We wondered what’s on college reading lists these days and asked some distinguished writer/professors of narrative what stories or books they assign — but also why. Stand by for Jacqui Banaszynski, Mark Bowden, Madeleine Blais, Rob Boynton, Jeff Sharlet and Rebecca Skloot.

Jacqui Banaszynski, University of Missouri

The course is Intermediate Writing. I have students in my writing class pick most of what we read and discuss. That allows them to explore and discover what they respond to, which gives them more ownership of the techniques at work in effective writing and keeps the class varied and fresh. Their choices range from narrative to investigative pieces to sports columns. Along the way, I have a handful of standards (some book chapters and magazine pieces, but mostly newspaper stories) that I pull out to emphasize the components of the craft:

Bird by Bird, by Anne Lamott. This has become my irreverent bible. It offers an array of solid lessons on writing, but mostly makes struggling writers feel a little less alone and a lot less crazy. It lets them in on two necessary secrets: Writing is damn hard work, and all writers feel like fakes.

The Things They Carried, a novel, by Tim O’Brien. I start my in-depth writing class with the first chapter. That means I reread it twice a year, and it always reveals something new and fairly astonishing. It is a masterpiece of foreshadowing, building tension, revelatory detail, character development, pacing, wordplay, metaphor and layered meaning. Students then write personal essays built around a similar prompt: The things I carried, wore, ate, lost, etc.

Hiroshima, by John Hersey. I have found nothing that better demonstrates the reporting that is both required and possible for powerful literary nonfiction. We analyze what Hersey would have had to notice and ask to reconstruct such precise, vivid and credible scenes. As for the writing, it is a study in simplicity. Hersey uses verbs that are strong but seldom flashy, sentences that are tight and direct, and a minimum of embellishment to let the raw drama of the narrative come through.

“A Boy of Unusual Vision,” by Alice Steinbach (Baltimore Sun). A great example of a rich story told entirely through a series of tight, focused scenes. Also demonstrates the kind of reporting evident in Hiroshima. Steinbach is fearless and compassionate in talking to Calvin about his blindness.

“From ordinary girl to international icon” (Terry Schiavo’s obituary), by Kelley Benham (St. Petersburg Times, now Tampa Bay Times). The first paragraph is a study in the use of parallel construction and pacing. Benham controls both throughout the piece, showing how structure itself can carry readers along. She also demonstrates the power of selection – choosing just the details that reveal the core of the story being told.

“The Girl in the Mirror,” by Julia Sommerfeld (Seattle Times). A long, complex story made readable through tight, focused and purposeful scenes. Strong example of immersion reporting, rather than reconstruction; Sommerfeld witnessed much of the action. Great use of analogy to help readers see and understand the inaccessible (facial deformation and surgery).

“Richard Nixon’s Long Journey Ends,” by David Von Drehle (Washington Post). I use this to demonstrate a writer’s voice and authority. It dares to have a strong point of view. It’s also a study in word selection and in essay-like structure.

“Digging JFK Grave Was His Honor,” by Jimmy Breslin (New York Herald Tribune). Another study in point of view, but this one demonstrates that classic lesson of “zig, don’t zag.” Breslin goes where no one else thought to, and finds a story all can relate to.

“What a Day!” by Ken Fuson (Des Moines Register). This shows how a mundane assignment can be turned into art in the hands of a creative and bold writer. The single long, breathless sentence echoes the feeling of the day itself.

“Old ladies ‘do what we can,’ ” by Alex Tizon (Seattle Times). This is one of 14 short dispatches that were part of “Crossing America,” filed on the road from Seattle to New York City immediately after the 9/11 attacks. All are great examples of “place profiles,” but this one stands out as a study in character development.

Jacqui Banaszynski (@jacquib) is the Knight Chair in Editing professor at the Missouri School of Journalism, senior collaborations editor for the Public Insight Network of American Public Media and a faculty fellow at the Poynter Institute. She won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize in feature writing for “AIDS in the Heartland,” a series about a gay farm couple facing AIDS.

Madeleine Blais, University of Massachusetts-Amherst

For a class entitled Diaries, Memoirs and Journals, I require a shifting list of full-length books as well as articles and essays. This fall’s assigned books include:

This Boy’s Life, by Tobias Wolff. I find this book a pitch-perfect evocation of the powerlessness of being a child — and of the power that ensues when an adult retaliates with his version of events. This memoir is widely considered one of the finest exemplars of the genre.

Father’s Day, by Buzz Bissinger. This new work by the author of the acclaimed nonfiction narrative Friday Night Lights and other books uses the journey motif to move back and forth in time, and possesses a candor that becomes its own armor in the service of revealing some of life’s less appealing truths about oneself.

Name All the Animals, by Alison Smith. Alison Smith experienced the loss of her idolized teenaged brother while still a child, and her memoir is both healing and devastating.

Brother, I Am Dying, by Edwidge Danticat. The author’s elderly uncle from Haiti enters several circles of hell when he is detained at the infamous Krome Avenue Detention Center in Miami while trying to enter the United States legally. A sad story ennobled by the quiet grace with which it is told.

Madeleine Blais won the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing while at the Miami Herald. She was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and has written for newspapers including the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune and the Boston Globe. She is the author of In These Girls, Hope Is a Muscle, which was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist in nonfiction and named one of the Top 100 sports books of the 20th Century by ESPN; The Heart Is an Instrument; Portraits in Journalism; and Uphill Walkers: Memoir of a Family, which won a Massachusetts Book Award.

Mark Bowden, University of Delaware

The course is called Masterpieces of Nonfiction.

“The American Male at Age Ten,” a short piece by Susan Orlean which she undertook after being approached to write a profile of Macauley Culkin, then the most famous 10-year-old in the world. Orlean wasn’t that interested in the actor, but was interested in studying a typical 10-year-old boy in hopes of better understanding men. She fails, but succeeds brilliantly in an essay that is sweet, funny and memorable. I love to assign this story because it shows that writing great nonfiction does not require dramatic subject matter, foreign travel or even huge amounts of time.

Hiroshima, by John Hersey, because of its historical importance in the genre of literary nonfiction, because of its relative simplicity as a piece of reporting and writing, and because it is a powerful and compelling read. Hersey illustrates the importance of asking, “Who and what, at the most basic level, is this story about?” In the case of the atom bomb, it was the one piece of the story that had not been reported — and which was the most important.

In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote, because every time I assign it my students love it. I enjoy pointing out Capote’s careful attention to craft. It also prompts interesting conversations about choosing subject matter, immersion in reporting and how the values and experiences of the writer shape the best nonfiction in the same way they shape fiction. There are also four films it has inspired – I usually choose one – so it’s fun to see how story is translated to the screen.

The Right Stuff, by Tom Wolfe, because it is such a joy to read, and it illustrates how a great reporter and writer can make something entirely new out of material that has supposedly been reported to death. The book is essentially an extended essay, or argument, as nearly all of Wolfe’s stories are. It is also useful to get students thinking about the importance of voice.

The Executioner’s Song, by Norman Mailer. I consider it to be one of the classics of American literature, and Mailer’s best work. The book is really two for the price of one, not just because of its length (I give my students plenty of time to read it), but because Mailer shifts gears so dramatically in the middle, first telling the story of Gary Gilmore as he imagines it really was, and then adopting a completely different style, telling how the same story was transformed by TV and the press into a bizarre media event.

The Perfect Storm, by Sebastian Junger, because it is a wonderful example of how a skillful writer can conjure a “true” story by cleverly reporting around the edges of that which he cannot know. Junger could not, of course, interview the doomed fishermen aboard the Andrea Gale, but that doesn’t stop him from writing a thrilling account of their final moments in the storm. I love going through the book chapter by chapter, and showing how he does it.

