If this is part of her brilliance, and it is, it’s largely because of who she is as an observer; meticulous but detached, intimate yet removed. These paradoxes are how she draws you in.

Adrienne LaFrance

The penchant for counting reveals what may seem like another paradox, but is actually the lifting of a veil: Didion shows that her language is musical but also mathematical, that she engineers her writing to sing.

In her most recent book, Blue Nights, she describes the song of her prose as inextricable from its mechanics:

In fact, in any real sense, what I was doing then was never writing at all: I was doing no more than sketching in a rhythm and letting that rhythm tell me what it was I was saying. Many of the marks I set down on the page were no more than ‘xxx,’ or ‘xxxx,’ symbols that meant ‘copy tk,’ or ‘copy to come,’ but do notice: such symbols were arranged in specific groupings. A single ‘x’ differed from a double ‘xx,’ ‘xxx’ from ‘xxxx.’ The number of such symbols had a meaning. The arrangement was the meaning.

But long before Blue Nights, Didion was counting syllables in a New Yorker piece about how much control a writer has over his or her life’s work. The November 1998 essay, “Last Words: Those Hemingway wrote, and those he didn’t,” is vintage Didion; penetrating, deliberate down to the last comma, streaked with cynicism and flashes of earnestness — all qualities that echo Hemingway himself. The piece is so meta that it tugs the reader to the edge of the uncanny.

Didion writes about Hemingway but she is also writing about writing, and in turn writing about herself. In essence, this is three stories in one.

She sashays between the technical and lyrical. (The piece begins with her counting the syllables in Hemingway’s poetic first paragraph of A Farewell to Arms. This pragmatism gives way to her own fluid and descriptive style.) At first she appears to seesaw from writing to writing about writing. But by the end of the piece it’s clear that she’s been doing both, concurrently, throughout.

The structural latticework of the essay both lays out Hemingway’s style and adopts aspects of it to drive the piece forward. For example, she writes about Hemingway’s omissions as narrative choices, and then uses omissions just as he did.

First she’s examining “four deceptively simple sentences, one hundred and twenty-six words,” obsessing over Hemingway’s repetition of “the” and of “and” and about the rhythm he established by leaving out another “the” in his fourth sentence. (The power of such an absence, she says, is in the chill it casts. It’s a warning, a premonition, a “foreshadowing of the story to come, the awareness that the author has already shifted his attention from late summer to a darker season.”)

Then she’s describing the snapshots in our “national memory stream” of Hemingway’s life — “the celebrated author fencing with the bulls at Pamplona, fishing for Marlin off Havana, boxing at Bimini, crossing the Ebro with Spanish loyalists, kneeling beside ‘his’ lion or ‘his’ buffalo or ‘his’ oryx on the Serengeti Plain.”

Implicit in this string of collective memories is the question of omission — what have we left out?

The close reader will notice that this question is itself the device she’s described, a foreshadowing of the story to come. Didion next goes on to describe in arresting detail Hemingway’s 1961 suicide: the double-barreled Boss shotgun he emptied into the center of his forehead, how he became a “crumpled heap of bathrobe and blood, the shotgun lying in the disintegrated flesh.”

For the rest of the piece, Didion brings Hemingway back to life, lacing her descriptions of him with hints of who she is.

Consider how she casts his way of “moving through but not attaching, a kind of romantic individualism,” his writing as dictating “a certain way of looking at the world, a way of looking but not joining, a way of moving through but not attaching.”

Didion also writes of Hemingway as “a man to whom words mattered,” that “he got inside them.”

Hemingway, too, had a tendency to count. Didion presents this excerpt from a letter Hemingway wrote to his publisher in early 1961:

Have material arranged as chapters—they come to 18—and am working on the last one—No 19—also working on title. This is very difficult. (Have my usual long list—something wrong with all of them but am working toward it—Paris has been used so often it blights anything.) In pages typed they run 7, 14, 5, 6, 9 1/2, 6, 11, 9, 8, 9, 4 1/2, 3, 1/2, 8, 10 1/2, 14 1/2, 38 1/2, 10, 3, 3: 177 pages + 5 1/2 pages + 1 1/4 pages.”

Didion says she finds the excerpt alarming, though she never explicitly says why. Is she disquieted because his counting is impossible to understand? Or is it because Hemingway died before he finished the project he’s describing?

The project would be published posthumously as A Moveable Feast. But, as Didion points out, Hemingway never called it that. To him, it was just “the Paris stuff.” He never settled on a title. This paradox — what the writer called his work and what someone else called it for him — is ultimately an exploration of the writer’s solitude. The idea is that a writer’s intentions exist in one universe and everyone else’s expectations about the writer’s work exist in another. The only overlap is in the writing itself, an endeavor that Didion presents as potentially deadly in and of itself.

“The peculiarity of being a writer,” Didion says, “is that the entire enterprise involves the mortal humiliation of seeing one’s own words in print.” (Just by making this statement Didion clearly inserts herself, the writer, into the story.)

Yet even worse than publication, she says, is the risk that something unfinished will be published.

The manuscript that became True at First Light, was some 850 pages long when Hemingway died. That this sprawling “African novel,” as Hemingway called it, would be “reduced by half by someone other than their author” meant that the story “could go nowhere the author intended them to go,” Didion says.

She sees this publication as a fundamental “denial of the idea that the role of the writer in his or her work is to make it.” A writer’s notes, she declares, are “words set down but not yet written.” But by referencing a writer’s unfinished notes in her final published piece, Didion raises the question of her own process. This suggests yet another omission: The process behind her story that the reader will never see.

Didion, not surprisingly, comes across as empathetic to the writer’s need to have authority over his words, and his need to sort things out on his own. Hemingway once wrote to his attorney that he had “a diamond mine if people will let me alone and let me dig the stones out of the blue mud and then cut and polish them.” Hemingway’s mine was deep, heavy and full. Yet for all of that darkness and weight, his writing — and Didion’s, and Didion’s writing about Hemingway’s writing — rings with clarity. (Hemingway’s reference to his “diamond mine” calls to mind something Boris Kachka, the New York magazine writer, once wrote about Didion. Kachka said reading her work is “like tiptoeing across a just-frozen pond filled with beautiful sharks. You look down and pray the ice will hold.”)

At the crescendo of Didion’s piece, as she describes what we know as True at First Light, there are moments that read as though she is talking about Hemingway and herself at the same time, about her relationship with him as a writer from the time when she was a little girl clacking out his words on her typewriter just to see how it would feel to write like he did. She’s writing about Hemingway, writing about writing, writing about herself:

There are arresting glimpses here and there, fragments shored against what the writer must have seen as his ruin, and a sympathetic reader might well believe it possible that had the writer lived (which is to say had the writer found the will and energy and memory and concentration) he might have shaped the material, written it into being, made it work as the story the glimpses suggest, that a man returning to a place he loved and finding himself at three in the morning confronting the knowledge that he is no longer the person who loved it and will never now be the person he had meant to be.

And then, another layer emerges, as Didion acknowledges that Hemingway had written this very idea into being, through the writer character in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.”

Didion quotes Hemingway: ”Now he would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well.” She goes on: “And then, this afterthought, the saddest story: ‘Well, he would not have to fail at trying to write them either.’” Such fear of failure must feel even more visceral for a writer like Didion, who has said that novels are “about things you’re afraid you can’t deal with.”

The afterthought from Hemingway’s “Snows” character becomes the bookend that mirrors the beginning of Didion’s piece, the counting of syllables in the first 126 words of A Farewell to Arms.

“Only one of the words has three syllables,” she had written. “Twenty-two have two. The other hundred and three have one.”

Though Didion leaves it to the reader to find that solitary three-syllable word or not, it’s no mistake she both singles it out and never identifies it at the same time. The omission is a clue, a chilling premonition:

Three syllables: Afterward.

Adrienne LaFrance (@AdrienneLaF) is a national reporter for Digital First Media’s Project Thunderdome, where she specializes in investigative reporting and breaking news. She was previously a staff reporter at Nieman Journalism Lab. Before that she opened the Washington bureau of Honolulu Civil Beat, where she covered Congress, federal elections and the intersection of money and politics. She has also reported and written for the Washington Post, worked as a news producer at WBUR, Boston’s NPR affiliate, and as a local news anchor for Hawaii’s NPR affiliate.

First, story craft:

Eli Saslow

The details and imagery are specific and devastating: Daniel’s freckled arms; the four gummy vitamins at the bottom of each after-school smoothie; his “books and toy trains in their familiar piles, gathering dust;” Jackie’s desperate texts (“DO YOU HAVE HIM YET?”) on the morning of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary; the Connecticut state trooper who sat next to Mark and wept. Saslow triggers our senses with, “… some days Mark believed he could still smell him here, just in from playing outside, all grassy and muddy,” and echoes a basement-related detail from the opening, via a photo of Daniel with his “arms wrapped around Ninja Cat, the stuffed animal that had traveled with him everywhere, including into the hearse and underground.”

The voice is quiet, respectful. Like any life-and-death story, this one might have gone turgid, and quicksanded itself. Saslow’s stories never do. He writes with a controlled mastery of details that, in this case, surely undid him as a writer — and as a young father — in the week that he spent with the Bardens. Those details both drove the story and held it together, like stitches turned with a steady hand.

The structure is compact, and suffused (intentional or not) with symbolism. Saslow starts us off in narrative action: Mark Barden descends to the basement (hell; death), to choose a photo for a Mother’s Day card that he and Jackie hope will help change gun laws:

Mark turned on his computer and began looking for the right picture. “Something lighthearted,” he said. “Something sweet.” He had been sitting in the same chair Dec. 14, when he received an automated call about a Code Red Alert, and much of the basement had been preserved in that moment. Nobody had touched the foosball table, because Daniel had been the last to play. His books and toy trains sat in their familiar piles, gathering dust. The basement had always been Daniel’s space, and some days Mark believed he could still smell him here, just in from playing outside, all grassy and muddy.

