Andrea Elliott | Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City

welcome to the free library of philadelphia online my name is jason freeman and i'm excited to be here to introduce tonight's author andrea elliott an investigative reporter at the new york times andrea elliott won the 2007 pulitzer prize for feature writing for a series of articles on sheikh reida shata an egyptian-born imam living in brooklyn she formerly worked as a staff writer at the miami herald where she covered immigration and latin american politics the winner of columbia university's medal for excellence the george k polk award the scripps howard award and prizes from the american society of newspaper editors and the overseas press club elliot was a visiting journalist at the wrestle sage foundation an emerson fellow at new america and received a whiting foundation grant she joins us tonight with invisible child poverty survival and hope in an american city based on her 2013 five-part series for the new york times on the plight of children experiencing homelessness in new york city this debut book according to a recent new york times review goes well beyond her original reporting in both journalistic excellence and depth of insight uh end quote to document eight harrowing years in the life of a girl named dasani who's helping her family navigate the disastrous effects of widening income equality and a disappearing social safety net that review continues quote the reporting has an intimate almost limitless feel to it end quote and that the result is a rare and powerful work whose stories will live inside you long after you've read them tonight's author will be in conversation with reginald dwayne betts mr betts is a yale law school graduate and is the author of a memoir and three poetry collections including the award-winning felon he is also a very recent macarthur foundation fellowship recipient so huge shout out on that uh congratulations um so let's get to it andrea duane thank you both so much for being here and the screen is all yours uh this is kind of cool i gotta say that um one i'm honored to be here with you and um and i feel like i would be remiss not not to start it this way um you know we we write and we work and i think the reasons why we do it like sort of scratch and extend and and so i just wanted to publicly um thank you for doing this and just acknowledge that um it's a lot you know and family is really important and um and i don't want to be like uh whatever i might be but you know it's a a eulogy um about your dad in the washington post and i just feel like i want to acknowledge it partly because thank you you know that's why that's the way we think about the lives that we've lived you know so i want to say condolences as we start thank you so much dwane i really appreciate that dwayne knew that uh a few two weeks ago my father who is very very dear to me died unexpectedly and um he was very important to my work so i feel him in the room right now and i really appreciate you saying that and i'm just so delighted to to be here with you especially after you just won this much deserved and extraordinary honor and i think this is going to be a very enriching conversation well you know i mean it's interesting right because i i don't know how we how we characterize whether or not people deserve anything they get particularly in the context of your book you know i think what your book reveals is that a lot of people don't deserve what they get and open this up because i know a lot of people who will be in this talk who may have read um the congratulations on the cover story that was in the new york times magazine which is a great introduction um to the book some people may have read that some people may have read the earlier piece but they might not have so just can you just give us a a brief take on like like who dasani is yeah first you know sure yes so invisible child follows eight years in the life of tasani coates who was 11 years old and homeless when i met her in fort greene brooklyn she was growing up in a neighborhood that was very much a new version of brooklyn the gentrified brooklyn that has become a kind of famous symbol of that whole phenomenon and it's a neighborhood much like many other parts of urban america that is increasingly divided between rich and poor she was one of 22 more than 22 000 homeless kids when i when i met her and i wanted to find a way into this story because i found it stunning that and i kind of stumbled upon this statistic doing i was i had been reading rereading alex kotlowid says there are no children here which is a book from the 80s and i kept thinking how much has changed because this book was from about chicago and these two brothers and henry horner houses uh in 1986 20 years later what's really changed and actually turned out that we had the exact same child poverty rate as that period in 2012 the same which was around one in five kids which is the highest child poverty rate of any wealthy almost any wealthy nation in the world and so um and the costs are great to society when you have roughly a fifth of the future workforce growing up in adversity and so that's what got me started but right in new york we had this homeless crisis and 22 000 kids if you think about it that's that is a comp that is a crowd that would fill madison square garden and there would be overflow so i just wanted one and i was standing outside her shelter talking to families she walked out with her mother and i was basically hooked on that family because they captivated me just from the very moment i met them they were uh and continued to be just full of surprises and electricity and all kinds of wisdom and look whether they were a poor family or or i was writing about them in a religious context or i was writing about them as people in fort greene it didn't really matter the way in the entree the the thing i arrived at was just pure fascination um chanel dasani's mother who's named after the perfume she's kind of a walking poet um yeah she was she was cool she has a lot of character she kind of she lights up she lights up the page that's what i feel but every time i started to write about her i would feel it like just excited uh dasani is another firecracker in her own way she just had you know i'm a mother i have two children i know how hard it is to draw them