How Rick Bragg Became His Generation’s Bard of the South
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The first time I spoke with the writer Rick Bragg, he was driving his truck in Calhoun County, where he grew up, a rural area fifty miles east of Birmingham, Alabama, surrounded by what he once called “the endless, beautiful, hateful rows of cotton.” As he recounts in his 1997 memoir, “All Over but the Shoutin’,” his mother, Margaret, picked that cotton while his father, Charles, was off getting drunk. These days, Bragg lives with Margaret nearby, in a red-cedar cabin on forty acres of pastureland grazed upon by two miniature donkeys. The day before we first spoke, over the phone in July, Bragg had brought Margaret home from the hospital, where she’d been recovering from pneumonia. At eighty-nine, she has also survived colon cancer and congestive heart failure. “More than that, she survived my daddy and my little brother, Mark,” Bragg told me. Mark died last year, at sixty-two, from cancer; Bragg’s older brother, Sam, had also succumbed to the disease a few years earlier, at sixty-four. Charles died of complications from alcoholism in 1975. “I’m the last one left,” Bragg said.
When Bragg takes calls from his truck, he tends to finish them there. He parked beside a stand of old pine trees where he remained for most of an hour. “There aren’t that many people to talk writing with,” he said, sounding lonesome. Since the mid-nineteen-nineties, Bragg has been among the most popular Southern writers of nonfiction and memoir. He recited a favorite line from “Land O’Goshen,” a book by another Alabamian, the novelist Charles McNair: “If the biggest, fanciest chandelier in the whole world fell off the back of a pickup truck doing ninety miles an hour, the blacktop road would look like the sky that night over The Secret Place.” “That’s pretty damn good, right?” Bragg said.
Bragg was born near Possum Trot, Alabama, in 1959. He and his brothers spent their summers stacking pulpwood for minimum wage, and each of them tried, in his own way, to protect their mother from the rages of their father, a veteran of the Korean War. But they did not grow up to be close. “The only thing we ever really had to talk about was this truck,” Bragg told me, referring to the red 1986 Ford Bronco that he’d bought in 1993. “Trucks mean something to us.” Bragg purchased the Bronco when he was a reporter at the St. Petersburg Times, in Florida. He’d spotted an ad for it in the newspaper. He was thirty-four, at his first big paper, a decade into a career that had emerged from his realization that he loved writing in an all-consuming way—“like some men love women.” At the St. Petersburg Times, he was a feature writer, free to roam. The truck ferried him from story to story. “I buried it in mud and cottonmouths,” he said. “I drove it through a hurricane, a wildfire, a Mardi Gras. I did things with it that you need a tank for.” Then he headed west, to the Los Angeles Times, before turning around and joining the New York Times, in 1994, where he became a national correspondent and eventually won a Pulitzer.
When Bragg got back to the East Coast from L.A., he gave the truck to his brother Sam, who worked in a cotton mill and volunteered in search and rescue. “He drove it over every mountain in northeast Alabama,” Bragg said. “He drove it for a decade, to do the things that good men do.” When Bragg returned again to Alabama, in 2003, to write books, Sam gave the truck back to him. Bragg had it for the next several years. “Then my little brother, Mark, went to Holman prison,” he said. “He did two years down there, essentially for having more D.U.I.s than any other human being in the history of the state of Alabama.” When Mark was released, Bragg gave him the keys to the Bronco. “And that’s the way that truck’s history developed: it passed not from the oldest to the youngest but to the one who needed it most.”
