Author Interview

Q:

What was the genesis of this piece?

A:

My editor, Michael Weinstein, was weary of reading stories about people trying to simplify their lives. He wanted a story about somebody who led a complicated life and loved it. "She's Driven" symbolized the lifestyle of a busy parent, overbooking her children, without ambivalence. Mike pestered me for several years to write the story.

Q:

Please describe your reporting process. How much is reconstruction and how much were you present for? What sort of research did you do?

A:

The vehicle (so to speak) for telling the story was an afternoon in Linda's car. I was with her until she returned to work after dropping off her daughter at her dance class. From that point until bedtime, the story is reconstructed. I interviewed her other times by phone and e-mail, at her house, in her office, over lunch. I interviewed her mother, her best friend, her ex-husband, her new husband, both children, her son's karate teacher, a co-worker, her neighbors. I gathered statistics about driving and interviewed experts about the statistics. Because it was a narrative, I never planned to quote the experts in the story; I wanted the information and the understanding so that I could write with authority.

Q:

What challenges did you encounter during the reporting process?

A:

The biggest challenge was to make compelling reading of something as mundane as chauffeuring children around in a car. This could easily have been another "day-in-the-life" story. The challenge was to find the meaning beneath the story and to make Linda more than a stick figure. I needed to get into her head, to understand what motivates her, why she is so driven. I tried to get varying points of view across without being condescending or editorializing.

Q:

Please describe your process of structuring and writing the piece.

A:

That part was easy. The narrative follows Linda chronologically in the car, with exposition woven throughout. I wrote the story in "chapters," each section a stand-alone scene.

Q:

What sort of reaction did you get to the story? Emails? Phone calls? Response from other media?

A:

Readers loved it and hated it. One wrote, "The article about the lady doing business in her car was absolutely awful!"

"It depressed me terribly," said another. The story won third place in feature writing in the National Headliners Association Awards and a third place in feature writing in the southeastern Green Eyeshade journalism contest sponsored by the Society of Professional Journalists. It also won the Thomas Wolfe award, given by The Associated Press for the best article in North Carolina. The judge of the AP contest said: "The best narrative writing in newspapers today explores extraordinary people doing extraordinary things or regular people enduring unusual hardship. It takes great skill to tell those stories. It may be an even greater leap of skill to craft a compelling story about a regular person doing a regular thing. … And therein lies one of the glories of this story."