out and um my kids like to talk but a lot of kids don't and i had interviewed a lot of children at that point i'd gone around i'd been i've cried i had crossed state lines i'd looked in different places for the right story and almost no kid did what dasani did which was to she wanted to narrate her story she wanted to tell me her story she was so full of words and um i remember one of the first quotes she gave me about the room they were living in this is a family of ten crammed into a room in a decrepit city-run shelter in one of the richest cities in the world where nearly half of new yorkers were living near or below poverty there were mice running around the room and roaches and the family had to hang their food from the ceiling in plastic bags and um you know she was just a survivor she was but also someone who could reach beyond those circumstances who wanted to see beyond um her situation into other worlds and like like anyone does um sorry yeah no the the series that ran so i followed her for um a year a series ran in the new york times a five-part series it was very much about that it was about that room that shelter that experience of dasani living with nine family members in one room a few blocks from townhouses that sold for millions and her trying to reach for more and this unfair burden that had been placed on this kid but when i realized as i embarked on the book and what the book i think does at least what it did for me writing it i will say is it showed me the much broader texture of that story of the history of this family of what it meant of what it really meant to be homeless that it wasn't just a label that it was an invitation to understand so many other things that are go beyond this way beyond this family that go into systemic structures that keep families like this in the city have you heard this line i can't i'm i just heard it again recently too it was like um i used to live in the world now i live in public housing hmm um and i'm so mad that i can't think of who said it in the world and i live in public housing and that's so funny because auburn shelter was in the middle of public housing it was well one of the things that you get in the book and one of the things that you get in the story is is one how challenging it was even to get to public housing and so when we think about who we see and who we don't see i think sometimes we think about public housing as being um like why are you still in public housing why are you living in section eight and i think one of the things that um that you helped like animate is the way in which it is actually a struggle sometimes to get to public housing um one the the sort of cost because you still have to make pay some cost um but two the burden it is to get to the situation that allows you to be able to pay that cost and and get out for the waiting list and to just be able to move in that way and so i thought i thought that um that that line i thought it was really profound but then i made me yo yo your book and the in the times piece made me think that it's a world outside of public housing and i know people who are homeless who have been homeless and i realize that um invisible child is an indictment not just on um [Music] not an invisible child is not just an indictment on the system but i think the invisible implies to to all of the ways we fail to see and so i guess one of the things i i would like to ask you is um it feels the keynesian in a way and and and spending so much time in this world and writing so beautifully about it um i want to how do people how how have people responded not just um like dasani and her family but have you ever have you ever been able to like talk to other folks who live in that world and see how they respond to to telling their stories oh i mean i could still be there with my notepad and my pen writing down these stories i um alluded to this in the original series i said you know gentrification has this way of erasing history people come in as if they've discovered the place dasani's there as a homeless kid randomly placed in a shelter however she had roots that reached deeper into fort greene than many people in fort greene four she went four generations back um and so i alluded to in the series because i remember writing uh something like her family history would fill volumes where it ever told and then and then i tried i set out to do it in two years and eight years later 14 000 records later school report cards dental records every agency's interaction with the family 132 hours of audio later 28 hours i actually like this stuff a video later because you messed because i was going to ask you a question about like what does it mean by process yeah and the crime not even your process right but it's this fascinating thing like the sony wants to tell a story and she has something that most of us don't which is that she now has insight in the process that it takes in terms of how do you accumulate enough information to tell a story you know and i just wanted to know like not so much as the process but one the the raw data you know like like everybody wants to be a writer and they'd be like you almost write me a book and they have no idea where to begin to marshal facts i am not a journalist i'm more of a fabulous and and and i recognized though that when i started doing some long-form stuff and working with the new york times magazine and people be like these people crazy they'd be like well how do you know that's true i said but fact checking will teach you that you saying is not sufficient right right and so what i wanted to know is like how do you how do you um like how do you go about understanding how much data is needed yeah to tell the story i mean it's just um i am an insecure over reporter so i just always assume i don't have it right and i obsess and obsess and says at one point my editor kate medina i call her kate the great at random house i think this was like five years ago she said i think this story has taken possession of you but i mean i i have timelines uh that's one way i do it that go back there are hundreds of pages long so um a great colleague of mine at the new york times benjamin weiser taught me this back when i was like on metro doing court stuff with him he's brilliant he said anytime if you're working on a big story and he really knew how to do that