I’ve taken a couple weeks off from Nonfiction Nut due to a long-planned dream vacation in Great Britain with Sophie and the boys. It wasn’t, per se, a “literary tour,” but books and history are bound up with the land, and they were a big part of the trip for us, obviously.

In London, we stayed with Sophie’s aunt and uncle in Putney for several action-packed, 100-degree days. London has changed so much since my college semester abroad there in 1999, but the old London is recognizable and my hideously perfect flat on Great Portland Street still stands.

Reading Patrick Radden Keefe’s London Falling prepared me for some of the changes. I thought of that stupendous book while riding the Uber boat on the River Thames. It was surreal, a little scary, to gaze up at the distinctive curved facade of the Riverwalk apartments, directly across the Thames from the MI6 building, and imagine what might’ve gone through Zac Brettler’s mind on that November night in 2019, during his last moments, before leaping from the balcony of unit 501.

Yes, the city has changed, but some new things are delightful, like the Princess Diana Playground, in Kensington Gardens, which reopened this month. North of London, we were hugely fortunate to enjoy what for many is the ultimate biblio-dream: “The Making of Harry Potter,” known simply as “The Experience.” At the Warner Bros Studio in Leavesden, we wandered through Four Privet Drive and the Hogwarts Express, hung out in Gryffindor Tower, rode a Nimbus 2000, and sampled real butter beer, which, if I’m being honest, is the most delicious drink I’ve ever tasted.

As both a steampunk fan and a nonfiction nut, I lingered on the Gringotts vault cart and the art-design room, where you can see the many research books—like Nightmares of Nature—that inspired the filmmakers. No one wanted to leave Diagon Alley.

From London, we drove to the county of Dorset, in southwest England, where we stayed with Sophie’s longtime family friends, Edward and Julia Booth-Clibborn. Edward, now retired, is a towering figure in the history of British book publishing. For decades, as founder of Booth-Clibborn Editions, he published books about art, photography, graphic design, and popular culture. Believing that books, as physical items, tended to be dull, Edward pushed the boundaries of the book medium—mixing paper stocks in a single volume, housing books in inflatable dust jackets, and using all kinds of other intriguing features to make, or build, books about art that were themselves art objects. His monograph on Damien Hirst uses pullouts, popups, and Mylar overlays. Edward is 94 now, but not long ago he was bundling Chicks on Speed with a unisex shift dress.

In 1980, Edward purchased a centuries-old homestead in Dorset. The place, known as Bhompston Farmhouse, was the inspiration for Thomas Hardy’s fictional “Blooms-End,” the Yeobrights’ home in Hardy’s 1878 novel, The Return of the Native.

Today, just about every corner of Bhompston, or Blooms-End, contains books. I found some mind-blowing stuff, as did Felix.

From Dorset we headed up north, to the Lake District. On the way, we stopped in Oxford, where Silas and I lost our minds again at the Bodleian Library. It was not the most fun thing to do to wake up at 7 in order to stand in line for an hour to get tour passes for the Bodleian. But so well worth it! It was heartening, actually, to stand in an early-morning drizzle with the assembled book nerds from all over the globe, like the librarian from Denmark and others who brought chairs to the queue like a Yankees-Sox game.

In the two photos below, Potter fans will recognize the Bodleian’s divinity room as Hogwarts infirmary, and Duke Humfrey’s Library, the oldest reading room at Oxford University, as the mysterious “Restricted Section” of Hogwarts Library.

Felix was too young to come on the Bodleian tour. (We had to say Silas was 11.) But Felix got to see a very cool exhibition at the Weston Library, Pets & their People, where sweet Felix contributed a note about our own dearly departed cat, William Wallace.

The Lake District—oh my. You read about it. Ground zero of literary history. Sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I listen to The Grasmere Journals by Dorothy Wordsworth. Dorothy lived in the village of Grasmere with her poet brother, William, in the early 1800s. Today, Grasmere is still Grasmere. But no poetry could equal the beauty of my wife against the backdrop of Ambleside.

Our trip ended, epically, in Scotland, with a tour of Stirling Castle, a bike around Callander, a hike up to the top of Ben Nevis, and a visit to the Glen Nevis Valley below, where the set of the young William Wallace’s hometown was built for the filming of Braveheart.

Finally, in Edinburgh, we stumbled on some great acts at Fringe Fest, and discovered The Gently Mad Book Shop & Bindery, which is just a short walk from the equally stunning Royal Botanic Garden.

We’ve been home for less than 24 hours, and it already feels like a dream that maybe didn’t happen. An unforgettable 17 days on the road with three of my favorite people. Joy, passion, love, gratitude.

I’m also happy to be back in the office, surrounded by galleys and review copies, the best nonfiction coming out this fall. The publishing industry is on fire. I’ve never seen such a fascinating crop of new books, and I look forward to covering them, one book a week, week by week.

From the depths of my soul, thank you for following along. Without you, I wouldn’t be here. And without being here, I wouldn’t be starting a new writing job in September, when I join Business Insider as books columnist, covering the best new books in the categories of business and self help. For those who’d like to read the column, the pieces will run here at Nonfiction Nut two weeks after they appear at Business Insider.

It’s back to business, back to school. May the year bring wonderful things.

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Hi, Silas. You turn 11 next month. For your birthday you want a job at Nonfiction Nut. For your first assignment, you read two books.

They’re memoirs by migrant workers in China. One is Adrift in the South by Xiao Hai. The other is I Deliver Parcels In Beijing by Hu Anyan. Both authors are writing about being in the factory workforce, and trying to find their place in the world.

Did you connect more with one book than the other?

I felt more of a connection with Adrift in the South. It was very emotional.

Tell us about it.

The author, Xiao Hai, was the third of four children, living with his family in Henan province. His family had a small farm where they grew wheat, corn, peanuts, and cotton. When Xiao was fifteen, his father told him and his older brother that the family could only afford for one of them to continue in high school. So Xiao volunteered to drop out and attend vocational school so he could begin working. But his parents didn’t have money for the vocational school, so they sold farming supplies and raised funds from family. The director of the vocational school said that if they weren’t happy with the curriculum, then they could get a full refund.

Was Xiao happy with the curriculum?

Well, he learned, basically, nothing. But he never told his parents, because he didn’t want them to feel like it was a waste. It wasn’t a total waste, though, because Xiao got a job at a microchip factory in the city of Shenzhen. And that was the beginning of a decades-long journey of factory work, more than twenty jobs, sleeping in hot crowded dorms, working long shifts.

What other kinds of factories did Xiao work at during his career?

He made circuit boards, drawstrings for pants, parts for iPhones. He worked at factories that made clothes for Adidas and Nike. When he was 19, he worked at a garment factory making English football jerseys. He was in charge of doing the red cross. It’s the St. George’s cross, but they called it the “aeroplane skeleton.” He earned two cents per jersey. Each jersey took him three dozen steps to finish. He made about five dollars a day, making jerseys that sold for more than 50 dollars each in England.

Did Xiao ever go home?

He would sometimes go home for the Lunar New Year and his parents would get a matchmaker to try to find him a girlfriend.

Successful?

No, but his life began to improve. He found a garment job at a pajama factory on an island called Meishan. Each worker got their own room, and there was a library where Xiao discovered poetry. He started writing his own poetry while working in the factory. When he scribbled poems on cigarette cartons, he’d get dirty looks from coworkers, but he didn’t care. Poetry made him feel like he was part of the world. He began to see himself as more than a factory worker.

But there was no one to meet on the island, because it was so small. So he returned to urban life and lived with his sister. He kept writing poems, at internet cafes and on his flip phone. Eventually, he got in touch with a famous rock musician who gave him advice on his poetry and what else to read. He discovered the poetry of Alan Ginsburg and the music of Bob Dylan. The musician advised him to focus more on the happy parts of his life rather than just his sorrowful life at the factory.

Did Xiao’s writing ever come between him and his day job?

Yes. When he tried to work as a real estate agent, his boss asked him why he was carrying around a book, and said real estate agents shouldn’t read. They should be present with their clients. So he left. And he took the rock musician’s advice and started writing more cheerful poems. At this point, he was in his early thirties. And the rock musician had a friend, a sculptor in Beijing, who invited Xiao there to follow his dream of becoming poet.

In Beijing, he found a museum that honors factory workers who died. And in the museum he saw all these really sad letters that the factory workers wrote. There was a toy factory that had caught on fire, and 70 women died. And Xiao saw a letter—it’s printed in the book—written by a woman who was working at the toy factory right before she died.

Why was this experience at the museum so meaningful for him?

Because he realized that he was part of a larger legacy of suffering in his country. And then he walked out into the courtyard of the museum, and there was dancing, and he saw his friend, the sculptor, and he realized people were good and life was joyful. In Beijing, he made friends and joined a free literary group that met every Saturday. It was led by different professors, artists, and writers from around China. He became a writer. He published his first book of poems, Howl in the Factory, and then eventually published his memoir, Adrift in the South, in 2017. This year it was translated into English and published by Granta Books.

How did you feel while reading Adrift in the South? Was it revealing, surprising?

The stuff about the labor was surprising. I didn’t know how little they got paid, or about the dorms, or the assembly lines. But it was interesting to follow Xiao’s journey. He was a loner, and he didn’t know what his purpose in life was until he discovered writing.

Did the book change your life?

Yeah. Knowing that people die in factories in China just to make stuff that goes around the world—like the stuff we have all around us. I look at that stuff differently now, with sorrow, but also with gratefulness.

I know you didn’t connect as much with the second book, I Deliver Parcels in Beijing, but was there anything in it that stood out?

The author of I Deliver Parcels in Beijing, Hu Anyan, is also a loner who didn’t know what his life’s purpose was until he discovered writing. But what stood out out for me in that book was how Hu, working night shifts, couldn’t sleep during the day because it was so hot. So he started drinking liquor to fall asleep. And he would read books while he drank, but then in the morning he couldn’t remember what he was reading.

A good lesson about the perils of mixing booze and books. Thanks, Silas. You did an amazing job. Welcome to Nonfiction Nut.

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I always look forward to our hangouts. May every creatively-inclined person have a pal like Matt, whose endless ideas and undefeatable optimism inspire you to get out there, engage, and make stuff. If you’ve been riveted by The Deadliest Catch, enlightened by LA92, mesmerized by Free Solo, gripped by The Cave, enchanted by Messi’s World Cup, or transformed by the challenges undertaken by Chris Hemsworth in Limitless, then Matt is your friend too.

We were eating and drinking when Matt mentioned that he’d recently spoken to Charles Manson’s granddaughter, a young actor and writer in Los Angeles named Sophia, about producing her documentary. Sophia’s father, Daniel, had recently discovered, through DNA testing, that he was Manson’s son. Daniel’s mother had a one-night stand with Manson in 1959, when she was 17 and Manson was 24. Sophia, adjusting to the fact that she was Manson’s granddaughter, was making a film about what this discovery meant for her and her dad.

I knew that the doc, now available on Hulu as My Grandfather Charles Manson, would be great because Matt was working on it. But I wasn’t prepared for how affecting it would be. I caught up with Sophia—who now goes by the last name Maddox, which was Manson’s birth name—and her co-director, Alexandra Orton, who goes by Allie. What follows is an abridged version of our convo.

Sophia, you’re a co-director on this documentary, but also its subject. Had you envisioned being at the center of the film when you set out to make it?

No. The idea started out as more about my dad and Charles. But in the investigative work, I was discovering similarities between Charles and my dad—obviously. So the generational trauma piece was always going to be there. I just didn’t expect for it to be so focused on myself. But when we teamed up with Hulu, they were like, “We need more of you in it.”

Was that terrifying?

I wasn’t really afraid.

I admire your willingness to be vulnerable.

If I was saying I wanted my dad to be a subject and Charles to be a subject, I’d be the world’s biggest hypocrite if I wasn’t able to bring my own vulnerability forward. But I wasn’t thinking about people seeing the movie when we were making it. I just wanted to get something made.

Allie, you’ve produced, written, and directed a ton of ingenious documentaries, from Framing John Delorean to Secrets of Playboy. Had you ever worked as a co-director before?

Not officially, where we’re sharing directing as we did here. But I’ve been hired to be the second person after someone who is new to the job. I think the goal was always that if Sophia, in her two roles, ever needed help, in jumping from one role to the other, I’d be able to flex in whatever direction she needed so that she could take the time to dive into the minutia, but also get that forest-for-the-trees big picture check.

Sophia was an actor long before she discovered the Charles Manson connection, and she’s written her own very sophisticated scripts. With storytelling, she’s a natural. But documentary is a different thing than a scripted production. In scripted, you plan it all out in advance. With doc, you discover the story in the edit. So I could be helpful by being on set and thinking about how it would all cut together in the end.

The filmmaking is very powerful. Sophia, as a young filmmaker, what was an inspiration for you?

My favorite movie is Cool Hand Luke. I love the ending montage of Paul Newman, smiling that Luke smile of his, and I wanted to do something like it here.

You’re 26. It was four years ago that your dad discovered that he’s Charles Manson’s son, and that you, by extension, are Manson’s granddaughter. Can you walk us through that discovery?

My dad, growing, knew that his “father” wasn’t his biological father, and at eighteen he confronted his mom about it. She said, “I don’t know who your dad is.” So he was always wondering, always searching. Then, when I was 15, I saw him spit in a tube and send it off to Ancestry.com. He said, “I’m trying to find my dad.” But we didn’t get any close relative matches for seven or eight years. It was always 3rd cousins, distant cousins. We gave up. But then, in 2022, Michael Brunner, born Michael Brunner Manson, joined Ancestry, and he matched as half brothers with my dad. So we just found out, point blank, in 2022.

So your dad’s mom, your grandma, who had a one-night stand with Charles Manson, never told your dad a word about who his father was?

I think the only story my dad ever got from her was that his father had gone by the name of Charlie Dear, which was an alias of Charles Manson. And my dad also did with his last name, changing it up, because we didn’t know what our real last name was. So we try that one, try this one. My dad went by Daniel Demarest for a bit. We were always trying to find out our real last name, which is why I ended up changing my last name to Maddox [the birth name of Charles Manson] at the end of the documentary.

It was almost like life was leading you down this investigatory path, even if you didn’t know the purpose or where it was leading.

Totally.

We see pieces of your childhood in the doc. There are happy moments with your dad when you’re little, and then really devastating moments when you’re older and your father is saying horrible things to you that should never be said to a child, things that suggest significant dysfunction on his part, whether we’re talking about depression or bipolar disorder or whatever it might be. You experience that abuse before you have any idea of this larger context, with the Manson connection.

With me and my dad, it was really emotionally turbulent relationship. I think I was 10 when I remember saying, “We get in fights a lot.” And I remember walking into my bedroom later, after he picked me up from school, and on my whiteboard, he wrote, “Let’s not fight today” with a heart next to it.

Before you knew about the Manson legacy, what was your interpretation of what was going on with your father?

When I was 14, 15, and the fighting started happening more, I became more aware of how tight money was. Struggling to pay rent, two kids, and he didn’t graduate high school. Every place we lived in kept getting smaller and smaller. At one point, we were in a studio apartment, and he was working his ass off to prove to a court that he could keep his kids. So that’s how I made sense of it. “My dad’s really stressed about money.”

I didn’t know what bipolar or narcissism was, and I can’t even say he has those things because he hasn’t gotten tested. But with what I’ve experienced, they were very clear patterns, and if I talk to my therapist about it, those terms do pop up.

