which verbose encomiums and fervent eulogizing can raise into the thousands of dollars. (In memoriam notices in newspapers that wish the departed “Happy Birthday in Heaven” remain a testament to the enduring value of print advertising.) While radio and television have generally fallen short in memorializing the dead, there are blogs, zines, and commercial websites devoted to dying, and personal web pages and online videos have all helped democratize death. So far, though, it’s one area in which even a buzzworthy website can’t always live up to its name (such as when Michael Jackson’s death was announced on MichaelJacksonLive.com).
The Charlotte Observer in North Carolina used to publish brief obituaries of local figures for free—until executives discovered that printing a full page of them daily was costing $350,000 annually for newsprint alone. When the paper imposed a fee, readers revolted; the editors relented in some editions. MyGoodbye.com was started by Stephen Miller (definitely not that one), who grew up next to a cemetery and, after escaping from his bank’s eightieth-floor office in 2 World Trade Center on the morning of September 11, 2001, decided to become an obituarist full-time. Legacy.com partners with hundreds of newspapers and thousands of funeral homes worldwide to account for about 70 percent of the deaths in the United States alone. A prototype called EPOCH—Electronically Preserving Obituaries as Cultural Heritage—created by the Orange County, Florida, Library System enabled people to publish an obit online for free. Another website, MyObits.com, also lets anyone publish a free memorial. Facebook even allows users to designate an executor to manage their profile after they’ve personally logged off this mortal coil for good.
While radio and television have generally fallen short in memorializing the dead, there are blogs, zines, and commercial websites devoted to dying, and personal web pages and online videos have all helped democratize death.
Paid death notices have been wielded as much to ward off the living as to get the last word on the dead. In the early 1920s, Audrey Munson, America’s first supermodel, became so fed up with fame that she tried to fake her death by paying to run a phony death notice in her local upstate New York newspaper. Her gambit failed; she was so celebrated that the clerk she approached refused to accept the advertisement because he recognized her. Rudyard Kipling may have done her one better: When a newspaper reported his death prematurely, he wrote to the editor, “I’ve just read that I am dead. Don’t forget to delete me from your list of subscribers.”
Six months before Oliver Sacks died of cancer at 82 in 2015, the London-born neurologist who lived in Manhattan wrote an op-ed in the New York Times that amounted to an auto-obituary. Sacks was galvanized, he wrote, by the eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume, who, learning he was mortally ill at 65, penned a short autobiography in a single day in 1776. “I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective,” Sacks wrote. “There is no time for anything inessential. I must focus on myself, my work and my friends. I shall no longer look at ‘NewsHour’ every night. I shall no longer pay any attention to politics or arguments about global warming.” He explained that his shifting priorities were influenced less by passion than perspective: “This is not indifference but detachment—I still care deeply about the Middle East, about global warming, about growing inequality, but these are no longer my business; they belong to the future.”
Kelly McMasters, the author of The Leaving Season: A Memoir, started writing her obituary when she was 12; she has refreshed it almost annually since then. Her ritual was inspired by an assignment her mother was given while training as a volunteer at a local hospice. “I usually end up with a gentle accounting of the year, held against all the past ones,” McMasters wrote in a New York Times opinion essay. “I found many of the accomplishments that felt precious one year were hardly worth a mention the next.” Her private accounts produced an album of verbal snapshots, unreachable versions of herself that seemed as good as the dead about whom obituaries are otherwise published. “It seems dreadfully unfair that we wait until after our deaths to write them and never get to read them ourselves,” McMasters wrote. “Writing your obituary while you’re still alive can offer clarity about your life and, mercifully, if you find something lacking, you still have time to revise.”