Saslow does two important things in that well-chosen lead scene. One, he introduces us vividly to the missing character: Through the photos Mark considers (birthday candles; Halloween) we meet sweet, lively, red-headed Daniel. Second, he lays out the story’s transcendent quality: how the Bardens’ story represents the perniciousness of guns in America. “The specific-as-universal quality reminds me, in a way, of what Primo Levi wrote about Anne Frank,” Harper’s contributor Matthew Power said Sunday afternoon as some of us chatted about Saslow’s story on Facebook. “‘One single Anne Frank moves us more than the countless others who suffered just as she did but whose faces have remained in the shadows. Perhaps it is better that way; if we were capable of taking in all the suffering of all those people, we would not be able to live.’” Power said, “I honestly can’t think of a piece — not even some of the best reporting done after 9/11 — that deals with grief in such an intimate and empathetic way. It brings something of unmeasurable horror down to an absolutely human scale.”

This, in fact, is one of Saslow’s gifts. A reporter on David Finkel’s narrative reporting team at the Post, he humanizes big issues by embedding himself in characters’ lives, which allows him opportunity to observe the kinds of details that make for deeply personal, and moving, stories. Once he has those details, he uses them without melodrama, leaving clear George Orwell’s proverbial windowpane.We talked to Saslow last November, for instance, about his piece on a swimming pool salesman whose struggles represented the ailing economy (the story went on to become a Pulitzer Prize finalist in feature writing), and again in late April, about the reporting and writing behind his ESPN The Magazine piece on Rumeal Robinson, a former University of Michigan basketball star serving time for conning his own mother out of her house. Saslow’s known consideration for structure shows up in the tenor of his sectional cliffhangers, which give his narratives forward momentum. At the end of “Into the Lonely Quiet” Section 1, for instance, when Jackie asks Mark if their lobbying efforts will make a difference, Mark says, “I don’t know.” We can only wonder they will succeed or fail, and to what degree.

From there, Saslow zooms us out to the larger issues of politics. Then we’re back to the active narrative: the morning of the photo hunt. One by one, the Bardens’ surviving children come downstairs and leave for school, and then Jackie and Mark decide to treat themselves to breakfast “someplace new.” They drive nine miles outside of town, where they think they can’t possibly run into anyone they know, only to suffer the unexpected. In the next section, we’re in Delaware with the Bardens, watching them try to change laws:

They were led to seats in the House chamber, where a junior lawmaker recited the Pledge of Allegiance…

Daniel Barden, Seven. Dylan Hockley. Six. Ana Marquez-Greene. Six. Six. Six. Six. Seven. Six. How long could one minute last? Mark looked at the lawmakers and tried to pick out the three who already had refused to meet with the Newtown parents. Could he barge into their offices? Wait at their cars? Jackie counted the seconds in her head — “breathe, breathe,” she told herself — believing she was holding it together until a lawmaker handed her a box of tissues. Hockley saw the tissues and thought about how she rarely cried anymore except for alone at night, unconscious in her sleep, awakening to a damp pillow. Marquez-Greene listened to the names and pictured her daughter dressed for school that last day: pudgy cheeks, curly hair and a T-shirt decorated with a sequined purple peace sign — a peace Marquez-Greene was still promising to deliver to her daughter every night when she prayed to her memory and whispered, “Love wins.”

The final section returns us to the Barden home, and to a painful moment with a neighbor — one that in any other context might feel voyeuristic but in this case sets up the story’s kicker. (No spoilers; go read it.) For a particularly deft move, look how Saslow handles the entire narrative of what happened at Sandy Hook — he does it within one paragraph of that final section, all within the Bardens’ narrative point of view:

… but now his mind was back inside the school that morning, where it sometimes went. Jackie’s imagination walked Daniel to the door of his classroom and no farther. She wanted to protect herself from the details, so she had left the box containing Daniel’s clothes from that day untouched and unlooked at in the attic, where state troopers had deposited it a few weeks after his death. Mark, however, felt compelled to know. For seven years, two months and 17 days, he had known every detail of Daniel’s life — the teeth that were just beginning to come in, the way his hands moved as they played “Jingle Bells” that morning on the piano — so it seemed necessary that he should also know every detail of its end. He had asked law enforcement officers to give him a tour of the school, which was still an active crime scene, and he had gone there one Friday morning while Jackie stayed home. The officers had walked him through the attack, all four minutes and 154 rounds, and because of that Mark could precisely picture the shooter, with his Bushmaster rifle, his earplugs and his olive green vest, firing six holes into the glass front door. He could hear the shouting over the intercom in the main office, where the principal had been shot, and he could hear the shooter’s footsteps on the linoleum hallway as he walked by one first-grade classroom and into the next, Daniel’s. He could see the substitute teacher scrambling to move the children into the corner, where there was a small bathroom. He could see all 15 of them huddled in there, squeezed together, and somewhere in that pile he could see Daniel.

Now for the emotional aspect — not the reader’s, the author’s. At the heart of the story is humility. The writer does not presume to overpower his material, or at any phase claim the stage. The delivery is poetic and moving without feeling manipulative or sentimental. Whatever anxieties Saslow may experience as a writer, he manages to shield his stories from them. However pressured he may feel to publicly gather the rose stems that inevitably fall at his feet, he resists. His work always feels like it’s about the work, nothing more. He forges a relationship between reader and story, not reader and writer. He is building an impressive body of work with calm, fluid authenticity. “Into the Lonely Quiet” may be his best yet.

We e-chatted with Saslow this morning:

Storyboard: This story had a visceral effect on me as a reader. I couldn’t sleep, after reading it. It sort of followed me around for the entire first day. I attribute its impact to, above all, the depth of detail you used to establish intimacy. How did reporting and writing affect you? 

Saslow: The story has followed me around, too, and I have a feeling I will be thinking about the Bardens for a while. I spent about a month working on it – two trips to Newtown, and then a week or more of writing. For most of that time the story occupied a good bit of my mind. I couldn’t shake it. Both the reporting and the writing had hard moments when I felt emotionally drained, but even writing that, to you, now feels lousy, because of course anything I experienced was fractional and irrelevant compared to the emotional toll I was writing about. And now the story ends and I get to move onto the next one, and the Bardens stay in place, dealing with this.

Detail of course is a hallmark and requirement of narrative. What did you do with this story — in the reporting or the writing — that departed from your usual methods?

I did most of the same things I always try to do. I went to Newtown without too many expectations, and I stuck around for long enough that I was able to watch what their normal days are like. If they went to Costco, I went with them. If they were sitting in the house, I sat with them. If they went for ice cream, I ordered chocolate. Not many of those moments are in the story, but sometimes I find that you have to be there for everything in order to fade into the scene for the right things. Then, when I came back with my notes, it was a matter of trying to pick the right details – and the right level of detail – to make the story work without the details feeling gratuitous or overwhelming.

How did you choose the Bardens and go about asking them to let you in?

After we decided to do a story about a Newtown family now, I spent a day watching videos of all of them giving interviews on TV over these last months. That helped lead me to a few families I felt drawn to, and the Bardens were one of those. I called and explained what I wanted to do. I told them I wanted to be there for a lot of things and a lot of time and that I wanted to do justice to what they were experiencing day to day. I told them I wanted to go to Delaware when they went, and I wanted to be in on all the meetings. And they thought about all of that, and we talked a few more times, and they decided to do it. After that, we rarely talked about process. They were open and honest, and, given the circumstances, easy to spend time with. So were their children, James and Natalie.

You spent a week with them — how so? Did you stay with them, as some journalists have done? Did you spend all day with them?

No, it wouldn’t ever feel appropriate to me to stay with someone I was writing about. But I did spend all day with them, always. I traveled with them on the train to Delaware and I got a hotel room in the same hotel. Sometimes, when we were at their home and I sensed they needed a break, I would go into the room in their house where they stored all the mail they have received since the shooting, and I would go through some of that and soak it in.

I see a lot of humility in your work. It’s rare. Your work always seems to be about the work itself. I admire that. Not sure what the question is here, except how it’s possible in such a graspy look-at-me age.

I think in most stories, and especially in this story, the most important thing to me is for people to leave a story remembering the story, and not the writing, or me.

How did the Bardens react to the story?

They felt like it was right. That mattered a lot to me.

Further reading: 

— Annotation Tuesday! Eli Saslow and the family con

— Eli Saslow on detail, dignity, nut grafs, patience, reporting v. writing, and what’s in his notebook

— Eli Saslow on writing news narratives, creating empathy and characters’ defining moments 

@GlobeMoskowitz

With Tamerlan driving now, Danny in the passenger seat, and Dzhokhar behind Danny, they stopped in Watertown Center so Dzhokhar could withdraw money from the Bank of America ATM using Danny’s card. Danny, shivering from fear but claiming to be cold, asked for his jacket. Guarded by just one brother, Danny wondered if this was his chance, but he saw around him only locked storefronts. A police car drove by, lights off.

Tamerlan agreed to retrieve Danny’s jacket from the back seat. Danny unbuckled, put on the jacket, then tried to buckle the seat belt behind him to make an escape easier. “Don’t do that,” Tamerlan said, studying him. “Don’t be stupid.”

Poynter’s Roy Peter Clark broke down the story’s strengths beautifully in a recent post. Three highlights:

It begins, like the ancient epics, in medias res—in the middle of things.

“The 26-year-old Chinese entrepreneur had just pulled his new Mercedes to the curb on Brighton Avenue to answer a text when an old sedan swerved behind him, slamming on the brakes. A man in dark clothes got out and approached the passenger window. It was nearly 11 p.m. last Thursday.” (I can’t help feel a digital-age irony here, that Danny drives into mortal danger by doing the right thing — pulling over to text.)

Clark, speaking at a Nieman Narrative Journalism conference

The construction of narrative journalism depends upon certain strategies associated traditionally with fiction, and we get all of them here: scene, dialogue, character details, point of view. The fact that the events tick-tock in a block of time (about 90 minutes) and inside the confines of an automobile, create what classical critics might call a unity of time, place and action that intensifies the experience of the reader.

This story should remind us of how rarely dialogue appears in breaking news, with reporters depending more often on quotes gathered after the fact. Even though he is using a single source (the bombers being unavailable, one dead, one arrested), the writer chooses to re-create the dialogue in the car based on Danny’s recollection. I count at least 12 paragraphs containing dialogue such as: “Don’t look at me!” Tamerlan shouted at one point. “Do you remember my face?” / “No, no, I don’t remember anything,” [Danny] said.