I didn’t complain. I was grateful that he was fighting for us. I don’t hold anything against him. But he should be responsible for his actions. And the way he treated me, what he called me….The reason why I started recording, that one time in the car when I was driving, was because the words he was using toward me were so awful. I had to put my blinkers on, emergency lights, pull over, and show him that I’m recording…for safety.

In the doc, you confront head-on the tendency to rationalize. Your dad surely had his own agonizing background. But, as your therapist suggests, there’s also a sense that he’s deploying a pity play, portraying himself as a victim to prime you to feel sorry for him. Do you come down on one side or the other? Or do you just live the contradiction?

It’s a really great question because there’s not a clear answer. I don’t feel like my dad had anyone to validate his experience. His mother never apologized to him for beating him up or sending him off to military school. And she passed away prior to the Ancestry revelation.

So there was no reckoning between your dad and grandma about, “Hey, why didn’t you tell me my father was Manson?”

I was his only family. When the divorce happened, the only person he could talk to was his kid. I’m not saying that’s healthy, or a good thing. But I have empathy. I lived seeing the sadness in his eyes, many nights, when he tucked me into bed. Other people might look at this and see him grooming me to carry his victimhood, and I think that’s fair. Because he does take it to an extreme, where he can’t take responsibility for his actions as a perpetrator of abuse.

Allie, My Grandfather Charles Manson was originally set up as a doc series, and then it was whacked down to a single feature film, right?

We all were thinking it would be 3 or 4 episodes. But Hulu thought that it’s so emotional, so heart wrenching, maybe it’s better as one complete film. When you’re parsing your memories of growing up, fulfilling your contract with coming of age, it’s such an intense process, and not linear, so I do think it did work better as a complete film. In the film, Sophia is on a very classical hero’s journey. And all of the people who are originally her guides on that journey fall away as her journey progresses.

Some of the guides are pretty complicated people.

And that’s part of the story too, right? Sophia’s story is the most extreme example of something that happens to all of us: You grow up, and realize the people in your family that you put on pedestals, they have to come down, and the people you put in your basement also have to get more complicated. They all have a backstory. The Western world is very obsessed with either-or. But it’s never either-or. It’s always both-and.

Sophia, had the details of Manson’s time in the juvenile detention center ever come to light, or was that your original reporting?

Those aspects of him were never really reported. There was a parole letter, for example, right before he got out of prison in 1967, where he begged his parole officer to not let him free and not let him go. He wanted to stay in prison because he said he wasn’t equipped for the outside world anymore. This isn’t to apologize or justify. People may call me a Manson sympathist. But honestly I’m focused on how cycles of abuse continue to shape people.

The idea of you being a Manson apologist comes up many times in the film. Have you felt misunderstood?

Oh yes. And it sucks feeling misunderstood and misrepresented. It takes patience for me to stay on track with my higher purpose and goal.

With the doc out in the world now, do you feel a sense of freedom? Is there relief in having shared your story with the world?

Relief, for sure. And I’m grateful that it’s over. But not much has changed. I’m still trying to find another job—that’s always the case. I have nearly 5,000 followers on Instagram. That’s the only thing that’s changed. In my Instagram bio, I was tempted to be like, “not a cult,” because…followers.

1) Arm your demons, unleash chaos:

What do you worry about? What are you actually afraid of? “The Joker is what I’m afraid of more than anything, more than any of the villains, these days particularly, when you feel civilization is very thinly lined.” Of the character that he and Heath Ledger created for The Dark Knight, Nolan says: “I think the Joker represents the id in all of this,” Nolan says—the impulse to tear it all down, to foment chaos without even knowing why. “I feel like I carefully used it as the engine of the movie, but I was afraid of it the whole time I was making the film.”

2) Your villain need not take human form:

Aside from a few betrayals, Interstellar has no human villain. But for some the antagonist in that movie—the unrelenting passage of time—is more agonizing than the Joker. In Interstellar, time separates the family as geographical distance (war, migration) does in other stories. Shone writes: “Nolan’s films have an unerring grasp of the way time feels—its surges and slippages, constrictions and convergences. Time is Nolan’s great antagonist, his lifelong nemesis.”

3) No matter how big your canvas is, keep the story’s core intimate, emotional, & personal:

A survival epic of space and philosophy, science and humanity, Interstellar is a HUGE movie. But at its core it’s really about how parents become ghosts of their children’s future. Nolan thought of the film as “Flora’s letter,” named after his daughter, to remind him of the guilt he feels every time he goes away to make a movie—the same guilt he drew on for Matthew McConaughey’s character, Cooper, who abandons his children for a chance to save the world, or fulfill his own sense of purpose. “You could read it as a ghost story,” says Nolan. “It’s about the parent revisiting the child as a ghost, and struggling to then be free.”

The amazing scene in which the ghost of the future revisits his daughter takes place in the tesseract. In The Nolan Variations, Tom Shone observes: “The tesseract is an eternal hall of parental regret, forcing [Cooper] to replay opportunities missed, things not said, paths not taken. Like Leonard Shelby’s looped life [in Memento], it has the timelessness of trauma, endlessly relived, but unlike the limbo into which Shelby finds himself cast, Cooper is not entirely without agency, and finds he can communicate with Murph [Cooper’s daughter] through the watch he left her, manipulating the second hand like a quadriplegic blinking out his autobiography.”

Here are Nolan’s sketches for the tesseract.

4) Embrace confinement in all its forms:

Prisons and interrogation rooms, dreams and amnesia, caverns and mazes, motels and cabins, fishing trawlers and spaceships, dormitories and tesseracts. In one way or another, all of Nolan’s characters learn to find liberation in their confinement. He says: “That’s your ultimate prize as a storyteller: a locked-room mystery. An impossible situation. How do you get out of it? Come up with a good answer to that, it’s gold.”

5) Everything is story:

To some extent, all Nolan films take storytelling as their subject, but none more than The Prestige, about rival magicians in Victorian London. “It was very much about trying to understand the language of magic, trying to get a movie that is itself a magic trick, using the grammar of film to do so.”

6) Steal from your heroes:

The relationship between killer and cop in Insomnia was inspired by Michael Mann’s Manhunter. The corruption that jumpstarts Batman Begins was adapted from Sidney Lumet’s Serpico. The chaos of Joker in The Dark Knight was lifted from Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. Nolan has found juicy creative vibes in the crime fiction of Wilkie Collins, the prints of M.C. Escher, the paintings of Francis Bacon, and many more.

7) A good twist elevates what came before it:

Nolan says that in order for a twist to bring fascination and joy, it should enhance what’s been seen previously, rather than invalidate it. Take, M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense. The twist, “I see dead people,” enhances what you’ve seen before it. Until then, you thought Bruce Willis’ wife had been rejecting him at the restaurant. Now you realize that in fact she was mourning him. The twist makes the story you’ve already seen better, and more emotional. Compare that to a similar device in Adrian Lyne’s Jacob’s Ladder, about a traumatized Vietnam vet. The twist—that Tim Robbins’ character actually died back in Vietnam, and that what you’ve seen is some imaginary journey of his soul—is cathartic because you know that he didn’t actually experience the horror of what you just saw him experience, but it also arguably invalidates what you’ve seen before it.

8) Build on what you’ve done & never give up on your ideas (not even the craziest ones):

When Nolan began shooting Inception—one of the most complex films, with a sprawling geography and five timelines—23 years had passed since he first conceived of the idea as a 16-year-old. In three of his first features—Following, Memento, and The Prestige—he used multiple timelines. By Inception, he’d earned his stripes as a structural engineer of narrative.

9) Flip it:

When Nolan considers a story or an idea, his first move is to “flip it” into something that approximates a three-dimensional object, which is easier to manipulate, conceptually, than mere words on a page. Below, see his two-page diagram of the nested storylines in Inception.

10) End with an echo:

Nolan says even a bad movie can work well if it’s got a great ending, but an inadequate conclusion will sink an otherwise good story. Nolan’s endings are often a crescendo of image and music that suddenly cuts off. He says: “Reverberation is the word. It’s the echo…crescendo with reverberations is a great way to go.”

I nominate the third week of July as National Movie Week. And since this Friday’s Nonfiction Nut newsletter will dive into the storytelling lessons of Christopher Nolan, it seems like the right time to drop the second episode of “True Adaptation,” a round-up of the nonfiction stories currently on offer in Hollywood. This is a theoretical and incomplete list of true stories that, according to my research, have been circulated recently to writers, directors, and producers.

Find the pilot ep here. Last time, hardcore true-crime led the way. But this season is all about the big life-lesson memoir, so keep working on yours.

Some titles may generate no film or TV interest. Others will be, or already have been, optioned for development in unpublicized deals. Some projects came out years ago, were optioned then, and are available again now. Others are forthcoming. Check publication dates. The 9 books photographed below are my own picks, things that strike me as ripe for development even if I haven’t seen them on any lists (yet).

NB: organizing by category even if I don’t endorse categories.

True Crime

Fires in the Night: The Earth Liberation Front, the FBI, and a Secret History of Eco-Sabotage by Matthew Wolfe, an immersive and cinematic tale of clandestine radicals who set fire to the world in an attempt to save it.

Catch the Devil: A True Story of Murder and Deception in the American South by Pamela Colloff, about a scoundrel and conman whose career as a jailhouse snitch exposes the dire need for massive prosecutorial reform.

History

The Spy and the Devil: The Untold Story of the MI6 Agent Who Infiltrated Hitler’s Inner Circle by Tim Willasey-Wilsey, about a German aristocrat who became MI6’s top spy in Berlin during WWII.

Night of the Assassins: The Untold Story of Hitler’s Plot to Kill FDR, Churchill, and Stalin by Howard Blum, a 2020 title about Operation Long Jump, the Nazi plan to take out Allied leaders.

Memoir

The Liar’s Playbook: A Memoir of Family and Crime by Leslie Bradford-Scott, about the author’s childhood on the run and her search for answers.

These Wild English: A Family, A Class, A Country on Fire by Nicola Wilding, a documentary filmmaker who turns the lens on her own family’s struggle in a changing Britain, and the appeal of the far right.

Dreamer’s Daughter: Surviving My Childhood and Raising My Father by Lori Thicke, a Wallsian memoir of surviving one’s dysfunctional family.

Monster of a Land: On the Road in Search of Modern America by Lauren Hough, a memoir by an Air Force veteran who finally embarks, with her Husky mix, on the great American roadtrip she’s always wanted to take.

A Bigger Life: A Memoir of Dating, Desire, and Wanting More by Louise O’Neill, the chronicle of a global dating experiment and the author’s attempt to reclaim her life after everything falls apart.

The Solo Honeymoon: A Brief Beautiful True Love Story by Laura Murphy, the uplifting tale of a young woman’s determination to keep living after her fiancé’s sudden death weeks before their wedding.

Magazine Pieces & Podcasts

“You Can Run” by Barry Meier (Atavist) about two sisters who unwittingly go on the lam with their mother, thanks to dad’s coke-smuggling career.

“The Extremist in the Family” by Alex Ronan (Atavist) about one family’s crisis when rejection of modern medicine puts children’s lives at risk.

“The Angelicism 01 Girls and Their Faceless Internet Prophet” by Katie Roiphe & Isobel Lola Brown (New York Magazine), about pandemic-isolated young women whose collaboration with a guru turns nasty.

“Cut, Color, Kill” by Jonathan Hirsch (Sony Music) about the murder of a beloved Hollywood hairdresser and his hidden life.

Dan’s Picks

There are days—moments, sometimes moment to moment—when I allow my automatic reactions to take control.

I’m anxious but I can’t say what I feel because the feeling is too weird or shameful. Instead of expressing myself, I become angry and resentful about the random stories my mind generates: that a past mistake has been ruinous, that the future is screwed, that my career is pointless, that I’ll never measure up, that I must fix my friend’s life. These stories quickly become steel-bound facts that must be acted on. I must be depressed about the past and fearful of the future. I must work harder to earn my place in the world. I must intervene to save my friend.

In Buddhism, my state of blindness is known as ignorance, or avijja—a mind that simply doesn’t see, as Ryushun Kusanagi writes in The Practice of Not Reacting: Zen Wisdom for a Happy Life. The book, which was read by the masses in Japan, came out here this week from Portfolio, and feels like one of the most timely and consequential books I’ve covered.

In The Practice of Not Reacting, Kusanagi charts the way out of blindness: “If you can step back and watch your reactions, if you can understand your worries and catch them in the moment, if you can let them go instead of indulging them, you will free yourself from suffering. Challenges will still come your way, but suffering itself will no longer control you.”

For anyone interested in therapy and healing, Buddhism is a great place to start since most of what’s learned in therapy is based in Buddhism. With clarity and concision, Kusanagi breaks down Buddhism’s core tenets as they apply to behavioral health and reactivity. Like Melody Beattie’s The Language of Letting Go, or the poetry of Nayyirah Waheed, Kusanagi’s practical guide for living can be used as a daily orienting device. A sleek, slim volume, sans dust jacket, this book punches above its weight and goes nicely near the coffee station.

“The Buddha’s insight,” explains Kusanagi, “was that behind every form of dissatisfaction lies a deeply ingrained craving (tanha)—the constant energy of our mind’s reactive tendencies.” This craving branches out into seven desires: (1) survival (the desire to stay alive), (2) sleep (the desire to rest), (3) hunger (the desire to eat), (4) libido (the desire for intimacy), (5) laziness (the desire to avoid effort), (6) sensory pleasure (the desire for comfortable surroundings and novel experiences), and (7) recognition (the desire to be acknowledged).

Here’s how reactivity works: I have a craving » that craving gives rise to one or more of the seven desires » I react based on the desire » I might feel happy when the desire is satisfied, or sorrow when it isn’t. Either way, my reaction-based mental formation, or sankhara, then latches on to a new stimulus, and generates more strong emotional reactive energy—feelings, desires, memories, delusions. This turbulent cycle of joy and frustration repeats endlessly. Kusanagi calls it the raging current of human existence.

His book teaches me that much of that current is driven by my desire to be acknowledged and validated. Because beneath my frustration with the little things people do that annoy me is often just my wish that they’d acknowledge me more. That’s why I keep competing, chasing the next win. That’s why I feel high when I’m ahead and crushed when I fall behind.

Back in 2020, when I was struggling to overcome demons, I discovered another helpful book about Buddhism, Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche’s In Love with the World: A Monk’s Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying. Rinpoche, a revered Buddhist abbot in India, tells the story of how, one night, he slipped out of his monastery and spent four years on a wandering retreat, following the ancient practice of holy mendicants. Like Buddha himself, Rinpoche relinquished his princely title and set out to live as a beggar. But he didn’t become a beggar right away.

At first, Rinpoche abhors his dirty fellow travelers and hates the screech of railway stations. Of this moment, he writes: “I needed to re-experience the continuity of change, to remember that every moment holds a chance to transcend the fixed mind—the breeding ground for anxiety and stress…. We often get caught in the illusion that arriving at a pre-determined destination will end the mental agitation of feeling in-between. The true meaning of in-between has nothing to do with physical references but is about the anxiety of dislocation, of having left behind a mental zone of comfort, and not yet having arrived anywhere that restores that ease.”

After spending the last of his money on a hostel, Rinpoche begins his life as a beggar. He sleeps outside, eats from garbage cans, and becomes deathly ill. Hovering near death, he learns that he is not his title, not his princely robes. By dis-identifying with these things, he connects with the “unconditioned mind,” the “immeasurable mind.” He sees that his emotions are empty waves: It’s only when he creates stories around the waves that they become powerful and knock him down.