Now the Bronco is a story vehicle: Bragg is writing about the thirty years and three hundred thousand miles that he and his brothers shared in that truck. He began reciting what he’d got down so far. “The first line in the book is—and I’m cursed with this kind of memory about writing—‘My little brother,’ comma, ‘too drunk to know better and running from the law,’ comma, ‘missed his turn at Reads Mill and sank our truck in Ohatchee Creek.’ Period. And the next line is ‘It was only three feet deep,’ comma, ‘but he was too hammered to tell.’ Period. ‘So he climbed up on the hood and kind of posed there,’ comma, ‘kind of listing and wobbling,’ comma, ‘but proud.’ ”
Bragg told me other stories that he planned to include in the book, some of which seemed to seek gallows humor in alcoholism: the time, for instance, that Mark got so drunk on homemade liquor that he “hallucinated a road through a forest.” “He made it a half mile, knocking down little trees. Then he hit a giant elm just head on,” Bragg said. “And so I guess—in journalism, we call it the ‘kicker’ to that graf—the kicker is ‘God’s own drunk,’ in quotes, ‘my mama called him.’ Period. And then my big brother said, ‘More likely Ford just made one mean damn truck.’ And so, once I wrote that paragraph, I thought, Yeah, I think we got a book.” Bragg went on, “The point of the book is that no matter what we did to the truck it always started right back up again. Idling in that kind of . . . you know how old Fords have that thumping sound? That thumping idle? The graf ends with ‘Idling in that thumping sound like it was immortal. And as long as we were behind the wheel, so were we.’ ”
“Bronco Boys,” as Bragg is calling the work in progress, will be his thirteenth and, probably, final book. Bragg is sixty-seven, and his kidneys are not in good shape. He told me, “I wake up in the morning and I go sit in my chair like the old guy that I am. I look at that array of medicine, and then I mix it all together like a chemist. I get it all down. And I’m grateful, quite frankly, because I still have a lot to do.”
Margaret named Bragg after Ricky Ricardo, from “I Love Lucy.” He grew up in abject poverty. The family enjoyed exactly two luxuries: occasional visits to a drive-in movie theatre, and PeeWee Johnson’s Dixie Dip, whose foot-long hot dogs Margaret carefully cut in half and distributed to her children. By his own account, Bragg was a C student who thought that he might grow up to be a truck driver. He drove fast and recklessly, chasing girls and preferring to “live for the moment and let tomorrow slide,” as he later wrote. He took journalism in high school only because it “was supposed to be easy,” and he got a hall pass for it, but when he had enough money to enroll in a single college class, at nearby Jacksonville State, he picked feature writing. He joined the school paper, then the staff of a local weekly. Bragg later wrote that the weekly had first offered the job to another writer, but “he already had a steady job at the Kentucky Fried Chicken, so he turned it down.”
Bragg kicked around various Alabama papers for a decade, until, in 1989, he moved to the St. Petersburg Times. In his stories, he mined pain with the vernacular of the impoverished but proud rural South. A friend of his came to call him “the misery writer.” He wrote—sometimes overwrote—about chicken-killing bobcats, Siamese twins, and race riots. Words such as “reckon” and “ragged” crop up repeatedly in his pieces. Ragged Bibles. Ragged grass. Raggedy cars. Overalls, both ragged and raggedy. When he reached the New York Times, his unflattering newsroom nickname was Haystacks Calhoun.
Bragg started on the Times’ Metro desk, focussed on New York City and the five boroughs, but the paper mostly based him in the South, including in its Atlanta bureau, where he wrote about tornadoes and swamps, sheriffs and housekeepers. “Rick had this incredible reputation for embodying the myth of what a lot of people wanted to believe about the South,” David Firestone, a former Times colleague in the region, told me. “That it was a special place, that it had this history that could only be told in a certain way.” Bragg poeticized his regionally predictable subjects with startling particularity. In 1995, he wrote about an unschooled Black laundress in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, who willed her estate to finance scholarships for Black students at the University of Southern Mississippi, a bequest that locals referred to as the Gift. He visited her a few years before her death, and in the resulting piece recounted that “to her, the Gift was a preparation, like closing the bedroom windows to keep the rain from blowing in on the bedspread.”
“There’s a saying in rural Georgia,” Dink NeSmith, a publisher of numerous small newspapers in the South and a friend of Bragg’s, told me recently: “He puts it down where the goats can get it.” In 1996, Bragg won a feature-writing Pulitzer for a selection of stories, including one about a prison for geriatrics in Alabama, which begins, “Grant Cooper knows he lives in prison, but there are days when he cannot remember why. His crimes flit in and out of his memory like flies through a hole in a screen door, so that sometimes his mind and conscience are blank and clean.”
That same year, Bragg took a leave from the Times to write “All Over but the Shoutin’.” Random House published it in 1997. Charles McNair remembers Bragg fretting about its reception over a plate of fried chicken. “He had a chip on his shoulder the size of Alabama,” McNair told me. “He wanted everyone else to know that a ’Bama boy from nowhere could write better stories than people who judged him for his roots.”
