While out reportingSay Nothing, Patrick Radden Keefe felt a lot likeTruman Capote.
EW caught up with Keefe about the process of writing the book, reactions so far, and more.
Read on below.Say Nothingis now available for purchase.
Credit: Doubleday
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Im curious about how this project evolved.
I only do three or four of them a year.
This book started as a piece of the magazine.
I read an obituary inThe New York Timesin 2013, of Dolours Price.
What initially drew me in was the outsize drama of the life of this woman.
Youre coming at this mystery as a total outsider.
Fairly or unfairly, they immediately draw conclusions about the baggage that youre bringing to that encounter.
I often think about the persona that a reporter has, when a reporter goes out into different environments.
That ended up helping a lot.
Were you conscious of that as you went into these interviews?Yes.
Im going to tell this story as I find out.
So how did that story evolve?
It starts in the opening pages with the abduction and disappearance of this mother of 10.
At a certain point, I knew, too, of the three people in the execution squad.
That was something I was thinking about constantly as I was writing.
You could have some interesting historical event which, in a history book, would be really important.
But my rule was always: Did this impact my characters in a first order way?
If it didnt, then it wasnt something I was going to dwell on at any length.
The one caveat for me would be, obviously, its a story about real people.
I encountered it a lot.
Lets talk about the way you play with genre a little bit.
The murder-mystery would be one.
ButSay Nothingis also very much, in places, a spy-versus-spy espionage story.
At the same time, its nonfiction.
Im both limited by and have to answer to the truth as I discover it.
To that point, what was your process of getting to the truth?
The book is calledSay Nothingfor a reason.
Youve got their attention for just a couple of stops.
You want to hold onto it and you dont want to let go of it.
On every page, in every paragraph, thats what Im thinking about.