The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion, because it lets me introduce the memoir and because Didion was so ruthlessly honest in writing about herself. It demonstrates how rigorous self-examination must be to rise above self-indulgence, a threshold very few memoirs achieve.

“Urban Cowboy,” by Aaron Latham, both the original article and the movie. The article cleverly ridicules the faux cowboys of modern Houston, who work on oilrigs and dress up in boots, buckles, and 10-gallon hats to go dancing with the gals. Turns out the gals ride the mechanical bulls better than they do, which leads to heartbreak. The movie (which Latham co-wrote) dispenses with the wit entirely, and turns these wannabe cowpokes into romantic heroes.

“The String Theory,” David Foster Wallace‘s amazing essay about what it takes to be the best in the world at anything, in this case, tennis. He examines the question not by studying the best tennis player in the world – he does that in a later, more famous piece called “Roger Federer as Religious Experience” – but by profiling Michael Joyce, an unknown second-tier tennis pro who, as talented and hard-working as he is, will never reach the topmost ranks of the game. Why? The story illustrates how a writer can elevate something as mundane as a sports story into something truly memorable by asking the right questions — not of the subject alone but of himself.

I also throw in some of my own work – this semester Black Hawk Down and a few shorter ones – to give students a chance to pick my brain about how they were reported and written.

Mark Bowden is a best-selling author and journalist. His book Black Hawk Down, a finalist for the National Book Award, was the basis of the film of the same name. His book Killing Pablo won the Overseas Press Club’s 2001 Cornelius Ryan Award as the book of the year. His book Guests of the Ayatollah, an account of the 1979 Iran hostage crisis, was listed by Newsweek as one of the 50 “books of our times.” His most recent books are The Best Game Ever, the story of the 1958 NFL championship game; Worm, which tells the story of the Conficker computer worm; and The Finish, an account of the mission to kill Osama bin Laden, to be published in October. Bowden is a Vanity Fair contributing editor and a national correspondent for The Atlantic.

Rob Boynton, New York University

Boynton’s excerpted reading list for his Literary Reportage class at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, sans liner notes:

We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live, by Joan Didion

Up in the Old Hotel, by Joseph Mitchell

Fame and Obscurity, by Gay Talese

Iphigenia in Forest Hills, by Janet Malcolm

“Introduction,” by John Carey, The Faber Book of Reportage

Herodotus and the Art of Noticing, by Ryszard Kapuscinski

“Why I Write,” by George Orwell

Hospital Sketches, by Louisa May Alcott

“The Dream Factory,” by Clive Thompson (Wired)

“The Hand-Off,” by Ted Conover (New York Times magazine)

“How Do You Like It Now, Gentlemen?” by Lillian Ross

“Ingrid Sichy, Girl of the Zeitgeist,” Janet Malcolm (New Yorker)

“The American Male at Age Ten,” by Susan Orlean (Esquire)

“Church and State” memo from Harold Ross to Raul Fleischmann

“Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” by Norman Mailer (Esquire)

“Secrets of the Little Blue Box,” by Ron Rosenbaum (Esquire)

“A Few Words about Breasts,” by Nora Ephron (Esquire)

“Nickel and Dimed,” by Barbara Ehrenreich

“Tilting at Tree Bags,” by Ian Frazier (Mother Jones)

“Out of Iraq,” by Adam Davidson (Harper’s)

Robert S. Boynton is the author of The New New Journalism and director of the magazine journalism program at New York University.

Jeff Sharlet, Dartmouth

The course is called Whose Story Is It?, borrowed from Jane Kramer’s great little book Whose Art Is It?

“In the Current,” from Boys of My Youth, by Jo Ann Beard. A portrait of the artist-to-be as a bored little girl, grasping metaphor for the first time. We read this to think about how we start to become writers.

“The Cross and the Color Line,” from Blood Done Sign My Name, by Timothy B. Tyson. Tyson remembers what he understood of the murder of MLK when he was a boy. We read this to think about the intersection between the personal and the public.

“Mic Checked,” by Rachel Signer, from KillingTheBuddha.com. I thought this was the best piece I read on the experience of the Occupy movement. I like it because it’s more or less topical, by a writer breaking radically from her usual style, and because it’s in the second person. I normally forbid the second person for the duration of the term, but I start with this piece to remind students to break my rules when they need to.

“Artists in Uniform,” by Mary McCarthy. One of my favorite descriptions of a conversation, between McCarthy and an anti-Semitic colonel she meets (and despite herself, flirts with) on a train. It’s good early in the term because it invites close reading and because the setup is so simple: a conversation, unplanned. There’s a companion piece by McCarthy, about writing it, called “Settling the Colonel’s Hash,” and a much later scholarly analysis of that essay called “Unsettling the Colonel’s Hash,” that I don’t assign but make available.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem, by Joan Didion. I assign it for the same reason most people assign it: because it’s one of the books that made me want to be a writer. That may have been generational, though. My students like it, but they don’t love it. None come to class wearing oversized sunglasses.

“Professor Seagull,” by Joseph Mitchell. I have them buy Up in the Old Hotel, but all we read at the beginning is “Seagull,” set up for a slow reveal. Meantime, the lesson is about voices.

“Animal Show,” by Rosemary Mahoney, from Whoredom in Kimmage. “Writer walks into a bar” is an old story. Mahoney makes it fresh by finding the right voices and giving them to us true.

Specimen Days excerpts, by Walt Whitman. I use Whitman to talk about the term “literary journalism.” It’s not a term he used, but exemplified the paradox inherent in the term through his love of literature past – piety – and fundamentally democratic impulse of journalism.

“Breathing In,” from Dispatches, by Michael Herr. An immersion in deep subjectivity. Also, a reminder that prose should move.

Safe Area Gorazde, by Joe Sacco. I taught Sacco’s Footnotes from Gaza to a big class last term, and it was one of the best teaching experiences I’ve had. I taught this earlier book of comics journalism, from Bosnia, to grad students at NYU years ago, and while they loved it, they couldn’t connect it to their own work. Turns out undergrads are more agile about moving between image and text.

Behind the Beautiful Forevers, by Katherine Boo. This replaces Melissa Faye Green‘s great Praying for Sheetrock as my excursion into the full potential of third person.

“Down at the Cross,” by James Baldwin. This one’s been on and off my syllabus, but it’s going back on here because Baldwin moves between memoir and reportage and essay. I don’t want students to think they must choose.

“Slaughterhouse,” from The Forbidden Zone, by Michael Lesy. By this point in the term, I want students to be venturing further off campus. “Slaughterhouse,” a minor masterpiece, is great because it gives them license to just write down what happened. Everything that happened.

“Needle and Thread,” in Number Our Days, by Barbara Myerhoff. To help students be aware of their role in an interview. They’re part of the story whether they want to be or not.

The Convert, by Deborah Baker. I can’t explain, without giving away the ending, why I assign this innovative book. It’s a very fine book and a great exposure to a different kind of immersion, that of the archive. It’s also ideal for the kind of debates students are ready for by the end of the term.

“Joe Gould’s Secret,” by Joseph Mitchell. Another one I can’t explain without a spoiler. After its companion piece, “Professor Seagull,” early in the term, “Joe Gould’s Secret” breaks the smart students’ hearts. It makes them decide to become writers or to never write again. Both honorable paths.

Jeff Sharlet (@JeffSharlet) is the nationally bestselling author of The Family, C Street, and Sweet Heaven When I Die. He’s coauthor, with Peter Manseau, of Killing the Buddha, and co-editor, with Manseau, of Believer, Beware, both derived from KillingTheBuddha.com, the online literary magazine they founded in 2000. Sharlet is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone and Harper’s, and the Mellon Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Dartmouth College.