anytime anything happens plug it into the timeline it doesn't matter how granular how small how big because once you what you start to see with the timeline and mine became color-coded so policy was in gray um the family things that have events that happened to the entire family were in yeah tell us again what you put the timeline on did you you do you put a word document so i would just plug things in um uh certain sets of records were green other sets of records were read and so i could track the sourcing and then i would do the date and what happened and then um i basically arrayed that timeline against a whole wall of the new york times this was just for the series but now i have one for the book what you can see is you can start to see connections between events that are small that are in the family and huge events um all right now you got to prove this yeah i know as soon as i said that i was like um yes i mean i remember you know certain things colliding for instance i have to go back and look now but the crack epidemic for instance and uh you know i should tell i should tell the audience one thing that i found really aggressive is that the one thing i disl the one thing that frustrates me about conversations about poverty from from the public space tell me may first they always overlap with conversations about drug addiction but i grew up in a very mean place and i don't mean i grew up in a necessarily uber violent place or a necessarily deeply impoverished place but like a friend of mine jericho brown has a poem that says the 80s that shot words into the dictionary like crackhead and this is how we talked about people um and you you feel it in a book and you feel it in the in in um the cover story about how dasani was was navigating that tension and i think what you did a excellent job of in terms of how this overlaps with the war on drugs and how this overlaps with other things that stigmatize folks is that you were able to tell chanel's story and she had like this kind she was bubbly you know i mean she was like she wasn't um oh yeah i feel like it was a a real danger of um of writing a a a book like this and and um and not caring for the people that you wrote about and and i don't mean like caring for him like you know you invite him home for dinner or to the barbecue which which you may do but i mean like oh yeah you know like seriously sure you don't have to i in my case we there was a lot of overlap in our lives of just being together and mostly me in their space but they know my children they've they've had many dinners with us i mean i feel that yes um but i hear what you're saying you know what's so interesting you used the word dickensian before dwayne that connected sound by the way that's our downfall why don't we just try to put that those thoughts aside and just speak our truths i mean you know but no you're not you're but no dickensian like charles dickens has started a book that's like i would i started reading um oliver twist to my son and and i got the page too and he was like oh wait a minute his father died his father died and he had to work in a factory we only on page two he was like but that's what i feel like i feel like the sunny story is the kinsey in in that way you know it's like a lot but wait i'm sorry no no i i was i wrote the word down when you said it because it's people said this also about the series and it was there were these shocking there are there were the conditions of their room were shocking to anyone including them by the way in the very beginning but you have to survive that so you become endured to it and i think the challenge with a story like this and this goes to your point about drug addiction as well um and i have a sibling who has struggled all his life with the serious addiction and so and i um it's not it's very familiar territory to me i think the way to there are many dangers as you just pointed out with a book like this um there's a lot of traps to fall into and i think that the challenge again and again is to try to go deep enough inside the experience of the people you're writing about which you can't ever fully know you can't but you just try so that when we experience that horrible room at the very beginning of the book we experience it at first as a shocking thing but then dasani's inside it and then dasani is navigating her way around it she's getting the bottle she's feeding the baby and i took it another step forward and this took a few years because we kept going back to that room and talking about it and talked about it where is her agency and where is her dignity where's her sense of agency was her sense of agency was i'm gonna attack these mice and i'm going to kill them every single week and in the beginning when she used to talk about that with me i would get like freaked out because it's like don't tell me about smashing your eyes out one more time i had a mouth crawling me in prison one minute i'm in prison and listen it horrified me it was one mouse i was in a it was a field mouse and i was in prison and i was asleep and i felt something on my leg and i kicked and i knocked it off and i saw it run out of the room and i used to build a barricade up to like prevent anything i didn't know they didn't have a spine and so when i read that part it was two things that struck me is that um even in describing it reminding me in some ways of like black boy but but just in describing um or maybe his native son but what it reminded me of is in describing her response to it it was even dignity in that because because ultimately you have to get back but also i think that like the whole family was like how do we organize our life organize our lives in a way in which this chaos is not determinative of what we do every day and so you you you like separate the space in the house to create room for yourself everybody has a little space and and you do your homework on that space even if it means you just sit there and you do your homework sitting on the mattress i thought that um and this is why i thought it was the kinsey you know not i don't think of dickensian as like depressing necessarily i think if dickensian is like when you write a story about somebody who finds a way through the worst kinds of circumstances and and and and i thought that that was powerful about it is that it was so much of her attempting