For more installments of “Why’s this so good?” go here.

Just before noon the horse was led haltingly into a van next to the stallion barn, and there a concentrated barbiturate was injected into his jugular….

Van Natta

And I still remember how I felt as I read the words—exhilarated and chastened. At the time, I was a 25-year-old reporter doing grunt work for little pay in the Broward bureau of the Miami Herald, writing about fires, Medicare scams and city commission meetings.

….Forty-five seconds later there was a crash as the stallion collapsed. His body was trucked immediately to Lexington, Kentucky, where Dr. Thomas Swerczek, a professor of veterinary science at the University of Kentucky, performed the necropsy. All of the horse’s vital organs were normal in size except for the heart.

Perfect. After reading that opening paragraph—and the entire piece, “Pure Heart,” published in the June 4, 1990, edition of Sports Illustrated—I knew two things: I’d never in my life write anything that spectacular. And I wanted to spend the rest of my life trying.

William Nack’s remarkable story affirmed not only my career choice but also, at the time, my favorite hobby. Back then, I was a weekend horseplayer or, more precisely, a fool that the horses usually played. In a manic manner with a few equally manic pals, I blew too many paychecks and sun-washed weekend afternoons at Gulfstream Park and Calder Race Course, pushing the few dollars I had through tellers’ betting windows. I was chasing what then seemed to be a mid-sized fortune, a cashed trifecta ticket that’d pay a few hundred bucks. Looking back on those days, there were many torn tickets, hurled programs, broken dates and heartbreaking photo finishes. At least the beer was always cold.

Back then, whenever I saw Nack’s byline in Sports Illustrated, I knew what followed would be special, maybe even monumental. From the age of 8, I have been a faithful reader of SI. When my first book was excerpted in its pages on March 23, 2003, it was one of the best days of my life. My all-time SI lineup is Frank Deford, Mark Kram, Franz Lidz, Richard Hoffer, Leigh Montville, Rick Reilly, Gary Smith and S.L. Price.

Batting cleanup is William Nack.

He’s an ex-Newsday reporter who jumped to sports—turf writing, first—after standing on a desk during a boozy office Christmas party in 1971 and impressing an editor by ticking off the name of every Kentucky Derby winner from 1875. As a party trick, he’d recite every golden word of the last page of The Great Gatsby (in Spanish, too). After joining SI in 1978, he wrote revealing profiles of boxers like Rocky Marciano, Sonny Liston, Sugar Ray Leonard and Roberto Duran. Nack was the rare poet with an investigative reporter’s zeal for digging; his work told you things you didn’t know, written in a humane and graceful way. He wrote about the hard subjects with a light touch. He’s now 72 years old, lives in Washington, D.C., and writes, on occasion, for ESPN, where I also work (technically, we’re colleagues—imagine that).

A writer needs a lot of confidence and discipline to begin a story the way Nack begins “Pure Heart.” It isn’t even until the fourth paragraph that Nack identifies the horse as Secretariat, “Bold Ruler’s greatest son.”

The opening paragraph is so detached and clinical that I caught myself wondering whether Nack had witnessed the things he describes or whether he even cared much about them. The nameless horse is led by an unidentified person (a groom? a veterinarian? we can only guess) “haltingly” into a van. There, an unnamed person injects a needle into the horse’s jugular. Writers are taught very early on to fortify their first few sentences with names, details, voice, color, especially if we want any chance to win over the reader. Details are gold and the better the details, the better the story. Good writers also try not to lean on adverbs; they’re often a sentence’s crutches. Nack ignores both maxims here.

The aural description of the stallion’s collapse—“there was a crash”—is the hint that the scene was described to Nack by someone who had only heard it. An anonymous driver “trucks” the horse’s body from this unnamed place. Nack is simultaneously vague and exacting, creating an uneasy vibe of tension and mystery. The anonymity is done on purpose; it doesn’t really matter who is doing these things. More important is what is being done to that horse. The van ends up in Lexington, Ky., where, finally, a man with a name—Dr. Thomas Swerczek—awaits. He has a job to do, a necropsy to conduct. Dr. Swerczek is hardly a household name so Nack drops the doctor’s bio, like a boulder, on the back end of a sentence.

No matter. The payoff is the opening paragraph’s perfectly crafted final sentence: All of the horse’s vital organs were normal in size except for the heart.

This tells you something you might have assumed about the Triple Crown champion but didn’t know for sure until now. And this fact is made even more amazing when you consider the writer. Because Nack is a man who spent every morning parked outside Secretariat’s stall as the horse made his glorious Triple Crown run in the spring of 1973; a man who wrote a beautiful love letter of a book to the horse, published in 1975; a man who, despite the remote nature of those first four sentences, cares as much about this horse than any person on earth.

You might not know any of this history at first. By paragraph eight, however, you realize how personally invested was Nack in the wonder horse, from the beginning:

… how on that early morning in March of 1973 he had materialized out of the quickening blue darkness in the upper stretch at Belmont Park, his ears pinned back, running as fast as horses run; how he had lost the Wood Memorial and won the Derby, and how he had been bothered by a pigeon feather at Pimlico on the eve of the Preakness (at the end of this tale I would pluck the delicate mashed feather out of my wallet, like a picture of my kids, to pass around the car); how on the morning of the Belmont Stakes he had burst from the barn like a stud horse going to the breeding shed and had walked around the outdoor ring on his hind legs, pawing at the sky; how he had once grabbed my notebook and refused to give it back, and how he had seized a rake in his teeth and begun raking the shed; and, finally, I told about that magical, unforgettable instant, frozen now in time, when he had turned for home, appearing out of a dark drizzle at Woodbine, near Toronto, in the last race of his career, twelve in front and steam puffing from his nostrils as from a factory whistle, bounding like some mythical beast out of Greek lore.

Sitting at that bar 23 years ago drinking a Rolling Rock, the parenthetical pigeon feather as souvenir got me; it gets me still. How many writers keep a memento of the subject of a story pressed into their wallets? And it happens to be a mashed pigeon feather that tickled his subject’s nose? Nack isn’t just a great writer; he’s also cool.

At this early moment in the story, Nack chases away any reader’s lingering doubt about his affection for Secretariat by beginning the next paragraph with the word, “oh:”

Oh, I knew all the stories, knew them well, had crushed and rolled them in my hand until their quaint musk lay in the saddle of my palm. Knew them as I know the stories of my children. Knew them as I know the stories of my own life. Told them at dinner parties, swapped them with horseplayers as if they were trading cards, argued over them with old men and blind fools who had seen the show but missed the message. Dreamed them and turned them over like pillows in my rubbery sleep. Woke up with them, brushed my aging teeth with them, grinned at them in the mirror. Horses have a way of getting inside of you, and so it was that Secretariat became like a fifth child in our house, the older boy who was off at school and never around but who was loved and true a part of the family as Muffin, our shaggy, epileptic dog.

Nack was 32 years old when he met Secretariat. On a Monday afternoon in October 1989, Nack, now 48, ferries the reader to Stone Farm, just outside Paris, Ky. Leaning on the farm’s long fence, Nack sees the great horse, looking skinnier and a bit wobbly as he grazes, alone, down a hill. In 48 hours, Secretariat will be dead. As he waits for the arrival of a man to interview, Nack gazes silently at the stallion off in the distance, “for a full half hour.” He resists the urge to hop the fence and join his old friend. About this quiet interlude, Nack writes pure poetry:

The gift of reverie is a blessing divine, and it is conferred most abundantly on those who lie in hammocks or drive alone in cars. Or lean on hillside fences in Kentucky. The mind swims, binding itself to whatever flotsam comes along, to old driftwood faces and voices of the past, to places and scenes once visited, to things not seen or done but only dreamed.         

Was it all just a dream? No. Those places and scenes are the very real venues of horse-racing’s springtime Triple Crown dash: Churchill Downs, Pimlico and Belmont Park. The faces and voices of Secretariat and Nack’s tandem journey belong to a swirl of grooms, owners, jockeys, horseplayers. Nack’s fate was bound up with Secretariat’s in a profound way rarely described in the pages of a magazine. Beginning on March 10, 1973, armed with a notebook, Nack is perched outside Secretariat’s stable every morning at 7 a.m. sharp, missing only one wake-up call, for an Easter egg hunt. Among Nack’s jotted notes, the horse is never called Secretariat; he’s “Red,” the nickname given him by a groom named Eddie Sweat.

Nack knows these private hours with Red are special, long before Secretariat does the work to guarantee they’ll be remembered by anyone else as special. “I remember wishing those days could breeze on forever—the mornings over coffee and doughnuts at the truck outside the barn, the hours spent watching the red colt walk to the track and gallop once around, the days absorbing the rhythms of the life around the horse,” Nack writes. “I had been following racehorses since I was twelve, back in the days of Native Dancer, and now I was an observer on an odyssey, a quest for the Triple Crown.”

Red isn’t just faster than his peers; he’s funnier, too. A born prankster and a true ham, writes Nack, “the most engaging character in the barn,” paying no mind to a roan stable pony nursing “an unrequited love affair” with Red.

For readers unfamiliar with the allure of horse racing, the game’s appeal becomes understandable, perhaps even irresistible, as Nack describes riding an unnamed filly as a boy:

I had ridden horses during my youth in Morton Grove, Illinois, and I remember one summer I took a little black bullet of a thoroughbred filly out of the barn and walked her to the track that rimmed the polo field across Golf Road. I had been to the races a few times, had seen the jockeys ride, and I wanted to feel what it was like. So I hitched up my stirrups and galloped her around the east turn, standing straight up. Coming off the turn, I dropped into a crouch and clucked to her. She took off like a sprinter leaving the blocks – swoooosh! – and the wind started whipping my eyes. I could feel the tears streaming down my face, and then I looked down and saw her knees pumping like pistons. I didn’t think she would make the second turn, the woods were looming ahead, big trees coming up, and so I leaned a little to the left and she made the turn before she started pulling up. No car ever took me on a ride like that. And no roller coaster, either. Running loose, without rails, she gave me the wildest, most thrilling ride I ever had.

