On wrestling with asking tough questions

Suffering hurts a little less when you talk about it

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Asking tough questions sucks. But it’s worth it.

At a coffee shop on a Sunday morning, I interviewed a man whose wife had died of cancer. As she withered away, he had to drain excess fluid from her lungs or she’d drown under the weight of it. That fluid, usually about a liter, filled a glass jar. He was left standing with it, in his hands, right there in his house, while their kids watched a movie in the other room.

As he told me the story, I worried I might cry, thinking about that jar, full of warm and red liquid that was killing his wife. He was roughly my age, his wife was roughly my wife’s age, and his kids were roughly my kids’ ages. As we talked, I could almost feel the bottle in my hands. I thought for a second and said, “I’m sorry for asking this question. But what did you do with that jar?”

Of all the questions I’ve asked in thousands upon thousands of interviews, that is the one I think about the most.

That’s in part because of the question itself and in part because of his answer.

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In this era of fake news and alternative facts and the increasing difficulty of discerning truth from fiction, I’ve thought a lot about the questions I’ve asked and the answers I’ve been given and the consequences of both. I wonder how many times people have lied to me and I don’t know. I wonder how many questions I haven’t asked that I should have. And I wonder how many questions I asked that I shouldn’t have.

Learning to ask difficult questions is like learning to run long distances. You can run one mile one day, two the next, etc. You only learn to do it by doing it.

Almost every major profile I write involves resilience—something horrible happens to somebody, and that somebody responds with … well, what they respond with is usually what the story is about.

It’s impossible for me to understand a person’s rebound if I don’t understand what he or she is rebounding from, so I spend a lot of time talking to people about the worst days of their lives.

It’s a delicate dance. I try not to assume someone is OK with talking about the trauma, though if they agree to the interview that certainly suggests they are. Sometimes I “warn” people that I plan to ask them about the dark days. It’s a roundabout way of asking for permission.

Sometimes I don’t know about trauma and only find out about it when they tell me. A former Marine once told me, out of the blue as we ate dinner in what I thought was a simple “pre-interview” before a fly-fishing adventure the next day, that she had been gang raped by fellow Marines. I was so stunned I asked no follow ups because I was wholly unprepared to do so and I didn’t want to say anything stupid.

My questions often aren’t even questions, they are more like empathetic active-listening interjections—“that’s terrible,” “that sucks” and “oh my gosh, are you serious?”

I sometimes worry that I am writing “grief porn,” that is, taking advantage of someone else’s sorrow. That feeling almost always goes away once I start asking questions. Far more often than not, people are not only willing to talk, they want to talk about the horrible thing.

People tell me often that they rarely talk about the subject, and I have concluded that it’s not because they don’t want to, it’s because nobody asks them to. It’s bottled up inside, like the cancer that was killing the wife. They see talking about it as a way to redeem that pain.

The first emotionally difficult story I wrote involved a boy who died of leukemia. I was only four years into my career, and I was not remotely qualified emotionally to write the story. His parents told me that the interview with me was the most they had talked about him since he died.

That made me sad for them.

A few years ago, I interviewed the family of a college football player who had died after head injuries suffered in practice. I interviewed a lot of his friends, and his parents asked me to send them whatever stories his friends told me that did not make it into the article I wrote. The stories kept him alive.

The first, “just ask the question” lesson I got came when I worked at my college newspaper. There were rumors that a high-ranking university official had used his high-ranking university official key card to sneak into the activity center to carouse in a hot tub with a woman who was not his wife.

I had interviewed this high-ranking university official several times and gotten to know him a little bit. Looking back on it now, I wonder if he was mentoring me without me knowing it. He realized I was dancing around the subject, because he said, “is there something you want to ask me?”

“Yeah. Did you do it?”

“No,” he said and waited a beat. “And I wouldn’t tell you if I did.”

I could read a thousand books about interviewing and endlessly study the questions my favorite writers ask but none of that will change the way I interview as much as becoming a father did. Now I conduct interviews as if I’m talking to other parents at the park as our kids play.

At first the transformation of my interview technique happened on accident. I didn’t even realize I was doing it. Now I do it on purpose all the time. Questions I learned to ask at the playground take interviews places I could never predict beforehand.

I was interviewing a football player’s mom once. She was hilarious and insightful and just pure joy to talk to. She told me she had attended all of his games except one, which she watched poolside with a daiquiri in hand at a resort in Las Vegas. We had been on the phone for more than an hour when I asked her a question I never would have thought to ask before I was a parent: “Does he look like you or your husband?”

I only asked it because I thought she’d have a great answer. She had funny stories for everything, surely she’d have one for this.I had no intention of using the answer in my story. There was a strange pause. I thought, does she not know the answer? Then she blurted out, “he’s black, I’m white, his mom and dad are both dead, my husband is his uncle, we adopted him, and you can’t use any of that.”

I didn’t know any of that. I had done a lot of research on this player, and nobody had written any of that. We chit-chatted for a few more minutes and then I ended the interview. In a hyper-literal sense, I suppose I could have argued that she couldn’t tell me something and then take it off the record. Hard-core journalists would say something is off the record only if both parties agree beforehand. But that’s not how I operate. Plus, she was a proud mom, not a media savvy politician. Still, I wanted to use the information.

I called her back the next day.

I got the sense she knew I was going to call.

“I know you wish you hadn’t told me all of that yesterday.”

“You’re right.”

“But you did. And I can’t write a profile of him knowing all of that and leave it out.”

“You’re right,” she said. She told me she didn’t want her son to think she was blabbing his deep secrets. She also told me another writer had interviewed her in person for an hour and a half and never asked how it was that she was white and her son was African American. She seemed surprised by that, like she thought it was a natural question.

I’m not sure I would have asked a question like that point-blank either. Anyway, she concocted “an out” for both of us by which I would tell her son how I found all that out. She referenced a specific game and said, “tell him you saw me on TV, and you asked why I’m white.”

I didn’t love that idea. I didn’t want to set up an extremely difficult question with a lie, even if it was relatively harmless. But I did it, because I was willing to cover for her, one blabber-mouth parent looking out for another.

I spent hours agonizing exactly when and how to ask the question … and once I finally did, he refused to talk about it. It wound up as two paragraphs in a five-page magazine story.

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Another time I covered a controversy that started when a police official blamed an increase in crime on an influx of new residents who had transferred to my town from elsewhere to work in one of our plants.

A union official representing those people was furious at the police official. He told me repeatedly that those were high-paying jobs that had been brought to the community and that the police should be grateful to have them here, not blame them for crimes they didn’t commit.

After he used that “high-paying jobs” expression multiple times, I asked him what he meant by “high paying.” I told him my editor surely would ask me that question when I turned the story in.

He got so mad at me for asking that question that he never spoke to me again.

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Back to the coffee shop and that most memorable question.

The truth is I waited quite a while from when I thought of that question before asking it. I didn’t want to blurt something like that out. Eventually I decided that if I was wondering what he did with the jar, a reader would wonder, too.

He told me he had asked the doctor what to do with it, and he followed those instructions.

He made sure his kids couldn’t see, and then he put it in the garbage.