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Dear Storyboard community:

Last year, Storyboard contributor Mallary Tenore Tarpley took us through her personal story of navigating “the middle place” in illness and recovery — the place where storytelling often oversimplifies the journey or seeks tidy narratives. Her deeply reported memoir, “SLIP: Life in the Middle of Eating Disorder Recovery,” uses her childhood journals to chronicle her diagnosis and treatment for anorexia following the death of her mother from breast cancer when Tarpley was 11 years old. 

This week, Tarpley is back with a new story annotation about illness and recovery, written by Rachel Aviv of The New Yorker. In “Mary Had Schizophrenia and Then Suddenly Didn’t,” Aviv tells the story of a woman diagnosed with schizophrenia whose symptoms disappeared 20 years later, after her treatment for cancer. Aviv's story was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist for Feature Writing earlier this month, and for Storyboard she shares how she restructured the piece only five days before publication. 

The story goes deep into Mary's life with her daughters, Christine and Angie, as they tried to make sense of their mother's illness. Aviv quotes from the journal Christine kept as a teenager: “My mom has erotomanic delusion disorder with a splash of persecutory delusions.” 

This is key to Aviv's work: her ability to build trust and connection with her sources, such that they feel comfortable sharing highly personal information like medical records and journal entries. In her New Yorker story “Alice Munro’s Passive Voice,” published in 2024, Aviv worked closely with the author’s daughter and included personal letters about suffering sexual abuse by Munro's partner. 

After they read that piece, “I think [Mary's daughters] were familiar with my approach, and that helped a lot,” Aviv told Tarpley. “Christine had this archive of childhood materials that she'd been keeping. She jokes that it was like she had been waiting her whole life for a fact checker.”

The result is a nuanced portrait of a life with mental illness, what happens when that illness mysteriously goes away, and a possible breakthrough connected to an autoimmune disorder treatment.  

Tarpley tells Storyboard that Aviv’s work provided inspiration for how she wrote about recovery in her own book. "Aviv's New Yorker story about the Newtown Bee [the local newspaper that covered the Sandy Hook school shooting] was the impetus for my work on restorative narrative,” said Tarpley. “The restorative narrative genre is what led me to then develop the middle place concept.”

For more story annotations featuring Rachel Aviv, check out our Storyboard archive: 

• How Rachel Aviv of The New Yorker exposed the “troubled teen industry” (2022)
• Shining light on a “shadow” special-ed program in the Georgia public schools (2019)
• Rachel Aviv on her New Yorker story, “Your son is deceased” (2016)

Rachel Aviv on reporting and writing her Pulitzer finalist story about a schizophrenia diagnosis

The New Yorker staff writer talks about finding the right story structure and working with a family to access medical records and journals.

[ Read the story ]

Links of note 

• “It’s not what they say about your story. It’s what you ask them about it.” In his newsletter, writer-journalist Paul Kix offers advice for getting good feedback from your editor by asking the right questions. “It’s been a lesson I’ve learned much too late, not to get defensive when I get an edit: The pieces I’d written in the first 10 years of my career could have probably been vastly better. And not because the editor is always right. The editor is mostly right, at best. But the editor is always onto something.” 
• The Rejection Questionnaire: Writer-filmmaker Naz Riahi has a new series in her newsletter, focusing on how writers and artists handle (and embrace) rejection. As author Shoshana von Blanckensee writes: “Receiving buckets of rejections is a skin-thickener. Over time, they become easier and easier. It helped me to reframe the rejections as stepping stones in the direction of a yes.”
• And a perfect final motivator: Author Jami Attenberg is kicking off her annual #1000wordsofsummer, which begins Saturday, May 30, and runs through June 12. The event, now in its ninth year, raises money for charity and brings writers together with a simple goal: write 1,000 words a day. People can share their work and progress on social media using the hashtag #1000wordsofsummer. As Attenberg writes in the FAQ: “Since I began writing books in earnest, I have used 1,000 words a day as my regular writing goal. It’s about four typed pages double-spaced. If I write 1,000 words a day, five days a week, give or take time for edits, research, and other job responsibilities, I can finish a messy-as-hell first draft in about six months. It usually takes me another six months to get it in enough shape to be able to share it with other people.” 