A Times review called “Shoutin’ ” a book of “majesty and power . . . in the tradition of Huck and Tom, Holden Caulfield and Dorothy Allison’s Bone Boatwright, of Richard Wright and Harry Crews.” The book catapulted Bragg into conversation with other noted Southern stylists, including Charles Frazier and Pat Conroy; the latter, Bragg told me, left him long voice mails at odd hours. Once, Conroy called and lamented, “Ours could have been a father-son relationship, but you spurned me to go associate with the Yankees of the New York Times.” Janisse Ray, the author of the 1999 memoir “Ecology of a Cracker Childhood,” remembered sitting next to Bragg at a book signing. “One woman, when her turn came, leaned over and said to him, ‘I want to be a writer, too. For years, I read Truman Capote every morning for inspiration. Now I read you.’ ”
“Shoutin’ ” made Bragg famous. It also made a few relatives uneasy. “Some of my kinfolk treated the book like there’s a snake in the house,” he told me. Once, before a reading, a family member told him not to go on that night, because a relative had threatened to attack him; in the end, Bragg appeared onstage with “two big old burly police officers standing on either end.”
Alongside Mary Karr’s “The Liars’ Club” and Frank McCourt’s “Angela’s Ashes,” “Shoutin’ ” helped propel a memoir boom that would last decades. It also demonstrated the commercial appeal of stories about rural America, laying the groundwork for other successes—including, eventually, that of an ambitious young man from the rust belt named J. D. Vance. (“Why would you write a book like ‘Hillbilly Elegy’—from what I understand about it—and then spend your professional life trying to grind their face into the dirt?” Bragg asked me.) Bragg often gets asked why so many Southerners are good storytellers. “I think it’s the amount of suffering,” he said earlier this year, citing the Civil War and the civil-rights movement. “That turmoil and that suffering and that—here’s another one of those forty-dollar words—that pathos lends itself to good storytelling.”
When Bragg started at the Times, in 1994, one of his backers was Howell Raines, a fellow-Alabamian who oversaw the Times’ editorial page, and later became the paper’s top editor. Raines recalled Bragg telling him that the L.A. Times “had promised me a Cadillac and didn’t deliver,” but that “the New York Times promised me a Corolla and made good on it”—a reference to how, according to Bragg, the L.A. Times had initially said that he was free to follow his muse, whereas in New York he was confined to the goings-on of the boroughs. Some colleagues saw Bragg as a loner, but he and Raines became close enough that Bragg would attend Raines’s wedding reception.
Bragg’s Metro work frequently found its way to page 1, just as the work of former Metro reporters Gay Talese, Anna Quindlen, and Dan Barry had. But some in the newsroom doubted the integrity of Bragg’s methods. Michael Oreskes, the section’s then editor, told me, comparing Bragg’s work to that of Talese, Quindlen, and Barry, “What’s shared by those other names was a strong ability to unite singular writing with great reporting.” Bragg’s work struck David Gonzalez, the paper’s Bronx bureau chief and its “About New York” columnist, as novelistic, noting that his front-page stories from neighborhoods such as West Harlem required sourcing that most reporters would need to spend significant time cultivating. In a piece about a spate of bodega robberies and killings, for instance, Bragg quoted a clerk as saying, “When I leave here, I am like a bird in the air, flying. I am free.” “I didn’t believe it,” Gonzalez told me. “You just don’t waltz into a city and come up with poetry like that. You don’t get those perfect quotes.”
“He wasn’t a reporter in any full and fair understanding of that title,” Joe Sexton, a Times colleague who later ran the Metro and Sports desks, told me. “I think he was hired because he was understood as this kind of poet of the beleaguered South who could help Times readers better understand a part of the country that many might be ignorant of or unconcerned with.” (Max Frankel, the former executive editor at the Times who hired Bragg, is deceased.) There was a long tradition of prominent Southern writers at the Times before Bragg, including Claude Sitton and John Herbers, who covered the civil-rights era. But in Bragg’s case some sensed a certain performance. “It was a ‘Mr. Bojangles’ thing,” Sexton said. “Rick, grab your banjo. Sing us that song again about the down and out.”
