The amazing thing is, you can get through. Literature is very theft-based, and it’s not a bad thing. If you’re Jackson Pollock, you go study Picasso to learn his technique, and if you’re Picasso, you study those archaic cave paintings. When I fell in love with Joan Didion’s work, I tried to read all of her heroes. As you trace back this way, you start to see how much is repeated. The same ideas, the same technical flourishes, the same cadences. Certain things flow down from author to author, book to book, just percolating over time. It’s through that gradual motion that literature enlarges us. Each borrowed gesture—whether it’s an intentional homage or just something a writer adored and internalized‚ is a sign someone or something broke through. A sign that a new way of thinking, one you could never have come up with on your own, occurred to you vividly through something you read. That’s what it means to be a writer, to me: to be a vehicle for a way of thinking, even a single thought, that’s been winding its way through the ages, that I have the good fortune to inherit and pass along.
I have a friend, a philosopher, who recently described to me a theory about the way objects become externalized ways of thinking, repositories for our emotions and thoughts. Memories can be hidden in them, ways of thinking can be inside them. A crucial piece of you can be contained inside an everyday object, some aspect of self that might be difficult or impossible to access otherwise, even if it’s just the sound of a marble rolling across a childhood floor. Of course, it’s easy to say a table is just a table—that’s not inaccurate. But objects can have such powerful associations for us that they take on a kind of emotional life. Objects are things that your mind takes and fondles and applies itself to, and entirely new thoughts come out the other side.
For me, nonfiction has always been about the brain. If story is the motor of fiction, than the motor of nonfiction is thought. And so in nonfiction, it seems very natural that you follow your thoughts wherever they take you, even if it means going into other people’s perspectives. That’s a good thing. As people, it’s so easy for us to start feeling that people of X political party aren’t human beings—or that this guy committed murder, he should get the electric chair. It’s unfortunately easy for us as a species to place others outside the zone of what we feel comfortable calling human. But literature is an attempt to do the opposite. It’s an attempt to locate humanity where we might least expect it, an exercise in broadening the scope of what can be said to be “like us.”
But as I continued writing, I spent more and more time with the murderer I write about in the book. Over time, I started to realize: We are all capable of inordinate cruelty. There is terrible stuff in our thoughts. You could say that, in some cases, the difference between a convicted killer and a “normal” person comes down to a kind of impulse control. All it takes is to hear yourself say something needlessly cruel to realize you’ve got all the meanness ready and waiting in there. You might have had an upbringing that allowed you to distract yourself from it, or you might not have been forced to experience an event that would bring it out. But it’s there. You can be polite and still do so much damage.