And there was nothing like the ride that Secretariat gave me in the twelve weeks from the Bay Shore through the Belmont Stakes.

Nack hitches up your stirrups and then—swoooosh!—gallops you along for the heart-thumping, 12-week ride. Even if you had read Nack’s book, Secretariat: The Making of a Champion, the glittering prose of “Pure Heart” puts you right back in the barn, on the rail and down the homestretch. Nack makes you feel every moment, every emotion, even an older man’s thrill at falling, with a teenager’s passion, helplessly in love. To hell with being unbiased or detached; this is a narrator rooting like a madman for a thoroughbred that belongs as much to him as to every $2 bettor. If Secretariat wins, Nack wins, too, though it isn’t cash at the betting windows. No, he wins a great story. A writer knows: Nothing is more valuable than a great story belonging only to you.

By the time Secretariat wins the Kentucky Derby, you’re rooting for the horse right along with Nack, seemingly close enough to bear-hug him near the winner’s circle. And when Secretariat captures the Triple Crown, stretching his impossible Belmont Stakes lead to 25, 26, 27 lengths, Nack has made sure you’ve bought into the super-horse’s invincibility. At this moment in the story, even during my 20th or so reading of “Pure Heart” on a recent languid Sunday afternoon, my pulse quickens. I can barely breathe.

Moments after Secretariat crosses the finish line, all alone, Nack writes, “I bolted up the press box stairs with exultant shouts and there yielded a part of myself to that horse forever.” Sitting on that stool in that beach bar, I yielded a part of myself, too.

Fast-forward 16 years from that magical Belmont afternoon to one of Secretariat’s last, just outside Paris, Ky. Naturally, Nack is there at Stone Farm, gazing for those long moments at Red, and you know where this is heading. Secretariat is suffering from laminitis, a life-threatening hoof disease. That night, Nack calls a dozen friends and prepares them for the inevitable. Two days later, Nack is back in Lexington when he sees the red blinking message light on his hotel room phone. “I knew,” he writes. “I walked around the room. Out the door and down the hall. Back into the room. Out the door and around the block. Back into the room. Out the door and down to the lobby. Back into the room. I called sometime after noon. ‘Claiborne Farm called,’ said the message operator.”

After finally getting the news confirmed—he didn’t, mercifully, witness Red’s final moments described in the opening paragraph of “Pure Heart,” we now realize—William Nack drops himself to the hotel room floor, “feeling like a very old and tired man of forty-eight, leaning with my back against a wall and sobbing for a long time with my face in my hands.”

No one will ever write a lovelier eulogy for a horse. Or for his own youth.

Don Van Natta Jr. is an investigative reporter at ESPN who writes for ESPN The Magazine and ESPN.com. Prior to that, he worked for 16 years at the New York Times, where he was a member of two Pulitzer Prize-winning teams and was posted in the Times‘ London, Washington and Miami bureaus. He is the author of three books, including the New York Times bestseller First Off the Tee: Presidential Hackers, Duffers and Cheaters from Taft to Bush, and Wonder Girl: The Magnificent Sporting Life of Babe Didrikson Zaharias, which will be published in paperback in May. He is now writing a book about the Murdoch phone-hacking scandal with his former Times colleague Sarah Lyall. He lives in Miami with his wife, Lizette Alvarez, the Times‘ Miami bureau chief, and their two daughters.

For our “Why’s this so good?” archives, go here.

A fundamental law of storytelling is: withhold information. As the writer Paul Metcalf put it, “The only real work in creative endeavor is to keep things from falling together too soon.”

Keohane

I thought of that line while revisiting Dan Lee’s devastating New York magazine feature, “4:52 on Christmas Morning,” about a Connecticut house fire that killed all three of a man’s young daughters. Particularly the lead:

Matt Badger believes that what happened happened for a reason. That his children were born in order to live in order to die the way they did, that out of it something meaningful must come. If at any point it becomes clear to him that he is wrong, that what happened is instead an anecdote of the universe’s brutal indifference, then he will kill himself.

The beauty of this passage is that there is nothing withheld, there’s no writerly misdirection, no trapdoor or blind hairpin turn. The impulse for many here would be to open with some lovely, sunny little scene from the past—preferably ending with a big-eyed child saying, “I wub you Daddy!”—to underscore the darkness to come.

But here, in this story about a whole family perishing in a wholly preventable Christmas morning fire, the darkness has already overtaken the story. No point in being cute about it. When we meet Matt Badger, the divorced father, who lives, as all of his children died, we meet a man in hell. Hell is where we begin, and, as it’s suggested in this lead—we can’t expect the universe to become less indifferent—hell is likely where it will end.

From there, Lee settles in to tell you the story of that night, a story so brutal that it barely needs to be written, it just spreads. For 678 words, he tells it slowly and carefully:

Inside 2267 Shippan, a 116-year-old Victorian house, three girls—Lily, 9, and her 7-year-old twin sisters, Sarah and Grace—had wanted to make a fire on Christmas Eve… 

The fire was warming the newly opened-up first floor by the time Madonna’s parents, Lomer and Pauline Johnson, arrived from Lomer’s final shift playing Santa Claus at Saks Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. The artificial tree was lit; the stockings were hung. Earlier in the day, the girls had played outside, riding their bikes in the street… 

Grace lit electric candles. Madonna cooked a ham dinner. She was, at 47, among the most successful advertising executives in New York City; she had recently divorced her husband and had bought the house the previous December…

At 10 p.m., the girls were herded up the stairs to their pink-and-white bedrooms on the third floor. They believed that Santa Claus was nearing the air above Connecticut. It was difficult to get them to sleep… 

Lily was, despite being the oldest, always the most sensitive, and she made a fuss about not wanting to sleep alone; she and Sarah fell asleep together, in the twins’ turreted room. Grace ended up in bed with her grandparents…

It’s hard not to feel a chill reading that.

Throughout this passage, Lee’s tone appears on its surface to be cold and reportorial, but look closely enough and you can see it’s trembling. Like the 116-year-old Victorian, there is fire in the walls. The result is more effective at building tension than it would be had Lee spent the same amount of time rolling the drums and summoning the gods of thunder. Tragedy of this dimension doesn’t like to announce itself. It prefers to just slide in.

Then, in section two, we meet Matt Badger—such a small, funny little name for a man bearing such a burden—in Battery Park City in New York. It’s daylight now, which gives a short-lived feeling of release, but the darkness has only intensified, in stark contrast to the neighborhood, which is almost entirely immaculate, gleaming glass towers:

When Matt Badger comes downstairs from his apartment in Battery Park City, wearing jeans and an untucked olive button-down shirt, there are two children playing in front of his building, a girl with bright-red hair pushing another girl on a scooter. He looks at them and smiles. He does not appear well.

Badger is wearing jeans, a shirt, he looks like hell, he’s ripping Marlboro Reds. “He wears necklaces around his neck, some leather, some metal, one a miniature version of Himalayan prayer flags.”  They go for a walk, and Badger says he went crazy when he heard the news on Christmas Day. He threatened to kill himself, he threatened others. What helped, gave him direction and a purpose, was his idea, inspired by his dyslexic daughter, to create a fund to support arts-based programs in early education:

It has since become all-consuming. It is his job. It is what keeps his children alive. It is what keeps him alive. So far, it has distributed more than $430,000 in 48 states.

Of course, because this is hell, after a strong start donor interest in the fund is drying up. It’s been a year since the tragedy. Others have the luxury of moving on:

The foundation, he says, is his daughters. If it fails, and now he is practically whispering, quietly crying, sitting in a crowded subway car heading uptown around lunchtime, looking down, fondling a business card, the image of the three of them laughing on one side, the color pink and the lettering of the LilySarahGrace Fund on the other, his hands shaking—

From there, we go into backstory. We learn how Matt met his former wife, about what his kids were like; there’s so much sweetness and love, it all seems, to invoke a cliche, too perfect. But of course it isn’t. “Matt has come to see inexorability in everything that has happened to him,” Lee writes. And in hindsight, the setup seems as deliberate and inevitable as teeing up a golfball. The cruelty of the sprung trap is so perfect it gleams:

Madonna [Badger’s ex] recalled instances of her young daughters’ grappling with the concept of death. Grace had asked her repeatedly “if she would die before me. And I told her, ‘No, that is never going to happen.’ But it did, and I wonder, ‘Why?’ ” Once, she had taken Lily to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to see an exhibit of Pietà statues. Lily was transfixed by the image of Mary cradling Jesus’ lifeless body. She demanded her mother tell her when she herself would die. Madonna was at first dismissive. Lily lay on the floor. She began crying. She begged her.

“And I told her, after a lot of not knowing what to say, that life is a mystery, and it’s a total mystery, that we will never know when we will die.

“And she accepted that,” she said, “and I did, too.”

From there, because as readers we are to get no quarter, we learn about Madonna’s parents, who also perished in the fire. They too, seem to have been moved toward their fate with an eye toward maximum cruelty. They moved up from Louisville to be with their grandchildren, and there they found happiness like they hadn’t experienced before. Witness the litany of detail:

…Upon arriving at his children’s houses, Lomer, nine-volt batteries in his pocket, immediately checked their smoke detectors; for Christmas, he gave them fire ladders to store under their beds.

Around strangers, Lomer was reserved, but children were another story. Wade’s daughter, Morgan, rolling around on the floor with him one day, tugged on his white beard, which, after retirement, he had vowed never to shave again. It was a little eureka moment. The following holiday, he applied to malls, and when no one hired him, he bought a Santa suit himself, creating a profile on a website called gigmasters.com. 

And last year, in what [Madonna’s father] called a dream come true, he beat hundreds of applicants to become Saks Fifth Avenue’s first Santa.

And one more detail that hits you right in the chest:

On his side of [Lomer’s] bed was Lily’s [drawing], which was made back in preschool, when the teacher asked her to draw a message to a family member of her choosing. It was all big circles and stormy swoops of color. When the teacher asked her what message she wanted written on it, she said: “I love you Papa. Don’t leave me behind. See Nana and kiss her. Love, Lily.”