By inspiring the “Portraits of Grief” series of intimate minibiographies of the victims of 9/11 in the New York Times, the attack by fanatical al-Qaeda suicide bombers on the World Trade Center in 2001 may inadvertently have made the obituary more egalitarian than any event since the Civil War. These 200-word vignettes with thumbnail photographs weren’t standard obits or news stories. Volunteer reporters interviewed families and friends of the victims and the missing to sketch some 2,500 hundred profiles. Overseen by Jon Landman and Christine Kay on the Metro Desk, the portraits were published over nearly five months. “Terrorism rather than the internet democratized the obituary,” Professor Clare Brant wrote. Roy Harris wrote for the Poynter Institute of the project, “The portraits identified one aspect of life—a woman gardening, a man taking his daughter to ice-skating lessons, or perhaps indulging in a fondness for cigars.” The obituarist Nigel Starck said, “Each day’s pages would renew a sense of the tragedy’s scope, while the individual portraits made each person intimately real.” Our exercise in mining the unremarkable found a larger-than-life common denominator, one that challenges the novelist W. P. Kinsella’s conclusion that “the lives of ninety percent of the population are so dull that no one would care in the least about them, the lives of the remaining ten percent are so bizarre that no one would believe them.”
Some of the deaths in those “Portraits of Grief” were preceded by chivalrous acts of courage and self-sacrifice. Those heroics worked their way into news articles. The portraits were not about how people died, not about their last moments of life, no matter how gutsy, but how they lived and what their loss meant to their family, friends, neighbors, and colleagues. The gruesome, grisly details were superfluous, unlike an earlier obituary style in which the how sometimes seemed to predominate over the who, what, when, where, and why.
When Louisa May Alcott died in 1888, for example, the New York Times explained in the first paragraph of her obituary, “For a long time Miss Alcott had been ill, suffering from nervous prostration. Last Autumn she appeared to be improving and went to the Highlands to reside with Dr. Rhoda A. Lawrence. She drove from there into town to visit her father on Thursday last, and caught a cold, which on Saturday settled on the base of the brain and developed spinal meningitis.” The first five paragraphs of Teddy Roosevelt’s Times obituary in 1919 left nothing about the cause of death to the reader’s imagination: “His physicians said that the immediate cause of death was a clot of blood which detached itself from a vein and entered the lungs.” In 1892, reporting the death of Caroline Harrison, the wife of President Benjamin Harrison, the Atlanta Constitution described her corpse in clinical detail: “She shows in her emaciation the effects of the long wasting illness of eight months that has reduced her large, matronly figure to a thin, frail form.” Then again, as recently as 2000, the paper, now called the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, ran an obituary by Kay Powell of a local church-choir tenor, who had also written a manuscript on the philosophy of religion, beginning this way: “David Robeson Morgan was a brilliant man whose future looked good, until he had a frontal lobotomy in 1947.”
“A writer may bear the same name as the subject of his memoir, but he is hardly the same person,” Robert W. Fuller, the former college president and self-styled dignitarian, surmised in the epilogue to his own memoir. “He has long since morphed into the subject’s successor, and then the successor of the successor.” Bridget Fowler, a sociology professor at the University of Glasgow and the author of The Obituary as Collective Memory, wrote, “The auto/biography as such is under the expressive control of its author and is thus as profound (or simplistic) as he or she is. In contrast, one characteristic of the obituary is that these lives are selected as particularly memorable, distinguished, or newsworthy.” She adds, “The obituary offers the rare accolade of public recognition, the first step toward posthumous memory. Yet it is not just a store of value, it is also a measure of value: the obituary as a biographical form illuminates the social reality of dominance and distinction, whilst only rarely shedding light on the world of subordination.”
The onset of the AIDS epidemic presented editors with a sensitive dilemma: Merely having the virus implied vulnerable behavior—either drug use or homosexuality—that society was far from accepting. In 1986, the fashion designer Perry Ellis died of AIDS at age 46, as stated in his obituary in the Washington Post. In the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, his cause of his death was reported to be viral encephalitis. In early May 1987, Charles Ludlam, a playwright, parody actor, and admired figure in New York’s East Village underground arts scene, withdrew from the New York Shakespeare Festival’s scheduled Central Park production of Titus Andronicus. On May 28, Ludlam’s publicist announced that he had died of pneumonia. The New York Times‘s Jeremy Gerard assumed correctly that the pneumonia was a complication of AIDS, and believed the refusal to acknowledge the disease compounded the tragedy of Ludlam’s death by validating the stigma attached to gay people, who were among its most prominent victims.