In 1999, Bragg left the Atlanta bureau for Miami, where he shared an office with Gonzalez, who had become the Central American and Caribbean bureau chief, based in Florida. Bragg was “a nice guy,” Gonzalez recalled, if a little cocky. “He said he had some Faulkner in him.” In Miami, Gonzalez watched him lean on an office manager for Spanish help, and on stringers for reporting. “He hardly left the office,” Gonzalez said. Amie Parnes, who assisted Bragg and a few other Times staffers in Miami, and who has since become a political journalist and an author, told me, “He taught me rhythm and cadence. I remember he would line up his paragraphs so that they all sort of—it’s hard to explain—so that the words would all line up. He’s the prettiest writer, I think, of our time.” David Firestone, who replaced Bragg as the national correspondent in Atlanta in 1999, told me, “Everywhere I went in the South, people would ask about him. I think it was the governor of Tennessee, at one point, who says to me, ‘Hey, is that Rickie Skaggs still working for the Times?’ I knew he was not referring to the mandolin player. He said, ‘Man, that guy can tell a story.’ ”
The story sometimes preëmpted the reporting. When Dale Earnhardt, Sr., died in a crash at the Daytona 500, in 2001, Bragg’s then editor told him to go to the racer’s home town, in North Carolina. “Rick didn’t want to do it,” the editor recalled—though he reminded me that it had been a long time since the incident. “God, he bitched and moaned.” The editor, who eventually prevailed on Bragg, continued, “He calls me after he lands, and he starts reading to me the top of his story. And I’m, like, ‘Rick, you’re barely in Charlotte. Why don’t you do some reporting?’ ” Luisita Lopez Torregrosa, who edited some of Bragg’s national-desk stories in the early two-thousands, found him to be an “imaginative” writer with an “earthy” feel for language. But, she told me recently, she soon developed concerns “regarding his repertorial method.” Torregrosa went on, “Meaning: Were the quotes accurate? Did he really meet these very fascinating people?” But when she questioned him about things, he always had answers.
The Truman Capote fan whose copy of “Shoutin’ ” Bragg signed years ago did not invoke Capote’s more complicated legacy as a fabulist who invented scenes and quotes. Like Capote, Bragg didn’t use tape recorders. “I only used notebooks,” he told me. Not long ago, when I visited Bragg at home, I asked whether he’d kept those notebooks. He mostly had not, he said.
At sixty-seven, Bragg is bearded and paunchy, with a thinning crown. The final stretch of my drive to his house had taken me past double-wides, furniture-strewn yards, and an old sign that read “HAMAS, ISIS, Alqueda are pulling for Kamala. Don’t be stupid again.” Bragg, who is a Democrat, told me, “I believe in the kindness of these people. But, man, when you get them together in an electorate, it’s different.”
Bragg and I sat in the dimly lit living room, where Margaret watched TV. During commercials, she talked about Bragg’s writing career. “It was hard for me to read that book,” she said, of “Shoutin’.” “I’d read a little bit and then I’d cry sometimes. I mean, it brought back memories. But then the next time I would go back and pick it up and he mixed it up”—by making her laugh. “And I think that’s why everyone liked that book.”
She’d made only one edit, Bragg recalled: demanding a removal of the F-word. “I said, ‘Well, Momma, it’s in a quote.’ I’ll never forget—Mom said, ‘Whose picture is that on that book?’ ” A young Margaret stares out from the cover.
“I told him so many stories, which is all true,” Margaret said. “And his book is all true. And that’s what to me was important.”
Bragg’s newspaper career ended abruptly, in May, 2003, following the publication of a Times story, almost a year earlier, that he wrote about oystermen in Florida. The piece began with a description of a boat:
The story carried only Bragg’s byline, but he had depended heavily on a stringer. The stringer had felt the chug of that boat and heard the clap of the mullet, not Bragg.
This was a violation of a “solemn and binding commitment,” a former Times editor told me, citing the Times Stylebook rules in effect then. Raines concurred. “It was understood that correspondents would exercise common sense in regard to information from stringers and dateline integrity,” he told me. “It was also understood that fudging was not an option.” The Times’ belated discovery of Bragg’s malpractice emerged through an unlikely incident that has not been reported in full. In 2003, an attorney in New York travelled to Apalachicola, Florida, to visit family, and stepped into a local photography gallery run by a man named Richard Bickel. The attorney told Bickel that some of his photographs reminded her of a Times story about the area’s oystermen, and Bickel told her that he’d taken the photograph that ran with the piece. “She asked what he”—meaning Bragg—“was like to work with,” Bickel recently recalled. “I said, ‘Well, he wasn’t here. I worked directly with an intern.’ ” (Bragg later said that he briefly set foot in the area to claim the dateline—text at the top of a story noting where the reporting took place—a discouraged practice known as a toe-tap.)