The story grinds on. We meet Michae Borcina, the contractor who renovated the doomed Victorian. Borcina’s record was a copse of red flags. His own workers tried to intervene:

Grunow, a former Sound Beach volunteer fireman, was particularly concerned about safety. He later claimed he took it upon himself to install fire extinguishers and battery-operated smoke and carbon-monoxide alarms throughout the house prior to an insurance-company inspection that he knew Borcina would fail. (He claimed, as well, that Borcina ordered them taken down because of false alarms once the sanding of the walls and painting began in earnest.) He said he repeatedly tried to warn Borcina that he was creating an excessive “fire fuel load,” citing the amount of wood being used—for columns, beams, cabinetry, moldings, oil-finished flooring, and paneling in the kitchen, mudroom, and up the butler’s staircase, which Grunow warned was already narrower than building codes allowed. Borcina made clear his uninterest in any criticism, once forcing Grunow to write a letter of apology, promising he would work according to Borcina’s precise specifications and not offer alternative opinions. 

We see Madonna fall into a relationship with this man. We see the stage being set, and in the next section, we see the fire itself. How it started, how it spread. I won’t quote from it, because to take anything out of context harms the passage, which is pure horror—the payoff for all the suspense being built throughout the story, up until this point.

From there, we get into the investigation, the lawsuit, the recriminations. But all of it is so dwarfed by the fire that it feels pointless and stupid. It doesn’t matter. Madonna fled to Little Rock after attempting suicide. Badger reflexively returns to his fund. He visits a state senator for help. He complains that the $1,200 he took in at the fundraiser was unacceptable, a disgrace. The senator shrugs it off, even makes a joke, which makes you hate him:

Matt grows increasingly flustered. He explains he needs to raise $20,000 to make the relationship worthwhile. Duff says he doesn’t have twenty people in his Rolodex that he can just call up. He jokes he is a Democrat. Matt is all but pleading. He reiterates that there were 200 people who attended the fund-raiser, and that they raised $1,200. He wants to know if the senator knows what this feels like: “I put my three daughters out there. And this is what they’re worth?”

I won’t quote from the ending. I’ll just say it derives its punch from a sentiment uttered so many times that it seems meaningless, but placed in this context it becomes everything: Don’t take life for granted, because at the drop of a hat, or the careless disposal of fireplace ash, it could all be taken away. Also: When you permit yourself to love hugely, you open yourself to unimaginable pain. Yet it’s also an article of faith that in the end, it will be worth it. Then we meet Matt Badger, and then we meet his universe, our universe, and then, for a brief moment, maybe we’re not so sure.

Joe Keohane is senior editor for Esquire Digital. Prior to that, he served as editor in chief of Hemispheres magazine, editor in chief of Boston’s Weekly Dig, and staff writer at Boston magazine. His stuff has turned up everywhere from the New York Times to the Boston Globe, to New York magazine and Slate. A Boston native, he also plays the bass, loves Irish picaresque novels and once got chased out of the Muslim Quarter of Old Jerusalem by a pack of children. Children. Then they demanded money, and he gave them a single American dollar, which only made them angrier.

For more installments of “Why’s this so good?” go here. If you’d like to pitch one, email us at contact_us [at] niemanstory.org.

Schwartz

Pierce’s piece paints Woods, a burgeoning 21-year-old phenom at the time, as an immature cad. He doesn’t just profile Woods, he takes aim at how we—sports fans, sports media, marketers, buyers of Nike products, etc.—create sports gods and then confine them to our chosen narratives. Though he’s written about sports for years, Pierce has never felt like a conventional sportswriter. He’s not the type to write cliché-packed pieces that fit easy storylines or to manufacture phony arguments just for the sake of it. His skepticism and intellectual honesty, combined with a gift for insight, may have made him more qualified than anyone to take on the packaging of Tiger Woods. (Considering the creepy Stepford pics that Woods has been posting lately of him and his new girlfriend, Lindsey Vonn, you sort of wish Pierce would come back and cover the re-packaging of Tiger Woods.)

Pierce opens with a nearly 650-word golf joke about Jesus and Saint Peter, asking what constitutes blasphemy, not just in religion but also in the revered game of golf. It’s an entertaining enough riff, though I could see some being turned off by it. The first time I read the piece, I remember beginning to lose patience, but then, just as I’ve had about enough, Pierce seamlessly shifts to Woods:

In the limo, fresh from a terribly wearisome photo shoot that may only help get him laid about 296 times in the calendar year, if he so chooses, the Redeemer is pondering one of the many mysteries of professional sports.

“What I can’t figure out,” Tiger Woods asks Vincent, the limo driver, “is why so may good-looking women hang around baseball and basketball. Is it because, you know, people always say that, like, black guys have big dicks?”

Whoa! Athletes just aren’t quoted saying things like that, especially not ones as high-profile and tightly managed as Tiger Woods. It comes as an extra jolt, after Pierce has lulled you into a groove with that long intro. It’s like you’re walking down the street, just moseying along, and when you turn a corner, BOOM, someone jumps out and punches you in the face. That impact, combined with the quote fitting so perfectly with the riff on golf and messiahs and blasphemy, at least for me, forgives the lengthy lead-in. More importantly, in one single quotation, Pierce has totally submarined everything we thought we knew about Woods. And then he follows with more: Pierce quotes Woods swearing up a storm (“Hell fuck no,” is a favorite expression) and offers a scene where the golfer tells a series of really bad, racially tinged jokes to impress the young women prepping him for a photo shoot. At one point, Woods asks the room, “Why do two lesbians always get where they’re going faster than two gay guys?” Pierce writes:

It is an interesting question, one that was made sharper when Tiger looked at me and said, “Hey, you can’t write this.”

“Too late,” I told him, and I was dead serious, but everybody laughed because everybody knows there’s no place in the gospel of Tiger for these sorts of jokes.

You can just imagine being in the room when this happened—the deadpan in Pierce’s response and then the disbelieving laughter around him. I have no way of knowing this, but I think Pierce described the scene this way because he wanted to draw readers into the choice he was making. Essentially, he’s saying, there are many sportswriters who would nod obligingly and leave this out. After all, that’s partly why we had the sanitized picture of Saint Tiger that we had. But Pierce goes the other way, and in doing so is able to bust through the accepted Woods narrative to present the rare authentic look into his personality.

That being said, I think it would be wrong to look at this as a “gotcha moment.” Pierce is acutely aware that Woods is a 21-year-old and no more of a god than any of us. He’s just a guy (albeit an immature one) who happens to be amazing at golf but has been blown up into this huge thing. As Pierce writes a bit earlier in the piece,

He tells jokes that are going to become something else entirely when they appear in this magazine because he is not most 21-year-olds, and because he is not going to be a 45-year-old club pro with a nose spidered red and hands palsied with the gin yips in the morning, and because—through his own efforts, the efforts of his father, his management team and his shoe company, and through some of the most bizarre sporting prose ever concocted—he’s become the center of a secular cult, the tenets of which hold that something beyond golf is at work here, something that will help redeem golf from its racist past, something that will help redeem America from its racist past, something that will bring a new era of grace and civility upon the land, and something that will, along the way, produce in Tiger Woods the greatest golfer in the history of the planet. It has been stated—flatly, and by people who ought to know better—that the hand of God is working through Tiger Woods in order to make this world a better place for us all.

Pierce leans heavily on religious allusions to make his point, but unlike the many magazine stories that try to loop in religion to elevate their subject matter, he’s using its language to bring Woods back down to earth. Despite everything, though, Pierce is still pretty obviously enamored with Woods as a golfer, as just about any sane sports fan would be. He expertly captures Woods’ unique talent throughout and, at the end of the piece he perfectly weaves together the dueling notions of Woods as a gutter-minded, decidedly non-messianic kid as well as an amazing athlete. As a result, I left the story feeling like the standards that we’ve all set for Woods (and that he and his father and his handlers set for him) are so impossible that his eventual fall, at least to some degree, was inevitable. As Pierce writes: “I believe that Tiger will break the gospel before the gospel breaks him. It constricts and binds his entire life. It leaves him no room for ambiguity, no refuge in simple humanity.”

Finally, the following, viewed through the lens of today, is my favorite scene in the piece (and a big reason that, when I gave this to my dad to read post-scandal, he asked me three different times whether it was really written in 1997). Pierce is describing the scene at a tournament that Woods won:

I believe in what I saw at La Costa, a preternaturally mature young man coming into the full bloom of a staggering talent and enjoying very much nearly every damn minute of it. I watched the young women swoon behind the ropes, and I believe that Tiger noticed them, too. There was one woman dressed in a frilly lace top and wearing a pair of tiger-striped stretch pants that fit as though they were decals. I believe that Tiger noticed this preposterous woman, and I do not believe that she was Mary Magdalene come back to life.

For all the thousands of stories written about Tiger Woods over the years, I’m willing to bet that not one of them has a single observation as sharp and revealing.

Jason Schwartz is a senior editor at Boston magazine, where he has covered sports, politics, business and education since 2007. He has also written and edited for ESPN The Magazine, New York magazine, Slate, and the Boston Globe, among others.

You can read past installments of “Why’s this so good?” here.

What was known was that an anonymous woman, of indeterminate age, had died alone, by her own hand, in a room at Seattle’s Hotel Vintage Park, leaving behind a brief and unrevealing suicide note. She had given a false address and possessed no ID. There were no signs of a struggle. She had checked in under the alias “Mary Anderson” and had, based on forensic evidence, favored Estee Lauder lipstick and velour outfits of black, navy and various shades of green (this was 1996; the story ran on Oct. 6, 2005). From all appearances, she had read the Bible before she died – the 23rd Psalm, to be exact, which is the one about the Lord protecting you as you walk through the valley of the shadow of death.

Huffman (photo by Andre Liohn)

Basically, that was it. The details were wanting. The overarching narrative was MIA.

Would the desk clerk perhaps have something to add? No, the last person to see Mary Anderson alive recalled nothing exceptional about her.