Keep writing (at any word count), and keep sharing your stories,

Mark Armstrong
Editor
Nieman Storyboard
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The post A closer look at a Pulitzer finalist story about mental illness and recovery appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

As a longtime New Yorker staff writer Rachel Aviv has covered some of the more fascinating topics in mental health: what happens when people reject their diagnosis, the challenges of going off psychiatric drugs, and whether suicidal students should be forced to leave college campuses.

In one of her latest stories, “Mary Had Schizophrenia and Then Suddenly Didn’t,” Aviv examines a phenomenon that doctors have only recently begun to uncover: Some people who experience psychosis are misdiagnosed with schizophrenia when in fact they have treatable autoimmune conditions that attack the brain. 

Earlier this month, Aviv’s story was named a Pulitzer Prize Finalist in Feature Writing for its “extraordinary exploration” of two daughters’ search to understand why their mother was relieved of her 20-year-long psychosis and what it was like to observe her recovery. 

Aviv said she was surprised when the piece was selected as a finalist, largely because of the challenges she had writing it. “Of all the stories I've written in the last however many years, it had been the one that caused me the most grief in terms of the actual writing process,” she told me. “I had structured it one way, and then maybe five days before the piece closed, I just felt like the structure was not serving the story as well as it could, and I was in a state of despair.”

With her editor’s support, Aviv restructured the story — a process she explains in greater detail in the annotation below. As I heard her recount this last-minute pivot, I was reminded of the value in acknowledging when a story’s structure isn’t working as well as we hoped and acting accordingly — even when it requires a last-minute scramble.

The final structure that Aviv arrived at reflects a masterful blend of historical context, immersive reporting, and rich source materials that help us see how a single diagnosis can alter the course of a life and shape one’s identity. Several related questions drove Aviv’s reporting, both in terms of the science behind a new category of illness referred to as“autoimmune psychosis,” and the family at the heart of the narrative. 

“There were the scientific questions, which were pretty straightforward: Is this real? What is happening? Why don't we know about this? Why has it taken so long? How many people is this affecting?” Aviv told me. 

“And then there were the more personal questions of: What is the experience of a mother who has been in another reality for an entire lifetime for her children, and then they're coming back to her as this person who is suddenly sane? What does that feel like to be returned to consensual reality, both for the person who has been ill and for the people who loved her and couldn't relate to her in that previous state? How do you rebuild a relationship when your past feels so split in terms of perspective and memory?”

The story’s driving questions and themes dovetail with Aviv’s bestselling book, “Strangers to Ourselves,” in which she writes about the limits of psychiatric explanations and the ways in which people can feel trapped or freed by stories of mental illness. Aviv’s next book,“You Won’t Get Free of It: Stories of Mothers and Daughters,” comes out this summer. 

To learn more about Aviv’s writing process and interest in psychiatry, I asked her to annotate her award-winning story and offer a behind-the-scenes look at how it took shape. Her responses have been lightly edited for length and clarity. 

Mary Had Schizophrenia—Then Suddenly She Didn’t

By Rachel Aviv, The New Yorker (July 21, 2025)

When Christine was nine years old, her mother, Mary, said, “Come here. I want to tell you a secret.” They sat on a brown couch in their living room, in Santa Ana, California. Mary, who was forty-three, said that a man she had known in medical school, a professor, was sending her messages about a plan to take her away and live in a mansion together. “I remember feeling really excited, because that fit with my sense of what should be happening,” Christine said. “I was really into ‘Harry Potter’ and the idea that, if you are part of the select, you can see a bigger story happening out there.” 

Mary leaned over and began separating strands of Christine’s hair, as if searching for lice. “Does he put listening devices in your hair?” Mary asked, about the professor. “Does he ever ask you to say things to me?”

Christine, the older of two sisters, said, “I believed everything she said until she accused me of something that I knew wasn’t true.” Mary had always been tender and doting and practical, and, Christine said, “I just had this feeling in my body that she was not the same.” [annotation q="MT: How did you find Christine and Angie as sources?" a="RA: I had read a story in The Washington Post about this center at Columbia University where they were looking for other conditions (often autoimmune conditions) that were masking as more typical mental illnesses."] [Read the Washington Post story.]

