'Always feels fraught': Sarah Stillman on the strangeness of writing about other people's lives
Sarah Stillman's work in the New Yorker captures the emotional core of being trapped by colossal structural forces
I first came across the work of Sarah Stillman, a staff writer at the New Yorker, through her 2018 piece, ‘When Deportation Is a Death Sentence.’ She was writing about the experience of Laura S., a 23-year-old who had lived undocumented in the US her entire adulthood. After a routine traffic stop, Laura was separated from her children and deported to Reynosa, Mexico, despite threats to her life from an abusive former partner. A week later her body was found in a scorched Ford Contour. Stillman’s story uncovered the plight of those like Laura—people who had immigrated to the US for a better life, but who were being sent back to dangerous and deadly situations under the increasing deportations of the Obama and Trump administrations. Laura’s mother, Maria, was left to care for her grandchildren.
One image stuck in my mind long after reading the story: ‘twice Laura’s eldest son had stood at the bus stop after school, craning his neck, waiting. “What is it?” Maria asked. “When is Mom coming?” he replied. “Mom’s not coming,” she told her grandson. “Remember where we left her?” she asked gently, pulling him close. “We left her on the other side of the border.”’
This piece, to me, captures the power of Stillman’s journalism. Her reporting investigates and exposes the colossal, systemic forces operating in society, in this case mass deportation; and it spotlights the fallout on the people trapped by these forces, finding the emotional core at the heart of broken systems. In this way she resembles a ship’s captain, steering a vessel while paying attention to both the macro and micro—keeping one eye on the tide’s waves lapping the hull of a ship, and the other on the threatening clouds swirling on the horizon above.
Last week, Stillman published a new story, about the push by jails to end in-person visits—and the companies profiting from it. In the piece, she writes about the big picture (‘America’s correctional institutions have sometimes doubled as laboratories where incarcerated people serve as low-wage or nonconsensual test subjects’) and what that means for the people impacted (‘The Lyle children were alert to the fact that video calls with their dad were surveilled; their mom reminded them of it often. “I don’t like that the police record our calls,” Lyle’s eleven-year-old son told me. Law enforcement and surveillance pervade their dreams, their group chats with friends, even their tantrums. Recently, after one of Lyle’s video calls with his two-year-old daughter dropped out, the girl said, “The police hung up on my daddy!”). You can read the piece here.
I wanted to know about Stillman’s process. Our conversation, which took place before that story came out, has been edited for clarity and length.
JB: Your longform stories always marry a deep, systematic investigation with a personal, compelling story. I wondered how you go about thinking systematically as a writer?
SS: One thing that fascinates me most is how actual individual human beings navigate enormous structures and systems. So often, we talk about significant socio-political issues as ‘structural,’ but I’m interested in exploring what that actually means where the rubber meets the road—where individuals get pressed up against these systems, which are also run by real human beings. So I'm always interested in the place where everyday human experience meets with broader patterns, broader realities of how power operates, and ways big cultural forces like incarceration or capitalism manifest.
One question I’m always curious about is how you find story topics. Because many of your stories seem to focus on an area of life where there's little accountability, or few checks, or maybe there’s an official or taxpayer-sanctioned element that no one's looking at. And your pieces always seem to intersect with wider stories, like the war in Iraq, the war on drugs, climate disasters, and so on. How do you go about it—do you start with the system, or do you start with the individual story and work back from there?
Ideation has always been a part of journalism that comes naturally to me. Moving from story to story, I'm always seeing fifteen more. When I started out, I was writing about the use of confidential informants in the war on drugs. While I was reporting that, I was sitting in at a murder trial of a young trans woman, who’d been put in a dangerous situation by police to get out of a minor marijuana charge. She was asked to bring her dealer back to the scene. The dealer came back to the scene with a large stash of cash, but didn't have anything criminal on him at the time. So the police just took his cash. I was sitting there at the hearing and, even though this man was ultimately unequivocally guilty of this awful murder, I nonetheless took note of how surprising it seemed that police were allowed to just take a bunch of cash from someone without any real process.
I got back to my desk, started Googling, and I found ‘Oh, there’s this phenomenon called civil asset forfeiture, that’s very poorly understood and not sufficiently talked about, but it’s ubiquitous among police departments.’ My next story was about civil asset forfeiture [‘Taken,’ 2013]. Then I was reporting on civil asset forfeiture and I came upon the phenomenon of felony murder, and ended up writing about how those prosecutions can be profoundly unjust [‘What Makes a Murder?,’ 2023, which won the Pulitzer Prize]. So my stories come from keeping an open mind and open eyes, seeing all the other layers that intersect with the original topic.