Rebecca Skloot, most recently of the University of Memphis

As a text, I’m a big fan of Telling True Stories, edited by Mark Kramer and Wendy Call (and I’m not just saying that because it’s a Nieman Foundation book and I’m doing this for a Nieman Foundation blog). It’s a wonderful collection of great writers talking about the essentials of nonfiction writing.

Structure: As for specific stories, structure is one of the most essential tools for writers to understand, so I absolutely harp on it in the classroom. We read and discuss a wide range of structures to really tease apart what structure is, how it’s held together, how it impacts the reading of a story. I always start teaching structure with something very basic, but still creative. One example: “How to Get Out of a Locked Trunk,” by Philip Weiss, which has a straightforward chronological structure (guy goes on a quest to figure out how to get out of a locked trunk). But of course the essay isn’t about getting out of a locked trunk – it’s about marriage, commitment, fear. Pieces like that are a good starting place to lay the groundwork and vocabulary for talking about more complicated structures. As a next step, “Travels in Georgia,” by John McPhee, is one of my essential go-to pieces for teaching structure because it’s brilliantly built. I talked a bit about that piece and why I use it here. Once we’ve covered that, I like to use a wide range of pieces with unusual or surprising structures, like Dinty Moore’s wonderful “Son of Mr. Green Jeans,” which uses the alphabet to organize short vignette-like paragraphs that collectively tell a story of fatherhood. Also Randy Shilts’ “Talking AIDS to Death,” and Lê Thi Diem Thúy’s “The Gangster We Are All Looking For.” (As an aside, I just finished reading Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, which would be a fun one to teach structure-wise. I find that reading fiction for structure can be very helpful for nonfiction writers, to help get them thinking about story, narrative drive, etc.)

Voice: I find that students often have a hard time pinpointing exactly what voice is, which is an essential first step toward helping them develop their own. I like to use collections of pieces by particularly voicey writers. Two of my favorite authors to do this with are Jeanne Marie Laskas and Susan Orlean. With Jeanne Marie, I start with “Enlightened Man,” her wonderful profile of Korey Stringer, the Minnesota Vikings offensive lineman who died of heat stroke during practice when he was 27. Jeanne Marie often does what she calls a “chameleon voice” – she spends a lot of time with the people she’s writing about, listening to their voices, so she can essentially channel their voices onto paper. In the Stringer profile, she is writing as Jeanne Marie but adopting Korey’s voice. For contrast, to illustrate how she changes her voice at will, I assign that profile alongside several other pieces of her writing: A few of her short personal “Significant Others” columns about living on a farm (one of my favorites was about planting a tree), plus some excerpts from her first book, The Balloon Lady And Other People I Know, which was (at least in part) written as her MFA thesis when she was a grad student. Some of those pieces have chameleon-type voices; others have Jeanne Marie’s very personal voice. So we look at all of those together, in chronological order starting from her earliest work to her latest, to look at what stays the same in her voice, what changes, what is “her voice” vs. the voices of those she’s writing about. After establishing what voice is, and how writers can alter their voice depending on what they’re writing, I like to look at how writers develop a personal and recognizable voice. Anyone who’s read a lot of Susan Orlean knows you can read a paragraph of her stuff without looking at the byline and know it’s Susan. But what does that mean? How does she do this? I assign students a big chunk of her stuff, starting back during her early days at an alternative weekly news paper, plus excerpts from her first book, Red Sox and Bluefish and Other Things That Make New England New England, her second book, Saturday Night, several of her New Yorker pieces, and The Orchid Thief. We discuss them generally as pieces of writing (structure, reporting, etc.), but the main goal is to specifically look at her voice throughout. In her early writing it changed a bit over time, becoming more honed, more Susan, but it’s still always distinctly Susan.

Rebecca Skloot (@RebeccaSkloot) is an award-winning science writer and the author of the No. 1 New York Times bestseller The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which is being translated into more than 25 languages, adapted into a young-reader edition and made into an HBO movie produced by Oprah Winfrey and Alan Ball. She has taught in the MFA and journalism programs at the University of Memphis, New York University and the University of Pittsburgh, where she earned her MFA. She is at work on a new book, about the human-animal bond.

And no wonder: Orlean’s most famous article is, in fact, not much of a story – in the sense that not much happens in it. But neither is the piece really a profile of John Laroche, the off-kilter orchid thief at the heart of the tale. “Orchid Fever” is, at root, a portrait of desire, a tribute to and cautionary tale of infatuation.

Orlean includes enough information about orchids to fascinate and educate. (They have a single fertile stamen! Some are shaped like insects! The Victorians were consumed with orchidelirium!) She also puts up a good front that the orchids matter as flowers instead of symbols. And she even gives obsession a shot at slaying her when she treks off into a swamp in an attempt to find the elusive ghost orchid in bloom.

But throughout the piece, it is Laroche, the collector, who serves as the pivot from which everything swings, and it is the force of Orlean’s reactions to Laroche that provides the story’s momentum.

We meet him right at the beginning, in a lede it is possible I have read enough times to memorize:

John Laroche is a tall guy, skinny as a stick, pale-eyed, slouch-shouldered, and sharply handsome, in spite of the fact that he is missing all his front teeth. He has the posture of al dente spaghetti and the nervous intensity of someone who plays a lot of video games. He is thirty-four years old, and works for the Seminole Tribe of Florida, setting up a plant nursery on the tribal reservation near Miami. The Seminole nicknames for Laroche are Crazy White Man and Troublemaker.

Laroche, it is mentioned in passing, lost those front teeth in a car accident that put his wife in a coma and killed his mother and uncle. If Orlean had been going for pity, she could have leaned harder on these losses, or indicated whether and how they helped deliver him into the mess that is his life.

But Orlean is not holding Laroche up as a figure of sympathy or someone to pity, because Laroche has done something most of us never will, at least on a grand scale: He has surrendered his life to obsession. He accidentally poisons himself with pesticide then writes an article titled “Would You Die for Your Plants?” In his third or fourth decade as a serial obsessive – before orchids, it was turtles, Ice-Age fossils, lapidary, then mirrors – Laroche is as caught up in the torture of compulsion as he is with the plants themselves.

This willingness to chase desire preserves his charisma, for all his dental disarray. He is cocksure, possibly brilliant and intermittently ignorant, the boyfriend every father is terrified his child will bring home. He is also, Orlean notes, “the most moral amoral person” she has ever known.

Through her proximity to Laroche, she manages to catch orchid fever, a little. But her mild case only underlines the distinction between her curiosity and the real thing. Here she is tramping through the ghost orchid’s home territory, a swamp Laroche loves:

The Fakahatchee has a certain strange, wild beauty. It is also an aggressively inhospitable place. In fact, the hours I spent retracing Laroche’s footsteps were probably the most miserable I have spent in my entire life. The swampy part of the Fakahatchee is hot and wet and buggy, and full of cottonmouth snakes and diamondback rattlers and alligators and snapping turtles and poisonous plants and wild hogs and things that stick into you and on you and fly into your nose and eyes. Crossing the swamp is a battle. You can walk through about as calmly as you would walk through a car wash. In the middle of the swamp, the sinkholes are filled with as much as seven feet of standing water, and the air has the slack, drapey weight of wet velvet. Sides of trees look sweaty. Leaves are slick from the humidity. The mud sucks your feet and tries to keep a hold of them; failing that, it settles for your shoes. The water in the swamp is stained black with tannin from the cypress trees, which is so corrosive that it can cure leather.

