Patrick Radden Keefe on exposing the Sackler family’s links to the opioid crisis | Opioids crisis | The Guardian
▻https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/feb/27/empire-of-pain-patrick-radden-keefe-sackler-opioid-crisis-oxycontin
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Très intéressant portrait de Patrick Radden Keefe.
In the afterword to Say Nothing, he describes his approach as “narrative non-fiction”. How would he define the term? He thinks for a moment. “I worked as a research assistant for thehistorian Simon Schama at Columbia and he would always talk about narrative history – that he was not just writing for other historians. In my own way, I want to write something that is sophisticated and rigorous but approachable by anyone. You don’t have to have an interest in big pharma or the Troubles, because hopefully the characters and their dynamics will be rich and intriguing enough that I can pull you into their world.”
His books, I say, are often as suspenseful and as tightly structured as crime fiction. “Well, that’s good to hear… I do use certain devices that may be more familiar from fiction. I’m thinking about a person reading my book on the subway. You don’t take that reader for granted, so you cannot be shy about thinking about character and suspense and editing in a way that’s compelling for the reader.”
For Say Nothing, which explores the darkest aspects of the Troubles through a single killing, Keefe drew on long interviews given to others – including the veteran Irish journalist and author Ed Moloney – by former IRA members. One of them was with Dolours Price, who before her death admitted that she had driven McConville across the border into County Louth, where she was executed. I wondered if Keefe’s interest in the dark dramas of the Troubles emerged from his Irish-American upbringing.
“People see my name and know I come from Boston, so they often assume I must have some personal connection, which is not true. I’d never heard of Dolours Price until I read her obituary in 2013, but she was so fascinating on so many levels. This was someone who took people across the River Styx, but, in middle age, she was having misgivings. The collision between her beliefs and her humanity was right there on the surface.”
Is the saga of the Sacklers is a quintessentially American tale, I wonder. He mulls this over for a long moment. “On one level, yes, because it illustrates the belief that many immigrants have that you can come to America, and in the space of one lifetime, completely transform the fortunes of your family, rise to the pinnacle of society and leave your mark on your new country. But it is also a story about corporate impunity and impunity for the super-rich. The whole last third of the book is about the bad guy getting away with it in the end. To me, that’s a story I could just as readily see taking place in London, as indeed it has – because many of the Sacklers are based there. You have to remember that OxyContin generated upwards of $35bn. That buys a level of influence that is hard to fathom.”