Q+A: Patrick Radden Keefe, Author of “Say Nothing”

Keefe shares how he got his start, the key to successful write-arounds, and what he’s looking in investigative narrative nonfiction.

Interview by Alex Ronan

It’s hard to believe, but there was a time when investigative reporter Patrick Radden Keefe’s story ideas were met with complete silence. “I blush to think about the pitches I sent off for years,” the New Yorker staff writer and National Magazine Award winner told me recently by phone. In his latest book, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, Keefe takes on the unsolved case of Jean McConville, a widowed mother of ten who was abducted and “disappeared” in 1972 by the Irish Republican Army. While there may be a mystery at the book’s center, it’s really a story about memory as much as murder, and a meticulous, humane look at the impact of violence on both victims and perpetrators across decades. If you haven’t read it yet, Say Nothing just came out in paperback. I spoke to Keefe about how he got his start, the key to successful write-arounds, and what he’s looking for when working on investigative narrative nonfiction.

Study Hall: Did you always want to be a writer?

Patrick Radden Keefe: I did, probably from when I was in high school, but there were questions for me about how to operationalize that. Today, a high school kid can read something I’ve read, find my email address, and send me questions. It was way more mysterious to me growing up pre-internet. I figured, I’ll be in school until I can work it out. In grad school I was sending pitches and drafts of articles to magazines and newspapers without any success. That ended up bringing me to law school and it was while I was in law school that I cracked the code.

SH: I was surprised to learn you sold a book before you’d developed a career as a writer. How did that happen?

PRK: When I was in the UK doing a masters degree, I got really interested in government surveillance. That was a fairly obscure research interest at the time. Then I went to law school and 9/11 happened the second week. Suddenly, the fringe thing I knew a little bit about became relevant. I found the name and address of a literary agent and sent off an email that was a couple of paragraphs long. The truth is, I’m sure I would have stuck with writing. But I joke that had she not called me, I might be a really unhappy corporate lawyer.

SH: One of my favorite things about Say Nothing is that a major revelation comes through re-reading an interview transcript for probably the hundredth time and noticing something you didn’t catch before. Can you tell me about that moment?

PRK: It’s funny, that’s both a story about the weakness of my process in that I should’ve been alert to this detail the first time I read the transcript through, but also about the utility of attacking things two, three, four, five times. Building a certain redundancy into your reporting.

I had a professor in college who’d talk about “gutting a book,” and the idea is that you’re eviscerating it, searching for the things you want and yanking them out. Inescapably, that ends up being part of the process in any long reporting project, but the danger in that is that when you think you know what you’re looking for, you can overlook something that’s hugely important but at a glance doesn’t seem to be the type of detail you’re after. When I re-read the transcript, I was looking for colorful scenes, evocative details, and turns of phrase one character might use. I didn’t go into it thinking, I gotta figure out who the shooter was.

SH: So, you’re sitting in your office and you see this detail. What did you do next?

PRK: I started shouting. My dog, who was asleep next to me, thought the house was on fire. I had to double and triple check. Then I called my wife and talked to her. I called my editor and talked to him. On some level, this was a tightrope I had to walk throughout the whole process of writing the book. On a storytelling level, it’s thrilling. It was the most thrilling moment I’ve ever had as a reporter. On the other hand, it’s a serious thing to accuse someone of murder and it’s a very serious thing to tell the grown children of Jean McConville, “I think I’ve figured out who killed your mother.” In fairly short order, the gravity of it all set in.

SH: Say Nothing is one of the most meticulously annotated books I’ve read in a while. I love that if you go to the back of the book, it’s like, “So-and-so sneezed and this is coming from CCTV footage, an interview done in 2016, and An Annotated History of the Troubles: Volume 65.” What was the research process like over the four years you wrote the book?

PRK: [Laughs.] The research process was intensive. Up front, I knew I needed to be very exacting because everything is so contested. My goal was to show my work so there wouldn’t be any mystery or guessing about why I’m making some inference. I wanted to do that even if it did seem painstaking and, at a certain point, kind of ridiculous. But I also wanted the narrative to move quickly. How do you achieve the absorbing immediacy that would pull people into the story who wouldn’t otherwise read a book about the Troubles while also giving it a factual backstop? I think of a duck: on the top of the water, it’s gliding along serenely, and under the water, it’s furiously paddling. The idea was not to show the furious paddling in the narrative itself, but it’s all there, in the back of the book.

SH: Can you tell me a little bit about your organizational strategies? How do you keep so much research accessible?

PRK: Scrivener is a great organizational apparatus. It was very, very helpful in the early part of the process, precisely to keep track of all this stuff and move things as the structure emerged. But I didn’t write the actual book in Scrivener. For writing, I’m in Microsoft Word.

SH: Do you remember your first fact checking experience at the New Yorker?

PRK: Vividly. My first piece for the New Yorker was in 2006. It was called “The Snakehead,” which would become my second book. The fact checker was Raffi Khatchadourian, who almost immediately became a staff writer and has now become a dear friend. It was a legendary fact check. I’d never been through anything like that.