As Leah Rosenzweig reported in Slate, for hours Gerard desperately tried to persuade Ludlam’s parents to confirm the actual cause but failed. “They were working-class Catholics from Long Island; as far as they were concerned, their son had died a shameful death,” Gerard recalled. But fifteen minutes before his deadline, the family’s lawyer called back. The Ludlams agreed to confirm the cause. On May 29, 1987, Gerard’s obituary of Charles Ludlam was the first that identified AIDS as the cause of death in the Times, on the front page.
“Obituaries contribute to national myths or collective memories of contemporary heroes by symbolically ‘reflecting what, in death, was most valued about the lives of individual citizens,'” Janice Hume wrote. “An obituary distills, publishes, and thus legitimizes something more abstract than mere facts. It also reveals values, highlighted in the attributes of the deceased, and should be examined not just as an indifferent chronicle but as a commemoration, a representation of an ideal, with its own distinct contribution to the understanding of history. Those ideals, part of obituary coverage, become safeguarded by their publication.”
To quantify those values, Lux Narayan, a social media analyst, conducted a statistical survey of some 2,000 New York Times news obituaries that were published in 2015 and 2016. Not surprisingly, the fields of academics, science, politics, film, theater, music, dance, and art predominated among those deemed worthy. On average, they achieved the thing that made them worthy of a Times obituary when they were 37 years old—athletes more likely in their twenties, politicians in their forties. The prototypical obituary subject lived to be 81, which meant 44 years had elapsed between the accomplishment and, in the cases of the many obscure and quirky characters, their public aggrandizement. “Talk about having to be patient,” Narayan said. In a TED Talk, he explained his obsessive reading of the daily paper over scrambled eggs this way: “If you think about it, the front page of the newspaper is usually bad news and cues man’s failures. An instance where bad news cues accomplishment is at the end of the paper, in the obituaries.”
What were the most common denominators among those obituarized, and what do they suggest society—or, more to the point, the Times—valued? If your name was John, you didn’t necessarily have a better chance of being the subject of an obituary, but it was more likely that a man whose first name was John would appear in one. That’s not so surprising, given that John (along with James, Robert, Michael, and David) has been among the most popular names for American men born in the last 100 years. Narayan was struck by another commonality, though. The language-processing program revealed that the one word that leapt out everywhere was help, as a noun or verb. The most universal value, it seemed, that elevated the famous and not-so into those the Times editors considered worthy of obituaries was how much people helped. “They made a positive dent in the fabric of life,” Narayan said.
For a family member, an obit represents an imprimatur, validation by association, a keepsake that maintains their heritage and, perhaps for a generation, prevents their own legacy from vanishing like a walnut in the batter of eternity.
Journalists understand, or should, that statistical surveys of subjective material are fertile ground for as many question marks as answers. Patrick Nolan, a sociologist at the University of South Carolina, wondered whether the cult of celebrity has blossomed over the last century, as the anecdotal evidence suggests. Has the public become so starstruck that somebodies in less glamorous professions have been overshadowed? One way to measure the trajectory of society’s fascination quotient, he figured, was to enlist New York Times obituaries as a cultural barometer. Nolan’s canvas was every “notable death” that was published in the Times during the entire twentieth century.
“Most striking are the simultaneous increases in celebrity obituaries and declines in religious obituaries,” Nolan and Timothy J. Bertoni reported in the journal Sociation Today. “They document the increasing secularization and hedonism of American culture at a time when personal income was rising and public concern was shifting away from the basic issues of survival. The magnitude of these trends is seismic. While the Greeks may have looked to their gods for guidance and entertainment, we’ve turned increasingly to our celebrities—entertainers and athletes.” After dividing the century into quarters, Nolan and a doctoral student, Timothy Bertoni, randomly selected 20 days from 1900, 1925, 1950, 1975, and 2000 and ranked the professions of the dead by the number of obituaries run.