It might have ended there, with a newspaper brief: “Mary Anderson (possibly a pseudonym), age and hometown unavailable, died of an apparent suicide on Oct. 9, 1996, in room 214 of the Hotel Vintage Park. She leaves behind no known survivors. Interment in Crown Hill Cemetery, paid for by King County.”

But how could you leave it at that? Surely there was more. And if there wasn’t more, why wasn’t there? At some point, Smith decided to push on – not to the next story in her queue, but to wherever Mary Anderson’s cryptic tale might lead. What she came up with was a profound and haunting story that owes its power to its very lack of information.

Rereading the story today, when so many people’s lives are aggressively tracked in real time on Facebook and Twitter, it seems unfathomable that Mary Anderson could have vanished, in plain view, without any record other than of her death, and likewise that Smith’s story could succeed so well without benefit of so much that seems crucial. If this were a work of fiction, the blanks could have been filled, but as a work of journalism it would seem to be destined to fail. Yet Smith decided to follow the story wherever it went, and found that its frustrating blanks – which were otherwise impediments to our understanding – were in fact the story. Smith’s newspaper article, later anthologized in Volume 1 of The Best Creative Nonfiction, embraces the story’s dead spaces the way great music incorporates silence. Smith is open to more than meets the eye, and what she found was not what might have been expected, nor even what she was looking for. The story works because it is open, honest and accurately told, yet unbound by a conventional host of facts.

When confronted with the gaping mystery of life, we all have a tendency to either look away or to try to impose our own measure of understanding, whether it is accurate or not. Part of a writer’s role is to help frame things, to organize the barrage of often inscrutable information into a coherent, manageable narrative. Particularly for a journalist, whose job it is to deliver the who, what, when, where, how and sometimes why, it is tempting to try to commandeer a narrative that is as incalcitrant as Mary Anderson’s – to either dismiss it or make it work for us. Even when we choose to proceed, we may overemphasize the known as a way of minimizing the unknown (represented by those empty pages), or to understate the story’s importance due to our inability to properly tell it. Sometimes we force things. Smith does not. She chooses to highlight the few salient details that float, untethered, like unnamed stars, then to descend into a succession of alluring box canyons, in which we encounter others who are literally attempting to describe the unknown. She explores the void through the story of a woman who personifies it.

It was a risky approach, but it works because it focuses on what matters most – on the wanting itself, which is rarely so vividly conjured, even in painstakingly informative works.

“The Cipher in Room 214” is not what we have come to think of as conventional narrative nonfiction (if there is such a thing). Smith does not dazzle us with decorative reportage or fact-based literary prose, though there are a few nice, telling descriptive passages. Neither does she make her own presence known. She breaks from the nonfiction paradigm by stepping into the margins of the verifiable world. Her story reads like reporting yet doesn’t gloss over the spaces that would normally be occupied by facts; instead, she highlights those spaces, which creates a level of suspense more often reserved for fiction.

Anderson, for her part, may have intended to magnify the void, to have been purposefully obscure in the end. Either way, that void is what ultimately interests Smith, who might have been expected to be at odds with it. Together, she, Anderson and a group of concerned officials raise a litany of questions, each one leading to another, accompanied by a precious collection of curious details. In that manner Smith manages so keep us engaged, and without a hint of artifice or imposition.

She writes:

If there was anything out of the ordinary about the woman’s arrival at the Hotel Vintage Park in downtown Seattle that autumn day, it was only the weather – a near record 80 degrees. That much is recorded.

The woman herself slipped by unnoticed. She had called an hour or so earlier to reserve the room. She took a cab, got out around the corner with two bags and walked into the lobby alone on Oct. 9, 1996.

She signed the register “Mary Anderson.” No one spotted the hesitation marks in her handwriting.

There were no tags on her luggage.

The desk clerk, Smith notes, recalled no accent, nor anything to make her seem out of place in the luxury boutique hotel. The woman appeared normal – neatly groomed, with an expensive, olive-green woven-leather purse, and paid $350 in cash for two nights in what Smith describes as “an elegant room at the end of a long, richly carpeted hallway.” That hallway, in this story, is the portal to the void:

This is where the trail of Anderson’s life ends. No one knows precisely what happened next. Was she absorbed in the final details of erasing her identity – perhaps flushing away a driver’s license and address book, ripping the label off a prescription bottle? Did she anticipate the confusion her act would cause? Did she have second thoughts?

What we do know is this: She made no phone calls. Ordered nothing from room service. Instead, in some unknown sequence, she put out the “Do Not Disturb” sign, applied pink lipstick and combed her short auburn hair. She wrote a note on hotel stationary, opened her Bible to the 23rd Psalm and mixed cyanide into a glass of Metamucil.

Then she drank it.

In the note, addressed “To whom it may concern,” Anderson wrote simply that she had decided to end her life and that no one was responsible for her death. She added, “P.S. I have no relatives. You can use my body as you choose.” She signed it “Mary Anderson.”

After she failed to check out of the room, the hotel staff bypassed the lock and found her propped against pillows, a King James Bible clasped to her chest. The room was neat and orderly – a detail that, given Anderson’s inexplicable death by poisoning, seems to mock our need to impose order on the story. Anderson’s obsessive ordering is the reader’s enemy, but what are we to do – capitulate to the chaos of the unknown? Giving the two equal weight, Smith compels us to read on:

And yet … her death raises other questions: How can a person live to middle age without leaving any ties to the world? What about her dry cleaner? The cosmetics counter lady? Did they wonder about a troubled woman in their midst?

Somewhere, someone must realize that she doesn’t come around anymore. To push through life and touch no one, to develop no gravity that pulls anyone else into your orbit, seems impossible.

And yet:

Even in her death, Mary Anderson has traction, a pull on certain strangers.

In her interviews with the people – mostly government employees – who wander those box canyons, Smith found that, like us, they appear to be at once drawn to and repulsed by the unknown. There is the former chief investigator for the King Count Medical Examiner’s Office who ordered Anderson’s embalming and burial, who remained haunted by the questions surrounding her life and death. The investigator, Jerry Webster, used all the available tools in his effort to discover Anderson’s true identity, which was, after all, part of his job. But it clearly wasn’t just a job. He had a deep, abiding need to find out. “I’m convinced she left us clues to who she was, and we missed them,” Webster laments. He and other investigators tried to trace Anderson’s clothing and makeup to their point of purchase, to no avail. They published an artist’s rendering of her face. They checked the address she gave, which did not exist. Another investigator wondered if she had intentionally sought to challenge them to figure out who she was. Her age was estimated at between 33 and 45, and an autopsy concluded that she had been in good health, had had cosmetic surgery and a copper IUD implanted in her uterus, and had never borne children. That was it.

Smith uses the familiar journalist’s tools to frame the mystery, providing facts about missing persons and clinical depression, and at one point resorting to uncharacteristic – and, under the circumstances, strangely intrusive – speculation. Ultimately, her research leads her, and us, back to the unfathomable mystery of Anderson’s life and the deliberateness of her death. Though by now we’re already acutely aware of it, she reminds us, “The mind wants to make sense of it, to find a reason.”

In the end, Anderson won. No one found out who she was. There was no funeral service, and she was buried in an unmarked grave, which she shares with an indigent man. Yet Josh Quarles, the front desk manager at the hotel, who found her body, and otherwise recalls nothing remarkable about her, tells Smith, “I’ve thought about her a lot over the years. It shouldn’t be that easy to just disappear.”

In the introduction to the anthology where her story was reprinted, Smith is quoted: “In many ways, the story of Mary Anderson is the antithetical newspaper story. There was no news peg. There was no resolution.” And yet, she notes, “Readers connected with the questions it raised about who we are, and how we live in the world. To me, there is no higher calling for creative nonfiction.” Smith’s piece is a fact-based paean to the unknown. It works because she is restrained in her account, though not utterly detached in that the questions she raises are existential – not something normally explored in journalism. She wants to know what happened, as everyone does, but she recognizes that sometimes the truth falls between the lines, in what is, for whatever reason, and perhaps of necessity, left out.

Alan Huffman has contributed to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution; the Los Angeles Times; the New York Times, Outside; Smithsonian; and Washington Post magazine, as well as to numerous websites including the Huffington Post and The Daily Beast. A former reporter for the Clarion-Ledger, he is the author of five nonfiction books: Ten Point, Mississippi in Africa, Sultana, We’re With Nobody, and his latest, Here I Am: The Story of Tim Hetherington, War Photographer, which was published this month.

O’Donovan (photo by Finbarr O’Reilly)

I fell in love with “Charlotte’s Web” because, when White talked about grown-up mysteries  like love and death, he was as honest as a punch to the jaw. Many years later, I fell in love with “Death of a Pig” because, covering the same subjects for adults, White was as straightforward as a pie to the face.

Here are the facts of the case: A gentleman farmer (and New Yorker staff writer) ventures out to his pig enclosure one September afternoon and discovers that the hog he has nurtured through spring and summer has lost its appetite, gone listless. An obstruction of the bowel is suspected. The farmer, his dachshund and a veterinarian preside over the pig’s decline, until it dies alone a few days later, sometime between supper and midnight. The pig receives a graveside autopsy and is buried under a wild apple tree. The farmer accepts his neighbor’s condolences (“the premature expiration of a pig is, I soon discovered, a departure which the community marks solemnly on its calendar, a sorrow in which it feels fully involved”) before taking up his pen and telling the story “in penitence and in grief, as a man who failed to raise his pig.”

It’s slim stuff, but that voice! That rueful tone, the invitation to cast White out of the society of pig-raisers. White remembers (perhaps he wrote) the golden rule of first-person narration, which is to approach readers with humility and a perspective they can share. “I live by my wits and started at an early age to inject myself into the act, as a clown does in the ring,” he told The Paris Review in 1969.

It’s one thing to describe the trick. It’s another to execute it.

White was, first and always, an essayist, and he could muse about anything: Model T Fords (“Farewell My Lovely”), making his way around Alaska as a firemen’s messboy on a steamer ship (“The Years of Wonder”), sales pitches for lightning rods (“Removal”). The subjects were diverse, but the common thread was his approach, which was often that of a hapless outsider – as his readers would be. He combined wide-eyed interest with concern for the natural world and a scientist’s knack for detached observation. (Not, however, a scientist’s precision or methods: Once, after collecting, studying and describing a spider’s egg sack, White forgot it on top of his bureau in New York, resulting in a brief infestation and a web-covered hairbrush and nail scissors. This later fueled the conclusion of “Charlotte’s Web.”)