There are certain patterns and paradigms that I’ve noticed resurfacing across justice issues. One that’s definitely interested me is: where do profit incentives misalign with the public interest? That’s been a theme across my work—whether it’s looking at the abuse of foreign nationals on US military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, profiteering in the immigration detention system, or companies that have profited from criminalizing poverty.
Like, underlining the perverse incentives of a particular system.
Exactly.
I wanted to ask you about sources. Many of your stories take subjects that are in vulnerable positions. How do you navigate anonymity and identification and so on?
I’m really interested in reverting the power structures of who gets to have authority, who gets to be treated as an authority. So it’s really important to be spending significant time with sources to have directly experienced phenomena that I’m writing about. To be guided by what strikes them as important—both understanding the texture of their specific experience, and how they see systems and solutions. I think fundamentally I’m guided by that.
I’m really interested in the collective enterprise that our field is going through, of really thinking about what it means to do that in ways that are as non-extractive as we can—so that we are aware of the inevitable, complex power dynamics that come with journalism. But I don’t think I’ve ever really fully emotionally reconciled the strangeness of writing about the experiences of other people’s lives, that always feels fraught, always feels complex, and always feels like an act of power. I’m very conscious of the ways in which that can be true.
Specific to the question of navigating anonymity and vulnerability, I think a lot of it is trying to have really open and honest conversations with the source, so we can get to a closer approximation of what informed consent really means. And then, trusting people to also make their own decisions about their own lives. Because I'm always quite moved by the reality that many people do want to speak out about the things that have happened to them. Because they want to see change, and sometimes they’re willing to take risks to do that. The question becomes: how do we be maximally conscious of being part of the process, as a journalist, in ways that are responsible and respect our sources’ own capacity to make their own decisions about their lives?
Right, and you’ve spoken before about your own journey on that question of trying to avoid extractive relationships. You've talked about how you’ve felt a lot of anxiety around ‘cannibalizing the traumatic experiences of others’ and doing everything you can to avoid that. But also, not wanting to take a patronizing view of people who are standing up and want to tell their own stories. How’s your thinking shifted after a number of years in the industry?
Well, frankly, it’s made me feel more and more invested in helping to shift the ecosystem of journalism and storytelling. Because I’m really excited by the fact that, increasingly, people have more opportunities—and should have more opportunities—to tell their own stories. Whether it’s through social media, or resources going into prisons to support incarcerated journalists to do reporting. Plus the overarching movement to diversify journalism, getting people access to the resources that storytelling requires. That’s a big part of it. And then some it is just going to be a perpetual wrestling with the realities—I don’t want to give up on the project of reporting altogether, which requires listening to people's experiences that often may be different from one’s own. I believe in what immersive investigative reporting can do. But I just think it’s important to never be fully at peace with all the complexities that go along with that, around power and around extraction.
You’re touching there on questions of form, around particularly longform narrative nonfiction—what it can do, and what maybe are its drawbacks. And in some ways, to me, that form tends to privilege the anomaly, right? It can be easy to interest editors in a magazine story about the odd person out, or the individual who’s doing things differently, or has maybe had bizarre things happen to them. But it’s harder sometimes to interest editors in a magazine story about, say, a typical person to whom systemic things are happening, even if those things can be awful. Do you still hold that belief that the form of longform narrative nonfiction can achieve the emotional impact and investigative insight to put these systematic issues on the agenda?
Certainly one of the things that draws me to longform is the opposite argument. That, unlike fast-hitting news stories that often (literally by virtue of the word news) over-privilege newness, longform can make space for the actual everyday. Longform storytelling is giving you the potential to say not just what’s anomalous, but to approach an approximation of a portrait of what someone’s everyday struggles are. It gives you the space to, instead of portraying a story as just, like, ‘Oh, it was this one bad apple county jail that precipitated the death of this individual, or one bad apple police officer whose poor judgment resulted in the death of this informant,’ to really portray it. And show, this didn’t just happen once, this happened in a pattern that’s reflected across multiple states and years—to really tell the span and arc of that story. To embed historical context that’s often missing, which is incredibly important to understanding how we got here. And to project ourselves into the future—what do families directly affected imagine to be the path out of the predicament? Having space for all those messy, complex things feels very valuable to me.