Orlean builds her study of obsession out of a vocabulary of desire and devastation, ranging from the apocalyptic to the sexually charged. Laroche’s own “passions boil up quickly and end abruptly, like tornadoes.” In the Fakahatchee, the rocks have crevices, the trees have crotches, and the orchids invite erotic speculation. Mere friction is enough to ignite the grass, literally setting cars on fire, leaving behind “pan-fried tourists” and the carcasses of burned-out Model Ts.

This landscape of desire – with its friction, pyrotechnics, snakes and wetness – is a dangerous place. To visit it is one thing; to live inside it is another. Anyone fully at home in this swamp is not operating with the same mindset that Orlean or her readers bring to the piece.

It takes a brave writer to underline the distance between reader and subject this way. The risk is that in some kind of false alliance with the reader, you freakify your subject. But Orlean manages to weave in the universal allure of passion, nodding at how easily and unpredictably the gap can be bridged: “Many seemingly normal people, once smitten with orchids, become less like normal people and more like John Laroche.”

Orlean never gets to see the elusive ghost orchid flower, which is probably just as well – surely she would only be disappointed. What she delivers instead is just a little taste of delirium, letting us feel the fever without ending up toothless, broke and in court.

She goes out to the swamp and even finds the plants. But they weren’t blooming, she tells Laroche later over the phone – though he doesn’t believe her. Her guide to the otherworld of obsession knows what was missing: “You should have gone with me.”

Andrea Pitzer (@andreapitzer) is the editor of Nieman Storyboard. She is also working on a book about Vladimir Nabokov and his century.

For more from this collaboration with Longreads and Alexis Madrigal, see the previous posts in the series. And stay tuned for a new shot of inspiration and insight every week.

“A children’s performer? Really?” you might wonder as you start the piece, but Weingarten is already there, waiting for you:

“You’re writing a story about him?” Vicki Cox asked, amused. I confirmed that I was.

“But … why?” she asked.

A few feet away, the Great Zucchini was pretending to be afraid of his own hand.

“I mean,” Vicki said, “what’s the hook?”

Now, the Great Zucchini was eating toilet paper.

“I mean, are you that desperate?” she asked.

Weingarten uses the skepticism to launch his tale: “if you want to know why that is – the hook, Vicki, the hook – it’s going to take some time.”

That setup is no accident. Writers have compared storytelling to a striptease, which points to the power of the dramatic reveal. But narrative also winds its way through comedy and magic acts. And Weingarten literally pulls rabbit after rabbit out of his, um, hat, summoning devastating answers to why The Great Zucchini can’t drive, has no furniture, and maintains a childlike obsession with children. The power of “The Peekaboo Paradox” lies in the way that form follows content – how the story itself becomes a performance in which Weingarten breaks and then restores the spell of the Great Zucchini.

The peekaboo of the title comes from the beginner’s hide-and-seek done with babies, and Weingarten describes its mechanics explicitly: a loved one disappears, a loved one reappears, and all is right with the world. As we get older, Weingarten argues, we learn to enjoy slightly more sophisticated versions of the gag, though at some level we’re still wanting reassurance, still hoping that peekaboo might be an apt metaphor for the biggest question of our lives.

But Gene Weingarten is not a believer. He is an atheist. And he can’t bring himself to buy the promise that it will all turn out all right – for him, for those kids at the Great Zucchini’s parties, or for the world. And like one performer calling out another, Weingarten begins to realize what lies behind the public face presented by his subject.

If you know even a little about Weingarten, you might be able to guess why he has the Great Zucchini’s number. The guy whose act is filled with cheap novelty items meets the guy whose Twitter avatar is a rubber pile of poop. The middle-aged reporter who promises to get a helpful reader laid encounters the bachelor who looks for romance at a strip club. The writer who, in his 20s, only remembered to pay his bill each month when the power company cut him off comes face to face with the performer whose electricity gets turned off for nonpayment in the middle of the story.

Deep in the piece, we learn that the Great Zucchini has other issues that Weingarten understands just as well. And he tips us to the weight of the coming darkness with the best line in the story:

We are rolling bones.

Later, an assist from the performer’s mother allows Weingarten to corner the Great Zucchini with the real nature of the world those children face. And if history is any guide, it will not all be all right.

Outside of writing circles, Weingarten’s fame doesn’t come from his literary chops. Ask a haphazard assortment of residents of greater Washington, D.C. (where Weingarten lives) to name one thing about him, and the most common answer you will get is along the lines of “The funny guy?”

Yes, the funny guy. But look close, and you come to realize that the Great Zucchini acting like an imbecile, inventing a banana phone and rubbing a fouled diaper on his face, parallels the juvenile material that Weingarten has chosen to tackle in his column at the peak of his career: indulging in borscht-belt goosing, mocking people with silly names, and making prank phone calls.

(Presented with this comparison between himself and the Great Zucchini, Weingarten says, “You could argue that the only thing distinguishing him from me is that I married an adult who in some ways saved my life.”)

Here, Weingarten does his act by showing the Great Zucchini doing his. And while readers learn exactly what the Great Zucchini is up to, they may not notice that Weingarten is pulling off the same trick.

“The Peekaboo Paradox” doesn’t work just because the Great Zucchini has a terrifying secret. It works because Weingarten recognizes him, conjures his demons, and then returns him to the height of his powers at a stellar performance for a group of kids with special needs. It works because magic and storytelling – all performances, in fact – come down to the same thing: behind the children’s games, behind the Great Zucchini’s act, faced with our mortality, the show we put on and the stories we tell may be the only things we’ve got. And even when we know that everything will not be all right, the most magical among us, flawed and sorry as they are, get us to suspend disbelief and buy the illusion.

Andrea Pitzer (@andreapitzer) is the editor of Nieman Storyboard. She is also working on a book about Vladimir Nabokov and his century.

Looking for further reading? We’ve posted Andrea’s full Q-and-A with Gene Weingarten about “The Peekaboo Paradox.”

For more from this collaboration with Longreads and Alexis Madrigal, see the previous posts in the series. And stay tuned for a new shot of inspiration and insight every week.

The weekend intensive offered thoughts from an array of magazine and book veterans, from Susan Orlean to Gay Talese, with a side of Hampton Sides and Ken Auletta. Dayton Duncan, who worked on Ken Burns’ “The Civil War” and “Baseball,” spoke for visual storytelling, while New York Times Managing Editor Jill Abramson represented daily news. Harvard’s own John Stauffer, who has written several narrative histories, bridged the worlds of academia and popular nonfiction. Isabel Wilkerson spearheaded the event in her role as director of BU’s narrative nonfiction program.

Gay Talese discussed his December New Yorker piece, in which the (then) 78-year-old reported on opera singer Marina Poplavskaya from three continents – a 21st-century global recasting of his legendary feature on Frank Sinatra.

He also shared his reservations about a particular kind of narrative reporting. As an example, he brought up the work of Michael Hastings, the Rolling Stone contributing editor whose narrative on Gen. Stanley McChrystal contributed to McChrystal resigning his leadership position in Afghanistan. While accepting the piece as accurate, Talese differentiated Hastings’ style from his own. Suggesting that Hastings may have caught McChrystal’s team off-guard, Talese described how, in a similar situation, he would return to his subjects before filing a story and ask exactly what they meant. “I want to reflect what people mean, not what they say,” he explained. “That kind of journalism isn’t worth it.”

For those hoping to follow in these veterans’ footsteps or to blaze new trails, here are some tips culled from the weekend’s presenters:

Date before you marry. Talking about the importance of finding a project that both moves you and offers enough material, Susan Orlean described committing to stories that she later regretted choosing, and admitted to switching book topics mid-stream more than once. (She advised that taking this tack with publishers might not be conducive to a writing career.)