The number of obits of entertainers and athletes, grouped together, rose, from seventh most in 1900 to fifth in 1925, third in 1950, and first in 1975. By 2000, they remained in first place and accounted for 28 percent of obituaries. In 2000, the researchers didn’t find a single notable religious figure who was memorialized. The category had plummeted from fourth place when the 20th century began to last when the millennium ended. During the same period, the number of obituaries of notable individuals from the fields of business, finance, manufacturing, and industry declined by half. Americans, Janice Hume has written in her study of grief, “value each other and, indeed, value life for collective reasons. They value a long, robust, and full life, a life that is uniquely American, and a life that ensures social preservation. A typical Victorian obituary would carry the statement, ‘in life we are in the midst of death,’ but as this study suggests, at least on the obituary pages of historic mainstream American newspapers, in death we are in the midst of life.” Nigel Starck, too, argues that obituaries provide a glue that bonds society not in grief but in an aspirational reevaluation of our own lives.
“There is nothing inherently gloomy about the newspaper obituary page,” he writes. “Done well, it should capture life rather than wallow in death.” Clare Brant recalled her euphoric reaction to reading of the death of Martin Wells, the grandson of the English writer H. G. Wells, in the Guardian in 2009. He was an 80-year-old biologist with a passion for cephalopods and was also a novelist, painter, and yachtsman. “Though marine biologists don’t have dry lives in a literal sense, and people who love octopus usually have a sense of play, he was really lively,” Brant wrote. “I rejoiced that an academic could have such a full, happy and entertaining life—there’s hope for the rest of us! It wasn’t that I wanted to know him or even to have known him, but I was glad he’d existed, and I still want not to forget the implications of his existence.”
And that was an obituary about a total stranger. For a family member, an obit represents an imprimatur, validation by association, a keepsake that maintains their heritage and, perhaps for a generation, prevents their own legacy from vanishing like a walnut in the batter of eternity. “The greatest investigative piece I ever wrote when I thought I was really important never survived more than a few weeks in terms of being kept around,” said Jim Nicholson, the Philadelphia journalist who regularly chronicled deaths of the common man, the nobodies, as he put it. “But these obituaries, they’re laminated. They’re put under glass. They’re hung on walls or in family Bibles. In fact, they’re even put into the inside coat pocket of the deceased. And, yeah, they’ll be around long after you and I are gone.” Nicholson’s obituaries were indelible. “My words give readers thousands of moments to remember of little lives lived well,” he said. “Perhaps I even gave them the secrets of how to live one well.”
What readers cherish about obituaries, Casey Cep wrote in the New Yorker, is “the opportunity to celebrate one’s own good fortune at still being alive, to keep tabs on death—who it comes for, at what age, and how much we have in common with the deceased—and also to trace an immensely compact narrative arc. So much of the news is ongoing and unsettled, but obituaries by definition have a kind of alluring finality.” In the two weeks after Victoria Chang’s mother died of pulmonary fibrosis in 2015, the Los Angeles–based poet feverishly wrote seventy poems. Her goal: to recast the newspaper obituary to identify what had been lost (“civility, language and the future,” she wrote) and death’s cultural impact on the living. She described writing an obituary as a wake-up call. “This person is dead,” Chang wrote. “You’re alive.”
Sam Roberts, a fifty-year veteran of New York journalism, is an obituaries reporter and formerly the Urban Affairs correspondent at the New York Times. He has hosted the New York Times Close Up on TV and the podcast Only in New York, anthologized in a book of the same name. He is the author of The New Yorkers, A History of New York in 27 Buildings, A History of New York in 101 Objects, Grand Central, and The Brother, among other books. He has written for the New York Times Magazine, the New Republic, New York magazine, Vanity Fair, Foreign Affairs, and Air Mail. Before joining the Times in 1983, he was the youngest city editor of the New York Daily News. He lives in New York with his wife.
By the time I encountered the fifth photo in Matt Seaton’s contemplative essay about New England’s stone walls, I found myself participating in the image, trying to figure out the maneuvers that had made the structure cohere. That’s a lot of the gratification here—”striving for coherence,” as Seaton, a former Atlantic editor, describes the work of walling. This is a quick read, and Seaton makes every word count, fitting a bit of Robert Frost and a lot of rock knowledge together just like he was building a . . . well, you know.
Bit by bit—which is the way with walls—my interest and knowledge deepened until what had begun as recreation morphed into a hobby job, mending other people’s walls. Eventually, I realized not only that I liked building walls, but also that I could scratch a subsistence living at it. In what probably struck friends and family as an act of lunacy, I quit my day job as an editor at this magazine and became a part-time waller.