to do that and it's hard you know and that's what came across to me too how it is really hard to make your way through in some circumstances but i i felt a person pushing to do it whether it was supreme or chanel or her like it came through um even in a space of five thousand words and that's why i know the folks who are watching now and listening will really enjoy the book um i keep cutting you off because i don't want you to give all of the good stuff away good no definitely i won't um i think you and i would agree most likely that another trap of this kind of story tends to be this like escape from poverty you know romance that people have in their minds that that's the story we celebrate the one kid who made it made it out versus all these kids who are just as talented but who for whatever reason and i think there are many reasons that are very clear um that have to do with the problems of the neighborhood the lack of access to better education to better job opportunities to basic housing only two percent of americans are housed in in either section 8 or public housing at this point my father created and helped to implement section eight so that's what he did as general counsel of hud and it's something that's i never talked about publicly and i wasn't going to talk about and then he died it's so interesting and and we we talked about it only a little bit here and there as i was working on the book because you know i this is my book and that was his thing but and there's flaws with section 8 but look it does a lot to lift people out of poverty to have a voucher to get you paid part of your pen rent paid or most of it paid and dasani's family actually benefited off of this program benefited from it twice in major ways so housing is so so so central right to their to their um to their lives and this we have just such a shortage of affordable housing so how do you with a family that also if you go back to her great-grandfather june who came to brooklyn at a time when everything was redlined he had fought in world war ii he had survived three battles he'd come back um as a buffalo soldier at the time at a time when the military was segregated to the laws of jim crow after fighting nazis abroad comes to brooklyn and the gi bill's just been passing can't get a mortgage i mean that's where i think this is this is actually where you know it's interesting this is where and what's really powerful about that story i'm sorry keep talking no no no no please please jump in my wife told me that i have um the very masculine habit of interrupting people more intelligent to me i was like i'm a genius and she was like that is what mcarthur said i did not call you a genius i called you my husband and you need to stop cutting me off and so i'm sorry for cutting you off keep going i i i am uh guilty of interrupting people all the time so no please i want you were about to say something about something powerful i was going to say what's really powerful about that is like i do think that like um on reparations and and i think what he tried to do is sort of track this narrative of redlining and he also tried to place it within families but what makes your book really powerful is that when we place narratives within these larger structural arguments we make it feels like we chose the narrative for that argument but the story you're telling illuminates the way in which no it's a lot of invisible stories that overlap on this structural injustice i mean imagine fighting in a war and not being able to get a a loan to buy a house and how that undercuts you know generational um wealth and and housing security he settled for renting in fort greene houses which sani would come to call the projects that's where her roots began four generations earlier was and he couldn't work as a mechanic because labor unions were largely exclusive of black workers and he was trained as a mechanic but he wound up working as a janitor and if you look at the gap in those two wages over 20 years he lost at least nearly 200 000 over that 20-year period i have his wage records if you look at what he wound up being able to earn versus what he should have earned and so it's so essential but it's it's i love that you point out that sometimes people try to some books read like you're fitting the story within the narrative i promise you and i say this with just it's not even humility or anything it's just the truth i this story showed me this dasani showed me the story at every step of the way her family's history showed me the story i didn't know the story i didn't i kept trying to understand certain things and then a new layer would be revealed in a new layer and this is why i kept going and i i don't think i understood the ark until five years in and went with the genealogists back into the family's history to the white enslavers um uh in north carolina of june sykes's great grandfather who was born enslaved and understood that arc i mean all of these pieces are interconnected and it's um i think that that's maybe hopefully why the book reads that way it's because i i didn't know what the narrative was i no things happened in real time and then tried to make sense of them you know what what's beautiful about it is like um i remember being in prison and learning about like narrative nonfiction and and you know what i realized is that part of me not knowing what it was is that um we don't have access to tell stories in certain ways to young people and so they don't necessarily know how stories exist and so what i was really being introduced to was like james baldwin and things like that and i think the work you're doing and and you know fits into that tradition and what i love about this particular story is that like dasani gets to witness that and and dasani gets to think about and her whole family really begins to think about how they'll tell their own stories and how stories get shaped and stories get told i am supposed to go to the q and a i have more questions um acknowledge that the audience exists the audience has been growing so i sort of feel like like people have been tweeting about what we've been saying they're like we got to hear this um i should really say that this is the first of many events for a book that i know is going to be like well honored in a year and so i'm glad folks are taking the time to come but um michael