Patrick Radden Keefe: ‘Gerry Adams is sort of similar to the Sacklers, in that he seems to sleep quite well at night’ – The Irish Times
▻https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/2022/07/02/patrick-radden-keefe-interview-gerry-adams-is-sort-of-similar-to-the-sac
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Keefe studied law at Yale and international relations at Cambridge but these things were just a “fallback”. He always wanted to write long-form journalism. His first New Yorker rejection letter is framed in his office. “I was a first-year student in college when the OJ Simpson verdict came down and there was a piece in the New Yorker... by Henry Louis Gates. He wrote a piece called Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man where he was looking at the OJ Simpson verdict and he interviewed a whole series of prominent black intellectuals. It was a long piece that might take you 45 minutes to read and it just felt as though he’d taken an issue and just worked it from every conceivable point of view.”
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He loves journalism that takes time. “You know, the Twitter abbreviation ‘TLDR? Too long, didn’t read’?” he asks. “I write a 10,000-word piece about a subject that feels inherently complex and people will say, ‘TLDR. What’s the gist?’ I wouldn’t have spent six months working on this if I felt that it could be fairly reduced to a bumper sticker.”
Does he feel that tradition of American long-form journalism is endangered by a world of hot takes? “I think what’s endangered is people spending the money and the time to do all the reporting. I’d say the average length of time I spent on a piece that’s in that book is probably six months of near full-time work... I’d interview 25, 30 sometimes 40 people for a piece. There’s a story in there about [the corporate exploitation of] Guinea where they sent me to West Africa, they sent me to France twice, they sent me to England... That stuff is expensive and I think it is endangered.”
He rarely tells the reader how to think or feel. “I find really didactic writing to be boring and patronising... I was mad as hell when I was writing [Empire of Pain]. It’s impossible not to be. And I know from readers that they get more and more angry as they read. But I think there’s a tone of writing that you saw a lot of in the Trump years, where the writer is furious and the reader is furious and we’re furious together and we commune in our fury and I really didn’t want to do that. It feels almost pornographic in its predictability... With this, I felt like the material is so shocking, I actually need to assume a very dry narrative voice. And occasionally you can see that I’m being a little withering or caustic but by and large, I’m just presenting it to you.”
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