Hello, this is Josh Levine. The Queen was made possible with support from Slate Plus members. To thank those listeners for their support, we've made two special bonus episodes that are available exclusively to our members. You're about to hear an excerpt from the second bonus episode. It's a roundtable discussion that explores what it's like to write a reporting intensive book like The Queen. To listen to the full episode, sign up for Slate Plus at Slate.com

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of all Slate podcasts and other great benefits. Thanks for listening, and thanks to our members

who support, helps make our journalism possible. Hello and welcome to this very special bonus episode of The Queen. I'm Dan Coise, editor of Slates Books coverage and author of How to Be a Family, which will be published in September. I am joined here in Slates DC studio

by my colleague Josh Levine. Hi, Josh. Hey, then. So as listeners of the podcast, no, this series is a companion to Josh's book, The Queen, The Forgotten Life Behind an American Myth. Josh spent years reporting the story which first appeared in Slate in 2013. Now for many nonfiction writers and journalists, The book like the Queen, you know, a full-length work of investigative reporting is sort of the

gold standard of projects. The thing you want to have the chance to write at least once in your career, but how does writing such a thing actually happen? How do you get the story? How do you find information that the government or that corporations don't want you to have? And how do you get stories from people who might not want to talk to you? And how do you then turn all that reporting into a book that is hopefully engaging, accurate, fair, funny, interesting? So I'm going to discuss this all with Josh today, and we are joined by three remarkable authors who have also worked in this mode. First, I'll welcome David Grant, a New Yorker staff writer and the author recently of

Killers of the Flower Moon.

Hi, David.

Hi, it's good to be here. We're also joined by Eliza Griswald, winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for her book, Amity and Prosperity, One Family and the Fracturing of America. Hi, Eliza. Hi. And finally, we're joined by James Forman, Jr., the J. Skellywright Professor of Law at Yale and winner of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for his book Locking Up Our Own, Crime and Punishment

and Black America. Hi, James. Hi. I'm so glad to have all of you here. Thank you for joining us. I'd love to just bounce questions around all of us, but if you have something you want to add, even if you, you know, I haven't called your name, please feel free to jump in. I'm not like the proctor. But let's start with a really basic question, but one that I think a lot of writers struggle with as they're trying to make this transition, how do you know when something is a book and it's not just, you know, a piece? Why don't we start with Josh Levine? My piece became a book, so I feel a very qualified to answer this question. It took me about a year from concept, execution on the piece they ran in slate in 2013 and it ran at about 17,000 words, which repeatedly is the longest piece that slate had ever run at that point. And there was a sense, I think internally, Dan, that it was more comprehensive than it perhaps had any right to me. But there were so many holes in the story, and so many things that I wanted to learn about this woman, Linda Taylor, who was known as the welfare queen, and about who she really was beyond this legend about her. I felt personally like I had only scratched the surface. But the thing that I really wanted to get at in the book was the larger framework of her story, the worlds in which she operated, but also the worlds that made her into this figure, this person who became so important in our politics, in our policymaking, why this woman in this place at this time, how did those things converge and turn her into this kind of icon, but also a person who, Her self her personal history was erased. And I felt like having the space to explore that in a book was something that I wanted to do and that I felt would be rewarding to readers. So for you as a mix of frustration at the stuff that you hadn't gotten yet and a desire to like tell a bigger story than the piece itself was able to tell. Yeah, I think that's right. James, for you, what was it, was there also some inciting incident that made you think, oh, this is a big enough story that this is a book? I think for me it was a little bit different in some sense is easier to get to the idea that it was a book because I knew from the beginning that I was trying to write the story of what happened in the last 50 years as the America embarked on this project that we now call mass incarceration. And I wanted to tell that story through the lens of African-American officials, black decision makers, legislators, judges, prosecutors, IndyC and around the country. So just the scope up front suggested that it might be worthy of a book length treatment. I think the biggest obstacle for me to getting to the idea of it being a book is a little is that I'm different from the others in that I'm a law professor, not a writer or reporter, and law professors don't study form very much in our writing, which is why a lot of, you know, law review articles are not that accessible. We were subject matter specialists, but we don't think that much about how to create a form that would be accessible to a broader audience. So for me, actually the biggest challenge wasn't even so much thinking through the content, the substance, but thinking through, well how do I make this in form a book that somebody might wanna read? David and Eliza, you both, if I'm correct, killers of the flower moon and Abedin Abedin prosperity both had their roots in stories that you wrote as well, right? Yeah, for me know actually killers of the flower moon Begin as a book and ended as a book. I had I did not do that one as a magazine piece interestingly enough. I've had two experiences and my first book loss Lost City, as he did begin as an article, much like Josh. And it was the case where I finished the piece about this British explorer. It disappeared in the Amazon. And I felt that I hadn't finished. That there were so many places to go. And with killers of the flower moon, it was a little bit more like James was talking about.

