Top Highlights

• This is nonfiction; this is my life.
• I wanted to spend more time with people who were not necessarily newsworthy.
• I get this care for language from reading the great fiction writers: F. Scott Fitzgerald, John O’Hara, Irwin Shaw.
• Taking an idea, a central point, and pursuing it, turning it into a story that tells something about the way we live today, is the essence of narrative journalism.
• The idea is vital. Telling a good story demands a great conception, a great idea for why the story works—for what it is and how it connects to the human condition. It is about ideas, about narration, about telling a story. You must be able to point to something larger.