That’s how suffering works: My misperceptions turn me into a target. The more rigid my sense of self, the more surface area I provide for the arrows to hit. In Kusanagi’s The Practice of Not Reacting, he picks up this thread, telling us how to escape what he calls the ego trap. This is an important concept to grasp.

Start with my misperception, which is some version of I’m not good enough. I tell myself stories that I’m lacking as father, husband, friend, son, brother, writer, candlestick maker. I react against these less-than feelings, and the reaction creates strong emotional energy: I want to feel good again. How do I do that? I attempt to feel good again by judging others. Deciding what’s right and wrong for others provides me with the illusion of understanding and makes me feel validated. Giving up this need to be right can feel like self-destruction, like giving up my very identity.

Such is the ego trap, and it begins with me tearing myself down, then tearing others down and/or running away. “When we judge ourselves harshly, we feel unworthy,” writes Kusanagi. “And when we feel unworthy, anger starts to build. Since anger is an unpleasant emotion, we naturally want to get rid of it. That leads us to one of two instinctive reactions: attacking or escaping.”

When that sense of I’m not good enough starts to creep in, there are many ways to emancipate myself.

I can stop putting myself down. Instead, I can step outside and walk, take in the world around me, and affirm myself.

I can stop comparing myself to others. Instead, I can let my own sense of self-fulfillment be my guide: I can give something a try, accumulate experience, and start achieving small results—maybe even recognition.

I can stop carrying my struggles in silence. Instead, I can share my problems with friends, because awareness is the first step toward change.

I can stop reproaching myself for feelings I don’t like. Instead, I can label the emotions with words. My energy is low. My mind feels scattered. I’m feeling overly sensitive today. I’m anxious around all these people. Labelling is a key move in zen: it’s what mindfulness means. I identify the source of my suffering: a worry exists. Worries can be resolved.

I can stop reacting to every moment. Instead (this is a great trick), I can regain peace and balance by simply labelling my actions. I’m waking up. I’m pouring coffee. I’m hugging my wife. I’m driving my sons to school. I’m sitting down to work. I’m working now. I’m making dinner. My sons are talking about their experience of the world. We’re watching fireflies in the meadow.

I can stop chasing validation. Instead, I can focus on action, on doing what needs to be done in the moment. I’m doing paperwork. I’m cleaning up. I’m putting the kids to bed.

I can stop hanging on to old memories that trigger anger. Instead, I can choose distance over drama, and remember it’s not my job to fix anyone.

I can stop tolerating mistreatment for fear of upsetting someone or hurting a relationship. A boundary-less relationship, in which one person is permitted to mistreat the other, is peak blindness. Neither of us is in this relationship to suffer. Instead, I can express myself with one true remark. Telling the other person, This is how I feel, or This is what I think, is one of the most constructive things I can do.

Greetings, Harry. Your new book, Those Who Are About To Die, feels like a landmark work of history. After reading it, I’m a different person.

Thank you so much.

I’m obsessed with the one-day structure of the book. You see it frequently in fiction, from Ulysses and Mrs. Dalloway to one of your own historical novels set in Ancient Rome, The Last Hour. But nonfiction examples are few. There’s Gene Weingarten’s One Day: The Extraordinary Story of an Ordinary 24 Hours in America, which takes place on a single day in 1986. And Mark Bowden’s Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War, zeroing in on a day-long battle. Your inspiration was a nonfiction history of the French Revolution, The Fall of Robespierre: 24 Hours in Revolutionary Paris by Colin Jones. How did you adapt the style of Jones’s book—which is about the relatively recent events of the 1700s—to your ancient material?

Colin Jones had hundreds, if not thousands, of documents: diaries, letters, government minutes. He could date to the hour, maybe the minute, and build up this pointillist detail. For me, it was entirely different. I had to drag together evidence that is scattered not just over centuries, but across the whole Roman Empire. And I’m trying to draw all that stuff together and make a composite picture of what would be a typical twenty-four hours of entertainment for a typical day of gladiatorial games. It was a very satisfying thing to do, and quite challenging.

This structure, you write, “offers the perfect vehicle to explore the lived realities and mentalities that shaped their ideas.”

I picked up on that structure because I thought it provided a series of natural windows to explore all sorts of aspects of Roman culture that we wouldn’t necessarily associate with gladiators: sleep and dreams, sex, diet and food, the natural world, attitudes toward animals, crime, punishment, philosophy and religion, and so on. Readers have to be slightly open-minded. The reader who just wants the nitty gritty of what gladiators did in the arena…well, we get to that eventually.

I love details regarding speech. The Roman phrase for “mansplaining” was to go “from the eggs to the apples.” Ludia was a slang term for ladies who fancied gladiators.

Yes—despite gladiators being far from the classical ideal of male beauty, with their carb-rich diet, scars and deformities, and the stresses of the job.

Roman sexuality is really interesting. Male sexuality focused more on being the “active” partner as opposed to the “passive” receiving one, than it did on the sex of the person you hooked up with. They had no words for heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual. Romans thought differently than we do about geography, history, time. This book was a monster research project. It’s clearly based on a life of scholarship.

I spent my whole adult life researching and teaching Roman history at various universities [i.e. University of Oxford].

But I’d never written about gladiators. I’ve set fifteen historical novels in the classical world, but I’ve never had a gladiator in them. In The Warrior of Rome [a six-book series], there’s one character who’s an ex-gladiator, but that’s it. And I’ve done three previous nonfiction books, but never gladiators. So I was playing around with the idea, wondering if it should be a novel or a nonfiction history book.

I’d recently published a nonfiction history called The Mad Emperor: Heliogabalus and the Decadence of Rome. It’s a biography of one of the most obscure emperors ever. I use him as a kind of prism. He does everything wrong as emperor, as he’s working out what Romans want their emperor to be and do. By looking at the negative image of that guy, I could explore how historians deal with the evidence: literature, art, archaeology. I enjoyed doing that, so I decided it was time to do another, and it was the gladiator’s moment. At first, when I started, the material was too free-form, until I stole the 24-hour concept from Colin Jones.

Don’t you love constraints as a writer? Within the constraint you grow.

Writing under constraint is a liberating thing.

I appreciate how you assess the source material you’re citing, telling us how much weight we might put on certain things. You point out that much of the source material we have was produced by the wealthy and powerful Roman elite. The stuff produced by the non-elite, the plebs, took the form of vanished street theater. But do we know how the plebs felt about the gladiatorial games? Did they largely delight in the games, while a minority found it abhorrent? Or am I projecting?

I think we can safely assume that the majority delighted in it. I would point to the incredible amount of ancient merchandise that survives. The little figurines and lamps you bought when you went to the arena.

There was one image I wanted to include in the book, but couldn’t get the rights for. It’s a piece of a terracotta pot that shows a female captive being killed. She’s topless and tied to a bull that is also being attacked by big cats. It’s just mind-blowing that Romans were saying, you know, That’s a really cool thing. I’ll have that pot in my house. I can look at it every time I eat my dinner.

That says a lot about the times. It makes you wonder how much of that genetic material still lives in us.

I think we like to think we’re morally superior to the Romans. You can ponder their gladiatorial combat and spectacular executions and go, Hell, no. That’s revolting. But, in England, we’re only two centuries away from public executions, which drew thousands of spectators. You had street food hawkers, mementos being sold, just like at the gladiatorial games.

Look at the popularity of someone like Conor McGregor today.

My son loves him, knows his whole story, the ups and downs of his career.

Some gladiators became famous, right?

They used the famous ones on advertising posters. Some gladiators, if they survived, could make a lot of money and achieve fame and sex-symbol status, then leave the ring and retire to country estates.

It was also maybe like boxing, a way out of poverty for tough kids from bad backgrounds. We get seduced by this image of ancient Rome, with senators and togas and big marble columns. But 90% of the population lived on the subsistence level. If you enlist as a gladiator, you’ll be housed and fed. And you have a chance at fame and money.

We don’t know where the gladiator tradition started. But we do know that Romans believed it came from elsewhere, and they appropriated it just as they did other things from the empire—farming from Carthage, swords from Spain, philosophy from Greece. The first recorded instance of gladiatorial combat is at the 264 BC funeral games of a senator. Can you explain how funeral games worked?

Initially, gladiatorial combat is totally linked to funeral games. Elite families wanted to put on a big funeral, to boost the status of their dead, but also to maintain the status of the family. Over the next two centuries, as gladiatorial combat spreads, it keeps a tenuous link to funeral games. But the link is very tenuous. Because, right away, the elite families and senators realize that, funerals aside, this is a crowd pleaser, a vote winner. They continue to use the excuse of a dead family member to put on the games, but maybe that family member died ten or twenty years earlier.

As it spreads, there’s an inbuilt inflation. Your family’s got to put on a big show for your dead father. And now it’s my turn. I need to put on a bigger and better show than you did. It’s no good just matching you. I need more gladiators, more exoticism in their kit and the performance. I need to give the crowd gifts.

It’s like weddings and bar mitzvahs.

And then, famously, Octavian beats Mark Anthony [at the naval Battle of Actium in 31 BC]. Octavian becomes Augustus, master of Rome, and sets up the imperial system of rule by emperors. Now, no one apart from the emperor can put on gladiatorial games. But there’s still inflation because each emperor needs to vie with his predecessors. It needs to be bigger, more spectacular.

So they introduce venatios, the hunts, with lions, panthers, bears, elephants and other exotic animals, and naumachiae, which were staged mass combats between groups of fighters on water. They introduce executions, which are carried out at lunchtime, before the afternoon gladiatorial combat. For me, the most disturbing part of the book is when you write about “sexual executions,” in which a woman marked for death is penetrated by an animal. In other executions, the condemned might cooperate in their own death by acting out scenes from the past, or from a myth, such as Heracles and his burning tunic.

Right. So fairly quickly, this entire package—twenty-four hours of entertainment—becomes set.

Some emperors were accused of taking too much pleasure in it. You point out the irony of Caracalla: As a child he burst into tears when he saw the executions, but then he turned out to be one of the cruelest emperors of all. Today’s therapists would probably see no paradox in that. Traumatized children often become disordered abusers. Did all Roman children watch the games and executions? Or did you reach a certain age, like thirteen, and then you could go?

That’s a really good question. I’ve never thought about a lower age limit.

Did the kids go with the parents? Were the events family outings?

Yes, but they usually sat separately. The audience is carefully structured in the arena. It’s an inverted social pyramid, with elite males, the senators, at the bottom. Above them are the equestrians, the men of the second rung down in the social order. Above them are the respectable players who can afford a nice white toga. And above them are the sordid plebs.

The organization tells you where you are in society. And the games were a not-very-coded warning that if you transgress the values of our society, you might end up out in the middle with the degraded and debased.

Let’s talk about the gladiators. There are three primary pools of recruits. First, prisoners of war—barbarians, Jews. Second, criminals convicted of things like sacrilege, murder, burglary, kidnapping. And third, slaves whose owners sold them to gladiator schools.

Slavery was a big thing in ancient Rome. Even radical philosophers, enlightened people like the Stoics, accepted slavery by calling it, simply, a legal fiction. They said slavery depends on your soul. If you’ve got a slavish personality, then you’re a “slave” even if you’r not actually a slave.

Each recruit becomes a certain kind of gladiator. There are eight kinds, and some are hard to distinguish. One type uses a sword, another a spear. But there’s one type that you mention frequently, the retiarius. They fight without a helmet or mask. Their weapons are a net and trident. You say the retiarius was effeminate. How so?

They’re effeminate because the other guys wear helmets and stand and fight, you know, in a manly, Roman way. Whereas retiarius is unmasked, and has to depend on speed, agility, and skill. He spends most of his time running away, while trying to entangle the other guy with his net.

Did the net work? It seems pretty Hollywood. You’re going to take down a big gladiator with your net?

There’s a famous mosaic from Spain, which actually shows the opposing gladiator totally tangled in the net.

Speaking of Hollywood, I have to ask about Gladiator. What’s the historical viability of Russell Crowe’s character Maximus—a general who’s betrayed, captured, sold into slavery, and sent into the ring?

There’s no evidence for that ever happening. But keep in mind that the emperors, from Augustus on, are military autocrats. And the best legal minds in Rome are writing that the emperor’s will is law. So there’s nothing intrinsically impossible with an emperor condemning anyone he likes to slavery. But it’s highly unlikely that a general would be condemned to slavery. He’d either be executed or sent into exile.

How about Joaquin Phoenix. He won an Oscar for his depiction of Commodus, who’s mentioned often in your book. Phoenix played him as a sniveling psychopath with catastrophic daddy issues. Accurate?

Members of the elite who wrote history say, yes, Commodus is psychotic, insane, a dangerous man. He was obsessed with fighting as a gladiator. The historian and senator, Cassius Dio, tells this story: One day Commodus is in the ring killing animals. He beheads an ostrich, then takes the head in one hand, sword in the other, and walks over to where Cassius Dio and the senators are sitting. He holds up the bloody ostrich head and smiles at them. Meanwhile, Cassius Dio has an urge to laugh. But if he laughs he’ll be executed. So he plucks some leaves from his wreath, and chews them, and encourages guys around him to do the same. The working of their jaws on the bitter leaves stops them from laughing, and saves their lives.

What a weird anecdote. It sounds too strange to have been made up.

That’s the sort of thing Roman emperors do. They like humiliating those close to them, to reinforce their power.

Sounds familiar. It’s an amazing book, Harry. Thanks writing it. Thanks for making the time today. I’ve really enjoyed our talk.

He stuck with books, and at eighteen he started college, preparing for a career as a sociologist, social worker, and journalist. But, at the same time, he auditioned for the job of “helper,” the guy who runs fifteen miles a day behind a garbage truck while hurling fifty tons of trash into its iron maw. He turned out to be a formidable trash thrower, and his side hustle became a second career.

Now, two decades later, as Paré-Poupart nears forty, people ask him if he’s going to stop “running” soon. Probably not, as he explains in Trash! A Garbageman’s Story. This darling little book, a bestseller in Canada, where it came out as Ordures! Journal d’un vidangeur, was translated from the French and published here last month by Melville House. Like many g-men, Paré-Poupart is addicted to the world of garbage and the rush of running behind a truck. As one narcotics-dealer-cum-g-man tells him: “The same adrenaline rush I’d get trying to get away from the cops, with my coke…well, the only other place I found that is on the garbage truck.”

His colleagues, as Paré-Poupart describes them, are “former bikers, dopers, athletes who’ve abandoned all hope of making the big time, grown-up kids scarred by tough childhoods. Violence is in our blood.” One g-man, nicknamed Spandex, once robbed a convenience store with a sawed-off shotgun. Now “Spandex runs behind a truck shirtless, in flip-flops and bike shorts, a surprising getup even for a garbageman.” The author’s other coworkers include:

Guys like Jo, who got filmed by a Boucherville resident dancing on green bins in the midst of an intense mushroom trip; Racette, whose life cycled between garbage collection, rehab, and stints of homelessness; Cat, who would regularly get picked up by cops in the middle of his run….and Séguin, who’d get dropped off at the same corner where they had picked him up, since that’s where he slept. Guys missing teeth, guys with tattoos, guys whose clothes looked like they came out of the garbage (and often did). Throw a bunch of guys like this together and you get a crew worse than the sum of its parts.

The g-men take breaks at poutine stands, pass around joints, and get back to their righteous, stinky work. For most g-men, Paré-Poupart writes, the smell goes away, eventually. He reminds us that medieval towns were open-air sewers, the streets caked in nauseating sludge. On his days off he even finds himself “taking pleasure in the waft of a distant garbage truck.”