The attorney wrote a letter to the Times. A week after her visit, the paper called Bickel. “I’m here in Florida pulling weeds when I get this odd call,” Bickel told me. Several Times leaders were on the phone, and they asked him whether he had ever met Bragg. He told them that he had not. A few years later, Bickel saw the intern again, who confirmed that he had worked on the story with Bragg. “I kinda feel bad that I let the cat out of the bag,” Bickel said. “The story was on the money.” (Multiple Times staffers from that period confirmed this series of events. The letter writer declined to comment. The former intern could not be reached.) Raines, then the paper’s top editor, requested Bragg’s resignation. “Dismissing Rick was a painful decision, as I regard him as one of the most gifted reporters I encountered in a long career,” Raines told me. But, he said, “We had a long, regretful conversation that convinced me he had cut corners. He expressed understanding for what I had to do.” Bragg resigned.
The Bragg affair came shortly after the Blair affair. Jayson Blair, a national-desk reporter, had written dozens of stories containing fabrications, setting off what the historian and former Times journalist David Halberstam called “probably the worst internal crisis in my memory.” At the time, Bragg publicly claimed, in his own defense, that Times journalists often leaned on uncredited reporters. “There is a huge gap in byline policy and byline practices here,” he said. Other national correspondents at the paper, e-mailing among themselves, called Bragg “poison,” and his methods “aberrant and repellent.” Firestone was among those who publicly took Bragg to task. “I think the kind of work he does is a perfect fit in between the covers of a book,” Firestone told me. “I don’t think it was necessarily a perfect fit in the pages of the New York Times . . . an institution that values meticulousness.” A former Times editor told me, “I’ve often thought, Why isn’t Rick just a fiction writer? He was incredibly enamored of his own words.” Others put it more pointedly. “He had no business in the newspaper,” Gonzalez told me. Sexton said, “What he did was an act of intellectual and spiritual fraud.”
Amie Parnes, the former Times assistant in Miami, insisted that several other Times writers on assignment in the region had relied on her as Bragg did, but she could not recall their names. Editors with a wider view of Times affairs—and perhaps reason to protect the paper—disagreed. Oreskes, a twenty-seven-year Times veteran, told me that Bragg’s practices were highly unusual. “It was certainly commonplace to receive ‘feeds’ from colleagues,” Oreskes said. But he clarified that using a stringer to report out a non-deadline feature “would have been out of the ordinary.” In retrospect, Oreskes added, referring to Bragg, “we all could have helped him more to integrate the news-gathering with the storytelling.” (Following the scandal, according to a former national desk editor, the paper expanded its byline policy to more frequently include multiple contributors.)
These days, Bragg no longer regularly reads the paper of record. The longtime Times reporter Adam Nagourney told me that Bragg was also among the very few former writers who declined to talk to him for “The Times,” his 2023 chronicle of the past fifty years at the paper. “I really tried,” Nagourney said. Unlike other reluctant sources, though, Bragg wouldn’t even help him with fact checking.
Bragg told me that he’s too busy to talk about the Times. He spends much of his time caring for his mother. When she’s looked after by someone else, he drives a couple of hours southwest in his current truck, a Tundra, to the University of Alabama, in Tuscaloosa, where he teaches magazine writing one day a week. (In anonymous online reviews, students have called him both “arrogant” and “very encouraging.”) He also visits fried-chicken joints and “grand hotels gone to seed” for essays in Southern Living, whose editor praised his “supernatural” writing abilities.
In early August, Bragg took me to one of his favorite barbecue joints in Anniston. I brought up his Times tenure over smoked chicken, and Bragg bristled. “Everything that I did at the time, I’d do again,” he told me. “Nobody likes to be picked at, and certainly not somebody like me. So I quit.” When Bragg resigned, he had already signed a contract with Knopf to write two books, and would soon sign another book deal worth a million dollars, which would be split between him and his subject, the former Army private Jessica Lynch. Howell Raines also stepped down and soon began work on a memoir of his own. Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., the Times’ publisher, had wanted to keep Raines, but the newsroom had lost faith in him, and Sulzberger ultimately told him he had to go. In “The Times,” Nagourney writes that Raines might have survived “if not for Rick Bragg.” Raines last spoke with Bragg earlier this year. He still regards Bragg with “respect and affection,” he told me, but he believes that Bragg “has invented a narrative of victimization that simply does not match the facts.” Bragg, he said, holds “a grudge” that has “only hardened over the years.”
