Q: How does a trained lawyer get into this kind of investigative journalism?
One. Well, I always wanted to do this kind of writing. It took me several years just to figure out a way to make a career out of it, to do it in a way that I could pay the rent. And then what happened was I went to law school, and I trained to be a lawyer because I felt at the time that I probably wouldn’t be able to make a career as a writer. And I wanted some kind of backup plan. I had a job lined up at a law firm. And just a couple of months before I took that job, The New Yorker accepted my first pitch. I had been pitching them for years, but this was the first time they accepted my pitch, and that was in 2005. So I’ve been writing ever since.
Q: Fortunately, what was the pitch?
One. That was actually the story you mentioned briefly. It became my second book. It was called Snakehead, about a woman known as Sister Ping, who came from Fujian Province in southeast China. She moved to New York City in the early 1980s, and this was a time when it was very difficult for people from China to immigrate legally to the United States. And so she became a human smuggler, and she would bring people, initially her own family and people from her own village, to the United States illegally. So they would pay her very large sums of money to smuggle them first on planes and then actually in the holds of ships. And her career kind of stalled. And there was a famous case in 1993 when a ship called the Golden Venture ran aground in Queens. There were 300 people in the hold, and they had been smuggled out of China. And when he was finally caught and prosecuted in the early 2000s, I started writing about it for the New Yorker.
Listen to the first part of the interview here:
TOI Bookmark Interview with Patrick Radden Keefe Part 1
Q: How do you choose your topic?
One. Well, I always try to keep an ear open for a good story. You know what I think is that if you meet a friend for tea or have a meal with someone or you find yourself talking to a stranger, sometimes they tell you a story or say something, and it’s something that fascinates you. You want to know a little bit more. I pay attention to things that fascinate me, that I want to know more about. And when I hear about something that fascinates me in that way, I think about it a whole lot. And so usually for me it’s the start of something. I wrote a book about the IRA, the Irish Republican Army, and the Troubles in Northern Ireland. But the way that book started was not that I wanted to write about that particular conflict or an issue in it. It was because a woman named Dolores Price died in 2013. And when she died, I read her obituary in the New York Times, and she was the first woman to join the IRA as a real soldier. And she had gone on hunger strike, and she had married a movie star. And later in her life, she looked back with some regret about her use of violence in the early 1970s, when she was a young woman. What it feels like to look back on your radical youth when you’re older. All of these issues were really interesting to me, but it started with character. It almost always does. It starts the way you pick up a novel and read it and meet a character. As I’m traveling around the world, I’m always looking for people who have led extraordinary lives and who I think might be the basis for good stories.
Q: You draw the reader in with your first sentence. How do you do that?
One. I know I’m writing in a popular medium, so nobody has to read anything I write. We have these phones in our pockets that are constantly bombarding us with alerts and news. We all have a little bit of attention deficit disorder. And so, for me, I know if I’m writing an article or a book, I’m going to have to struggle to get your attention in every paragraph on every page. And so I’m trying to put a lot of thought into how I’m going to pull you into the story, how am I going to make you forget about all those other distractions, how am I going to make you want to keep turning the pages. And it’s funny you mentioned thrillers. When I was younger, I was very addicted to reading mysteries. I loved Sherlock Holmes stories. I loved reading Agatha Christie. And so, in a way, that was my first love. LiteratureAnd so I enjoy, whenever possible, stealing some tricks from this kind of fictional writing and incorporating them into the world of the true stories I tell.
Q: You write about real life. You have an incredible patience for interviewing people and getting down to the details.
One. Yeah, I think it requires a lot of patience. I would say that in some ways, I think it’s easier for me than it is as a novelist. What I do as a nonfiction writer is I go around the world and interview a lot of people and get my hands on files and records and try to uncover mysteries. And then when I sit down to tell a story, my material is already there. And once I have this huge amount of material to work with, how do I mold it into a story that is engaging and entertaining and hopefully informative for the reader?
Q: How do you win the trust of the people you interview in your work? Research,
One. I think it varies from one story to the next. It’s like the story I just wrote. I was in London, and I was talking to cops and gangsters and citizens, middle class people from the west side of London who knew this one particular family. And the story right before that, I was in Hollywood, and I was just talking to screenwriters and producers and directors and actors. And the story before that, I was in the art world, and I was talking to painters and art dealers and billionaire collectors who collect fancy art. And before that, I was doing a story about the CIA, and I was talking to hackers and spies. And so each of these different worlds, you know, each world that you land in, the rules are a little different and the culture is a little different, and they feel differently about reporters. And so I need to learn again. But to some extent, each adventure is brand new, and I’m confused trying to figure it out. One of the great advantages of working for The New Yorker is that I have time. So I can spend six months, sometimes nine months a year on an article. That’s a huge structural advantage for me, because it’s really hard to develop trust with people all at once. Sometimes people are scared or they don’t want to talk, and I can leave them alone for six weeks. And then come back to them.
Listen to part 2 here:
TOI Bookmark Interview with Patrick Radden Keefe Part 2
Q: What are your subjects? Books Does an article ever come back to you in any way?
One. Interesting question. Sometimes it does. I mean, some of them I’m still in touch with many years later. Some of them get very upset when I write about them and never talk to me again, if they even talk to me. And, you know, sometimes it can be difficult, because in some cases, these are people I know very well. You know, it’s a strange process when you write about someone, there’s a kind of intimacy to it, and yet it’s not the same intimacy as friendship. So if I’m writing about you and you really want people to understand your story, I’ll put in hours. And I always warn people: ‘I’m not your psychiatrist. I’m not your PR spokesperson. When I write, it’s going to be you, but it’s going to be filtered through my perception of you.’ And people don’t usually see themselves that way. What I’m trying to do usually doesn’t fully capture the way that someone sees themselves, because I think we all have vanities, we have insecurities. We don’t really see ourselves that clearly. And so it’s a difficult process. And I think sometimes it makes people not particularly excited to stay friends afterwards. And I’m okay with that. I wrote a big article about that Anthony BourdainAnd it included things that I think he found a little uncomfortable when he read the article. And yet we remained close after that. We continued to spend time together. And I only saw him a few months before he ultimately took his own life. So there are examples like that.
Q: When you are exposed like this, the ground slips from under your feet, all your flaws and shortcomings, then your life becomes public, isn’t it?
One. Yeah, I think there’s some truth to it. When I wrote a big story about Larry Gagosian, the art dealer, he was very supportive of me, but he’s a very controlling person. And it was a bit of a wrestling match because obviously he has his own story of his life. And the story I was telling was a little different. I think that’s the great thing about Anthony Bourdain that he had such a great sense of self that he could see that, and frankly, he had such a strong ego that he could see that and not feel threatened by it. But it’s hard to accept that.