Like Anthony Bourdain and his restaurant kitchens, Paré-Poupart’s love of garbagemen and their underworld holds Trash! together. Writing in the rough-and-tumble register of Kitchen Confidential, Paré-Poupart compares his people to yesteryear’s “heroic lumberjacks” and “fearless log drivers”—with at least one crucial difference. Because society’s idea of progress is shaped by the human obsession to accrue goods endlessly, the g-men—like the waste produced in order to keep our homes comfortable and clean, so the goods can keep arriving—are society’s outcasts, the ultimate unclean “other.”

It’s a complicated relationship, and Paré-Poupart is at his Bourdainian best when he’s berating his thankless, condescending customers, those “arrogant fucks” and “smug fuckwits” who load their bins and bags with crushed stone and construction material and then hide behind their flowered curtains, “emitting serious frustrated bougie vibes” as they judge and monitor the g-men from afar. “If you find your trash can laying in your bed of tulips, assume your garbageman is not a happy customer.”

He sees hope, however, in customers who reuse goods, and in g-men who accept their fellows as they are. Of the ironically nicknamed Beaujeunehomme (“handsome young man”)—a severely alcoholic fifty-two-year-old g-man who keeps trying to save money for his daughter even though she doesn’t want to see him anymore—Paré-Poupart writes: “Everyone in the garbage business accepts him just the way he is, unconditionally, few questions asked. Sometimes keeping your mouth shut is an elegant way to love someone.”

Paré-Poupart relishes the liberty and fraternity of the job, the outlet it provides for male anger, and the hard worldly truths it forces one to confront. Ever a g-man, ever a book lover, he quotes Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables: “The sewer is the conscience of the city….The mass of filth has this in its favor, that it is not a liar.”

We don’t often hear from g-men authors. But Trash! is an unusual book in more than one sense. Of the hundreds of thousands of books published each year in the U.S., only a tiny fraction of them are foreign books in translation. Translated fiction and poetry comprise most of that fraction. Translated nonfiction is rare.

Only a handful of translated nonfiction books are published in America each year, and they’re often quite interesting. Some are by big-name authors, such as groundbreaking journalism by Svetlana Alexievich and the gripping narratives by Emmanuel Carrère. Others are by debut authors, like Paré-Poupart, who broke out in their homeland with a best-selling memoir about, say, defecting from North Korea, working in a Chinese factory, or studying cannibals in France. Such books, when translated, are marvelous gifts from abroad: A whole world is unlocked, and we’re invited inside.

I plan to discuss translated nonfiction as often as I can, and each time I will try to pair two books translated from the same language. I’m starting with French, since it’s the most commonly translated language and because two French-language books appear in English this season: Paré-Poupart’s Trash! and Nathalie Von Zelowitz’s I Ate His Heart: Interviews With a Cannibal, published here by (who else?) Feral House.

If you think Paré-Poupart has a peculiar work environment on the streets of Montreal, consider where Von Zelowitz reported for duty, in the medieval town of Chateau-Thierry, in France’s Champagne region. She writes:

The Chateau-Thierry prison is quite ancient, dating from a time when prisons were erected in the town center, like scarecrows designed to deter crimes and misdemeanors. There are no watchtowers, and it is a world apart from modern, ultra-secure prisons, even though it houses some particularly dangerous inmates. The age-old stonework of this heritage-listed structure is so impressive that tourists, thinking it is a hotel, have been known to ask if there are any rooms available, especially in the evenings, when the words “MAISON D’ARRET,” chiseled above the door, are less visible.

Here, Von Zelowitz worked as a psychologist, treating patients who’d been convicted of the worst crimes—patients like Bernard, of the book’s title. While homeless, Bernard killed a fellow homeless person, and, well, ate his heart, trying it first raw and then cooking it over a camping stove with onion and canned veggies.

Articulating the goal of her ten-year-long professional relationship with Bernard, Von Zelowitz writes: “We would attempt to understand the inexplicable, to look for humanity in monstrosity, to find, in his life story, what caused his passage to the act of cannibalism….I am interested in the psychological truth at the core of passing to the act against a backdrop of drive-based movements, mental short-circuits, and unconscious archaic mechanisms that lead someone, for example, to eat human flesh.”

Driven by her passion for cinema and crime novels, Von Zelowitz began studying psychology in the 1980s. She wrote her first master’s thesis on rape and her second on pedophilia. She interned in prisons, treating inmates with penchants for, among other things, zoophilia and gerontophilia. She writes: “My taste for marginality, punk rock and, in a broader sense, counterculture certainly influenced my desire to work with criminals who have unusual mental illnesses, and, more than anyone else, are at the jagged edge of the so-called ‘normal’ world.”

As patient and clinician, Bernard and Von Zelowitz found common ground in their mutual love of movies. She told him that Peeping Tom inspired her work on sexual perversion. Bernard, in turn, felt comfortable discussing his appreciation of films like Cannibal Holocaust. He said Silver Bullet, based on Cycle of the Werewolf by Stephen King, awakened his first cannibalistic desires.

We watch Von Zelowitz pursue “psychological truth” by exhuming Bernard’s life narrative. It’s a story fraught with trauma, abandonment, sexual abuse, rape, prostitution, consensual sadomasochism, periodic incarceration, unfilled requests to be castrated, and strong urges that Bernard tried (and ultimately failed) to resist.

At Feral House, Von Zelowitz’s American publisher, Christina Ward is owner, editor, marketer, publicist, and barista. Ward told me that I Ate His Heart—published in France as Le patient cannibale: Carnets d’une psychologue en prison—came to her via a friend’s recommendation. Ward reads enough French to make her way through the manuscript. “A few chapters in, I knew this needed to be a Feral House book!” she told me. “The book embodies the Feral aesthetic: taking an outré subject seriously without taking ourselves too seriously.”

An author’s attitude toward her material tells us how to read it, and Von Zelowitz’s carefully deployed levity guides us through these pages. A typical Von Zelowitz sentence is: “He described a quest for sensations rather than a gustatory experience.” When she writes, “The use of cannabis facilitated [Bernard’s] passage to the act,” I couldn’t help jotting in the margin: “Munchies?” One can only nod along when a newly-arrived prisoner objects to Bernard having been given the job of doling out food to fellow inmates, quipping, “And a cannibal is serving meals!”

Ward said: “Nathalie’s approach, of wanting to understand the why of Bernard and those like him, gave her the perfect way to explore a taboo topic. I think the best nonfiction should leave a reader thinking: ‘I feel I know the most important things about this topic so I don’t have to spend a decade studying it.’”

This book certainly does that. In addition to Bernard’s story, I Ate His Heart covers cannibalism throughout history, from biblical times to contemporary society. We hear about America’s Lawrence Paul Anderson, Germany’s Armin Meiwes, and Japan’s Issei Sagawa. We learn about how different legal systems treat the act, the origins of the word itself, as well as cannibalism’s categories and subcategories. Every once in a blue moon, when I come across something really astounding in a book, I might write in the margin, “HFS.” These initials stand for a sophisticated literary concept, “Holy Fucking Shit.” My copy of I Ate His Heart is lined with HFS’s.

No need to grasp for neat comparisons between Trash! and I Ate His Heart. But I will say that both authors, in their respective quests for truth, meet their subjects head-on. Their unblinking boldness makes us want to follow them into putrid trash and the dark corners of the mind, and maybe even continue on our own. Von Zelowitz says that when treating extreme cases she tries not to give in to her feelings of fascination and horror. But any book is a record of obsession, and she leaves a long trail of mind-boggling references and bibliographic breadcrumbs.

For instance, I hadn’t heard of Dumplings, a 2004 Hong Kong horror movie in which restaurant customers pay handsomely to eat human fetus potstickers that rejuvenate their libidos. Will I check it out? Not sure. The kids would need to be asleep. Nor was I was aware of Issei Sagawa, the Japanese cannibal whose crime was committed in France. Sagawa’s “secret notebook” of the act, containing photos, was published in a 1983 French art magazine—an event that initiated Bernard’s own passage to the act. That magazine was withdrawn from newsstands but remains available. How close do we want to get?

In 1963, when Richard Pryor abandoned the club circuit in the Midwest and took his shot at the big time in New York, a talent agent advised the twenty-three-year-old Pryor: “Be the kind of colored guy we’d like to have over to our house.”

His early standup routines offered what he called “white bread humor.” Making his TV debut on Rudy Vallée’s On Broadway Tonight, Pryor introduced himself as an outsider from Peoria, Illinois, and said: “I’m from an average type family—eleven kids. No mother and father. Just kids. When I was young I used to think my people didn’t like me because they used to send me to the store for bread and then they’d move.”

Thus began the process of Pryor opening up to the world about his past. In fact, his grandmother ran a string of brothels in Peoria. His father entered the family business and married a prostitute, Pryor’s mother. Pryor would later describe the experience of growing up in a brothel as “fantasy-like.” He said: “It was an adventure, it was two worlds”—the world of decency that his mother and grandmother preached, on one hand, versus the brothel reality of illicit sex and violence on the other.

In the early seventies, when the new Richard Pryor emerged—boldly employing racial material, unleashing a galaxy of street characters—he revealed more about his childhood: “I remember tricks used to come through our neighborhood. That’s where I first met white people. They come down through my neighborhood to help the economy. Nice white dudes though: ‘Hello, little boy, is your mother home? I’d like a blow job.’” Later, in a candid 1979 interview with Barbara Walters, Pryor said he fathered his first child at fourteen, with a woman who had also slept with his father. He talked about his drinking, drug use, infidelity, and history of hitting women.

Pryor had seven acknowledged children with six women. (The child he said fathered at fourteen is excluded from the official count.) His third child, Elizabeth, was eleven when she was on set for the filming of the Barbara Walters interview, an experience she describes in her powerful and exquisitely crafted memoir, Something We Said: Richard Pryor, a Notorious Word, and Me, published by Simon & Schuster’s 37 Ink.

In the book, Elizabeth recalls how her father regretted having said so much to Barbara Walters. After the interview, he was so distraught that Elizabeth was afraid to leave him alone and afraid to be alone with him. The interview opened her eyes, not only to the truth about her father’s past but also to crucial facts concerning her own life.

I recently caught up with Elizabeth. She’s now a fifty-nine-year-old professor of history at Smith College, as well as a wife, mother, and demon slayer. Of the Barbara Walters interview, she told me: “At the time, my dad was at the pinnacle of his career, but also at the depths of his personal problems, battling the demons as he’d never battled them before.” We spoke about those generational demons and the courage it takes to face them, as well as the healing power of storytelling and the importance of friends. What follows is an abridged version of our conversation.

You didn’t meet your dad until you were six. When he was six, his parents were divorcing and he was getting thrown out of his Catholic school because they found out about his family’s business. These six-year-old experiences aren’t the same, but it’s one of many instances where your life rhymes with his. At six you’re both confronted with: This is where I come from. This is my reality.

It’s funny—I think it relates to why I had to begin the book in four different places.

Take us through the four starting points for Something We Said.

First, my dad’s 2005 funeral felt like a big starting point for me, because at the time that had such a feeling of finality to it. The second starting point was in my classroom in 2010, when a white student used the n-word—that began my academic work that eventually led to the memoir. The third starting point was 1619, with the n-word and the foundational moment. The fourth starting point was meeting my dad for the first time in 1974, when I was six. All of these were beginnings for me, and each had their own timeline.

You braid those timelines beautifully in the book. How did you figure it all out?

It was a process. I started writing in 2021, and in 2023 I hit a wall. I had all the stories down on paper, but I thought, How does this sludge become a book? Then my best friend from high school, Julie Merson, stepped in. Jules made all these charts showing where each timeline begins and ends. I said, “I can’t do it.” She said, “You’re going do it.”

You have excellent taste in friends. I love how the book charts the path of awareness you traveled as a child. There were back-to-back events that helped bring you into awareness. The first was your grandmother’s funeral in 1978, when you were ten. Your dad took you back to Peoria for it. The second was the 1979 interview with Barbara Walters. Was your grandmother’s funeral the first time you learned about your dad’s past?

No, I actually remained naïve. Even though, at the funeral, there was a white woman with fishnet stockings and tight shorts sitting on my Uncle Dickie’s lap while Dickie’s wife was right there. My sister, Rain, is two years younger, but she’s much more aware than I am. She was like, “They’re prostitutes.” I think it was the Barbara Walters interview, the following year, when I really learned. I remember watching that interview and thinking, Wait…it sounds like…they were prostitutes?

The Barbara Walters interview upended your world. At eleven, you learned that your dad never loved your mother, and that, contrary to what your mom told you, they were never married. He was married to someone else when you were born. After the interview, when you tried to talk to your dad about it, he said something to you that is heartbreaking. I can hardly repeat it without crying. He said: “Nobody will ever love you. Do you hear me? No one. Will ever. Love you.” I am so sorry that happened, Elizabeth. What did it mean for you?

When he said that to me—“Nobody will ever love you”—I believed what I heard. What was so healing for me about writing this book is that it helped me see that he did love me. But I think that moment was a breaking point for me, and sent me on my own journey in life with my own demons.

Reflecting on that moment, you write: “I felt my body split down the middle…It took me forty years to realize he was talking about himself.” How did you realize that?

It was a conversation with my friend. I was telling her the story, and she said, “Hmm, I wonder if he was talking about himself.” And I just broke down in tears, because of course he was. He couldn’t even see me. I wasn’t even in that room. But, at the time, I thought he very much saw me. And for years I never left that room. I was always an eleven-year-old in conversation with that moment. I was never a mother, never a professor, never a grownup, never a demon slayer.

With so many of the moments in the book, when I first wrote them, it was the eleven-year-old writing them, or the thirteen-year-old, or the fifteen-year-old. And there was a childishness to it. Even though I was born in 1967, I wasn’t yet grown in relation to these things I was describing. The writing process demanded that I grow up in relation to those moments. Part of that was realizing, Oh, my parents were just people who were not doing the best parenting. That was a powerful reckoning.

The Barbara Walters interview had other consequences for you. Afterward, you went to your mom with this new information—that, contrary to what she’d told you, she was never married to your dad. There was an argument, and your white mother called you the n-word. Later, when you conveyed this to your dad, he got angry and took you to live with him. What happened with you and your mom?

We fought every single day. It was sick. I wanted something from her that she could never give me—an apology or explanation. She’d say, “Oh, Elizabeth, you’re fifteen now. You’re seventeen. Why are we still talking about that?” She didn’t have the emotional maturity. She had a hard childhood. She was abused, unappreciated, a brilliant woman who was told to go to secretary school. She was resentful about it. I loved her anyway, but she was hard. She was much easier to love when she was gone.

If it was today, and I had access to the kind of conversations young people are having on TikTok, about growing up black with a white mom, then it might’ve been different for me. I love watching these young people. They’re like, “You cannot tell me I’m not Black and Jewish at the same time. You cannot tell me that my experience doesn’t count because I’m biracial.” They are so vocal about it. But I was trying to find places to process it, and I didn’t have anybody. It was all secrecy, all holding it in, no sharing.

You were first invited to share your story—or your dad’s story—when you were in your twenties and he tapped you to write his autobiography. You were struggling at the time with drinking, smoking, and isolation. The project seemed like a good opportunity. You recorded his memories and learned all these things about his childhood that you hadn’t known, like the fear he felt as a kid. You found out that he was forced to choose between his parents, just as you were, and blamed himself for it, just as you did. You saw how broadcasting his demons to the world had been his way of trying to get free of them, and how his life had been a tug-of-war between the man he wanted to be and his self-destructive behavior. But when you sat down to write his book, you couldn’t do it. Eventually, he fired you. What happened there?