Isabel Wilkerson, discussing her book “The Warmth of Other Suns,” described interviewing more than 1,200 people before choosing the three central characters for her narrative. (For more on Wilkerson’s book, read our March interview with her.)

Give voice to the invisible and the dead. Dayton Duncan, who has written nine books in addition to his work with Ken Burns, addressed the creation of suspense and forward motion in “Out West: A Journey Through Lewis & Clark’s America.” Describing Lewis and Clark’s first loss and burial of an expedition member, Duncan noted that the first man they lost would also be the last. But to recreate how the trip felt to those on it, he let his readers agonize along with the characters in the book over whether and when the explorers might meet up with death again.

While Duncan focused on bringing the dead to life, Talese described the idea he had early in his career of reporting on the private lives of ordinary people. Aiming to treat these invisible characters with the complexity and significance that fiction accords everyday people, he became a self-described “master of the minor character.”

Rock the intro and the finale. When it comes to a book manuscript, Kate Medina, executive editorial director at Random House, described what she wants to see: “Go for something big, and write it the best you can. Write it in your natural voice.” Writers should strive for clear writing, clear thinking and a big, bold statement that’s backed up – a story that makes readers think or feel something they haven’t thought or felt before. Start with something riveting to draw readers in, she suggested, and pay attention to the very end. When readers finish the last page and put the book down, Medina wants them to think, “That’s the best book I’ve ever read.”

Live dangerously. Wilkerson talked about re-enacting the long drive one of her characters made from the deep South to California. Her subject’s trip had taken place during an era when finding a motel or hotel willing to let African-Americans stay was difficult. Wilkerson’s parents rode with her in the car. As the trip dragged on, Wilkerson became exhausted, and her parents grew more and more fearful. At one point, her parents said they would be more than happy to tell her what those years were like, but as far as re-enacting the trip with her, they wanted her to let them drive or let them out: “You must stop the car.”

Get a cave of some kind. Wilkerson talked about how she “went into the cave” on starting her book, entering the world of people who had lived the migration. Hampton Sides, author of “Hellhound on His Trail,” invoked the “pain cave” that he descends into when he begins writing. (This cave is apparently metaphorical, as he does his work at a local eatery that lets him run a tab.)

Talese, it turns out, had a real-world cave dug underneath his Manhattan brownstone to create a place to write where he would not be disturbed. This hideout has apparently been finished and polished in the years since it was first excavated (he recently wrote a tale for New York magazine on how he came by the rest of his digs), but having a bunker mentality about creating the space and time to work seems to be a requirement.

The list of speakers includes some fabulous storytellers:

• Susan Orlean, New Yorker contributor and author of “The Orchid Thief”;
• Jill Abramson, managing editor of The New York Times and co-author of “Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas”;
• Hampton Sides, editor-at-large of Outside magazine and author of “Hellhound on His Trail”;
• Gay Talese, who penned “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” along with eleven books;
• Kate Medina, executive editor at Random House; and
• Isabel Wilkerson, BU professor and author of “The Warmth of Other Suns.”

Storyboard will cover the event again this year, allowing those of you who can’t make it in person to attend virtually. But if you can make it, visit their website to register or to get more details on the conference.

[An earlier version of this post included Jane Mayer, who was originally slated to speak at the conference.]

What made you want to do a book about Christmas – something longer than the long-form stories you’ve done in the past?

I actually pitched this as a newspaper story a long time ago, when I was at the Albuquerque Tribune. I kept a private list of stories I should work on in addition to all the stories that I was assigned to do. I had written a line on my story list: “follow a family through Christmas,” because I had been the metro general assignment reporter who had to do different stories about Christmas every year.

It’s very hard to tell the truth about Christmas. People don’t mind being in online forums where they kvetch about their families and Christmas stresses, but that very rarely makes into newspaper stories about Christmas. Newspaper stories about Christmas need what I call “soft focus,” so they’ll be happier. Even back then, I thought it would be much better to follow a family and stay with them long enough to see the joy and the unavoidable misery that comes with Christmastime.

To deny the misery is to commit the same sort of malfeasance as saying, “The war is going OK,” “The economy is OK” or “Your houses will always be worth more than you paid for them.” There are a certain set of denial mechanisms. Christmas is one of them, journalistically, and it’s very hard to report. It’s hard to be a tough reporter and come back with a story and get an editor to say, “OK, great! Nobody’s happy at this toy distribution.” We just resist it.

I had thought, “Wouldn’t it would be interesting to tell the true story of Christmas in America?” But I never got around to it – I thought it would be too long to be in a newspaper. But then ultimately I thought maybe it was the book that I wanted to write, mostly because it intersected with everything: the suburbs, strip malls, box stores, families – families being good to one another, families not being good to one another – popular culture, music, television, crap, credit cards, debt, sweetness, grandmas, mawmaws, meemaws and neeners. It had all those things about it that I’ve always liked writing about.

You dive right into these things that we, as readers, suspect you loathe a little bit – obsessive decorating, buying expensive presents – and you explore why they’re important to the people who do them. But then you drop back to just one or two lines that change the pages that came before. A woman behind the mall makes herself throw up. A baby dies. It’s almost like you’re trying to see what’s wonderful in what you’re looking at, but you can’t help seeing these other things.

I can’t help it.

Can you talk about that a little?

I honestly didn’t know if I was going in to write a book against Christmas or for it, but I did know that I wanted a book – actually I want this from all pieces of nonfiction I read: if there’s not a clear point of view pro or con, I just want to feel that I’m in the hands of someone who is really conflicted and trying to think this through out loud or on the page. I really did want this to be about a man who grew up with perfectly nice Christmases who somehow found himself – not careening away from mainstream culture at all – but just having a series of heartbreaks about how we live now and what we’ve become, and yet work this material with heart. I really do like these people. I really did enjoy living in Frisco, Texas.

That comes across. You’re not just wanting to draw us in – it feels like you want to find something out yourself. There’s that moment with the make-a-wish guy, Frank, on the radio –

Christmas Wish.

Yes. He fulfills their wishes. People submit these requests, and the station makes them happen. There’s an actual moment when you break out of your own storytelling, and you come up with all the questions that you as a journalist want to ask, because you don’t really buy what you’re hearing.

I don’t, and Christmas is larded with all of these hard-luck cases, and they show up on the radio and in the newspapers. It really does seem like people take off their reading glasses – again, it’s soft focus. They don’t ask questions of it, and when I ask, they say, “Why do you have to ruin it?” Really, my question about all that is why does it only happen this time of year? Why do the people who spend the rest of the year ticked off about welfare and taxes and literally being kind to others – at least fiscally – why does all that come off at Christmastime? Because of faith, because of religion, because of concepts I don’t really accept as good answers. I accept them as dear answers and important to a lot of people, but I don’t accept them as factual answers about why we do what we do at Christmas.

And I attempted to ask all those questions of Frank at Christmas Wish, and I was rerouted to the corporate office with a message that said, “We don’t think we can participate.”

In order for our Christmas to be good, we need to hear stories about houses that caught on fire, car wrecks that happened on Dec. 23, cancer diagnoses – the appetite for tragedy is very strong for tragedy at Christmastime, for things that were going on all along. There’s a very good book, Stephen Nissenbaum’s “The Battle for Christmas.” He writes from newspaper accounts in the 1880s, the 1890s, about how people used to buy tickets for Madison Square Garden to watch street urchins get fed at Christmas. The price of your ticket helped pay for the meal. People needed to observe the poor being fed at Christmastime.

It was performance art?

Yes. Something about that makes me deeply uncomfortable. And I would hope it would make others uncomfortable, too. But you know, we do a lot of the same thing – Angel Lists and Christmas Wish – it’s the same sort of imaginative idealizing of the poor that I think is just part of the experience.