The canvas was so sprawling about this racial injustice that covered so many years, had so many individuals, that the really, it was almost, they couldn't even figure out how to excerpt the book, because it was just too many people, too open and narrative, and spanning too many years. But for me, the know, the difference between, generally speaking, an article or a book is does it have enough dimensions, places to go, avenues to explore? Also, does the subject matter have enough resonance that it justifies, hopefully for the reader, staying with something larger? I might do a short story that's like a lark, like the search for the giant squid that i don't think should be a book something like the systematic murder of the o-sage uh... in the early twenty century for the oil money for the twenty century felt like something that had lots of dimensions that at the birth of the f-b-i and i guess the other question always for me to with a book is is it something i want to spend years with and that's a really important question to you because I have had subject matters that I thought could be books but I would have no desire to spend three to five years researching it and that's another important element that goes into the into the equation. Eliza when you made the decision to write your book you definitely were committing to a lot of extremely in-depth research and reporting on the ground. Was that a consideration for you as well, whether this was a story you wanted to live with that long? Oh my goodness, yes. I mean, I really hoped that by writing an article, I would do right by the subject and be able to put it down, and that did not happen, you when I wrote the article, you know, there was a sick family, animals were dying, and they were just at the beginning of what happened to be a multi-year lawsuit and investigation with both state and federal authorities into what had gone wrong at this oil and gas site. But yeah, I mean, when I wrote that article, we knew very little. You know, the family knew that there was benzene and taluing in their bodies. They knew they'd lost pets. They knew that a 14-year-old had arsenic poisoning. But that's about all they knew. That had a pretty steep learning curve to how do you put down on a page what's known and what's not known and what can't be known because with a lot of environmental related illness, you know, the causal link between the chemical or what goes wrong in a site and the sick kids or the dead animals, that link is never going to be substantial enough to satisfy a reader. So it was tricky ground from the beginning and then yeah, it was seven years. It was seven years of following this family and following their frustrating, maddening walk through the court system, through regulation. That's what it entailed. Something really sparked for me there. One of the biggest challenges for me throughout the whole process, Eliza was sorting things into categories of things that I, not to be too rumsfeldian here, but the like kind of known unknowns and unknown unknowns. Just the category of things that I don't know now, but I could be reasonably expected to know or figure out if I just kind of bash on it for long enough and the things that it's probably not a good idea for me to be spending my time trying to sort out and sort through even if they're big and fundamental mysteries that would speak to something big in the world in which I was able to figure them out. So how do you think through that problem, Eliza, and I'm curious for what other people think too? Well, for me, I mean, one of the greatest injustices involved with many corporations and oil and gases, just an example of it, but they control all information about the substances they're using, about when they're using them, and regulators are really just subject to their whims of releasing them, right? So any kind of definitive information, for instance, for many, many years, one of the main questions is, where did these chemicals go underground? Did they end up in people's drinking water? It took four or five years of this lawsuit for us kind of puzzling this out to figure out that in fact the company knew because the company had used tracers. So the company knew had chemical and radioactive tracers in the water that would have allowed them to map exactly where those chemicals went. So that disparity between, and that really reveals the sort of greater corporate power of what people do already know and what they're not going to tell you is really stunning. It's something I learned a great deal about. And I would have just been absolutely sunk if I didn't have the legal records that from the two lawyers who made all these documents public, John and Kendra Smith are their names. Now, they're not environmental attorneys or even plaintive attorneys. Kendra, the wife in this husband and wife team, is a corporate defense attorney who works for railroads mostly, defending them from asbestos cases. And she was so disgusted with what she saw in this case that she decided to take on this plane of case. So she had the training, super expensive training of like being an industrial hygienist, being able to puzzle out what these chemicals actually meant, what test results meant, what testing methods meant. And so with her help, I was able to understand what really needed to be established in order for the book to make any sense at all. David and James, as you were embarking on these projects, how did you kind of sort the questions that needed to be answered out? Did you use similar categories to Josh's of these are the things that I think