I didn’t know how to write the book, and I didn’t know how to ask for help. I was afraid that if I asked for help then I would lose my chance. So I lost my chance anyway.

Flash ahead: You get sober, meet a great guy, get married, have two kids, become a history professor, and another chance comes along to tell your story. But on the first page of Something We Said, you write that the book wasn’t meant to be a memoir. The project began, rather, as an academic investigation of the n-word. Can you talk about the path that led to the book becoming a memoir?

As a history professor, when I started talking about the n-word in my work, I knew there were going to be a few stories about me. Part of the work I was doing was mapping what I call “points of contact” with the n-word, the run-ins that each person has with the word. For me, many of those obviously had to do with my father.

He was famous for using the n-word in his comedy until a trip to Africa changed his worldview.

Right. And the deeper I got into the research, the more I realized I’d been haunted by my father. Just look at that first moment in my classroom that launches everything, when a white student used the n-word: She was quoting my father’s screenplay for Blazing Saddles. So it was a haunting from the beginning, but I couldn’t see it right away. Then, as I worked on my book, my editor said, “You need to talk more about your father and go deeper.” I was just skirting the surface, taking an academic approach. That was my way in. The emotion and the personal side came later, and tied it all together, but a memoir was not what I had in mind when I started.

You write, “Sharing my stories changed the trajectory of my life.” I think they will also change the lives of your readers. Thanks for the chat today, Elizabeth, and best of luck with the book.

I love books about movies and TV almost as much as I love the things themselves. I have shelves of such books, which taught me tons about storytelling, but a handful of them stand out for their depth, clarity, and innovative approach.

In The Godfather Notebook, for example, Francis Ford Coppola chronicles, page by page, the process by which he transformed the novel into the screenplay. In The Nolan Variations, the film critic Tom Shone helps us understand Christopher Nolan’s films in terms of theme and element, with chapters titled: “Structure,” “Orientation,” “Time,” “Perception,” “Space,” “Illusion,” “Chaos,” “Dreams,” “Revolution,” “Emotion,” “Survival,” “Knowledge,” and “Endings.” Other filmmaking books have helped me think more dynamically about specific aspects of narrative: transitions and editing (In the Blink of an Eye by Walter Murch), the power of palettes (Colors of Film by Charles Bromesco), or framing (Reflections on Cinematography by Roger Deakins). For TV, I’m drawn to books that illuminate how scripted shows were crafted from their nonfiction milieux, like Deadwood: Stories of the Black Hills by David Milch, By Order of the Peaky Blinders by Matt Allen, and The Wire: Truth Be Told by Rafael Alvarez.

But when it comes to the nitty gritty of actually making this stuff—the on-the-ground, day-to-day circus of it all—I’ve never seen anything more revealing than Cinematic Immunity: An Oral History of New York Filmmaking As Told By the Crews That Got the Shot, written and compiled by Michael Lee Nirenberg, and available now from Feral House, one of my favorite independent publishers.

Decades ago, in its founding charter, Feral House defined fe-ral as 1: related to, or suggestive of a wild beast; 2 a: not domesticated or cultivated: wild b: having escaped from domestication and become wild.” I can hardly think of a better way to describe any great new book, and Cinematic Immunity is right on brand for Feral House.

In the intro, Nirenberg writes: “Today, streaming tech companies dominate TV and movie production hubs on the East Coast, but throughout the 1960s and into the 1990s New York was home to a small, freewheeling community of motion picture technicians. That era was a wild, pre-gentrified, dangerous New York that no longer exists. This book looks at half a century—from 1954’s On the Waterfront through the 9/11 industrywide shutdown—nearly fifty years commonly thought of as the Golden Age of New York filmmaking.”

Nirenberg didn’t enter the industry, as a scenic artist, until 2007, but for the past two decades he’s worked with people who knew the Golden Age intimately. Cinematic Immunity records their experiences on more than fifty films and TV shows, from the classic to the obscure: The Godfather and Wolfen, The French Connection and The Brink’s Job, Annie Hall and Death Wish 3. “Entire books have been written about many of these movies,” Nirenberg writes. “Film scholars and historians debate which movies are important and what they mean. I don’t care about any of that.”

The dozens of people Nirenberg interviewed are not the Coppolas and Nolans. They are below-the-line talent, the folks we never hear from: camera operators and electricians, hair stylists and makeup artists, prop masters and carpenters, script supervisors and sound mixers, producers and location managers, a helicopter pilot, and an entomologist, or insect expert—the moth wrangler on The Silence of the Lambs.

Of his book’s title, Nirenberg explains: “‘Cinematic immunity’ is an industry term for the invincibility crews feel on a film set, wherever that set is located. Having spent most of my waking adult life on movie sets, I’ve come to think that this invincibility comes with creating our own superseding reality.” Cinematic Immunity is about all the cuckoo-bananas stuff that used to be done, in the pre-regulatory era, to create that reality, in a time when the only limiting factors were imagination, budget, and balls.

Richard Adee, a set decorator on The Godfather, recalls how he and Coppola scrapped the idea of using a stuffed horse’s head, but chose not to tell anyone about the new plan. Adee went to a slaughterhouse and said he needed a horse’s head: “But you gotta euthanize the thing,” he told the butcher. “I want the head chopped off with an axe, and I want all the entrails and everything hanging out of it.” Adee used dry ice to keep the head frozen for two weeks.

In The Godfather Notebook, Coppola’s margin notes (see below) show the importance he placed on the volume of the scream when Jack Woltz, the movie producer played by John Marley, finds the horse head under his sheets. For each scene that Coppola planned to adapt from the novel, he would write down the potential pitfalls, places where the director could go wrong. For the “Woltz Bedroom” scene, his note to himself was: “PITFALL: That it is not horrifying enough. If the audience does not jump out of their seat on this one, you have failed. Too much in the Corman Horror film tradition would also be a mistake. One must find the perfect balance of horror without losing the thread of the overall film. Deliver it and get out.”

When shooting day arrived for the head-in-the-bed scene, they rehearsed and then broke for lunch. Coppola told Adee, “Okay, get the head—bring it in.” Adee put the head in the bed, with gallons of fake blood. They kept the room dark. Adee recalls:

And then we come back from lunch and nobody knew it….I say to this actor [John Marley], “Get in the bed, I’ll help you in the bed. Don’t touch anything. Just do what I tell you….and I put him in the bed, and Coppola says, “I want more blood in the bed—more blood, more blood.”….So then, when we started rolling the camera and Coppola says, “Action,” he [Marley] wakes up, he feels something, and he opens his eyes and he throws the covers back and here’s this head with all the guts and shit hanging out. The guy lost his mind. That was it. One take.

Cinematic Immunity is loaded with such tales, of the wild and feral natures it took to capture something on film that felt real, that superseding reality. We see what happened behind the scenes when Mario Van Peebles vowed to bring all the grit and flavor to his Harlem gangster picture, New Jack City, using actual crackhouses and crackheads; when Martin Scorsese chose to use untrained, mob-connected actors for Goodfellas; or when Spike Lee committed to filming actual live births for Mo’ Better Blues. That movie’s camera operator, Jonathan Burkhart, recalls:

[Spike] had posted up at the Harlem Hospital that he was shooting a movie, that he was looking for volunteers giving birth on the days that we were shooting at the hospital—you would agree to let him film the birth, that he would pay the medical costs and put together, like, ten or twenty thousand dollars into a college fund for the babies….When the baby comes out and the doctor’s holding the baby with the umbilical cord, the agreement is that Denzel Washington is the first one to hold the baby, kisses it, and then puts it on the mom’s abdomen….

….Finally, this woman is dilated. She’s signed the releases and whatnot. The mom gets to eight centimeters, nine centimeters, ten centimeters, and everybody’s in the room and she’s pushing and we’re all there. The husband’s in there and there’s all this excitement, and all of a sudden the woman who’s delivering, who’s having contractions, starts to cry and she rolls on her side, and I’m like, “What the fuck is going on here?” and you have to understand…we’re, like, twelve, eighteen inches from this woman’s vagina, and this whole weird event takes place and she’s crying so hard….

She asked everybody to leave except for Denzel Washington. She’s crying but she regains her composure and she leans in and she whispers in his ear. He stands up with this look in his face like had just seen a ghost….What she told Denzel was that it wasn’t the father’s baby.

If this is the first time we’re hearing from technicians like Adee and Burkhart, it’s because, as Nirenberg writes in the intro to Cinematic Immunity, “The studio celebrity machine needs to keep the viewers at a distance in order to keep selling glamour…Celebrities are mentioned throughout this book, but only because the action often swirls around them. It’s a complicated relationship.”

Hardened film techs may not admit it, Nirenberg writes, but, like all of us, they too are charmed by celebrity stardust. And in Cinematic Immunity we might come as close as we will ever come to knowing what it’s like to swirl around towering giants like Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins at their peak in The Silence of the Lambs. Michael Burke, an electrician, recalls the first time they rehearsed the opening shot of Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter. In the scene, Jodie Foster’s FBI trainee, Clarice Starling, walks by several standard bar cells before arriving at Lecter in a special plexiglass cell, where he delivers the lines: “A census-taker once tried to test me. I ate his liver with some fava beans and nice chianti…You fly back to school now, little Starling. Fly, fly, fly.” Burke recalls:

As she walks in, the guy in the first cell is supposed to whip a handful of come and it hits her in the face, and she goes three or four cells and then she stands in front of the cell and Hopkins is facing away from her—then he turns and does his dialogue…and it is so fucking scary and good. It was the first time anybody’s heard it. And Jonathan [Demme, the director] turns around and says, “Well, I think that’s okay.” We were thinking, “Fuck, that was incredible.” That was just a moment in the show when we knew, “Wow, we’ve got an actor here.”

According to Burke, Hopkins wasn’t the only feral performer on set of Silence.

The actor who played the killer [Ted Levine] was a little strange bird. He was getting into the role of that killer. I remember he had a book on piercings and tattooing with photographs of people that would split their penises up the middle and all kinds of shit, different cuttings and stuff. He was just getting into that deviant role of a serial killer, so we were thinking “Oh my God, stay away from this guy.” [laughs]

If there was one day on which Stephen King became Stephen King, it might’ve been a day in 1972, when, at twenty four, he realized that anger alone wasn’t enough to be a writer, and that his art would be empty if he couldn’t face his fears on the page.

Living in a rented trailer with his wife Tabitha and their two babies, King had thrown out his initial stab at a story about teenage girls, feeling, as he’d later recall, “completely at sea” because “I didn’t know jack-shit about high school girls.” Tabitha fished the three single-spaced pages out of the trash—he wrote single-spaced because paper was expensive—and encouraged him to continue, saying she’d help with the girl stuff.

But it wasn’t just the female perspective and the details of menstruation that were holding King back from writing Carrie, his first novel, about a bullied girl with telekinetic powers who takes vengeance on her tormentors. The problem was deeper. He later said he based Carrie on “the two loneliest, most reviled girls” from his own childhood, and he feared “the level of cruelty” he would need to describe. He didn’t want to revisit the memories of “what I’d not had the wit or moral courage to stop.” When he forced himself to do so, however, Carrie sold to Doubleday for $2,500, the paperback rights sold for $400,000, and from then on he could afford to write his pages double-spaced.

In the 1970s, when Caroline Bicks was a girl growing up in New York City and spending summers in Maine, Carrie was one of many King novels that terrified Bicks. But those books also taught her to manage her fears of the unknown and “transform anxiety into action and adventure,” as she explains in Monsters in the Archives: My Year Off With Stephen King, published in April by Hogarth Press. Bicks writes: “Carrie’s horrific first menses”—school shower, legs covered in blood, girls throwing tampons at her—“embodied everything I feared about my changing body…My need for control didn’t jibe with this bloody, unpredictable rite of passage, or with the explosive telekinesis that accompanied Carrie’s.”

As a teenager, Bicks discovered the work of King and Shakespeare around the same time, and both writers made “enormous claims” on her imaginative life. She was drawn to the way they both used language to create “clusters and patterns” of words and “hair-raising horrors” that worked their way into the reader’s mind, scars, and fearbone.

Bicks went to Harvard and Stanford and became a Shakespeare scholar. She’s the author of Cognition and Girlhood in Shakespeare’s World: Rethinking Female Adolescence and Midwiving Subjects in Shakespeare’s England, as well as a co-host of the Everyday Shakespeare podcast. After spending fifteen years teaching Shakespeare at Boston College, she moved to the University of Maine to become the inaugural Stephen E. King Chair in Literature, where she was given dibs on the King archive and a year-long sabbatical to explore it.

Monsters in the Archives is a delightfully unclassifiable gem of next-level fan-girling and literary reverse engineering. Bicks investigates the creation process behind five early iconic works: the novels Carrie (1974), ‘Salem’s Lot (1975), The Shining (1977), and Pet Sematary (1983); and King’s first story collection, Night Shift: Excursions into Horror (1978). So much do we learn about King’s process in Monsters in the Archives, the book makes a nice companion to King’s own book about his work, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, in which he says that succumbing to fear, rather than facing it, “is at the root of most bad writing.”

Facing her own fears, Bicks, a world-class lit crit and word nerd, goes deep. By comparing successive drafts of Pet Sematary, for instance, she shows how King built the “sonic horror” of that novel, which was inspired by a tragedy and a near-tragedy in the King family. First, their cat, Smucky, was hit by a truck and buried in a nearby area, behind a neighbor’s house, identified with a hand-painted sign: “Pet Sematary.” Shortly after Smucky’s passing, King’s youngest son, Owen, not yet two, ran toward the same road that took Smucky, but fell down, or was taken down, just before he reached the road as a truck zoomed by. Of Pet Sematary, King has said, “I simply took existing elements and threw in that one terrible what if. Put another way, I found myself not just thinking the unthinkable, but writing it down.”

Bicks tracks the development of the unbearable scene in Pet Sematary, in which the family’s two-year-old son, Gage, runs into the road and gets hit by a truck. King decides to have Gage’s death narrated after the fact, at the funeral parlor, from the father’s point of view. In the first draft of the novel, King wrote the scene in one uninterrupted 300-word sentence, the run-on creating a sense of breathless momentum. In the second draft, however, he broke the sentence up, replacing the breathless structure with “a terrifying soundscape”:

Now he could hear the drone of a truck coming toward them, one of those big ten-wheelers that went back and forth endlessly between Bangor and the Orinco plant in Bucksport, and he had screamed Gage’s name then, and he believed that Gage had heard him and tried to stop. Gage seemed to realize that the game was over, that your parents didn’t scream at you when it was just a game, and he had tried to put on the breaks, and by then the sound of the truck was very loud, the sound of it filled the world. It was thundering….And then Gage’s forward motion had carried him out into the road, and the truck had been thunder, the truck had been sunlight on high chrome, the truck had been the deep-throated shrieking bellow of an air horn, and that had been Saturday, and that had been three days ago.

King could write down the unthinkable, but he couldn’t bring himself to publish Pet Sematary, finding it too “startling and gruesome.” And oh man is it ever! For my money, Pet Sematary is the freakiest of all King creations. First they bury the cat in the magic burial site, and the cat comes back, but not quite the same cat. Then the father exhumes and reburies his son on the site, and the son comes back—as a toddler monster, and kills his mom, whom the father then also buries in the magical site, thinking he’ll get a better result this time because she’s “fresher” than Gage was. And that final scene! Is there a more terrifying final scene in all of horror? But when he finished the book, King thought he’d finally gone too far with this one. He put the manuscript for Pet Sematary in a drawer in 1979 and didn’t publish it until 1983, primarily to fulfill his final contractual obligation with his former publisher, Doubleday, after having moved on to Viking. (The book is now available in a gorgeous 40th anniversary edition from Folio Society.)