i'm not going to say people's last name um i'm going to keep asking questions myself too but i just want to we the audience and so they feel involved but michael says um as a writer i'm curious about how you will recommend balancing the humanity of your subjects against the realities of the environment every person deserves to be represented with dignity and humanity i'm i'ma answer this too but how do you avoid the glorifying the struggle of being poor i actually don't know how you glorify the struggle of being poor like i don't know if you like do you like tell a story about somebody who like um i actually don't know how you glorify the struggle of being poor any more than you glorify the script of being rich so i'm gonna give my response to that question and i know that we've talked about this a bit but i just want to give my response because i actually think i actually think like we talk in in cliches unintentionally and and and what i think the question really asks is like how do you write in a way that doesn't make us believe you hate your subjects but i think one of the ways you do that is not to hate your subjects because i know that's what i'm saying it's like i don't i don't think anybody like i don't know what it means to glorify the struggle of being poor and it's weird because nobody ever says that when they write a piece about bezos they are glorifying the triumph of being rich right it's only that when we talk about poor people that if you show them being triumphant if you show them being successful if you show them really making it even if you do it well people ask you are you trying to glorify the triumph of being poor and it's a weird it's a weird fascination that we have with believing that we must somehow denigrate people who suffer and so maybe to flip that question a bit i will ask you did you feel the need to to put more attention on some of the worst aspects of chanel's life or supreme supreme's life as you tried to tell the story because it's like a real balance even in a cover story where like you could see this tension between dasani and supreme and how supreme is moving and controlling the money but but you really resist trying to stigmatize supreme for those decisions that he's making around how like the that check might be what he owns and so i wonder like how did you navigate that tension so maybe not how did you navigate the attention of glorifying the poor but how did you navigate the tension i'm not falling into the the pitfall of of denigrating struggle in a way that seems justified because you think you would have did it better i think it's really important in a story as complex as this to allow the reader to experience the story and to not interfere by imposing judgments and it's hard because we all bring our lens right we're all human i think the closer i get to a person just in terms of feeling like i really uh if i feel great great empathy for some somebody i'm writing about and i've done this you know i've been in journalism for more than 20 years doing kind of long-form work like this where i immerse in people's lives my rule of thumb is just the closer i get the um harder i'm going to have to work when it comes to writing to make sure that i'm cognizant of any potential you know i don't like words like balance and objectivity and i don't think anyone does anymore like those words so fashionable to say objectivity doesn't exist fine we all agree but like to be even more precise you know let's have many different people read um this this book and respond to it that i am making sure that i've i've done right by it chanel is veterinary brave she never once asked me to keep anything out she said the truth hurts she said that again and again and it's interesting you know people often ask me how do you think you're following them affected things change things one thing i would say is people ask you that including people in the q a so that's the next question all right fair enough yes i mean there's there's no question that me being in the room is going to have some kind of immeasurable or measurable impact and it depends and there were many many different situations i i was with i still am in their lives i mean this is nearly a decade of reporting um they like your cousins i mean at least like play cousins i mean we i slept on their floor at times i ate food it's so funny that you didn't get that joke [Music] okay i didn't really get that joke you're right uh but your response was um a a definition of what a play cousin is though you know how like um one of the interesting things happens in the community in a poor community but around black folks though is you got people that's related to you for real and you gotta play cousins like who is that oh that's my cousin and it's not really your cousin okay and and what i get from your book though is it's the kind of intimacy that you got with these folks that it's endearing but i think it's also it's also human and so when you talk about they know who my children are when you talk about you know we've been around each other for a decade i've mentioned it because sometimes we think about our subjects and i think the audience thinks about our subjects and we ask a question like what happened as the result of you're writing about them like one of the things that happens that matters is as we became close you know like like the world didn't necessarily shift for me all for them but like we became close i became somebody that they would call upon and they became somebody that i would call upon and that's essentially like what a play cousin is so yeah so yeah absolutely i have grown up you know with many play cousins i have a big big chilean family um my mother's side but anyway i mean i know i know i know what you're saying i what i wanted to say about chanel's it's funny what we wound up realizing she's i think this is this is potentially how me being around this is one of the ways that and i don't know what me not being around would have resulted in differently and i don't for a moment take away from her agency and her if anything i was a bother and a really annoying presence many much of the time i wasn't um i hate it when people are like oh do you think you were model absolutely not was i a role model sonny had has the most powerful role models and people like her black principal paula holmes who