The Book Club: Andrea Elliott

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4.4 • 785 Ratings

🗓️ 15 June 2022

⏱️ 39 minutes

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Summary

In this week's Book Club podcast I'm joined by the New York Times's Andrea Elliott, who won the Pulitzer Prize for her book Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival and Hope in New York City. She tells me how she came to spend seven years reporting on a single, homeless family in Brooklyn, how she negotiated her duty to observe rather than participate – and what their telenovela-like experiences tell us about American history.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Subscribe to the next 12 weeks of The Spectator, in print and. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor for
0:28.5	The Spectator. My guest this week is the New York Times reporter Andrea Elliott, whose new
0:34.0	book is Invisible Child, Poverty, Survival and Hope in New York City, which has already
0:40.8	scooped the Pulitzer Prize and been nominated as one of Barack Obama's favorite books
0:46.6	of the year. Andrea, welcome. Now, this story didn't start as a book, did it? It started as a piece of journalism, a huge piece of journalism, it should be said.
0:58.1	Can you tell me how you met your invisible child, how this story started for you?
1:03.4	She was invisible to me when I became interested in her story.
1:08.2	Her whole world was not known to me, and I think that's precisely
1:12.5	what drew me in was just how shocked I was by this other New York that I shared my city with,
1:21.4	and yet had really little, had noticed so little. The project really did begin with sort of traditional shoe leather
1:31.8	reporting. It was, it's my favorite thing to do, a lot of knocking on doors. And what I was
1:37.6	trying to do is get inside the life of poor American children, because I had seen this
1:43.5	statistic that kind of shocked me, which was
1:45.6	that one in five children were growing up poor in America, the richest country in the world
1:50.8	with the highest child poverty rate among developed nations in the world. So I looked far and
1:57.1	wide. I went to different states looking for the right story, what felt like the right
2:02.2	story. And by the time I met Desani standing outside her shelter, her homeless shelter in
2:08.5	Brooklyn, I really was more than anything keen on finding a child who could just articulate
2:15.0	what she was experiencing. That mattered more to me than any kind of
2:19.8	backdrop. This project began with me seeing a statistic, which is that one in five children were
2:25.4	growing up poor in America, and that was shocking to me, given it was their wealthiest country
2:29.6	in the world with the highest child poverty rate. I've always felt most drawn into stories that get inside statistics, that illuminate what
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