Just as King had imagined the plot of Pet Sematary after his younger son’s close call with the truck, it was a nightmare about his first son, Joe, being chased through the halls of a Colorado hotel by an antique fire hose, that inspired The Shining. But in the King archive Bicks discovers other inspirations as well, namely, Hamlet.

Both Hamlet and Jack Torrance, the abusive father in The Shining, are dogged by generational trauma. Describing their common psychological struggle, Bicks writes: “To leave, or not to leave? To listen to the ghosts of your past and bind yourself to a shared toxic history, or to move forward and forge your own future and family?”

Of all his horror work, King says the episode that scared him the most was the bathtub scene from The Shining, in which Danny Torrance discovers the dead woman in Room 217 and she gets out of the tub and chases him. Of writing it, King said:

It wasn’t too bad when I wrote it; all at once it was there. It was one of those things that just happened. But on the rewrite, as I got closer to that point, I would say to myself, eight days to the tub, and then six days to the tub. And then one day it was the tub today. When I went down to the typewriter that day I felt frightened and my heart was beating too fast and I felt the way that you do when you have to make a big presentation, or when something’s going to happen. And I was scared. I did the best job I could with it, but I was glad when it was over.

When Bicks asked King what inspired her own scariest King creation—the monster in “Boogeyman,” a story from Night Shift—he wrote to her: “Always being in touch with my fears, and two little ones, Naomi and Joe, I was very worried about crib death. I imagine the story came out of that. If there was a more specific ignition point, I don’t remember it. Stories are like dreams. They are clear, then they melt like cotton candy.”

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The Spanish journalist Carlos Barragán made his first trip to Nigeria in 2022 to interview romance scammers, known as Yahoo Boys. He was twenty six, and he went to Lagos blindly—naively, as he would later write—to find one romance scammer in particular, someone who, years earlier, had posed online as “Brian” and nearly succeeded in scamming Barragán’s own mother in Madrid, stealing her heart but ultimately failing to get her money.

It was a wild swing of a reporting trip, and while Barragán failed to find his mom’s scammer, his dedication to the larger story has resulted in an astonishing book, Yahoo Boys: Love, Deception, and the Real Lives of Nigeria’s Romance Scammers, which comes out next week from FSG. “I realized the best way to show the magnitude of Western loneliness was from the vantage point of a slum in Lagos,” writes Barragán. “I wanted to understand how these boys saw us, how they made sense of our isolation, and how that shaped their lives and community.”

Yahoo Boys is the chronicle of five Nigerian scammers: a teenage boy, three young men, and a young woman who stand in for thousands of Yahoo Boys (and Girls). How are scammers such as these able to take more than a billion dollars a year from Americans alone? Loneliness plays a big part. But also, as one Yahoo Boy puts it: “Americans love pussy.”

In Nigeria, Barragán had expected to find an organized network of fraudsters, a romance-scamming syndicate, the kind of intricate con that would justify his mom having fallen for it. What he found instead was simpler and more uncomfortable. “Most of these young men weren’t master manipulators,” he writes. “They were just fulfilling unmet emotional needs….The scam was all about making the victim feel seen.”

A Yahoo Boy tells Barragán: “If you give them attention, you have their heart. You must understand that victims tell everything to their scammer. Everything! I’m one hundred percent sure your mother told things to her scammer that you don’t know. Things about her you’ve never imagined in your life. Her ambitions, her flaws, her broken dreams. They’re looking for someone who will listen, period.”

With its green bottles of Orijin, its face-me-I-face-you tenements, and its grafting cops who track the fortunes of the Yahoo Boys, Barragán’s book has the lived-in feel of a Graham Greene novel and the bracing intensity of a Gaspar Noé film. One of the most immersive and closely-observed ethnographies I’ve read, Yahoo Boys belongs on a shelf next to Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier and Down and Out In Paris and London.

Although Barragán didn’t join his subjects in their trade, as Orwell did in those books, Yahoo Boys was written (in the author’s second language, English) with that same kind of unflinching commitment. He moved to Nigeria and rented an apartment near Ikotun, the Lagosian slum where the Yahoo Boys he was writing about resided. He walked the neighborhood at all hours, ate at the same local canteen every day, and hung out in the same hotels, malls, and clubs where Yahoo Boys blew the money they made scamming.

He also accessed the written records of their scams, the surreal back-and-forth between scammer and mark, and in the book he follows many scamming escapades to their bitter end—with bankrupted victims, families destroyed, and one Yahoo Boy haunted by the possibility that his scamming might’ve resulted in the death of a “client.” Others claim to be unbothered by the moral aspect. Miracle, a Yahoo Girl, scams women who want to adopt babies. She told Barragán, “People don't give a damn about you or how you feel. So that is why I’m wicked now. If you do me pepper, I'm sure I’ll be back with pepper.”

“This kind of work wears you down,” Barragán confesses in an author’s note, and credits his fixer, a local man in his forties, for making the book happen. “The deeper we went, the darker the stories became—as the book itself inevitably does.” At times Barragán lost faith, unsure of why he felt compelled to tell this story, but he always came back to a sustaining sense of shared humanity. “In an age when everything feels two-dimensional, when we live inside rectangles of sadness and the internet has failed to bring us closer, we need to lower our guard and try, sincerely, to understand each other.”

I should mention that my own interest in romance scams goes beyond that of a nonfiction nut. Fifteen years ago, I was working on my first book, the titularly-challenged Love in the Time of Algorithms, about the online-dating industry. The book’s last chapter, called “Let’s Keep This Fucker Coming Back” (a better title?), looked at how a happy customer can be bad for business. One online-dating entrepreneur told me that when he threw scammers off his site he lost money, because scammers bring in customers.

While researching romance scams, I came across a prolific Ghanian fraudster who had scammed one English woman for 300,000 euros, and was living in a gold-plated villa on the outskirts of Accra. If you could catch up with that guy, I remember thinking, there might be an amazing story there. Alas…one gets older, and has kids, and accumulates a long list of projects that never come to be.

Romance scams are a young person’s game, and the thirty-year-old Barragán, who, prompted by his mother’s experience, has spent the past decade thinking about the subject, was the writer for the job. He recently spoke to me from Madrid, where he now works as a reporter and researcher for the New York Times. What follows is an abridged version of our conversation.

Hi Carlos. Amazing book. First, can I ask how your mom is doing? We have her hardship to thank for Yahoo Boys.

Since the divorce with my father, she always struggled with loneliness and finding a partner. But I think if the scam hadn’t happened, she probably would have tried more on dating apps, would have put herself out there to see what happened.

She would try to go into dating apps, but every time she would say, “I’m gonna be scammed.” She would ask me, “Do you think this is a scam or not?” She’s become better at telling who’s real and who’s not.

You write about how your reporting in Nigeria challenged your assumptions and surprised you.

In Nigeria I learned how they were also scamming people in marriages, people with children. So it’s not only about physical isolation. It’s about all the kinds of isolation, some of which are even more dangerous.

Also, it was surprising to see the victims through the eyes of the scammers. The same way that we look at Nigerian scammers in a two-dimensional way, imagining them as evil, they see their victims in the West as two-dimensional as well. Take Trisha, the American woman who got scammed by Richie, and then faked her own death.

When you tracked her down in Kentucky and knocked on her door, she pulled a gun on you.

Yeah. With Trisha, it was always assumed: Kentucky, white trash, no education. But then you get there and you talk to her, and suddenly you see there are all these forces behind her story. She was working as a welder, had a job accident, and her whole life was ruined. So the whole story becomes more complicated, just as it did in Nigeria. When you do journalism, I find that things always get more complicated, because reality is very, very, very messy.

Can you talk about your journey as a journalist, and your path to this book?

My mom met her scammer in 2016, when I was in college and still living with her. Later, the pandemic came and loneliness got worse. When I moved out of the house, I kept thinking about the guy who tried to scam her, and who he could be. And at the same time I was becoming a journalist. I was a reporter in Madrid for El Confidencial, writing stories about Spain. I wanted to write a book that went beyond the kind of journalistic work I was doing.

Then I got this scholarship that allowed me to study two years in the U.S. I wanted to use it to get an MFA in journalism at Columbia. An editor of mine advised against it. “You’re already a journalist,” he said. “What you have to do is improve your English.” He was right. My English back then was pretty rubbish. But I thought, if I want to write in English, what about spending two years doing an MFA in New York?

I was afraid of feeling like a fraud at Columbia. I thought I had to bring a really good story with me, or some reporting already in progress, so before going to the States I did my first trip to Nigeria, which was the most important one, because I wrote a long article from that trip that was published by Atavist.

Apple News picked up the story and it went viral, so they sent me a nice check for $10,000. With that money I spent three months in Lagos, while professors at Columbia helped me. Until then, I thought that the opportunity to spend so much time somewhere was only for, like, writers for the New Yorker.

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In addition to the Friday newsletter, which will focus on books and the written word as such, I’d like to do an irregular series called “True Adaptation,” a round-up of all the nonfiction stories currently on offer in Hollywood—a theoretical and incomplete list of true stories that, according to my research, have been circulated recently to writers, directors, and producers. Some of the below titles may generate no film or TV interest. Others will be, or already have been, optioned for development in unpublicized deals. Some books came out years ago, were optioned then, and are available again now. Others are forthcoming. Some are magazine or podcasts pieces. Check publication dates. And please message me with True Adaptation news!

(NB: organizing by category even if I don’t endorse categories.)

True Crime/Family Drama/Social Drama

London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family’s Search for Truth by Patrick Radden Keefe, a Ripley-esque tale of deception and a kaleidoscopic portrait of the city, landing at A24.

Checkmate: Genius, Lies, Ambition, and the Biggest Scandal in Chess by Ben Mezrich, to be developed by Emma Stone and Nathan Fielder, also at A24.

The Oracle’s Daughter: The Rise and Fall of an American Cult by Harrison Hill, about a young woman’s escape from the Aggressive Christianity Missions Training Corps.

Dangerous, Dirty, Violent & Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground, the best-selling memoir by Zayd Ayers Dohrn, child of an infamous underground family.

Plastic Shaman: The True Story of a Deadly Self-Help Retreat and America’s Misguided Quest for Wellness by Annette McGivney, an investigation of the wellness industry.

Man in the Mirror: Hope, Struggle, and Belonging in an American City, about the 2023 subway death of Jordan Neely and ensuing trial, by Anand Giridharadas.

A Death in Malta: An Assassination and a Family’s Quest for Justice by Paul Caruana Galizia, a 2023 book about the author’s investigation of his mother’s assassination, on offer again after two years of development for series at Working Title/Angelina Jolie.

The Yahoo Boys: Love, Deception, and the Real Lives of Nigeria’s Romance Scammers by Carlos Barragán, an astonishingly intimate look at a hidden but prevalent phenomenon, one of the most cinematic things I’ve read, coming June 9.

True Crime by Patricia Cornwell, a best-selling memoir of family dysfunction and coming of age by the forensics expert and author of the Scarpetta series of novels.

Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City by Bench Ansfield, a 2025 masterpiece about the arson wave that hit American cities in the 1970s, described by the Times as deeply researched and masterfully told: “The narrative moves from the intimate and local to the global, encompassing unscrupulous adjusters who brazenly pinned arson cases on residents themselves; congressional testimony from an arsonist who described insurance as ‘instant liquidity’; and the sordid complicity of Lloyd’s of London.” Winner of the LA Times Book Prize for History, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History.

The Wild Card by Marcia Clark, a proposal that is out to publishers, about a home invasion and an investigation that pulls back the curtain on two marriages and a tangled affair.

History, Sports, Adventure, War

This Vast Enterprise: A New History of Lewis & Clark, the best-seller by Craig Fehrman, an innovative approach to the iconic journey, introducing new characters.

The Long Run: Steve Prefontaine, Frank Shorter, Joan Benoit, Grete Waitz, and the Decade That Made the Marathon Cool by Martin Dugard.

The Rush: California Gold, the Civil War, and the Making of the Modern World by Nathaniel Philbrick, the National-Book-Award-winning author of In the Heart of the Sea, billed as the story of America’s contradictions, a country tearing at the seams.

The Queen of Codes: The Secret Life of Emily Anderson, Britain’s Greatest Female Codebreaker by Jackie Ui Chionna.

A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win WWII, the 2020 espionage thriller by Sonia Purnell, back on the market.

Memoir (non-true-crime)

Mother Tongue by Sara Novic, a memoir of living in both the deaf and hearing worlds.

I Am Not a Robot: My Year Using AI to Do (Almost) Everything by Joanna Stern, a memoir described as a time trip to the near future and an A.I. guide for ordinary people.

Cancel Me If You Can by Dave Portnoy, founder of the Barstool Sports media empire/

Hard Pushed by Leah Hazard, a love letter to midwives everywhere.

Magazine Pieces

“I Traced An Anthropologist’s Deadly Obsession With the Dark World of Kanaima” by Frank Bures (Outside) about shamans in Guyana.

“The Rise of the ‘Menopause Retreat’ and Why Midlife Women Are Flocking to Them” by Christina Yu (Outside), billed as How Stella Got Her Groove Back meets Something’s Gotta Give.

“The Stunt Pilot Hunting Russian Drones” by Ed Caesar (New Yorker), about a Ukrainian aerobatics pilot defending his country from Russian drone attacks, plus see the top-gun-style video report here.

“The Car-Crash Conspiracy” by Patrick Radden Keefe (New Yorker), one of the most distinctive crime stories I’ve ever read, Michael Bay meets Elmore Leonard.

“Big Game” by Nick Davidson (Atavist) about an undercover federal agent posing as a taxidermist to take down poachers.

Podcasts

Deep Cover: The Family Man by Jake Halpern, true-crime drama about dad’s double life.

Who Shat on the Floor at My Wedding? by Helen McLaughlin, Karen Whitehouse, & Lauren Kilby, billed as the true story of two brides and one turd, on offer again after development by NBC Universal.

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Amid declining sales, WSJ noted that podcasts have become a prime mover for dad books. Booksellers and editors say they pay attention to five podcasts: Club Random by Bill Maher; The Lex Fridman Podcast; The Rest is History by authors Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook; Making Sense by neuroscientist and author Sam Harris; and The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway.

Given this concentration of dad-book influence, it’s interesting to think about the above seven men and where they each stand in relation to writing, because that might tell us something about their own staying power.

For starters, Maher and Fridman are not known as authors. Holland and Sandbrook are two of the western world’s leading historians, but they write the kind of books that WSJ says are becoming harder to sell, in part because history podcasts like their own tend to cannibalize interest in the same books and authors they feature. Nonfiction history, in its written form, may soon become history (which is unfortunate, because have you seen the Folio Society editions of Rubicon and Pax?). As for Sam Harris, he writes about consciousness and philosophy. Harris is an elegant storyteller, but one could imagine his books going the way of history too.

Of the author podcasters, Scott Galloway might be the only one whose genre, self-help, has a more promising future. Some of the strongest nonfiction titles in recent years have been The Let Them Theory by Mel Robbins and Atomic Habits by James Clear. Galloway’s last two bestsellers were The Algebra of Wealth: A Simple Formula for Financial Security and a hybrid of memoir and self help called Notes on Being a Man.

In these books, Galloway writes of a mid-life transformation that began, incidentally, right around the time I met him, about 20 years ago, in late 2006.