[annotation a="I had called the center and just talked to them about the work they were doing, and I remember thinking they were doing something that felt close to a paradigm shift in psychiatry. Having covered psychiatry and written about it for many years, I thought it felt very new. I had asked them if there were any current or former patients who might want to speak. They got back to me and said that Christine had been wanting to tell her story."]

Her sister, Angie, who is seven years younger, learned to follow their mother’s instructions, whether or not they made sense. “I was taught the rules of her delusions at the same time as I was taught other rules and norms about the world,” Angie said. She came to view her mother’s stories about the professor, and about friends who were part of his mission, as akin to tales in the Bible. “It’s kind of like, O.K., some of these people are real, and some of these people aren’t real,” she said.

Christine was often cast in the role of the villain. Her mother would yell at her for poisoning her pizza or hiding her keys or other menacing deeds, even as Christine tried to explain that she hadn’t done them. Sometimes Mary smacked her. (Mary doesn’t remember this.) [annotation q="I appreciated this simple sentence, both because it shows the reader early on that you spoke with Mary and because it signals the importance of being transparent about memories that don't align. Why was it important to you to include this line?" a="The story felt like it was so much about memory and perspective in general. One of the most traumatizing aspects of this experience for Christine and Angie was that they felt like they were living in a reality that was very different from their mother's reality, and that their complaints for years couldn't be validated. And then they had gotten to this point when I met them, where their mother was lucid and receptive. And anytime they would mention something that had been painful for them, she would be encouraging them to share what that experience had been like."]

[annotation a="But it felt like they could never quite figure out whether she was in denial or evading painful experiences, or whether she truly had some sort of cognitive dysfunction where she could not remember. That felt like the trickiest part in the whole piece — having conversations around this memory hole."]

[annotation a="As we continued with our conversations over the course of a few months, I think we all had a clearer sense of the contours of that hole and what it was that she couldn't remember. And then toward the end, we started really talking about the actual things in that hole. There was a way in which their mother would say, 'I don't remember this' (but not as a way of saying 'I didn't do that.') And so I think with something as serious as a mother smacking her child, it felt important to make it clear whose memories these were."] Christine began to mistrust her own memory, too. “My mom would accuse me of things, and then I’d be, like, Maybe I did do these things,” she said. In fifth grade, she asked Santa Claus for a polygraph machine. [annotation q="This detail made me think about how, when reporting on people's childhoods, it could be revelatory to ask: What did you want for Christmas when you were X years old? Did you ask a question along these lines, or did this detail come about more organically?" a="That wasn't my question. That was something Christine told me about how unbearable it was to feel like her mother was doubting her — she had an excruciating desire to prove to her mother that she was reporting reality honestly. The polygraph detail captured so much about Christine's desperation — if only she could prove to her mother that she wasn't doing the things her mother was accusing her of."] “I just had this baseline sense of: I could be doubted at any time.”

She felt that people might help her mother if she could just find the right language to describe her transformation. By high school, she was spending so much time studying the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders that she texted a friend that she had actually “married the dsm-iv.” [annotation q="Did you ask to see the text messages? For this story, how did you go about establishing trust so that Christine and Angie would will feel comfortable sharing personal correspondences with you?" a="They had read the previous New Yorker piece I had written about Alice Munro and the sexual abuse that was hidden in her family, and it actually had resonated with them previous to even my getting in touch. I think they were familiar with my approach, and that helped a lot. Christine had this archive of childhood materials that she'd been keeping. She jokes that it was like she had been waiting her whole life for a fact checker. She had sent me a Word document of the diary she had been keeping from that time, and she had included the text conversations in that diary."] She explained that her mother suffered from the “fregoli delusion,” a belief that strangers were disguised as doubles of people she knew. In her journal, Christine wrote, “My mom has erotomanic delusion disorder with a splash of persecutory delusions.” She asked for help from teachers and a school counsellor, but, she said, the “message I got was, basically, Everybody has their shit, and you have to just deal with it and keep getting good grades.”