passed away who was a mighty amazing woman uh her teacher faith hester her grandmother joanie she has remarkable role models she would say that herself i was a strange being who'd come in from this other place of journalism of a different upbringing in a different city and um i was there watching and laughing and sharing and sometimes even crying with them the worst moments um i had a lot of really intense experiences being among them with them i would uh so but the thing that i most what struck me with chanel is that we finally came to understand that i was the author author of her of this book okay of course but i would say to her but you're the author of your life and i'm just following your life so so did was that in the back of her mind and certain junctures did she choose differently if if i hadn't been there would she have chosen differently would she have acted differently i don't really know all i know is that uh i'm sort of beside the point i know that it's an important question but i feel that really the book is about them and and that's that's the what i want to talk about is the story of them um right and and i also think it's like yeah nothing it's interesting because i think that i think that the role of of of writing about humanity and this is whether you're a fiction writer or poet or journalist is to find a way to get into spaces and be human in those spaces and and and you know it's artifice but if you're there long enough it stops being artificed you know you're around somebody for ten years and they were like chanel was probably like i don't know if andrea's gonna write that book i mean she's saying she going right oh there were many times trust me you know like literally my publisher was like my editor was like they was like congratulations i was like yeah man i'm gonna get this book done and when you said it took you 10 years my heart was like oh i got a shot at finishing you know i went from like this team journalist the new york times writing this thing to like this weird person who just always hangs around them at this point like this is awkward it got awkward but not for them but for everyone around us it's like what is what what is the deal it's like yo was she what was she writing how long does it take to write a book how long does it take to write a book no wonder no wonder most of us aren't writing i can't spend 10 years on one book but but i will say that like revealing that to all of the writers who are listening i hope it encourages all it encourages me to believe that like like great art takes time and i i have to ask one question about sentences before before i go back to this other author question i think you have some like really lovely sentences and one of the things i like to believe or i like to point out is the way that like like you said uh the first sentence in the times piece right it says all her life she had been hearing about pennsylvania yeah i mean that's a beautiful opening to a piece she could have been hearing about anywhere and what i wonder is um in terms of how you organize ideas in the sentences this is like really me just inside baseball turning this into a craft lesson um wonderful i love it but but how do you approach you know i was like how do you approach this sentence you know how do you approach wow uh creating a story out of all that mountain the mountain of data that you collected yeah i mean uh i suffer and uh some of it's suffering some of it's delightful a lot of the time it's just writing and then well i i don't call myself a writer i call myself a rewriter i don't i've never written something that just lasted as it in its original form i mean you got to go to poetry you put it down oh maybe that's my next act you put it down uh so i know myself well enough now to know that whatever i write however decent i think it is no matter what if i give it some room to breathe by the next morning there are changes there's so it's it's and i read my stuff out loud and just over and over and over until it starts to sound right but it doesn't usually for a while and there's a lot of moving things around and and stuff will just happen like but you have to kind of give in to the suffering of it lack of a better word sometimes it's more just sort of chaos but it's like but i loved this story so much i loved the people in this story and their humor and their wisdom and their brilliance and um you know i and also just like just all of the ironies and you know one thing i did doing as i would walk around always i still do with the notepad and write stuff down as it came to me i never ever get your notepad and that was a stupid question but like i got a friend who carries around a notepad that's like this big i think that he's uh he you think he really writes things that he could read in that because i always feel like i carry around this and then so what happens is i'm like hold up let me write it and it doesn't work and i and i think you know you raise a very good question um at the d in the dc bureau of the new york times they have these little notepads that for whatever reason nowhere else at the paper and this is a little bit dated but it may still be the case but back when i was doing stuff down there i i was covering um i was actually on the guantanamo story once upon a time i remember just grabbing whole stacks of them because they were so little i think it's important to have them be portable but you can even do it in your phone sometimes i leave voice memos it's just it's the thought is fleeting otherwise and if you i had something called train notes this was in the very beginning actually it was a special notepad train notes that i carried with me that i only would be an excellent sociologist i mean well i don't know if the sociologists would agree but uh so you know i i i'm like almost certified well so on the train there's a 45-minute ride between fort greene brooklyn and where i was living uptown and on the upper west side and i would just put everything i was feeling down in that notepad and a lot of those initial observations made their way into the book and this was from 2012 years and years ago but when it's fresh and when you're new and attending to what you're noticing as a newcomer to the story versus where you are having been eight years with the family there's those are two different things and i feel