White emerges with vivid prose. “Death of a Pig” is chockablock with precise and memorable lines:

When he opened his mouth to scream, I turned the oil into his throat – a pink, corrugated area I had never seen before. (On dosing the patient with castor oil.)

I made a sucking sound through my teeth to remind him of past pleasures of the feast. With very small, timid pigs, weanlings, this ruse is often quite successful and will encourage them to eat; but with a large, sick pig the ruse is senseless and the sound I made must have made him feel, if anything, more miserable. (On tempting him to eat.)

I have noticed that Fred will feverishly consume any substance that is associated with trouble – the bitter flavor is to his liking. When the bag was above reach, he concentrated on the pig and was everywhere at once, a tower of strength and inconvenience. (On his dachshund’s attempts to sneak sips of an enema solution.)

We’re not being told much of anything; instead, we’re seeing and feeling it. And so we’re having fun, skipping from one bright image to another, along for whatever ride White wants to offer.

The narrative essay isn’t a self-help manual; if we do get any help, it’s to see that we are not alone. The first-person narrative is an invitation to consider the human condition, and part of that condition is indignity.

In that regard, White doesn’t spare himself. In “Death of a Pig,” at least ostensibly the story of a failure and death, the absurdity is relentless and delicious. White begins with a small pomposity:

I spent several days and nights in mid-September with an ailing pig and I feel driven to account for this stretch of time, more particularly since the pig died at last, and I lived, and things might easily have gone the other way round and none left to do the accounting.

Who doesn’t standing at a graveside and say, aghast, “I could have died – and one day I will”? This self-centered concern leads to all manner of human nonsense – thus the adage that tragedies begin with a wedding, and comedies begin with a funeral. White goes one better: We can’t forget that the grave, in this case, might as well be a luau pit.

Just as White is ginning up some pathos over his pastoralis interruptus, here come the clowns, flinging pies at the funeral.

Enter Fred, a “vile old dachshund” who thrusts his pointy nose into the story and the pigpen as “a happy quack, writing his villainous prescriptions and grinning his corrosive grin.” The pig is “plugged up,” which leads to doses of castor oil and ultimately leaves White “cast suddenly in the role of pig’s friend and physician – a farcical character with an enema bag for a prop.” In the days of treatment, White describes Fred’s surreptitious sips from the soapy enema solution with such exasperation and helplessness that it’s easy to forget that White, not Fred, is in full control of the storytelling. White could have omitted the indignities, if not from the experience, then from his narrative.

But he needs them.

Storytellers often borrow the idea of “a lens” from filmmaking and photography. One of White’s particular gifts was knowing when to shift his lens to unexpected details that seemed like whimsical asides. More often than not, the odd bits act as a counterweight, pulling the camera back from White’s self-contemplation and offering us some perspective. The world spins on when pigs are shuffling off their coil, and when people do, too.

One of my favorite bits of the piece is a quote:

“Poor piggledy-wiggledy!” said Miss Wyman.

It might be the silliest interjection in nonfiction. Miss Wyman, the veterinarian’s fiancée, speaks her only line  just as White’s anxiety and the pig’s illness are nearing their crisis. Miss Wyman hits the sour note in the funeral dirge and the balloon of White’s self-importance is punctured again.

And that’s another pleasure of this essay, and why I come back to it over and over again. White invites us to see how uncertainty enters the life of the farmer when reaping intrudes before its season, and to consider that at the end of farming and husbandry (for pigs, wheat, cows, corn, farmers) is death.

But when we finish the piece, we haven’t really read about life interrupted by death. White’s essay is the story of a death interrupted by life. Fred and Miss Wyman are to this story what Dogberry the constable is to “Much Ado About Nothing:” irrepressible and absolutely necessary vulgarity.

White wants to talk about death, he wants to tell us things – often quite interesting things:

The loss we felt was not the loss of ham but the loss of pig. He had evidently become precious to me, not that he represented a distant nourishment in a hungry time, but that he had suffered in a suffering world.

It’s an important thought, dancing on the edge of discomfort. White can get away with that, and keep our attention, by unleashing reality, messy and absurd and undignified – and true.

Betsy O’Donovan (@Oditor) is a 2013 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University.

A fundamental law of storytelling is: withhold information. As the writer Paul Metcalf put it, “The only real work in creative endeavor is to keep things from falling together too soon.”

Kix

Bear that in mind, because we’re about to consider “Upon This Rock,” a GQ story that I’ve read probably 15 times since it was published in 2004. It is not only Sullivan’s signature piece but also a great example of a writer having patience, revealing what he truly wants to say only at the appropriate moment, which in this case comes about halfway through the piece. Sullivan is much too smart to work within the shadows of an inverted pyramid, and the story is better – memorable; re-readable – because of it.

The piece is about a trip Sullivan made to the largest Christian Rock festival in the country, the Creation Festival, in rural Pennsylvania. What I love about any of Sullivan’s stories, but especially this one, is his command of the language. The man can flat-out craft a sentence. He can do pathos, he can echo (without mimicking) the flourishes of other writers, and he can do humor. That’s what the reader gets a taste of right away. Sullivan identifies, and comments upon, his day-to-day shitstorms with ease. Here he is after realizing that GQ booked him an RV, the only rental available within 100 miles of the festival:

The reason twenty-nine feet is such a common length for RVs, I presume, is that once a vehicle gets much longer, you need a special permit to drive it. That would mean forms and fees, possibly even background checks. But show up at any RV joint with your thigh stumps lashed to a skateboard, crazily waving your hooks-for-hands, screaming you want that twenty-nine-footer out back for a trip to you ain’t sayin’ where, and all they want to know is: Credit or debit, tiny sir?

He keeps it coming. The employee who rings up the 29-footer is a woman named Debbie. “She was a lot to love,” Sullivan writes, “with a face as sweet as birthday cake beneath spray-hardened bangs.” (Do you not immediately know this woman?) Meanwhile, the inside of the RV, “smelled of spoiled vacations and amateur porn shoots wrapped in motel shower curtains and left in the sun.” Outside, a man named Jack helps Sullivan inspect everything else:

We toured the outskirts of my soon-to-be mausoleum. It took time. Every single thing Jack said, somehow, was the only thing I’d need to remember. White water, gray water, black water (drinking, showering, le devoir). Here’s your this, never ever that. Grumbling about “weekend warriors.” I couldn’t listen, because listening would mean accepting it as real, though his casual mention of the vast blind spot in the passenger-side mirror squeaked through, as did his description of the “extra two feet on each side”—the bulge of my living quarters—which I wouldn’t be able to see but would want to “be conscious of” out there. Debbie followed us with a video camera, for insurance purposes. I saw my loved ones gathered in a mahogany-paneled room to watch this footage; them being forced to hear me say, “What if I never use the toilet—do I still have to switch on the water?”

It is so much fun to read a John Jeremiah Sullivan story.

And for a great while – for about 2,500, words in fact – that’s what “Upon This Rock” is: fun. We learn of Sullivan screaming, “No! No! No! No!” as he merges onto the Pennsylvania Turnpike; of heavy traffic and idling vehicles miles before the Creation exit and the girl one car over blowing crisp notes on a ram’s horn; of Sullivan’s eventual entrance into the festival and the great throngs of Christians – tens of thousands! hundreds of thousands! – moving about him and the RV, the vast majority of them under the age of 18 and all but, say, four of them white. Sullivan takes pains to say that the Creation Festival’s expanse is endless:

I drove so far. You wouldn’t have thought this thing could go on so far. Every other bend in the road opened onto a whole new cove full of tents and cars; the encampment had expanded to its physiographic limits, pushing right up to the feet of the ridges.

He says all this for a reason: He’s setting up the next turn in the story. And the RV, that yuck of a set piece from the narrative’s first third, helps guide the reader through the transition.

There is no place to park his beast, not until a kid on a bike motions to Sullivan to follow him up a steep hill, at the top of which, Sullivan presumes, the RV can at last rest peacefully. But then the incline begins to overpower the 29-footer: “…the little bell in my spine warn[ed] me that the RV had reached a degree of tilt she was not engineered to handle,” Sullivan writes. And the only thing to save him – and untold hundreds of Christians below – is a man with a thick West Virginian accent shouting at him to “JACK THE WILL TO THE ROT” – while braking hard. So Sullivan jacks the wheel to the right, breaks hard, and the vehicle stops. Then the voice tells him to hit the gas on three and, miraculously, the old girl grinds upward again, with some “freakishly powerful beings” pushing from behind. Soon, the RV mounts the hill and the voice and freaky-strong things identify themselves: Darius, Jake, Ritter, Josh, Bub, and Pee Wee, all in their early 20s, all from West Virginia and all, as Ritter tells Sullivan, “on fire for Christ.”

Sullivan surprises the reader here. Thus far, he has been a sneering East Coaster on an anthropologic mission to rural-most Christendom. The reader might expect him, now that he has at last confronted the natives in their habitat, to sneer some more at their simple ardent faith. Instead, Sullivan gives us a touching, nuanced group portrait. The West Virginians know the Bible cold and are something approaching biblical scholars – and yet they’re rustic, too, living off game back in Braxton County and knowing which plants can serve as accoutrements to a meal and which ones can cure ailments. Sullivan does not laugh at any of this. And he asks us not to either. “In their lives, they had known terrific violence,” Sullivan writes. And here the sympathy for the West Virginians builds:

Half of their childhood friends had been murdered—shot or stabbed over drugs or nothing. Others had killed themselves. Darius’s grandfather, great-uncle, and onetime best friend had all committed suicide. When Darius was growing up, his father was in and out of jail; at least once, his father had done hard time. In Ohio he stabbed a man in the chest (the man had refused to stop “pounding on” Darius’s grandfather). Darius caught a lot of grief—”Your daddy’s a jailbird!”—during those years. He’d carried a chip on his shoulder from that.

“You came up pretty rough,” Sullivans says.