I want to move back to your work at the Post for a moment, because these days, you’re writing some creative, voice-centered television reviews there.

I actually am willing to say after doing reviews for a year now that it’s much more of a challenge to me to make it work within the length and time allowed, and the subject matter, which is not terribly important, not important at all, or only kind of important. It’s a very difficult kind of writing.

There’s this middle part that I struggle with: what is the show? what is it about? what is it about to us? does this belong to any other conversation we might be having about ourselves right now, about life, grieving, laughter, disease, manners? Every TV show is about something in life anyway. In that regard, it totally feels like an extension of feature writing.

I really do interview these shows. I write down questions and quotes as I watch. Can I find out the answer to this or that, without launching an investigative story? It’s a very difficult way of watching TV. If you’re doing it right, you’re like, “Oh, God, it’s two hours long.” That’s going to be like a two-hour interview.

Stuever's Patented Outlining Method (click for details from his blog)

In addition to books and reviews, you’ve also done feature writing.

And spot news!

And spot news. When you sit down to write a story, do you have one way you start?

On the one hand, it feels like continuing a conversation we’ve been having, you and I – the reader and the writer. Really, early on, it kind of dawned on me that there was one massive epic story of people living in America, and that each piece was part of it. It just felt like the sensibility was first and foremost, as far as how to write a story, so I looked for whatever voice I would want to read it in. I followed that voice, that entity – not me and not the reader, but something inside that wanted to tell the story, that I usually trusted.

And so I feel like the reviews I’m doing now are part of that conversation. Now, I’m sort of interviewing a TV show, and I’m taking notes on it, and then I’m coming back and telling you what it felt like, which is sort of how I was doing stories about people’s weddings, stories about funeral homes, stories about one guitar shared by five different owners over time. It’s all the same voice to me.

I just wait for a good place to start – I listen for it. Boy, that’s not a very good explanation.

Do you start writing before you’re done reporting, or do you separate the two?

I’m one of those believers who says that if the writing is not happening at the usual clip, generally the problem is in the notes. You have not found the right person, you have not found enough of the right thing, you haven’t checked everything off the list. You’re trying to write too soon. For me, if there’s real serious stoppage in the writing, it usually is because of something that’s not in the notebook yet.

You comment a lot on stories at Gangrey.

I don’t know why I do that.

Whether it’s your own stories or other people’s stories, what do you see come up as the most common issues in stories you read? Actual ability to craft language? Structural issues?

I think there is a seriousness that gets in the way of a lot of stories that I read at Gangrey, here in the Post and everywhere. There just seems to be this – not overwriting – it’s almost like someone is telling you a great story on the way to church, and then we get to church and they shut up, or they kind of whisper it to you instead. Or it becomes an incantation. I feel like a lot of stories are written from that high point, not from the pulpit, but from the feeling that people are in sacred space and they’re too afraid of violating the space.

A lot of narrative stories have that hush of seriousness about them. That feels like capital “W” writing to me. They are honoring all the narrative or feature stories about serious or weighty or disturbing subject matter that came before, so therefore there’s going to be that mood. It’s too dramatic or liturgical.

Do you know about “they came”? Look out if the first two words of the story are “they came.” Usually you see it in vigils or people waiting for news about miners or plane crash victims. “They came” bearing objects. Who are they? We don’t know, because the writer has taken on that priestly seriousness. He’s just elevated his delivery in such a way that it’s getting in the way of what he wants to say. That, to me, is the first indication that I don’t want to read on.

What do you think the cost of that approach is, other than annoying Hank Stuever?

Isn’t that price enough?

What does it do to the story?

I think it just becomes too much reaching for art instead of being art. That’s the fine line in everything, that’s the fine line in cinema, that’s the fine line in making greeting cards, that’s the fine line in songs.

What’s the worst piece you ever wrote?

I will say that some of my worst stories have been about things that are very important to the gay community. Because I am gay, and a lot of times, the stories fall to the gay person. It’s the only time that journalistic red flags go up for me as far as representing. More than any other subject, I feel the need to explain. I keep telling, not showing.

What are the biggest challenges you have in writing your own stories?

My challenges have always been separating the good from the bad from the ugly as far as the material. I think in the decade or so that I wrote features for the Washington Post, I learned to get everything up higher, finally, which I still think is important. I wasn’t in this business very long before someone described the concept of throat-clearing to me. I was turning in stories with a lot of stuff up top. At some point, you learn that people don’t want to watch you build the set. They want to see the play.

What journalists have been the most instructive or interesting for you?

I would say Joan Didion, hands down. I know that she aggravates a lot of writers who don’t want to do that kind of thing at all. There are two things about her that I keep going back and rereading. One is the precise, meaningful detail that makes a sentence razor-sharp and completely right. And then the other thing is the sentences themselves. She over time really learned how to parallel park an 18-wheeler truck. Some of what she can do with a comma in a very long sentence is worth studying just for the craft.

I did an internship at The Washington Post in the summer of 1989, and there were some people going full guns at that time who I have paid attention to ever since: Henry Allen, who I think was and is really good at American character and meaning in the popular culture. I admired it early on and aped it. Martha Sherrill, who’s always worth looking up. She’s written four books. I think Paul Hendrickson is really good, but he was in the seminary, so he’s somebody who does the priestly voice, the prayerful, meditative opener, really well, and it’s worth going back to Paul Hendrickson’s stuff, and his books, because he does right what people do wrong. Well, sometimes he did it a little wrong, too, but he was willing to push it out there, that feeling of “bow your heads.”

In the ’90s, I really liked Susan Orlean. I really thought that she had just the right balance of the quirk and the heartbreaking. And presently, I go to Gangrey, just to keep abreast – anytime Ben (Montgomery) and Michael Kruse write, and it gets posted there, I like to read it.

Here at the paper now, I think Dan Zak is really starting to – well, he had a voice, he has always had a voice – but some of his features are turning into lovely pieces of work. And Monica Hesse. They’re the two people who are carrying the torch for the Style section now.

Any thoughts on the future of narrative?

I really hope that somehow, what we collectively think of as the hard bearing down on a story and sticking with it, and then writing it in a fantastic way so that people take time to read it – I hope that all survives the current mania. I hope people don’t lose heart in doing it. It’s so easy to talk yourself out of beauty right now in favor of speed. But that’s what you stand for; that’s what this whole project is about.

Skloot used the film "Hurricane" as a model for the multi-narrative structure of "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks." Above is her coded system breaking down the stories of both (click to enlarge).

When you turned the book in, what were your hopes for it, and have they changed given its success?

My hope when I turned the book in – which I think is the hope of any writer when they turn their book in – is that it would get out there into the world. I know so many writers who’ve spent decades of their lives working on books that are incredible and that don’t ever get press coverage, or the book just doesn’t take off because of the time of year that it’s published or because of the other books published at the same time. There are so many factors that are out of the writer’s control.

I knew all that going in, but for me, the story itself – just the facts of this story – were so incredible, I always felt like if I could get them out to people, if people could read them and learn this information, they’d have the same reaction I did, which was “Oh, my God. I have to tell people about this.”

As a writer, one of the things that I thought a lot about and that weighed on me as I wrote and revised was wanting to do justice to the story. The simple facts of the story and the narrative of the story are so amazing that I felt in some ways like the only thing I could have done was to screw it up. And so much of my job was to take this incredible natural story and tell it in a way that let readers experience it in the way it really happened, to bring it to life as much as I could while staying out of its way.

And now that you’ve met your original goal?