The peg for Robert Zaretsky’s essay on Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot feels flimsy: “the 70th anniversary of its American premiere,” which lagged the show’s proper premiere, in Paris, by three years. Disregard the peg; as Zaretsky makes clear, there’s not a bad time, these days, to consider Beckett’s best-known work, a demonstration of “solidarity and compassion” set against a “featureless, colorless vista.” The stage directions for Godot have Estragon, one of the play’s leads, look out into the auditorium as an extension of the devastation. “Inspiring prospects,” he says. Let’s hope so.
Of course, Godot never arrives. In a Sesame Street parody of the play, the tree, fed up with the melodramatic and nonsensical patter of two Muppets waiting for Elmo, uproots itself and walks off the stage. But we cannot uproot ourselves and walk off the stage; instead, stuck like Didi and Gogo in a state of non-arrival, we wait. For those who waited for an answer from Beckett, none ever came. He once snapped at the English actor Ralph Richardson, who asked if Godot stood for God. If he had meant God, Beckett said, he would have written God. The play, he insisted, strove to avoid definition. This strategy of avoidance leaves us to gaze at a landscape void of meaning, one that by turns is the source of our bemusement and amusement.
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Pamela Colloff is an award-winning reporter at ProPublica and a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine.
She spoke with Brendan O’Meara, host of The Creative Nonfiction Podcast, about how she developed as a reporter and writer, using these skills to uncover the failures of the American criminal justice system. Colloff and O’Meara talk about preparing for interviews, how thoughtful reportage can effect real change, and learning from the perspectives of incarcerated and exonerated people.
Colloff’s first book, Catch the Devil, a deep dive into serial con man Paul Skalnik, is now available.
This conversation has been edited for pacing and flow.
—Krista Stevens
Brendan: What do you make of the fact that regardless of how skilled, experienced, and accomplished you become as a writer, it’s still really, really hard? And yet writers put together amazing work that creates change, and if not change, at least true art that makes meaning.
Pamela: Every assignment, at the beginning? I’m sure this is the one that reveals I’m a failure, that I don’t know what I’m doing. This is the one that’s going to break me. There are different stages. There’s the elation after finding a great idea, and then despair because no one’s going to talk to you, and then elation when people talk to you. Then there’s despair because you have this amazing material, but you have no idea how to write it. It’s this endless roller coaster. It’s funny to have been doing this for so long and still have so much self-doubt.
I remember asking Gary Cartwright [Ed: Cartwright wrote for Texas Monthly from 1975–2010.] about this after a particularly tough close on a story. This was in the late ’90s, early ’00s, and I was really struggling because it felt like every story took so much out of me. It still feels that way, quite honestly. And I sought him out and said something like, “Gosh, this is so hard. Does it get easier?” And he just laughed and he said, “When it gets easier, it’s time to hang it up.” I think what he was saying is that when the work gets boring, when you feel like you really know what you’re doing, then maybe you should move on to something else. I loved that, and it also gave me an appreciation. I think about this a lot now; I feel so lucky at this point in my career to be doing work that is endlessly challenging, like every story is a new Rubik’s Cube to figure out.
Brendan: When it comes to writing, there’s something called the Skip Hollandsworth Method. What is that method, and do you still employ it?
Pamela: He read a draft of mine. I couldn’t tell you which story. His rewriting instruction was to take all the quotes out, and once I had taken the quotes out, to revise it. And once I had revised it, then decide which quotes to put back in. He said, “You’ve got to do a draft where the only voice that’s there is yours.” It was such good advice because in that particular story (and I think this happens in stories where I’m having more difficulty), I was leaning really hard on quotes. He was telling me to figure out what the story was saying. You have to tell the story, and then thoughtfully choose where you need someone else’s voice and judiciously put that back in. It might also have been referring to Skip’s theory of interviewing. My inclination is to over-research everything before I arrive at the interview, to show the person that I’m knowledgeable. I have to earn their respect. Skip would show up to an interview and say, “Wow, so what’s podcasting? How do you do it?” Just the most broad questions imaginable. He got great material just coming to people totally fresh. He’d done his homework, and if he needed to follow up with something specific, he could. But I think there’s something to that. I’m really working on coming in and trying to leave a lot of space for the person I’m interviewing instead of showing them how much work I’ve done.