At the time, I was a young staff journalist at The Deal, an industry magazine for the investment banking world. Six months earlier I had left my law firm, days after getting sworn into the New York State bar, to join the world of journalism. At The Deal, I was accustomed to fielding story pitches from publicists and sources who reached out via phone or email, but Galloway walked right into our newsroom one day and I wound up sitting across from him in a room while he pitched himself for a piece.

Galloway was different than the besuited Wall Street types we typically wrote about in The Deal. He was tall and rangy, athletic and casual. He wore a t-shirt beneath an overcoat, like an aging hipster, and a sweatband around his forearm as if he’d just come off the basketball court. His profile was also varied. He was a professor of brand strategy at NYU business school, an entrepreneur from California, and an activist investor who bought stakes in companies that, as he told me, had “great brands that are getting the crap kicked out of them.”

While writing the piece, “The Accidental Activist,” I attended Galloway’s branding class at NYU. He was brilliant, though he came off as a bit cold and aloof. As he'd later confess in Notes on Being a Man, his NYU teacher reviews get some variation of “Scott’s an asshole” or “Scott’s a dick.” Students comment that his profanity and self-absorption reduce his credibility. “Every time this comes up, I get rattled,” he writes in Notes on Being a Man. “Why? Because it’s true. If an outside assessment throws you off balance, feels like you’ve just been told really bad news, it’s usually a telltale sign.”

But back when I met Galloway, he was still a decade away from becoming a writer and achieving writerly self-awareness. A divorced 43-year-old, he had just had his first child and he was nervous about becoming a dad, about giving up his status-obsessed and self-absorbed ways for a life of service to family.

I didn’t know any of this at the time. The short piece I wrote about him for The Deal focused on his investing exploits. I didn’t know anything about his absentee father (“He was a low-end gigolo, basically,” Galloway writes in Notes). But I did sense the anger. Coming myself from a family beset by dysfunction and rage, I had a radar for it. While writing about Galloway I was getting ready to reach out to my own dad, following an estrangement that had lasted most of my twenties.

In Notes, Galloway tells the story of growing up in Southern California in the sixties and seventies as the son of a devoted but cash-strapped single mom; of how he found confidence and a skill set in college; became a driven entrepreneur in his twenties; and then a selfish and resentful party animal in his thirties—an invulnerable island of a man who was headed to an early grave.

“Between ages thirty-four and forty-four, I lost the capacity to cry,” he writes in Notes. “Didn’t cry when I got divorced or when my mom died. It felt like I just forgot how. I was self-numbing by being obsessed with business and became hugely stressed over it. Avoiding my feelings and deeper emotional life, I wrapped way too much of my identity and self-worth around professional success.” But following the arrival of fatherhood, Galloway eventually discovered what it meant to be a good man and live a good life, by learning to cry and express his feelings.

Writing also helped him get there. He kicked off his writing career in 2016, when, as head of his branding firm, he began writing a client newsletter that grew and grew into today’s Prof G media empire. In a recent interview, Galloway reflected on his writing origins, how he started off talking about business but soon found that his personal stories resonated more with readers. “The most-read post I’ve ever published was a post I wrote about putting my dog down. There’s a wide space for men of my age to talk about their emotions.”

Now a 61-year-old father of two adolescent boys, Galloway is all about emotions. He says alcohol, though poisonous, helps him open up emotionally and connect with friends. At night, with a drink or two under his belt, he sends heartfelt texts to friends, and in the morning he doesn’t regret having sent the texts, even if they make him cringe a bit.

“Practice vulnerability, even if it makes you feel like a klutz,” he instructs in Notes. “Ignore cultural messages telling you that being emotional means you can’t cut it. Compliment your friends. Tell them how much you value what they bring to your life….We are emotional, physical beings—to not express our emotions in person, through shared experiences, is to be less human. Less alive.”

I thought about Galloway while attending a recent launch party for No Contact: Writers on Estrangement, a new book of candid and vulnerable essays by writers who cut off contact with one or both parents. During the Q&A, when an audience member asked the book’s editor why there were so few male writers in the collection, she smiled apologetically. Men just don’t write about their feelings, she said.

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Some more nuggets of wisdom from Notes on Being a Man:

“To this day, if there’s a skill I could transfer to my kids, it wouldn’t be fluent Mandarin or computer programming or even STEM stuff. It would be the tools, the endurance skill, of being a good storyteller.”

“The key, the skill, the talent, the mastery, the ninja artisanship no one teaches, is that the greatest, most specific skill a young man can develop is his willingness to endure rejection.”

“The struggles young men share are often kept private—you’d be surprised how universal and solvable most are.”

“The fastest blue-line path to a better world isn’t economic growth or a better phone. It’s more men becoming irrationally passionate about the well-being of a child who isn’t their own, getting involved in the life of a young man.”

“It’s a man’s job to take the temperature down, to model calm….Being a man means taking the occasional body blow. It doesn’t mean letting people walk over you, or whack you, but it doesn’t have to escalate.”

“As you get older, the relationships you have with people you love and who love you overwhelm everything else in your life.”

Here, “incredible” can be read both in the modern way, as “amazing,” and in the literal sense, as “implausible.” In the piece, we watch McKay Coppins, a dogged reporter, pursue a seductive lead, a story that was pitched to him by an aspiring screenwriter. The story is about a Mexican guy, known as Mau, who claims to be a former Olympian, and says he was once kidnapped by a drug cartel and coerced into participating in a gladiator-style flag football tournament, in which the penalty for losing was death. Mau says he was told: “If you win, you live. If you lose, you die.” The screenwriter wanted Coppins to write about Mau for The Atlantic so that he, the screenwriter, could then option the piece and adapt it for a movie with the actor Michael Peña in the lead.

“The darkness of the story was just the kind of thing that Oscar voters loved,” Coppins reflects. “So was the ‘body transformation’ that would be required for Peña to convincingly play an Olympian. But the actor had a condition: He wanted a journalist to vet Mau’s account and publish it in a reputable outlet so that he and the filmmakers could say, with full confidence, that the movie was ‘based on a true story.’”

But was the story true? “The story seemed preposterous,” Coppins writes. “An inter­cartel sports tournament? The hero’s life hanging in the balance? Flag football? It sounded like an overwrought episode of Narcos or something. ‘It would be an incredible story if it were true,’ I told my wife that night. ‘But it almost certainly isn’t true.’”

At first, Mau seems credible. And as Coppins educates himself about narco culture, he sees that cartels do indeed have some interesting traditions. “They raise money for churches and build health clinics in rural areas,” Coppins writes. “They throw block parties and hand out toys to kids at Christmastime. And, yes, they host sporting events—­see the boxing matches organized by Los Zetas.”

I perked up at the mention of boxing and Zetas, because in my 2016 nonfiction book, Wolf Boys, about American teens who became killers for the Zetas, I reported about the Zetas training camps, where the recruits, or reclutas, were forced to box—the obligatory boxing being perhaps the least alarming activity at the training camps.

Below are three of the main characters from Wolf Boys, left to right: Wences Tovar, Rosalio “Bart” Reta, and Gabriel Cardona, plus a self portrait that Gabriel drew for me during the years we were in touch for the book.

For a decade I’ve watched Wolf Boys travel its own development gantlet in Hollywood. Multiple screenwriters. Countless visions. It’s the prequel to Scarface! An updated Peter Pan! Oliver Twist meets Stranger in a Strange Land! One studio wanted to position Wolf Boys as a socially important story—with hard stats about drug-war deaths and child soldiers coming onscreen at the end—but also wanted to see the boys at the aforementioned homicidal training camp no later than page ten of the script, lest audiences get bored.

Publishing a book is such a crazy experience, and some things about it always amaze me. Here’s one: my core fears about publishing a given book rarely come to pass, while I often get dinged for something I never considered. With Wolf Boys, I had worried about the project being seen as that of white author capitalizing on brown poverty. That would’ve been a fair critique, not least because the story was one of the more violent true stories I’d ever read in a book.

In fact, the sheer amount of violence often threatened to overtake the narrative and weigh it down, so I decided to establish a rule: I would only depict those violent episodes that advanced the story or revealed something important about a character. This seemed like a good compromise, until the book came out, and a review suggested that I’d withheld details from some of Gabriel’s murders in order to soften his image and make him more relatable. Damn, I thought. Should’ve had more violence!

In Coppins’s experience, the screenwriter who brought him the story had wanted Coppins to write the piece so he could adapt it for a movie “based on a true story,” but, in the end, it turned out that the Hollywood people didn’t care if it was true or not, so long as the carnage was good ‘n bloody.

“In the months after I left Mexico,” Coppins writes, “the news in my own country would be dominated by ICE raids and mass deportations—­a hard-line immigration agenda built on the stories we are told about crime and migrants and cartel bosses. When the death of a drug lord in February set off a brutal wave of cartel attacks, the United States canceled flights to resort cities and issued shelter-in-place alerts for Americans in Mexico. Mau’s account of the cartel Olympics fit neatly into the governing narrative of the age, one that imagines a permanent, untamable dystopia just beyond America’s southern border.”

I love Coppins’s Atlantic piece because the article is as much about the veracity of Mau’s story—the “Squid Game–style tournament”—as it is about what our appetite for drug-war stories says about us.

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I’m choosing Jordan Ritter Conn’s new book, American Men, for my first book-recommendation post on The Nonfiction Nut, not only because I love how it bucks a big nonfiction publishing trend by absenting a subtitle, but because I think American Men is that rare book that maximizes what great journalism can accomplish.

Inspired by Lisa Taddeo’s groundbreaking 2019 book, Three Women, Ritter Conn set out, as writes in the introduction of American Men, to chart how four men “built their own relationship to masculinity and how they navigated that relationship over time.” Intro sections in nonfiction books can be tedious, but the intro here feels essential, beginning with masturbation in conservative Christian circles and quickly moving on to the genesis of Ritter Conn’s journalism career and how he arrived at this project.

In the intro, he writes: “Nearly all of us inherit similar ideas about it means to embody an ideal form of masculinity. Physical power over other men, sexual attractiveness, emotional steadiness, and the ability to support a family, to name a few. And all of us, at one point or another, fail to live up to that ideal….For some, this failure arrives early in life. For others, not until middle age or even later. For most, it happens in fits and starts as we embody certain ideals in some moments and fall short of them in others. And our relationship to masculinity comes to be defined by how we navigate the gap between the men we think we should be and the men we actually are. American Men is a book that explores that gap.”

From there, Ritter Conn, as author, disappears from the narrative, and American Men becomes a totally immersive and novelistic journey into the lives of four guys: a golden-boy West Point grad who is running up against the white masculine ideal; an indigenous man coming to grips with his sexuality and propensity for violence; a law student whose unresolved childhood trauma threatens to derail his life; and an impoverished, five-foot-one, Black trans man who must build his own masculine identity from whole cloth.

None of these men are famous or infamous. They’re just guys that Ritter Conn found and spent years with, and through his intimate, judgment-free, chronicling of their lives, all the big subjects, all the silent pressures of masculinity, are covered: the consequences of a coddled childhood, of an abusive childhood, of a bullied childhood; the tendency to cope with drinking and denial, anger and rage, secrecy and avoidance, self-loathing and doubt; and, finally, the possibility of redemption and recovery.

This is literature as a connective force, literature at its best. If you have sons, I can’t think of a better book to give them than American Men.

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Here is Lower Manhattan in 1912, looking down toward the Lower East Side and the Brooklyn Bridge beyond.

Ever since the 1880s, Eastern European Jewish immigrants, many of them fleeing massacres in Russia, had been flooding into the Lower East Side.

According to the below NYT article from 1910, the Lower East Side had become the most crowded urban area in the world—the planet’s most densely-populated ghetto—surpassing Bombay, India (modern-day Mumbai) for that title. The Lower East Side had as many as 1,500 people living on a single square block, and one acre of park space for every 16,000 LES residents. Do you know what an acre of land feels like? Imagine 16k people trying to hang out there.

Life in the Lower East Side ghetto was rough. To find relief from the heat of the tenements, East Side families slept outside in summer to escape infernal tenements.

East Side children found food wherever they could get it.

They went around shoeless.

They smoked.

They gambled.

And they were arrested for picking pockets.

With the development of this ghetto came the development of the most vast and complex underworld on earth. There was a lot of vice and crime. There was the usual, of course, such as gambling and pocket-picking. But there was also much bigger stuff going on, such as an emerging market for narcotics, as the new anti-drug laws began to take effect between about 1907 and 1914. Drugs that had always freely available at your corner pharmacy were now illegal.

In the Jewish underworld, there were also gangs. And these gangs didn’t just fight each other. They were in the extortion business. Some gangs were hired by the Hebrew labor unions to go after garment manufacturers. Here, below, is a murdered garment manufacturer who refused to bow to union demands.

There was also a gang of Jewish horse poisoners—yes, this is true. They called themselves the Yiddish Black Hand, and made their money by extorting businesses that relied on horse transport. Small businesses that dealt in perishable goods, such as produce and ice cream, were the most vulnerable. Here’s a photo of an extortion letter from the Yiddish Black Hand. Note the last line: “We are watching you all the time, so beware. If you fail to do as we ask you we will poison your horses.”

But the largest underworld industry on the Lower East Side was in fact Jewish prostitution, which at its peak generated as much as $5 million a year, more than $100 million in today’s dollars.

In the Jewish underworld, it wasn’t only the amount of vice and crime that impressed, but the extensive organization of it. Each category of vice had a corresponding association. The Jewish pimps, for instance, banded together into something they called the Independent Benevolent Association. These splendid gents gathered at a café at 92 Second Avenue, to network, do business, and pool their resources. The IBA even filed incorporation papers in New York State. They had bylaws and a corporate constitution that spelled out things like unemployment benefits and burial rights. They needed each other. It was hard out there for a pimp!

Not surprisingly, as the Lower East Side ghetto grew, along with its reputation for vice and crime, there was a big backlash from mainstream America, who saw the Jewish immigrants as a threat to the country, a threat to “America for Americans.” The anti-immigration movement, which had begun to coalesce back in the 1890s, wanted to pass a law that would shut down the border. They wanted “eugenics” to play a role in deciding who could procreate. And if you were part of this nativist crowd, then the idea of Jewish crime was wonderful validation for the policies you wanted to see enacted.

This was not a minority viewpoint. In 1908, the NYPD commissioner, a guy named Theodore Bingham (pictured below), wrote an article in a popular magazine, entitled “Foreign Criminals in New York.” He blamed the city’s crime problem on “Russian Hebrews.” He said it should be no surprise that a people who were naturally unsuited for physical labor, and who lacked language skills, should turn to poisoning horses and selling their daughters on the street. He wrote: “They are burglars, firebugs, pickpockets and highway robbers—when they have the courage; but, though all crime is their province, pocket-picking is the one to which they seem to take most naturally.”

As you can imagine, Bingham’s piece really stirred things up. There were about a dozen Yiddish newspapers on the Lower East Side, and they all took different positions on Bingham’s article. Some said, this is really anti-Semitic. And others said, “Well, he’s sorta right. We’ve got a lot of crime.” Others wondered if he really meant what he said. Maybe he’d just misspoken. Bingham did later retract the statements. He said he based his comments on faulty data. But it didn’t matter. The anti-immigrant voice to which Bingham gave permission became louder and louder in the following years—1909, 1910, 1911.

Meanwhile, as this was happening, there was another group of Jewish people in Manhattan who were watching with horror. These were the German Jews who lived in mansions uptown and worked on Wall Street. Their ancestors had arrived in America a generation or two before the Eastern Europeans. Back in Germany, they too had come from a long history of oppression, but they’d also come from a more enlightened background in Western Europe. And the German Jews thrived here. We know many of their names today because they adorn, or have adorned, important institutions: Lehman, Solomon. These folks founded roughly half the firms on Wall Street. One family owned Macy’s department store. Another family owned the New York Times. They congregated here, at a fancy Fifth Avenue synagogue, Temple Emanu-El.

