You do stick to the facts, but your writing is more suspenseful, more compelling, than fiction. Mark Twain said that ‘truth is stranger than fiction,’ adding, with his dry humour, because truth doesn’t have to stick to the facts. Ideally, one sort of reader can just inhale the book as if it were a novel - a frictionless reading experience - and another sort of reader can be checking endnotes and auditing my sources and engaging with the text in a very different way. My books have extensive endnotes, though I’m no academic the notes are there so that the skeptical reader can check my work.
But at the same time, there is an empirical rigor that comes with journalism (good journalism, anyway) which I hope means that the reader can trust what I am relating. I know that what I do has a certain literary ambition, a desire not just to relate information but to capture character and scene and drama in an artful way. I don’t get too hung up on the semantics. Is there a difference between a journalist and a writer? It took me years and years of pitching and rejection before they finally gave me an assignment, and because I enjoyed being in school and felt that I should probably have some sort of backup plan in the event that the New Yorker did not come to its senses and finally hire me, I ended up accumulating graduate degrees until they finally accepted a pitch. But, as I soon learned, it was one thing to have the aspiration and quite another to make it a reality. I always wanted to be a journalist, and more specifically a New Yorker journalist, going right back to when I first discovered the magazine as a teenager. What made you decide to become a journalist? You have a masters in international relations from Cambridge, a masters in science from the London School of Economics, and a law degree from Yale. Co-owner of Bookoccino caught up with the globe-trotting Patrick Radden Keefe for a chat about journalism, investigative reporting and how to craft a page turner. His New Yorker profiles of “Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks” are collected in his new book Rogues, one of our top picks for 2022. His books range from The Troubles in Ireland (The Prize-winning Say Nothing) to an expose of the family that gave us opioids ( Empire of Pain: The Secret History of Sackler Dynasty). Patrick Radden Keefe is one of the most acclaimed masters of literary journalism.
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