But all of that said, I do feel a fundamental shakiness in the narrative project of trying to encapsulate any other complex human’s life on the page. I think that’s the natural failure of writing to me. Writing hitting up against that failure over and over, and having to just come to some sort of peace with the fact that we’re always collapsing people’s multifaceted experiences into a bunch of patterns of letters on a page, and that’s never going to fully do it justice. It’s almost a preposterous conceit altogether. I’ve had to come to peace with that, and maybe even lean into the subjectivity of that—to say, ‘I don’t purport to offer a mirror of the full complex truth of the situation,’ but what I try to do is, like, ‘this is a sliver I could see at this particular moment in time, the best I could encapsulate it on the page.’
Yeah. Like how, you know, a ‘profile’—inherent in that term for a genre of writing is the idea of seeing someone’s face from just one angle. And from that one angle, the medium can still have power. But knowing that it’s incomplete, and in some ways bound to fail.
Yeah, like I don’t have a claim on the objective truth of the situation. What I have is what I perceive in that moment, the best that I can do, what I understand at that time.
I want to ask about post-publication. When your pieces come out, they tend to have an impact, influencing policy or at least the debate around an issue. How much do you follow afterwards, either with sources or with the story, before moving on? Can it be hard to let go of coverage areas while you’re deep in the next investigation?
I’m a huge believer in retaining the relationships I’ve built through reporting. One of the things I find most rewarding about this work is the chance to build meaningful connections, to learn alongside other people who really care about things close to my heart. I’ve kept in close touch with many of the people I’ve written about. Just yesterday I had a long conversation on the phone with Sadik Baxter, who was the center of my story on felony murder. We’ve kept in touch, I’ve followed the legal twists and turns in his case. Oftentimes I’ve learned important things from watching the long haul of someone’s case after I’ve written about it. Someone from Sierra Leone I met on a US military base in Iraq—who had been subjected to very horrible labor practices that verged on labor trafficking—I’ve kept in touch with. Years later, when the Ebola virus outbreak hit Sierra Leone, he called and shared a lot of information about what his family was going through. I always feel lucky to learn from those long-term relationships.
I have a question about becoming a player in the drama accidentally. In your 2011 story ‘The Invisible Army,’ you were there to witness the aftermath of a sexual assault, which led to you becoming entangled in that story, raising concerns with the US military chain of command as your investigation was still underway, and leading to interviews by labor lawyers with your subjects. How do you navigate something like that as a reporter?
I never enter pretending to be an objective source from on high, but instead trying to navigate as a human being with transparency. I feel very gratified by the shift in journalistic ethos towards a transparency-orientation, where we can disclose to the reader how we—as real human beings—move through space and time and ethical quandaries. That’s what I tried to do in that instance. I learned really important reportorial information that I wouldn’t have otherwise learned. A really good example is, I shared with the reader that I called the military sexual assault emergency hotline. It had posters plastered all around the base. I thought, ‘Well, okay, the military is actually taking this quite seriously.’ Then I called the hotline. It rang and rang and no one picked up, across the span of multiple calls. Finally, when I reached them, I learned that, because the people who’d been sexually assaulted and the alleged perpetrator weren’t US nationals, the military said to contact the company [contracting the workers]. So I called the company and they said to contact the military. It became a chance to report more deeply on what it means for this group of individuals to be living in a legal black hole. That’s one example of how moving as a human first can actually be, reportorially, very useful, as a proxy for the questions that your reader will also have.
Personally, you document so many stories of abuse and exploitation, death and grief. How do you take care of your own mental health and resilience and what would you pass on to other reporters getting into this line of work?
I can’t pretend that this work doesn’t sometimes make me exceedingly sad. Because when you see time and again the way exploitation, profiteering and often straight up cruelty manifests—I think it would be strange not to be affected by that. But for me, the single greatest thing has been deep friendships. I feel so lucky to have an incredible community of people I love, to have really remarkable friends who do work in parallel worlds, who see these systems up close and share a lot of the ethical quandaries and frustrations and sadness about living in the world as it’s configured. So that’s a source of solace. And it’s also very motivating to see what people are doing in all kinds of ways. Some of them are artists, some of them are community organizers, some of them are lawyers. So yeah, having good family and friends, finding solace in reading beautiful work from across the years of people wrestling with these things, that’s really good for me. That’s why I’ve been drawn to collaboration [on projects such as the Yale Investigative Reporting Lab]. I’m really inspired by the incredible work my colleagues are doing because—as much of a difficult place journalism is financially—it’s in a remarkable place when it comes to the power of investigative reporting. I feel lucky to be part of a community that’s pushing forward what’s possible.🗨️