Fact checkers are often the very best reporters, in terms of how innovative they are and their ability to find people and track things down. But I also really learned from Raffi’s skepticism. There was a moment in that story with a shootout. Basically, the guy shot at three people. The first one he shoots, the second one he shoots, and then the third one, he pulls the trigger and no bullets come out. I said something like, “He pulled the trigger the third time and the gun was empty,” and Raffi was like, “How do you know it didn’t jam?” This was an incident that happened a decade earlier. I’d interviewed some cop who said it was empty. “How do you know the cop was right?” he asked. It was this very devilish, almost reductio ad absurdum exercise that I always think about.

[Here’s the final version they settled on: “Then he pointed his .380 automatic at Dan Xin’s head and pulled the trigger. But the clip was empty, or the gun jammed — and Dan Xin fled the store.”]

SH: With good reporting, there are always these little gems — tiny telling details or insights into a character’s thinking at some key moment — that bring a piece to life. As a reporter, I’ve learned how painstaking it can be to gather them. With Say Nothing, is there one in particular that you love, either because it was so hard-earned or because of the work it does in the story?

PRK: This will sound evasive, but done right, the kind of writing that I like to do is nothing but those details. They’re the hardest things to get, but they’re always the things that stick with you. In Say Nothing, a big obvious one is the nappy pin, which came from interviewing Archie McConville about being asked to identify his mother’s body. At first, he couldn’t look. He asks if the nappy pin was there and the police officer can’t see it. [With so many children, Jean McConville always had a diaper pin on her.] There’s this thought that maybe it’s not her. But then they turn her garment around and there it is.

The thing I always think about with an interview I’ve done or something I’ve read is, if I were telling my wife about it afterwards or telling a friend about it at a bar, what are the two or three details that I would remember? Those are the things that take primacy and that I’m looking for. I’m much better now than I was when I was younger in realizing that people don’t want five pages of unbroken exposition. You need to weave in things that they can see and hear.

SH: How do you go about getting people to talk to you, whether it’s an average Joe or an arms dealer?

PRK: Well, I should say, I often don’t. I try to be persistent but I almost never doorstep people. I tend to gently prod and make my case. If people are receptive to it, I’ll send stuff I’ve written to give a sense of the kind of approach I take. It does depend a bit on how savvy they are in terms of dealing with the press. I don’t want to feel like I’m taking advantage of someone who hasn’t talked to a journalist before. I might explain the whole context to someone like that. With a repeat player, I’ll say, “Why would you not take advantage of the opportunity to try and shape this story as best you can?”

SH: You don’t seem at all daunted by a write-around. How do you tell the story of someone who will not speak to you?

PRK: The big guiding principle for me is writing it in a way that feels intimate enough that someone who isn’t reading it all that closely won’t even realize I didn’t talk to the subject. It’s a great point of pride for me when people ask, “What was it like to meet Steve Cohen?” and I said explicitly in the piece that he wouldn’t talk to me. In terms of how you do that, I think it’s about getting as close to their current or former inner circle as you can. With that big piece about Mark Burnett, it’s hard to find a substitute for having both of his ex-wives talking to me on record.

As a reader, something I often find missing in write-arounds is the subject’s voice. Literally, at a sentence level, are there plenty of things between quotation marks attributed in a reliable way to the person you’re writing about. I’m working on a book about the Sackler family now. I wrote a piece a few years ago about them and I was hesitant to do a book because they were such a locked box. They wouldn’t talk to me. Some people in their universe talked. A lot didn’t. Their company is privately held, so I couldn’t get records. It was only at the point where there was a lot of litigation that I thought, Oh, wait, maybe there’s a way to do this. Through subpoena, I was able to get internal information and emails. Now, we can actually figure out what someone like Richard Sackler sounds like in a way that will make him come across as a real person and not just a cardboard cutout.

SH: Is there a part of the process you dread or don’t like?

PRK: Having been doing this for quite a while, I thought that there would come a point where I wasn’t filled with this reflexive dread in the hours between when a piece is closed and when it comes out. I still feel huge anxiety. I never sleep well. It’s not that there’s some specific fear, it’s just like Road Runner going off the cliff and he keeps running for a few seconds before he falls.

SH: When it comes to reporting a story or a book, how do you know when you’re done?

PRK: That’s a hard one. I don’t know that I ever feel like I’m done. I’ve gotten better at this and more efficient, but because of the way I approach reporting, there’s a dangerous tendency for the reporting to proliferate outward forever. Every new book you read brings up five other books you should probably read and every new person you talk to gives you the name of five other people.

Years ago, at a certain point in the process, I started saying, “Now I need an outline. I need to stop reporting for the moment, make an outline, figure out what story I’m telling, and have that outline determine the rest of the reporting.” It gets much more straightforward because you see some interesting thing and you’re able to say, “That is interesting, but it’s a rabbit hole. It doesn’t have any place in the piece I’m going to write.” Otherwise I would just report and report forever. It’s important to remember that you have to come back and tell the story.

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