Quite unlike the Lower East Side kids, the children of uptowners played with the latest toys in Central Park. And the cops, rather than carting these kids off to jail, helped them cross the street.

The German Jews had built a lot in America, and they had a lot to lose. For one thing, they worried that their co-religionists from the backwaters of Eastern Europe would undermine their own hard-won social respectability. But it wasn’t just self-interest. They were also idealists. They believed that an open border was what made America. They believed in elevating their downtown brethren who were less fortunate. They donated huge sums of money, and built all kinds of philanthropic organizations—free education, free healthcare, orphanages. The uptowners sponsored soup kitchens and breadlines.

They organized matzoh giveaways on Passover and established public milk stations, handing out free pasteurized milk in order to assuage the typhoid problem.

Notably, all this help could’ve only been supplied by private money. Because there wasn’t yet a welfare net in America. There wasn’t an income tax until 1913. There were few labor laws. No effective regulations of child labor or hours worked. No minimum wage. East Siders, particularly the Jewish girls and young women who comprised most of the garment industry’s work force, organized into labor unions and protested in the streets.

The German-Jewish uptowners were trying to fix the various problems that ailed the poor, but the issue of downtown crime was something that had irked the uptowners for years. In the first few years of the century, some uptowners had been involved in trying to eradicate vice on the Lower East Side, but those attempts often blew back in their face. Now, however, with the police commissioner writing articles, and Jewish vice being a constant feature of newspaper headlines, it was getting to the point where it could no longer be ignored.

And then, by the summer of 1912, it got to the point where it really couldn’t be ignored. It was that summer that a notorious Jewish gambler and casino owner named Herman Rosenthal was murdered outside of a hotel in Times Square.

Several of the folks implicated in the Rosenthal murder were Lower East Side immigrant Jews, or the children of immigrant Jews, plus one member of the NYPD, a cop who was charged with having ordered the murder.

The unique circumstances of the Rosenthal Affair would make the story front-page news, nationally and abroad, for the next three years, as newspaper editors let fly about Jewish crime. Here’s a headline from the Times of London.

The Rosenthal Affair was the most obsessed-over murder case of its time, and it put Jewish crime front and center. One week after the murder, the German Jews met and decided they needed to take real action to rid the Lower East Side of this problematic underworld. For assistance, they decided to contact this young man, a 21-year-old named Abe Shoenfeld, about leading a war on crime.

Abe was raised in the Lower East Side. He was born there in 1891, to Hungarian-Jewish immigrants. During Abe’s childhood, many of his friends had been sucked into the underworld in one way or another. Notably, Abe wasn’t an uptowner with a political goal. He was just a Lower East Side local, the American-born son of Hungarian-Jewish immigrants, who was ashamed of the state of his neighborhood, and angry that so many of his childhood friends, including his best friend and his teenage sweetheart, had been sucked into the underworld as gangsters and prostitutes.

As a teen, Abe had worked as a reformer who provided research about the underworld to the uptowners, but now the uptowners wanted him for something else—to eradicate vice, at first by providing actionable intelligence about who was who in the gambling world, and which cops and politicians were paid off.

So with the financial backing of the uptowners, Abe had success in the first few months of this secretive endeavor. The NYC mayor took note. The mayor suggested installing Abe in the NYPD, and give him a squad of twenty cops of his own choosing. This group became known as the Incorruptibles, the title of my book.

During 1913, these vice crusaders made their way through the underworld, confronting phase after phase of it. They went after pimps and brothel owners. They arrested drug dealers and shut down pharmacies that were selling the stuff in violation of the new drug laws. They arrested pickpockets, fences, and the cops who allowed those folks to operate. Eventually they went after the gangs as well.

As I researched and wrote this story, many other figures would enter the fray and become part of it. For instance there was a young prostitute named Antonia who was an important figure in Abe’s life, first as a paramour and then as a partner in crime fighting. I don’t have a photo of Antonia, who was known in the underworld as Tony the Tough, but perhaps she looked something like this.

Or this.

And there were other important figures who walked into the story, too, such as the all-around kingpin Arnold Rothstein and the mysterious Big Jack Zelig. Through it all, Abe Shoenfeld and his crusade remained the narrative spine of The Incorruptibles. It was Abe’s story that got me into this project, and I hope it gets you into the book as well.

To learn more about The Incorruptibles and my other books, visit my author website.

Storytelling is also intimidating because it’s such a vast enterprise. Anything can happen in a story. We can travel through time. An animal can speak. If we’re doing narrative nonfiction, as I do, then we must divine the “true story” from the material we gather in our research and reporting. And then there are all the story elements to consider: character and setting, dialogue and interiority, time and time lapse. Scenes, acts, beginnings, middles, ends, crisis and climax.

Where to begin?

I like to break the vast job into non-intimidating, manageable tasks. Through such tasks I can begin to build the stuff of story, the material from which I carve out and sculpt my story.

Story-making is like sculpture—with one crucial difference. When sculptors want to begin a new project, they procure a hunk of stone. We storytellers, on the other hand, must create the stone ourselves before we can begin to carve anything. Jordan Peele, whose 2017 movie Get Out is one of my favorite screenplays, says: “When I’m writing the first draft, I’m constantly reminding myself that I’m simply shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build castles.” As we get more and more sand in the box, we can eventually get a handle on what we’re doing, making decisions about things like genre and format, about what vehicle is best suited to house our story and make it run.

So how do we create the sand, the stone, the stuff? What is the stuff?

The stuff, in a word, is CONFLICT. Nothing moves forward in a story except through conflict. It’s been said that conflict is to story what sound is to music.

Conflict is what draws us to the stories we love, or at least to the stories we stick around for until the end. And the lack of conflict is often what turns us off from the many forgettable stories we walk away from before we get to the ending. When we’re reading a book and it feels like a slog, or when we’re watching a movie and our mind drifts, it’s usually because the work is friction-less: i.e., no conflict.

Conflict is what creates the tension and momentum that keeps a story aloft. And it’s funny, because while conflict is what draws us to stories and holds our attention, it’s also something that many of us avoid in our actual lives. In life, conflict is painful, stressful, and messy. Conflict can evoke our worst fears, and push us past our mental and physical limits. And yet…we can’t avoid it. Along with death and taxes, conflict is natural to life, regardless of one’s life circumstances, and so, as storytellers, our job is to dive into it, to study it, create it, and, finally, to resolve it.

That resolution part is important.

If you were lucky enough to grow up in a functional family, you might’ve seen conflict resolved. But those of us who come from dysfunctional families probably saw lots of conflict but little resolution. Perhaps we learned to survive by pretending that the conflict around us, all the crazy stuff going on, wasn’t really happening, and now, as adults, we’ve become conflict avoidant.

Still, even as we may avoid conflict in life, we seek it out in stories. Why is that? I think it’s because we are smart little survivors. And whether or not we’re good or bad at confronting conflict, we know that the next conflict in our own life is right around the corner. Our friend’s plight today could be ours tomorrow, and so we’re curious. If stories are essential to human life, if it really is true that we tell them in order to live, I think it’s because stories let us experience conflict vicariously.

So, as storytellers, we become experts in conflict. Our understanding of it is always evolving as we observe human nature and experience our own lives.

But how do we create conflict on the page?

Conflict exists at many levels but let’s begin with three basic types: (1) interior; (2) interpersonal; and (2) what I’ll call societal/environmental/governmental.

With interior conflict, friction arises from within a character’s belief system, as the character experiences mixed emotions over what they want, what they’ve done, or what they plan to do. To get a sense of how interior conflicts might arise, ask yourself: What is your character’s greatest fear? (Fears are highly motivating!) What are their core moral beliefs? Their wants and needs? Insecurities and doubts? Their secrets?

With interpersonal conflict, a character faces off with another character in a battle of wills. They might be rivals, competitors, or enemies. But they might also be lovers or buddies. Whatever the context of the relationship is, they have opposing desires, agendas, personalities, and, often, backgrounds. And when these oppositions clash, head to head, we wind up with a tension that must be resolved. Tension is good! The kind of interpersonal tension we might avoid in life is precisely what we embrace as storytellers!

With societal/environmental/governmental conflict, a character confronts some powerful agency within their world. It might be an evil totalitarian governing force, like Nazis or Big Brother. Might be a greedy and corrupt corporation. Might be a natural element, such as a hurricane or a flood or some other looming apocalypse. The character must confront, survive, and tame the force.

We want our stories to be rich and varied in conflict. In the best stories, conflict is firing at all three of these basic levels.

To get into a little further, here are some sources of conflict:

Relationship friction. A divorce, or breakup. A love interest leaves. A romantic competitor enters the scene. Being betrayed, cheated on, insulted, manipulated, rejected, blown off. One discovers a spouse’s secret.

Duties and responsibilities. A child gets sick. A job is lost. Having to break a promise. Having to punish someone.

Moral dilemmas. A dilemma is when a person faces a choice between two values, or convictions, that align with their sense of integrity. Again, we as the storyteller choose a moral dilemma as a source of conflict based on how it pushes the character to choose between right and wrong. How far over the line will a mother go to save her child? Will she cheat, take dirty money, sabotage someone else?

Failures and mistakes. These are my true assets, because they’re such a wonderful opportunity to grow. In storytelling, failures and mistakes are wonderful, because something that seems negative and catastrophic at first often becomes, with hindsight, a life-changing positive.

Change—a great thing! In fact, the purpose of conflict in a story is to create change. Story, in a sense, is the study of change. You create change by bombarding characters with conflicts, by applying pressure and ticking clocks. Sometimes, to create change, we’ve got to be really mean to our characters. We kill off what is most meaningful to them. We force them to cross lines they’d never imagined. We present them with no-win scenarios that eat them alive. They’re caught in the middle. They’re set up to fail. They must pick the lesser of two evils. They must hurt a person they love in order to save that person from a worse fate.

As we think about what conflicts to develop in our stories, it can be helpful to think about conflict “backwards”—that is, based on how it affects the character, creates change, and ripples through his or her life.

For example, if we’re going to show an instance of relationship friction in a character’s private life, why do we care? Well…maybe the character’s emotions will be activated by the interpersonal conflict, and perhaps, in turn, he’ll then lose his temper at an inopportune moment at work. And then maybe, as a result of the lost temper, his professional life will be affected as well. Maybe he’ll lose his job and be forced to contend with larger forces in the universe, as he’s pursued by economic forces or legal troubles, etc.

When thinking about conflict, it’s important to always take a character-level view. Forget the world of the story for a moment. Forget the concept. Just focus on a character needing to do something, or trying to do something, and running up against a formidable wall. We can use different words to conceive of this setup:

Intention Vs. Obstacle.

Objective Vs. Hurdle.

Goal Vs. Blockade.

Motivation Vs. Antagonist.

Desire Vs. Impossibility.

Whatever conflict a character wrestles with, the STAKES of the conflict must be HIGH. We can’t have low-stakes conflict. The conflict, for instance, can’t really be a character’s internal debate over whether to order the Big Mac or the Quarter Pounder (although it would be cool to see a storyteller elevate that decision into a high-stakes conflict!) For conflict to matter, something bigger than a Big Mac needs to be at stake. Stakes are what makes a conflict matter: there will be a big cost incurred if the character fails to navigate the situation successfully.

Stakes can be far-reaching and public—stakes that affect others. A bomb will go off. The world will end. But stakes can, and should, also be very personal. The more personal the better. It’s not just that the bomb is going to go off in the building, it’s that children—no, my children—are also in the building.

Stakes can be moral. Someone’s beliefs are at risk. The pastor turns out to be a fraud. A straight cop is offered a bribe.

Stakes can be primal, involving the death of someone or something significant. Sometimes it’s a character’s defining idea that must die.

Lots must be at stake. Our futures and our reputations are at stake. Our families and loved ones are at stake. Our freedom is at stake. Justice and morality hang in the balance. The fate of the world, the survival of the species. The stakes must be HUGE. And here’s an important thing to note about stakes: They don’t necessarily need to matter to us personally in order for an audience to care. We just need to know why the stakes matter to the character. Remember, we’re always at a character-level view.

Conflict happens at every level of the story, from the smallest moments to the whole arc. Conflict is everywhere. Every scene needs conflict. And the playing out of the conflict is what the scene is about. That conflict is then going to force the character to make a decision, and not just any decision, but a really RISKY DECISION. I said that storytellers are students of conflict. We’re also students of decision-making. We pepper our characters, bombard them, with the hardest, riskiest decisions anyone has ever had to make.

I began studying the art and craft of storytelling more than two decades ago, when I was in law school. In law school, the cases and opinions that you study are the hard cases, the ones with amazing conflict and difficult fact patterns that really test the law. “Hard” cases are cases that don’t have obvious resolutions. That’s why we read about them in law school. And there’s a lot at stake in these cases, not just for the parties involved in the case but also for those who might come after, and for society at large, who will live with the new precedent that the decision in the case sets.

Legal writing, I saw, is a back-and-forth between each side’s best arguments: back and forth, down the road of argumentation, until the road runs out and you arrive at what I think of as THE FORK. The fork is the branching point in the road where that tough decision, the judge or jury’s decision, must finally be made.

In story, the characters themselves are judge and jury, and they must make their own risky decisions on their own behalf, one after the next. We want to maneuver our characters into forks, where there is no way out, and they must face the risky decision. Each decision they make elicits a consequence from the world, a consequence the character does not expect. That unexpected consequence arrives in the form of some new complication, a new conflict that then forces the character to make another risky decision, an even riskier one than the last decision, so and so forth, onward and again. A story, when unfolded, is really a long chain of risky decisions, of progressive complications, in which the risks and stakes go ever higher, as the character confronts one conflict after another, committing and recommitting to his goal in the face of impossibility.

When this process is managed well by the writer, you get a juicy sense of escalation. Escalation is great! That’s what we want in a story. Escalation is what powers stories forward, creating that page-turning propulsion. A good story turns like a wheel with three spokes: Conflict-Choice-Consequence. The three C’s. Our job as storytellers is to turn that wheel, never letting up on the three-C pattern.

We must set up major conflicts, and then we must write directly into the conflict, directly into the fork. This is important, too: We can’t set up the conflict and then skirt it. We must force our characters to go right into the storm. Which is easy to talk about, but harder to actually do, on the page, because it requires us to be vulnerable and to face our own demons: What bedevils and bothers you, the writer? What problems do you obsess over? Our characters need to be bothered. That’s what makes them characters. That’s what instills in them intentions, goals, and motivations that are so great and so urgent that they will take on immense risk to pursue them.

Think about your own life. What is the biggest, most all-consuming problem or conflict that you’re dealing with? What dilemma do you spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about? What’s the hardest, riskiest, and most consequential decision you’ve ever had to make in your life? I invite you to consider these things not to push you into uncomfortable territory but to give you a sense of just how monumental the action in a story must be to make it entertaining and worthy of an audience’s time.

We reward an audience’s time and attention with our authenticity, our honesty, our courage, and our vulnerability. Story is the language of truth tellers. To tell the truth, we must be confident and free. We must silence the self-editorial voice inside us. We must eliminate the walls and defenses that we often rely on to get through our days and stay safe. On the page, we are always safe.

Note: This article is adapted from a storytelling presentation I gave at the Easton Public Library in March, 2026. If you’re looking for a story coach to help develop your work, hit me up!

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