like they're both essential to good narrative and the great thing about the passage of eight years is that you have the privilege of this incredible experience of of having seen time pass and growth happen and i mean this kid grew up in front of me you know yeah um no that's that's fascinating i mean and it's actually i like the way you connected it both to because sometimes we think of like these craft questions of of how you do something it's just about sausage making but it's all it's actually about how to make yourself more equipped to notice the thing that you care about and you you can't write about something you can't attend to something you know i like you say right about something but i like you know you can't attend to something for that long without deeply caring about it and the ways in which you care matter and like the idea of being able to take train notes and the idea of being able to like use a small notepad to capture things i think it's how you get a line like this and then i ask this question from the audience early in the piece you say this and it's so beautiful right because you talk about irony the reader wouldn't necessarily know from the first sentence why this is ironic right none of the sonny seven siblings had ever left home and it's a lioness both about having like the question is i wanted to separate from the audience from ryan he says i wonder if separating dasani from her family in order to offer her a good education is both harmful and beneficial every child should have access to such an education without separating from their family right but what's what's dope about that sentence is you're talking about the fact that they had never left home to get the education that she had but they also hadn't been separated from that from that family you know you had times when the mother was gone or the father was gone but i think it's something powerful and arguing that like like staying together matters and it's actually an accomplishment because some people think having never left home is not an accomplishment but what gets revealed in the piece is heaven never left home also is an accomplishment because it is quite easy to be like permanently separated from your people you know there's nothing more important i think to most of us than these bonds of family and i think that's just the way human beings are um and we do it in different ways some of us have chosen families right it doesn't have to be blood kin for her family was her system of survival she went through all these other systems with names that suggest help like public assistance like child protection like criminal justice you think about the names right attached to those systems those to her were systems you had to navigate you had to survive in order to do that she relied on her siblings and her parents and they really considered one another one being it wasn't there's no there was so little individualism there it was just an incredible experience of togetherness and it wasn't at all pretty sometimes right i mean there are a lot of you know every family can you imagine living in one room with your nine family members i mean my brothers and i would have murdered one another i mean so we and we practically did anyway so i mean uh you know it's intense the relationships in those families but but beautifully so and when she left to go to hershey pennsylvania that was a lot that was to her mind that was too much to ask of her she shouldn't have had to leave in order to get the education she deserved and she doesn't by the way want to escape and this is the problem with the word escape when people link that word to narratives around poverty that you escaped this neighborhood you got out dasani doesn't want she's proud of her family her neighborhood her streets and by the way as a homeless person she's not without a home she said it to me home is family it's the streets i grew up on it's the people who've had my back ever since i was little that is home and she wants to thrive in in in that home and she's doing it in her own way right now she recently she became the first of the children to graduate from high school and she started at laguardia community college so she's staying at community college straight up like you know i mean i went to community college i i did pretty well then i went to university of maryland you know a lot of people didn't agree with that journey looks like and and i think i hope that the sunny knows that like it's a legit journey you know and and and it has really unpredictable destinations but but but but you know pleasant ones i bet my wife my wife went to community college but you also went to yale yeah i know that was later though i first became i guess i guess i mentioned that i went to community college because i want decided to know if she's watching this yeah but i was somebody when i went to community college and when people like denigrated community college people around me i was like i like my professors i like the work that i'm doing i am somebody in this space and this is the beginning of something this is actually just something actually you know and like and to know that this is something and i feel like that's what she was saying about home like i i mean i have a home and my my siblings and my mama and supreme or something and i feel like your book gives them like that dignity and that's one of the things that's that's frequently missing you know when you look at somebody that's poor you always judge them by what's missing and never give give credence to what's there and i feel like in your writing you actually do the opposite you give credence to what's there um even if it's there it's it's it's a struggle can i say something to you thank you so much for saying that you said earlier something about how you know you yeah you spend those months this much time with a family you can't help but care i think i would go further and say that not only is it fine to care and i think it's essential in a way to develop i used to see in my you know days as a an old school whatever i am an old school reporter no matter what a shoe leather reporter through and through metro is my home i've always done those kinds of stories you know and i was at the miami health but you had we you know back in the day i mean it was like i'm the reporter with the reporter hat on you're the