Telling true stories: the hardest part

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Dear Storyboard community: 

I am away this week. In my place, I'm excited to share a new guest post from journalist, author, and Storyboard contributor Erika Hayasaki. 

— Mark Armstrong

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When Lillian Ross published the wildly controversial profile of Ernest Hemingway in The New Yorker in 1950, many believed the journalist had made a fool of the legendary novelist. Recently, when my students in the Literary Journalism Program at the University of California, Irvine, read the piece, many of them also thought Hemingway came off like a drunken man-child. How, they asked, could the profiler and her subject possibly have remained friends after? 

It’s the kind of discussion that comes up regularly in the course, the history and ethics of literary journalism, a requirement for all students enrolled in the program. The ethics class — like the undergraduate major — was created by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Barry Siegel, who has been at the helm of the undergraduate degree program since 2003.

“We recognize we’re in a field where there are ethical issues about what we do,” Siegel told me in a recent interview. “We have to believe in the value, the meaning of what we do.”

This winter session marks the third time I’ve filled in for Siegel, teaching the ethics class while he’s on sabbatical. I’ve had the privilege of teaching a range of classes in the program, but the ethics course is one of the most provocative — an auditorium of 50 to 75 students debating the ethical choices made by writers like John Hersey, in “Hiroshima,” and Janet Malcolm, in “The Journalist and the Murderer.” 

Students explore questions such as: When, if ever, is it OK for journalists to write with interiority from their subjects’ minds? Can we ever really know what someone else’s thoughts are? Students constantly question whether a journalist is exploiting someone or shedding light. 

“I emphasize that we're navigating in a sea of ambiguity,” Siegel says. “I don't have a rule book in my back pocket.”

Over the years, Siegel has added and deleted readings from his history and ethics syllabus. In discussing immersion journalism, students read excerpts from Jack London’s “People of the Abyss” or Nellie Bly’s “10 Days in a Madhouse.” When I teach the course, I weave in a few contemporary writers like Suki Kim, whose undercover journalism book on North Korea, “Without You, There Is No Us” was dismissively categorized as memoir, or Leon Dash’s “Rosa Lee,” whose drug-addicted subjects were constantly asking for money and favors.

I assign the Hemingway profile the same week that I ask students to read Zora Neale Hurston’s 1952 profile for the Pittsburgh Courier of Ruby McCollum, a Black woman on trial for murdering a white doctor. Ross was employing nonfiction narrative techniques like scene-by-scene reconstruction and status details, and Hurston used a chameleon-like point of view, before Tom Wolfe defined such techniques as the “New Journalism” in 1972. 

The Hemingway portrait embodies a timeless conundrum that spans all nonfiction, the thorniest terrain for all journalists who do deep, immersive work: How to navigate that relationship between writer and subject? “My point of view is always implicit in how I write the story,” Ross wrote in her book “Reporting Always.” Writers make their own subjective choices in terms of structure, style, and selection. As Ross put it: “A reporter is always chemically involved in a story.”

In 2022, I published a book about separated twins and transracial adoption. Readers were divided over my portrayal of the adoptive mother in the book. Some found her selflessly benevolent. Others saw her as willfully blind.

The adoptive mom I profiled also wrote to me with her own response, which I included in the epilogue: “In a world where there is so much tension and divide you could have told a story of love and inclusivity with difficult moments that were very real, but instead you have told a controversial, complex and ugly story with rare beautiful moments.”

Siegel’s advice on writing about real people: “It’s the hardest thing, but you’re not going to be a very effective writer unless you own this. Own the story. And to own the story, you can’t portray somebody the way they want to be portrayed, or the way they see themselves. Of course, it's easier to say this than to do it.”

You can read more of my interview with Siegel here.

Keep writing, 

Erika Hayasaki
Professor of Literary Journalism at the University of California, Irvine
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