My hope is that it keeps going. I’m thrilled that it’s still on The New York Times bestseller list. How many months out are we? Like six months – so I’m thrilled that it’s still there.

A lot of people say, “So now that you did this, what’s next?” But I’m still working on this one. I still feel like it’s part of my job to keep it alive and get it out to more readers.  I’m moving the day after tomorrow, and I’ll take a few weeks to settle down. And then I’m going to be on the road once the academic school year starts, basically September through December, talking about the book at schools and doing events.

Henrietta Lacks’ story has been a part of your life since you were a teenager, and you’ve researched her life and its aftermath for more than a decade. Were there ever crisis points at which you doubted your story, or wondered if you would actually be able to tell it?

It’s not so much that I thought, “I can’t do it.” There were crisis points, though, and a lot of them had to do with being completely overwhelmed by the story. There were so many places where I wondered, “How is it humanly possible to put this all in one book?” There are so many different storylines, and so many different amazing things that happened, and there’s the science, too. Figuring out the structure of the book was maddening, and it took me a very long time.

I never really felt like, “I can’t do it.” It was more like, “I may be 90 by the time I finish it.” I was so determined it just didn’t cross my mind to quit. One of my closest friends is a writer also, and there were many times when I called or sent him emails and said, “Oh, my God. I can’t do it. I’m never going to finish this thing.” It was mostly the feeling of the size and scope of it. My dad was a big supporter – both my parents were – and he would say, “It wouldn’t have been like you to pick a small straightforward book as your first book. Of course you picked this complicated, monumental story.” So it is sort of my personality to do something like that.

My mother’s helpful piece of advice was, “When you sit down to eat an elephant, don’t think of it as eating the entire elephant. Think of it as eating one bite, and then another bite, and another bite.”

Until you’re 90.

Exactly! Those were more the things that I wrestled with. For any writer, when you’re sitting down and looking at this vast, complicated project, it can be really daunting. Also, I felt the burden of history. I was lucky to start working on it long enough ago that Henrietta’s immediate family was still alive. Her husband was alive; her cousins she grew up with were alive. There were actually a lot of people who remembered her and the time, and George Gey, but they were dying as I was doing my research.

There was one time when I had interviewed a guy who was just an incredibly important source for the book, and he died soon after. There was another time when I had been scheduled to interview a guy, and he died before we could talk. So I constantly had this feeling of scrambling to get the story before it disappeared. And then also being aware as time went on that I was the only person with this information.

The combination of the sheer complexity of the narrative combined with that feeling of wanting to do justice to the history – that was rough sometimes.

Moving on to the structure a little bit: in one interview, you mention the book “Fried Green Tomatoes” and the movie “Hurricane” as inspiration for structure, and it’s apparent that such an attentive approach to the story made it comprehensible for readers. Did you give anything up in exchange for adopting the model you did?

[Laughs.] A few years of my life?

Really – no, I don’t think so. I knew that the structure was going to have to be complicated, and I’m just very into structure. I think structure is one of the most important tools a writer has. When I teach, my students get so sick of me harping on structure, structure, structure. I read and dissect a lot of things. I teach John McPhee’s stuff because he uses these very complicated structures you can pull apart. Structure is all about making the story more rich.

What I thought all along was that if I couldn’t find a way to do a structure that jumped around in time like that and told all three narratives at the same time, I’d lose a lot of the story, because the story of the cells and what happened to Henrietta take on such a different weight if you learn about them at the same time that you’re learning about the science, the scientists and her family, what happened to them and where they are now. To me, it was that I would have lost those things if I couldn’t have done the more complicated structure. But there was never a point where I thought, “I have to leave out this one really important part of the story because it doesn’t fit in this structure.”

There were some hard decisions, like where do you put the backstory of Elsie, Deborah’s sister? You really don’t get that story until pretty late in the book. Those were conscious decisions about what could wait, but I never felt like that was a sacrifice.

You have a triple narrative running in the book. Did you worry about showing change or transformation within each of the three narratives?

No, definitely not. I actually feel like the book has three narratives woven together, but the storyline for me is the story of Deborah. You meet me before you meet Deborah, but I’m only a vehicle to get to Deborah, to show where she is today and the impact that all of this has had on her. That was very much one of the reasons I was in the book – to show the way she responded to me and the impact I had on her, with us traveling together, her going into laboratories to see her mother’s cells for the first time and learning some really hard information that had some essentially life-threatening effects on her.

The story is about a lot of things, and there is an undercurrent of the impact journalists have on peoples’ lives. So I felt like I couldn’t leave it out for a lot of reasons, but in terms of the narrative arc of the book, for me, it was really the story of Deborah: her struggle to learn who her mother was, to come to terms with the cells. To essentially move on from them and let go of the cells and her memory of her mother as a traumatic thing and to get to the place where she does in the end, where she’s pretty happy about the cells.

That’s the big narrative arc with a climax, and the rest of it is, in a sense, backstory that’s woven in throughout, as chronological narrative. They do each have their own ups and downs as narratives, but as far as feeling like all the parts had to have a climactic moment,  I felt like Deborah took care of all that, and it would have felt forced to do it any other way, because it didn’t happen with the other ones.

You’ve explained on your site why you put yourself in the story, a practice you often discourage in your teaching. Did you develop a rule for yourself about how present to be?

Basically my rule for first person in the book was that it’s only there if it’s relevant to their story. I spent so much time fighting against being in the book, thinking, “It’s not my story, it’s their story. It’s not about me.” And I was right, it’s not. It’s just that I became a character in their story. So many other journalists, doctors and various other people came before me in similar circumstances, wanting something from the family related to the cells. I realized I couldn’t leave that out. Then there would be this obvious question: “Well, what about you?” And what happened with me was in some ways much more complicated and potentially dangerous than it was with any of the other journalists, because there was so much time together and because Deborah got so involved.

For that reason, I could never leave it out, but in my head, the way that I always thought about my role was as a character in their story, not as me telling my own story of my quest to find this stuff out. That made it challenging, because for me, writing the first scenes, where I’m first trying to get in touch with the family, Deborah’s not there yet. And so I really struggled with those — what those are about to me is the family’s resistance and trying to understand where that came from.

So you don’t learn anything about my backstory unless it’s relevant to Deborah or to the family’s story in some way. In the prologue, you learn that I didn’t come from a religious background, that I came from the Pacific Northwest, and that I’m white – and those are specifically juxtaposed against Deborah. You don’t really learn that much about me as a character outside of their story. That was what I constantly had in my head, that it only belonged if it was something relevant to their story.

At first, I was barely present in any of the first-person parts of the book, because I was really holding back and not wanting to have it be about my emotions. It took a lot of revising to let myself have some reactions. Some of that was my editor. When she read the first version that I gave to her, she was like, “OK, you seem like a psychopath in this scene, because Deborah just threw you against the wall, and she’s screaming at you, and you don’t react. You have to react.” My editor drew out a little of that emotional stuff that I was really hesitant to put in.

What advice would you give to someone looking to tackle a big, comprehensive story like this that spans decades?

Within the big sweep of history, there usually is – not necessarily a moment, but there is a story that’s not the whole sweep of history that you can use to hold it all together, and then some of the sweep of history can be told in flashbacks.

One of the things that often doesn’t work about big sweeping books like that is that they start in the beginning, and they tell the whole thing, and there isn’t the narrative or the central character or characters in the book that you follow through the entire story as you learn the history. I think that narrative exists in every story in some way, and finding it even in a multiple-part narrative is really important.

And organization, that was one thing that I didn’t know about early on and wished that I had. I didn’t have any sense of just the sheer volume of stuff I was going to accumulate related to the book and how important it was to organize it thematically and narratively, to have narrative in mind at all times as I accumulated things. Eventually, I went back and I cataloged everything that I gathered and put things on color-coded index cards. I had a system for using key words for coding things that I could search on my computer.