person i'm writing about i ask the questions you answer them i'm here to do the story on deadline my evolution has taken me in a very different direction where i no longer see that that dividing line as not only is it not necessary i almost see it as an impediment i think that the writing the power of the story rises or falls on the level of intimacy that you feel for it and it's not only okay it's almost necessary to feel whether it's caring for them or not or feeling angry whatever it is you know you you have to take that in in order to have it um work in a clear and powerful manner in the writing i think it's not at all perfect process and there are many checks and balances and there's a need for balance and all that but you know if that makes sense i think it's yeah yeah no it does wait i want to make sure that i ask um specifically let you address ryan's question and t simpson's question so ryan says um every child should have access to such an education without separating from that family right i think we both agree that that's yes um but one of the things she one of the things ryan asks um is if separating to sani from her family in order to offer a good education is both harmful and beneficial i i i wonder if you might talk about some of the ways in which um that separation might have been you know both harmful and beneficial and i know it's in a book and i encourage ryan and everybody listening to read the book but um but just because it's obvious that that's one of the main things um it'll be nice to have ryan a bit more i think the parts of hershey that were beneficial did not have much to do with her separating from her family i think had her family been given the resources just monetarily i'm talking about because they taught their kids chanel and supreme had them read the dictionary every night if they had enough food if they had um the the kind of resources that were available at hershey dasani would have been able to thrive educationally i think that obviously there are other issues with the parents they uh are survivors of deep childhood trauma both of them and have addictions that they've come in and out of um over the years and um you know uh are in drug war and drug and continue to be in treatment programs and um currently doing really well but this is a lifelong battle but it as you said earlier it's it's it's a mistake to kind of just focus on the addiction as a reason to sort of turn away or when we never do that by the way with upper middle class people right it's like oh but i do that kid all the time no depressed or i mean i do it all the time i'd be like what mr mr joseph yeah he's he fell off the wagon we should evict him and they'd be like he owns this house oh man we can't you know it's like that funny thing with one of the reasons why we don't do that for upper middle class people and middle class people because it's like so many resources in place that you can mask your struggles you know and like and you could literally hide them for decades right but um but hershey was fascinating for dasani and she did thrive and maybe some of it was look there are plenty of kids um from other backgrounds from from well-off families or whatever who who take off when they get away or they go to boarding school they they're they feel free they're out of the miz they're out they're away from their miserable parents marriage or whatever it is i mean there can be upsides but i think the main thing for dasani was that when she left a serious and essential part of that family engine was removed she was so essential the very things that gave her so much promise in the eyes of like her teachers like the things that her gifts were the things that made her indispensable you know to her parents i mean those are often sort of the same kid it's the kid that is dasani is beautifully gifted but at the same time quite representative i don't want to make her as an out to be exceptional at all i think she's so representative of so many kids who if they were just had slightly different circumstances would thrive and it's not because of a lack of willpower or talent or ambition that they don't and that's that's what i think is so important about her story and but the piece you just said was actually it was actually a little frightening because the very thing that makes people notice you might be a very reason why you need it at home and and i mean the height of success i don't know i left home you know i don't live in i don't live in a city where i grew up in and i mean i left home first to go to prison but when i came home i left again and i think in some ways one of the burdens that you you write about that that's on his shoulders it's like what does it mean to have something that's of value to the people you love the most and and how that very thing be the thing that allows you to to leave the people you love the most and and i think that's why i called it the kinsey and not not because it's it's wallowing in any way in a kind of tragedy but but it's making us contemplate the human dilemma which for better for worse like i think sonny still has to to compliment i mean to um to confront yeah i think um i want to give you the last word and and and maybe the last word for me is it's just going to be um two words you know 10 years is a long journey for any writer and it's just a huge accomplishment to write this story it's a huge accomplishment to come out on the other side still caring about your subjects and have them still caring about you and um but more importantly i think it just takes a lot of um beauty to spend some of those hours writing the sentence well and so um the last words i'll just say is really thank you for what you've written and what and what you've offered to us you know i just want to say thank you thank you and i want to thank dasani who i believe is watching and chanel and supreme and oh man they could be like who the is this talking you got this dude cursing all the damn time writers could curse like that sonny but i'm gonna be a writer it i didn't even know that this was possible damn just do one what kind of grant anyway i really enjoy myself thank you i hope the audience i hope they did too thanks

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Id: XtchS22eMso

Length: 56min 40sec (3400 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 07 2021