I can figure out and these are the things that I'll probably never find out or are you more optimistic than a pessimistic Josh? Well, first of all, I just want to say I'm so glad that lawyers are heroes in Eliza's story. That's kind of exciting and rare. They're probably plenty of villains as well, I would imagine. For me, I think it was about figuring out which topics I wasn't gonna talk about. Again, not because I couldn't maybe figure them out, because again, I'm writing about a topic that I've already been studying for most of my career, but because they didn't fit into the narrative in some way. You know, I talk to time who say, I want to write a book that reaches a wider audience. What advice do you have? And one of the things that I'm always telling people is that you've got to leave a whole bunch of stuff out. And for academics, that's really counterintuitive because typically when academics write books, the biggest thing that can get you criticized by fellow academics is not talking about something that might be tangentially relevant. But of course, if you want people to read your book, you have to not talk about a lot of tangents or else the book just becomes a series of tangents. So for me, it was really cutting, cutting, cutting. It was, yeah, this is interesting, this is important, but it's got to go in a separate article or a separate book or it will never get written it's gonna way down my story if i try to include it that's funny i have i basically have a folder which is where all the digressions go which are usually you know three thousand words of history that i have been weeks researching some point of context. And then my wife reads it and says, that's really good, you got to cut it. And I end up just stealing it down to a paragraph so that the narrative keeps moving. And the paragraph, I hope, is really good because it's the most informed paragraph you'd ever have. But I do think that is essential to keep people and keep it moving and make sure you give the reader enough to know things in the context but not go too far off. I would say with killers of the flower moon, I encountered something that was a real challenge beyond the kind of normal narrative structure challenge of what do you put in a book and what don't you put in a book which had to do with again these were crimes that took place in the early 20th century when the Osage were the wealthiest people percapped in the world because of oil under the land and then they began to be severely murdered and as I began to research the case I had originally thought of it very much as kind of a traditional crime narrative of a kind of singular evil figure who had committed these crimes. And that was FBI theory of the case. And over time I began to gather evidence from the Osage and through archives that showed that there were really many, many more murders, scores, more murders, unresolved. Many of them improperly investigated or covered up. And I tried to investigate many of them. I thought it was so important to try to find answers but in so many of the cases you know all the witnesses are deceased now, the victims are deceased, the suspects are deceased and so how do you handle that? And in some of the cases I was able to gather enough circumstantial evidence that indicated who was responsible and in other cases I couldn't and so one of the challenges for me was to not obscure that doubt which I think author sometimes want to do because they want to be all knowing and give satisfaction on all fronts to the reader and yet I thought it was so important to reveal that doubt and kind of incorporate that doubt but it was a real struggle at first because in many ways that doubt was essential to the theme of the book, which was this systematic cover-up in which these crimes to haunt families less than a century later, or still haunting families who don't yet know who is the precise perpetrator of a murder in their family. I think that's so important, what David's saying, and hard one is to let readers know what you don't know and what you can't know and to have faith in them that you're not gonna be able to answer any question. And that ends up weirdly, I mean, I know sort of growing as a journalist and writer, I would be afraid to do that at an earlier point. Well, how can I admit that? That's going to call my authority into question. And the truth is just the opposite. I mean, I think even in this era of fake news, you know, and all these questions about authority of fact, you know, the role that integrity plays in personal honesty, whether that's with sources, editors, or with a reader,

I think that really goes a long way, that we're in conversation here, we're going on this journey together, and that doesn't mean I'm sitting in the authority seat and I have all the answers. I think people really underestimate the power that a writer admitting they can't know something has for a reader and the reader's trust in there, honestly.

So in the slate piece that I did... power that a writer admitting they can't know something has for a reader and the reader's

trust in there, honestly.

So in the slate piece that I did that became the book, I had a section towards the end about Taylor and sociopathy. behaved in many ways that seemed irrational. She treated people extremely callously. She used people. She abused her own family. There were a lot of markers of the specific type of mental illness. And then as I was writing the book and I actually learned more, I got some psych evaluations that had been done on her when she got into the federal mental health system. The choice that I made was despite actually knowing more, I decided to say less about what I thought was going on in her brain just because it felt more honest to me to admit that I didn't know. And I can present what these various other people thought. But as David and Eliza were saying, I think I hope that you can earn the trust of readers that when you do say something authoritatively, they'll trust you if the flip side is when you admit gaps in your knowledge. I did a story once about the world's greatest Sherlock Holmes scholar who's found guaranteed a mysterious circumstances and all these kind of Sherlockians and Conan Doyle and had taken up case and investigated it. You know, by the end I had a very strong circumcised case of what happened. And I remember speaking to the sister of the Sherlock Holmes scholar. And I remember saying, you know, we have to learn to live with doubts. And I think that's the difference between Sherlock Holmes fairy tales and real investigative reporting. Thanks for listening and thanks to our members who support, helps make our journalism possible. The rest of this episode is available exclusively to Slate Plus subscribers.

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