Brendan: You need to get them talking and get into their headspace, and it helps to have that baseball card knowledge. But the whole idea is to get them talking.
Pamela: I will make my list of questions, which is usually absurdly detailed and many pages long, and I’ll spend a lot of time working on that. I put it away when I get to the interview. Of course the work that went into it is informing the conversation, but I just try to have a normal conversation for as long as I possibly can. And it’s not until we’re going to shift gears and I’m trying to remember the things I haven’t asked that I pull out my notes. I used to be embarrassed about looking at my notes. I don’t know why I used to be so self-conscious about that.
Brendan: I loved that you brought up Skip’s tip on removing the quotes, and then having the confidence with your authority over the material, and then cherry-picking the right ones. You need to take agency and shape the piece in your own voice.
Pamela: Before I have the confidence to write in the way that I want to write, where I really own the material, I have to spend so much time with people. At the outset, once I outline what it’s going to involve after they say yes to talking to me, I’ll say, “I’m going to be around a lot and you’re going to get sick of me at some point.” To be clear, it’s not always in person. I just finished a story where much was done by phone and Zoom and text, but I was in constant communication with my sources for about six weeks, throughout the day, every day, in various ways. For me it’s spending enough time with people that I feel like I have the right to describe what I’m describing in a story, and to tell their story in a somewhat omniscient way, that their voice comes in when they say something unique in the way that they phrased it, or makes you suck in your breath.
Brendan: There’s your book, and the long stories you’ve written. There are false starts, stories that don’t get off the ground. Coming up with ideas is paramount. Ideas are your currency. How do you generate the story ideas that you know that you’ll run with, be it for ProPublica, The New York Times, or even a book?
Pamela: When I started at Texas Monthly at 25, again having no idea what I was doing, we had a monthly staff meeting with everyone who worked at the magazine. Before the meeting, each writer had to submit five fully developed story ideas. Not just “Hey, it would be cool if we wrote about this.” You had made some calls, or had done some real research, and you had them fleshed out. It was coming up with five viable ideas, so you had to come up with 20 ideas to get down to five, and then you had to flesh them out, and you had to write them up, and they were put in a packet that was distributed to everyone. You would get called on. If the editor in chief liked an idea on your page, you would get called on to talk about it. To pull that off every month, you’re looking for story ideas every second of every day. There’s nothing that is not fodder. There is no conversation that is not something that might lead to a story idea. I felt like it made me. I was already a curious person, but it made me talk to anyone and everyone and ask them more about their lives. So that was really good training. And it’s an exercise, a muscle you build over time.
So much of what I write about is dark and intense. The people I get to spend time with to tell these stories? I feel like my life is a lot richer with them in it.
Brendan: In your work for The New York Times, but also in Catch the Devil, there are men on death row, and they hear guards stomping and keys jingling, and they’re wondering if they’ll be taken to death watch. It’s chilling to hear that and you put us in their headspace. It’s incredibly moving and pulses with a kind of terror that you feel for them, no matter what they may have done.
Pamela: So much of what I write about is dark and intense. The people I get to spend time with to tell these stories? I feel like my life is a lot richer with them in it. I always think about the perspective that I have as someone who spends a lot of time talking to people who are incarcerated or formerly incarcerated, the things they long for, or the things that they savor when they have the chance to get them. I’m thinking in particular of one exoneree who I’ve spent a lot of time with. The way that they described just the most ordinary things. Anthony Graves had been on Texas’s death row and was freed. He talked about what it was like to go into a grocery store after you’ve been in solitary for years, and all the colors and textures and smells and the way light falls on different things. The way he talked about going to the grocery store was like how one of us might talk about going to see the greatest work of art we’ve ever seen. The way these men talk about the food they long for or putting their feet in the grass, things like that. I’m lucky to have that perspective.
Another thing is the potential for writing to change things. Some stories I’ve written made things happen in the world, and that is the greatest feeling there is. And then there are other stories that haven’t done that, but they have put a light on people who really needed that light on them. They’ve highlighted something important to make readers think more deeply, or maybe focused on people working in the trenches where no one’s paying attention, but what they’re doing is so important.
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