Bragg’s books since his resignation have examined his bootlegging grandfather, an illiterate man who was a spellbinding storyteller; a grandmother who was, as Bragg writes, “a half bubble off plumb”; a twenty-first-century Appalachian community of cotton-mill workers; and Jerry Lee Lewis, one of his favorite musicians. In 2021, he published “The Speckled Beauty: A Dog and His People,” another best-seller. “I ain’t going to lie,” Bragg told me. “I made a good living from nostalgia. Nostalgia is as powerful a force in writing as I know.”
As I reread “Shoutin’ ” recently, I noticed Bragg’s tendency to preëmptively insist that he is “not making this up.” He says so after telling a story about a fishing guide in the Everglades who confessed to Bragg of having “et”—that is to say, eaten—“dog.” After describing how Mark, drunk and running from the law, found refuge in a church mid-sermon, Bragg writes, “I could not make that story up if I tried.” He also suggests that there is a difference between accuracy and truth. During his first year at the Times, he returned to northeastern Alabama to cover a disaster: a tornado had rearranged the landscape and taken twenty lives, including those of six children in a church. Bragg wrote a piece that begins, “This is a place where grandmothers hold babies on their laps under the stars and whisper in their ears that the lights in the sky are holes in the floor of heaven.” In “Shoutin’,” Bragg recounts that he received an outpouring of mail in response to the piece, concluding, “It wasn’t that I had gotten it right—God knows I mess up a lot—but that I had gotten it true.”
I asked Bragg about that line. What’s the difference? He paused, before saying, finally, “It’s the feeling.” He went on, “Because, at the end of the day, the feeling is what’s going to last. The numbers will shift.”
Could that feeling of truth be arrived at via extra-factual means? Earlier this year, Bragg told an audience at a library in Newnan, Georgia, “There ain’t no better way to illustrate a point than to exaggerate it slightly. But I’m trying not to do that in my old age.” A couple of times, Bragg also caught himself telling me things he apparently did not believe. At one point, I asked whether he still had a chip on his shoulder—the one that he frequently notes in “Shoutin’ ” and that acquaintances, such as McNair, could see. “It ceases to matter very much,” he began. Then he said, “I just told a flat lie. It’s there, because I’m not convinced that we change very much in a lifetime. I always hated that word: ‘Well, he reinvented himself.’ But no, he didn’t. He just found a way to make what he was doing work again.”
After lunch, Bragg and I went to see the old Bronco. The truck sits down the road from the cedar cabin, on some brush-covered acres where Mark lived out his last years. “It rots and it rusts on a pine hill,” Bragg had told me. “My little brother beat it to death.” After a jouncing climb up an unpaved driveway, the Bronco came into view: an old red truck disappearing beneath weeds, beside a run-down trailer. I couldn’t say whether the truck’s front end had collided with an elm during one of Mark’s hallucinations, as Bragg told me it had, but it was in bad shape.
“I gave him money to build a house,” Bragg said, of Mark. “He drank it up and bought this five-hundred-dollar trailer.” The truck had been special to Mark, though. “It gave him dignity,” Bragg said.
We got out as stray dogs barked from a thicket, a few emerging with their tails held high. I ventured toward the truck through tall grass. “Watch for snakes,” Bragg said. Shooting them is one of his pastimes. “Look, I’m sixty-seven years old with kidney failure,” he told me. “Having somebody come after me because I shot a snake—a venomous snake in the grass where my mother puts her feet. Well, they can kiss my ass.”
He turned his attention to the truck. The spare tire had been stolen, and a window was busted open. The vehicle lay exposed to the elements, and to time. Bragg said, “I just kind of want this thing to disappear. Anybody that’s ever spent a summer in the Deep South knows: if you give this place time, it will cover everything up. People say, ‘Well, if you just want it to go away, how could you write a book about it?’ And they don’t understand how writers think. That’s power over a thing. You can chain it with words of your making, and you can put it on a shelf with all the other ghosts in your life.” ♦