Watching for thematic and narrative elements and trying to organize your materials will save a lot of time and help you look at the story in a narrative way. It’s really easy to get caught up in the day-to-day reporting and the details, everything you’re gathering, and not sit back and think, “What’s the actual story?”

I’m always looking for narrative with every story that I write. All great stories tell a sweeping story through one small story. Among other things, my book is the history of tissue culture and the evolution of bioethics told through the story of a family. With “Seabiscuit,” it’s the story of a horse, but you learn the history of racing. All great nonfiction does that. In “The Orchid Thief,” you learn everything about the world of orchids through this one guy. It’s looking for that one family, that one person, that one moment that will help hold everything together.

Fiction provided your structure for this particular book, but in addition to the writers you just mentioned, can you name other nonfiction authors who’ve inspired you?

I think in terms of character, Alec Wilkinson, he’s a New Yorker writer. He did this incredible little book – I’m sure it was a New Yorker story before it became a book – it’s called “Moonshine.” I’m sure it’s out of print, but you can get it used. It’s just a brilliant character study. In everything he writes, he’s very good at using voices to make three-dimensional characters. I think he’s fabulous.

Also Burkhard Bilger, who’s at The New Yorker. He was at Discover for a long time, and he does a lot of science writing. He’s a great narrative writer. And Anne Fadiman – “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down” was a great influence on me in part because of the content. It’s a similar story.

That was the book I most thought of when reading yours.

In some ways, it’s an obvious comparison. I read that book when I was in grad school, and I was like, “She gets it!” Part of what spoke to me about that book was that she tells this incredibly complicated story of the clash between the family and the world of medicine, and she doesn’t demonize either side. I think that’s really important, and it’s not always done in science writing.

And there’s John McPhee – I’ve read everything he’s written, and as I said, I dissect his stuff a lot. He thinks about structure in such a direct, almost methodical way. It’s a mechanical thing, structure. It’s something that’s artistic, but it’s also a puzzle.

One of the biggest influences, who I think was an incredible science writer, was Randy Shilts – he did “And the Band Played On.” He was really talented at weaving story and science. Deborah Blum, too.  She’s done a lot of great books. “Love at Goon Park” is wonderful. And also Jonathan Wiener. Lewis Thomas is one of those that I say every time someone asks this question. Linguistically, he just wrote about science in such a beautiful way.

Is there anything about the book that you’re surprised no one has asked yet?

Not exactly, but one thing has cropped up now and then – not in interviews, but every once in a while online or at readings. As someone who has spent 11 years working on a book like this, I find it fascinating. When you write nonfiction in a way that will hopefully read like fiction, with scenes and dialog, there’s an assumption that you made it up or made some things up. When I do Q&As, people in the audience will ask, “So how much liberty did you have to take?” Not did you take any, but how much? There’s this assumption that it’s impossible to recreate history in a way that reads like a story.

And I actually talk about this in the end notes and in the little note at the beginning of the book, where I say that none of this is made up, it’s all documented fact, which is why it took me so long to write the book. In the opening scene it’s raining, and the room looks a certain way, and her husband is parked outside under an oak tree. The weather came from the weather bureau. I saw archival pictures of the tree and took it to an expert, who said “Yes, that’s an oak.” I saw archival photos of the room.

Rebuilding that kind of narrative uses historical documents and interviews where you cross-source it. There’s just one moment in the book that only had one person who recalled it, and I said that in the book. But other than that, multiple sources verified all the information.

I think it’s interesting that people assume that when they read dialogue that took place in the 1950s, it was made up, because I wasn’t there. But in fact there are ways you can recreate that accurately in reporting. It is absolutely possible to recreate nonfiction in a narrative way and still be factual. It takes a heck of a long time, but it’s worth it.

If you want to pass along stories you think we should include in future lists, please don’t hesitate to send them along via email or Twitter.

SPORTS

“In search of the perfect round rolling object” by Ian Jack from The Guardian online (via TheBrowser.com). Jack looks at the evolution of the soccer ball in international affairs from Kashmir in the 1890s to this year’s World Cup in South Africa.

The Machine: A Hot Team, a Legendary Season, and a Heart-stopping World Series – The Story of the 1975 Cincinnati Reds, by Joe Posnanski (via Tommy Tomlinson).

Tony Perez was standing at home plate, ready to hit. They called him the Big Dog, or Doggie for short. Doggie had grown up in Cuba, before Castro’s men came rushing down from the mountains. He had been raised to spend his life lugging bags of sugar at the refinery near his home. That’s what his father did, that’s what his brothers did, and when he turned 14, that’s what he did too. He would never forget the way his body felt at the end of those days. And he would always tell his mother that he wanted something more, he wanted to play baseball in the United States under the bright lights. She told him to grow up and stop dreaming about nonsense.”You will work in the factory just like everyone else in this family,” she told him.

THE BP OIL SLICK

Not surprisingly, now that the oil has begun to come ashore in the Gulf states, classic storytelling about human-petroleum encounters have begun to appear.

“Oil blankets Pensacola Beach,” by Ben Montgomery from the St. Petersburg Times, with a nod toward the Book of Revelation.

The tide came in Tuesday night, under a moon almost full, and when the sun came up and the water retreated there it was: a broken band of oil about 5 feet wide and 8 miles long. It looked like tobacco spit and smelled foreign, and it pooled in yesterday’s footprints as far as you could see.

“Seven Days in the Life Of A Catastrophe,” by Gary Smith from Sports Illustrated. The svengali of sports profiles looks at the Gulf spill up close for a week, from the God’s-eye view to the perspective from the ground, and tries to figure out what it has to do with athletics.

PARENTAL LEGACIES

“Sergey Brin’s Search for a Parkinson’s Cure” by Thomas Goetz from Wired. Goetz looks at Google co-founder Sergei Brin’s odds of getting Parkinson’s, the $50 million he’s plowed into research and the ways in which the flood of data made possible by technology will change the way medical research will be done.

“A love of story was my Dad’s gift to me,” a Father’s Day remembrance by Roy Wenzl from The Wichita Eagle (via Gangrey.com).

Dad grinned a half-grin. He was dressed in the grease-stained denim jacket he wore to drive the tractor in winter. “Why is Achilles interesting?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Because he is great?”

Dad frowned, and opened the door to walk outside.

“Achilles is interesting because Achilles is flawed.”

“What flaw?” I asked. “WHAT FLAW?”

“Figure it out,” he said.

“Where I Was,” a blog entry from Laura Zigman on HearLauraBrant.com (via @susanorlean).

Everyone has had a phone call, or a moment, like that — one that divides the present and the future: who you’ve been and who you suddenly become. My phone call came on a cold quiet day in early January. It was from my mother telling me she’d gotten her CAT scan results back and that there was a growth on her pancreas.

THE WAR

“From Vietnam to Afghanistan: Not winning hearts and minds,” from former Washington Post editor Henry Allen.

I’d done some counterinsurgency work as a corporal in the Marine Corps. This was in 1966, three years earlier. I was at Chu Lai, south of Danang. We gave away truckloads of flour, cement and roofing tin. The Vietnamese were cool with their thanks, but that was understandable. We’d gotten a warm response from one village chief we worked with until the Viet Cong worked with him too, by cutting off his head. I think of him when I read of Taliban reprisals against Afghans who work with Americans.

One day our 105mm howitzer battery was particularly noisy, taking out a Viet Cong hamlet. Then came a cease-fire order. It seemed it wasn’t a Viet Cong but a friendly hamlet. We’d leveled it.