Chapter 172: Eureka Moments: Thrills and Perils

I can think of no moment in reporters’ lives that so captures the thrill of the work than the one that comes from a discovery no one else in recorded history has ever made.

Maybe even before then, like the Druids. Or cave painters.

I am not speaking only of investigative reporting, for which such moments are the stock in trade. The euphoria extends to those of us whose reporting is not limited to the news but extends to features, profiles or narrative nonfiction. It comes from the familiar places – documents, interviews – but often with such twists as observing the revealing moment or hearing the telling anecdote, both of which emerge from time spent with subjects.

We get to know the people we are writing about, often with a degree of journalistic intimacy that cannot be matched by a sit down interview. People come to trust us in ways that come only with time. And from that trust a relationship develops that can lead to finding ourselves facing choices about what the world will learn from us.

Or perhaps never will.

With respect to the memory of Janet Malcolm, I do not subscribe fully to her characterization that “Every journalist who is not too stupid or full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.”

I say fully because while there is an element of truth to how we go about our work in gaining peoples’ trust, I do not accept that every – her word – one of us do so without remorse. Or, to take it a step further, without consideration of the consequences of sharing what we’ve learned. That those discoveries occur at moments of our greatest excitement, makes the moral quandary so much greater.

My students are learning this now and it has not been easy. Because many are writing about people close to them, or who were close to those they know and love, the discoveries they’re making have begun to cause unexpected discomfort and even pain: A great grandfather who espoused troubling views. A grandfather who comes from a long line of alcoholics. A friend who was enmeshed in a destructive romance. Parents who became her parents as teenagers.

They are trying to sort out what to do with discoveries that, journalistically speaking, represent success. Just as they are growing as reporters, they are beginning to experience the sort of soul searching that Malcolm, in her broad (and yes hypocritical; see In the Freud Archives) swipe at all journalists, did not think it worth mentioning.

I admire them for their struggle, which feels a little odd given that I am the one who sent them searching and encouraged them to push and probe.

I had been a reporter for several years – long enough to have gained experience but not long enough to have gained wisdom - when a young woman was murdered in one of the towns I was covering in the Chicago suburbs. I set about learning who she was, and what had led her from Ohio to the fateful encounter that led to her death. I had little time and only the phone and when I was done I felt inordinately pleased with myself.

I learned her nickname – Spanky – the name her circle of friends called themselves – the Big Five – a picture of her hometown as well as what sounded like a casual and hardly atypical discovery of marijuana. This was important because it had led to her meeting the young man who killed her.

Forty five years later, I remember these details vividly. That I do, I believe, has something to do with one other memory. Several weeks after her murder, I happened to drive by the apartment complex where she lived and died. People were removing furniture from the building, and when I approached and asked whether they were connected to the young woman who’d been killed, one of them, an older man, said he was her father. We chatted a bit and he said there was one story in particular about his daughter that upset him – the story that mentioned her dabbling with drugs. I confessed that I had written the story.

He did not get angry; I cannot recall him saying anything more. But I can still see the look of hurt and sadness in his eyes – he was suffering from unimaginable pain that I, in my moment of journalistic triumph, had made worse.

His daughter had been caught not only in the deadly embrace of the man who had murdered her – I still remember him, a doughy young man from California who, like her, had made his way to Chicago – but in the cross hairs of an eager journalist who saw her as a story, and perhaps in deadline-imposed haste, little more.

Looking back, it was a story I would likely do again, and likely report, for the most part, as I did, with one important difference. In what I felt as a desire to extend some kindness to the family and not interrupt their grieving with my questions, I did not try to reach them.

Then, a year or so later, there was another killing on my beat – this time of a young man with a bad temper who died in a bar fight. I did as I had done in the story about the young woman called Spanky. But this time, I had a new editor - Cissi Falligant, who is now my colleague at the Delacorte Review.

Cissi read my story and came back to me with words so wise and compassionate that I remember them precisely: “you need to give someone who loved him the chance to talk about him.”

I cannot recall whether I balked or hesitated but in the end I did as Cissi said and tracked down his father. He had a lot to say about his son, about the loss of his wife, and the toll on his son. I remember we stood outside his house and how much he needed to talk about his murdered child.

That the story was better for that interview is beside the point. I had caused pain in the Spanky story. Her murder was a story and I suppose I did my best to tell readers who she was. But there was no escaping the twin outcomes of the piece: my delight in my reporting; and the memory, all these years later, of its toll.

As to the second piece, Cissi understood that by seeking out the father, I gave someone who loved him the chance to talk about him as long as he liked. I am not so naive as to think it lessened his pain. In the end, perhaps it was nothing more than the decent thing to do – Cissi’s wisdom and where Janet Malcolm missed the point.

To have not done the story, or to have written something anodyne and less than revealing, would have been a dereliction of responsibilities I felt I owed readers, as well as to Spanky’s memory; here, in the end, was a portrait of young woman who had come to the city, looking for a new and exciting life, only to meet with a tragic end. I suppose I wanted people to like her, and feel badly for her. I know I did.

But that self-satisfaction and justification came at a price, one that in the years to come I was willing to pay, though with ever more caution.

Ever since I have worked to weigh more carefully what details I was willing to share, and what would remain between me and the people I was writing about. I suppose I might have taken a more unsparing line at some points, and gone softer on others. Did a particular detail, enticing as it was, advance the narrative, or was it just a nugget I unearthed? Did readers really need to know, say, of subjects’ infidelities if the revelations had nothing to do with the story and would have surely wrecked havoc on their marraiges? I erred on the side of no. Sometimes, as the old journalistic saw goes, we drown our kittens. Or in this case, our feral cats. It is one thing to profile Elon Musk, who knows and re-writes the rules. It is another to have “civilians” place their trust in you. You score no points for punching down, much as it seems to be in vogue these days.

I have been doing this work for a long time and, as I told my students when they asked for guidance, I cannot say I have arrived at a place where I am fully at ease in resolving the tension between finding out and telling everyone.

I told them that there are no rules, nor should they listen to anyone who says there are – especially when someone is preaching that the story is all that matters. My students are encountering at an early point in their careers moral judgments that confront us all. Like all such judgments, they are deeply personal.

You will, I told them, be caught between feeling you are cheating the reader by holding back and cheating the subject by telling all.

You are driven to report.

You want to let people know what you’ve found out.

You will cause pain.

You will always feel caught.

If you do not, you are cheating yourself.

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If you have a question, a problem in your work, if you are feeling lost, stuck, confused, at sea, searching, grappling, or baffled, email me at Michaelshapiro808@gmail.com and tell me what you’re confronting and what help you need.

It is seldom, if ever, the case that one student’s problem or question is their’s alone.

Please indicate if you want to remain anonymous, have your name or just first name included. I will include the question and then answer it as best I can.

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Nothing good ever came from writers punishing themselves. We know writing is hard. We’re here to show that it doesn’t have to be torture