“Not really,” Darius responds. “Some people ain’t got hands and feet.” And, besides, he adds: “I gave all that to God—all that anger and stuff. He took it away.”

What a concise encapsulation of one’s character, and one’s faith. You’d think that in an 11,000-word story Sullivan would lean toward verbosity. I would argue he wastes not one word in this whole thing.

Never is this truer than in the piece’s discussion of music at the Creation Festival. There is in fact very little discussion of music at the Creation Festival. Sullivan doesn’t think it worth his time:

For their encore, Jars of Clay did a cover of U2′s “All I Want Is You.” It was bluesy.

That’s the last thing I’ll be saying about the bands.

He’s lying, but not by much. Sullivan decides that if he won’t talk about the music, he’ll use his surroundings – the music festival itself – to advance the narrative. And it’s here, halfway through the piece, as Sullivan listens to a band named Skillet, that the story opens itself wide. Sullivan is shocked to discover that Skillet’s lead singer is a guy Sullivan grew up with. Sullivan, the reader then learns, was once an evangelist himself. This revelation is the story’s gift, made all the better for how long Sullivan waited for readers to open it.

And now we can’t read the words fast enough. This guy, the one who just called young Christians “little fuckers,” this guy was once an evangelist? How? Why? And this was once an evangelist business – what happened?

Sullivan takes his time explaining because by now he knows we’ll follow him right to the core of his teenage self: He attempted to convert the masses wherever the masses needed converting. And as if to prove his evangelical bona fides, Sullivan later breaks from his bio and gives us this beautiful snippet of conversation following an exchange he and the West Virginians have with a small band of girls, who are trying to tell the guys that they can’t eat frogs:

“Wherefore, if meat make my brother to offend,” Darius said, “I will eat no flesh while the world standeth.”

“First Corinthians,” I said.

“8:13,” Darius said.

That “I said” says it all, doesn’t it?

Okay, but what happened? Well, in short, Sullivan gained his faith for the same reason he lost it: He loved how his young brothers and sisters in Christ intellectualized the ancient texts. But as they applied their grad-school fervor to the Good Book, Sullivan began to read works outside it, works not on any Christian-Youth-approved list. These books introduced new ideas, contradictory but no less reasonable ideas, and his faith began to ebb. Sullivan lays all this out for us page upon page, section after section. It is riveting stuff.

And it is the reason I love “Upon This Rock.” For all its literary pyrotechnics, the story succeeds because of its structural restraint.

From here, Sullivan could have gone the route of Christopher Hitchens, say, ridiculing a religion he was too smart to fall for. But Sullivan ends the story with one last surprise: He is haunted by the faith he has lost. “I love Jesus Christ,” Sullivan writes. This opens the story wider still, because who among us has not lost someone or something and regretted it? Sullivan is speaking to every one of us when he writes:

He was the most beautiful dude. Forget the Epistles, forget all the bullying stuff that came later. Look at what He said. Read The Jefferson Bible. Or better yet, read The Logia of Yeshua, by Guy Davenport and Benjamin Urrutia, an unadorned translation of all the sayings ascribed to Jesus that modern scholars deem authentic. There’s your man. His breakthrough was the aestheticization of weakness. Not in what conquers, not in glory, but in what’s fragile and what suffers—there lies sanity. And salvation. “Let anyone who has power renounce it,” he said. “Your father is compassionate to all, as you should be.” That’s how He talked, to those who knew Him.

He doesn’t say the word regret but he doesn’t have to. His appreciation of Jesus shows how much Sullivan still yearns for his comfort, but intellectually and emotionally he can’t accept the love. Sullivan admits to envying the West Virginians now:

They were crazy, and they loved God—and I thought about the unimpeachable dignity of that love, which I never was capable of. Because knowing it isn’t true doesn’t mean you would be strong enough to believe if it were.

We’re a long way from the snide commentary of the beginning. To feel this piece evolve as you read it is the true miracle of it, regardless of whether God told Sullivan to exercise restraint.

Paul Kix is a general editor at ESPN the Magazine. He tweets at @paulkix.

For more installments of “Why’s this so good?” see our archives. 

1.
Complex magazine: What do you listen to these days?
Lil Wayne: Me! All day, all me.

Ho

As a pick-up line, it works. People uninitiated to Lil Wayne are left wondering whether the rapper can actually deliver. And for those more familiar with his music or his outsize personality, the claim comes as little surprise. What is surprising is the writer’s numbered structure (25 vignettes) and a lede that pulls from a past interview: a strategy that immediately sets the scene for an unconventional narrative.

The story is ostensibly a personal essay about how Lil Wayne indirectly helped the author survive his first year teaching in New Orleans, but it also acts as music criticism and a reported piece. The vignettes by turn expose the reader to Lil Wayne’s appeal, Ramsey’s students, and in the process, New Orleans. Slowly, subtly, slyly, we see what makes Lil Wayne so great, and even more slyly, we fall for him, too – in new ways.

Lil Wayne had already released his sixth studio album, “Tha Carter III,” to critical acclaim by the time Ramsey’s piece appeared in print, and had established himself with a prolific output of mixtapes and a series of guest appearances on songs by nearly every major rapper. As Ramsey explains:

Dwayne Carter, aka Lil Wayne, aka Weezy F. Baby, was in the midst of becoming the year’s biggest rapper, and among the black teenagers that made up my student population, fandom had reached a near-Beatlemania pitch.

More than ninety percent of my students cited Lil Wayne on the “Favorite Music” question on the survey I gave them; about half of them repeated the answer on “Favorite Things to Do.”

For some of my students, the questions Where are you from? and Do you listen to Lil Wayne? were close to interchangeable. Their shared currency—as much as neighborhoods or food or slang or trauma—was the stoned musings of Weezy F. Baby.

That shared currency quickly becomes the reader’s shared currency. Ramsey manages it in two ways:

A “mixtape” approach. Each numbered vignette effectively acts like the track to a CD. (The “montage” has a long history. Janet Malcolm’s New Yorker profile of the painter David Salle is just one example.) In framing his piece as if it were a mixtape, Ramsey sets a rhythm that’s not unlike listening to, well, music. He cuts to 1, 2, then 3 and so on. Snapshots of his time teaching fifth-, eighth-, and ninth-graders filter by in fast takes, and we’re left to piece together the bigger picture. Rather than have us seek out Weezy’s songs, Ramsey does the next closest thing: He brings Weezy to us.

Ramsey leads into this by recounting his own experience, after a student asserts, “it’s all about the mix tapes:”

The following day, he had a stack of CDs for me. Version this, volume that, or no label at all.

And that’s just about all I listened to for the rest of the year.

The pathos of “I Will Forever Remain Faithful” lies largely in the fragments that Ramsey shares of his time in the classroom and, by extension, New Orleans. A reflection about Lil Wayne slips into one about students named Darius or Michael. Poignancy careens to outright laughter, dropping at some points to defeat or swooping to moments of hope.

Each section can stand on its own, but Ramsey doesn’t hesitate to mix genres, going from personal anecdote to analysis to a combination of the two and back again. The framework lets him switch gears repeatedly, leaving room for the piece to function as a tribute to an artist, a profession and a city.

Sampling. Ramsey freely excerpts from other outlets. Some parts incorporate Lil Wayne’s lyrics, others reference early interviews, articles or reviews. In a way, Ramsey co-opts (and plays with) Lil Wayne’s practice of pulling from a pastiche of sources. The singer helped make a name for himself with mixtape songs that were frequently raps over other artists’ hit tracks. Ramsey, in turn, has chosen to describe Lil Wayne’s allure by mimicking the very characteristics that set him apart. Consider this segue devoted to Lil Wayne’s sound:

3. My picture should be in the dictionary next to the definition of definition

Lil Wayne slurs, hollers, sings, sighs, bellows, whines, croons, wheezes, coughs, stutters, shouts. He reminds me, in different moments, of two dozen other rappers. In a genre that often demands keeping it real via being repetitive, Lil Wayne is a chameleon, rapping in different octaves, paces, and inflections.

Sometimes he sounds like a bluesman, sometimes he sounds like a Muppet baby.

Lil Wayne does his share of gangsta posturing, but half the time he starts chuckling before he gets through a line. He’s a ham. He is heavy on pretense, and thank God. Like Dylan, theatricality trumps authenticity.

And yet—even as he tries on a new style for every other song, it is always unmistakably him. I think of Elvis’s famous boast, “I don’t sound like nobody.” I imagine Wayne would flip it: “Don’t nobody sound like me.”

As Ramsey explains, Lil Wayne sounds like everybody (“two dozen other rappers,” “a chameleon, rapping in different octaves, paces, and inflections,” “a bluesman,” “a Muppet baby”) and nobody all at once. He may be copying other people, but that’s not necessarily a limitation. He’s someone who, Ramsey suggests, can invert a boast like Elvis’s (“I don’t sound like nobody”) to something that is still unique (“Don’t nobody sound like me”).

Ramsey uses that idea as narrative inspiration. In “I Will Forever Remain Faithful,” he appropriates wherever he likes. There’s a block that quotes entirely from AllHipHop.com, and another that crystallizes Lil Wayne’s lyrical witticisms by simply listing verses from songs. And there’s Ramsey’s decision to open certain anecdotes with relevant lyrics.

More than just a dissection of Lil Wayne’s popularity, the piece riffs on certain conventions of music criticism, which can insist on identifying the progenitor of a genre and determining the authenticity of a specific sound. Who’s really to assign ownership and does it even matter who got there first? Whether impersonating E.T. or dropping snippets of Rihanna, Weezy himself has demonstrated that imitation hasn’t confined him creatively in any way.

Writers market in a form of thievery, too, and Ramsey uses his framework to clever effect. He widens the scope of his piece because of the range of his references; and setting it up as a string of anecdotes lets him play with voice, style and tone. Brevity doesn’t preclude depth. And as Ramsey – and Lil Wayne – remind us, art takes its inspiration from other art.

Margaret Ho (@mwho) is a copy editor on the business desk of the New York Times. Her first job was as a grant writer at a charter school in Harlem. She lives in Brooklyn and is perpetually hunting for the best sandwich.

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