Mary, who was from India and had worked as a physician there for a decade, spoke so much about the professor that her husband, Chris, who worked at the California Department of Motor Vehicles, eventually found the professor’s number and called him. “He said, ‘I am not in contact with her,’ ” Chris recalled. “ ‘I didn’t even know your wife came to America.’ ” At the professor’s suggestion, Chris scheduled an appointment for Mary with a psychiatrist. Christine sat in the waiting room, hoping that this would be the beginning of getting back the mother of her early childhood, whom she remembered as a “magical, glowing figure.” But when Mary finished the appointment she said that the psychiatrist thought she was fine. Not long afterward, Mary kicked Chris out of the apartment and barricaded the door with a desk and two heavy suitcases. Christine and Angie allotted extra time to get to school each morning so they could remove the obstacles.

Karl Jaspers, the German psychiatrist and philosopher, has described what he calls the “delusional atmosphere,” a profound alteration in the way certain people experience the world. “There is some change which envelops everything with a subtle, pervasive and strangely uncertain light,” he wrote. People in this state search for a story that explains why everything suddenly feels uncanny and ominous. The “vagueness of content must be unbearable,” he wrote. “To reach some definite idea at last is like being relieved from some enormous burden.”

Mary had landed on a story that overwrote the reality of her daughters’ lives, but they also recognized in it a kind of emotional logic. Mary had been pressured to marry Chris, in an arranged match, and, when they settled in America, he had traditional ideas about a woman’s role and restricted her freedom to pursue her career. Christine and Angie came to feel that their mother’s delusions—that her former colleagues would free her from marriage and she’d be restored to her place in the medical community—were “a way of explaining how she ended up trapped in this position,” Christine said. “We theorized that psychosis was almost a reasonable response.”

Christine moved to New York after high school, because her favorite book, “Underworld,” by Don DeLillo, was set there, and because it seemed like the city where people went to escape their homes. She lived in the Bronx, near her father’s brother, and got a job at Planet Hollywood. She wanted to be a novelist, and obsessively re-read “Underworld,” covering the pages with determined annotations: “integrated dialogue”; “meta commentary”; “sensation of young immediacy.” [annotation q="This is another great example of how you use source materials to fill in gaps and add color to the piece. Did you ask to see her copy of the book?" a="She was in London at the time, so she just took photos of her book. I thought it was so interesting that ‘Underworld’ had been such a meaningful book for her, and I couldn't quite see the line of continuity in terms of her own life. So I did ask her a lot of questions about what that book meant to her. In general, I always love to know what people are reading at particularly pivotal moments in their lives."]

Angie and her mother would text Christine asking for groceries or pizza, and she would order the food for them from across the country. Mary was still barricading the door. Chris slept in his car. (Eventually, he moved in with a girlfriend.) Christine worried that Angie, who was eleven, was growing up in a kind of folie à deux, a delusional system that structures two lives. Angie said, of her mother, “I could never figure out why she was doing these things to me, and I had this kind of emotional explanation: Other things are just more important to her. I’m only there as a vessel for the magical thinking.” After about a year, Christine arranged for her mother and Angie to move to New York, too. (Mary asked me to use only her middle name, to protect her privacy.) [annotation q="Why did you think it was important to heed this request and protect her privacy?" a="Because she was sharing very private medical information, as well as medical records, which made her feel vulnerable."]

Mary moved into an apartment in the Bronx, in the same building as her brother-in-law, and plastered the walls with tape, to prevent reality-TV shows from recording her and Angie through the cracks. Angie tried to bathe while her mother was asleep because Mary believed there was a camera in the showerhead, and had covered it with a sock. Angie felt as if she were living in a kind of urban version of “Grey Gardens,” a formative movie for her. The documentary chronicles the lives of a mother and daughter, relatives of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who live together for years, piles of trash accumulating around them, social conventions becoming remote.

After two years in New York, Mary seemed increasingly unable to care for herself, so Christine, who had enrolled at Columbia, called the city’s mobile crisis unit, a team that assesses people in psychiatric distress. The crisis unit knocked on Mary’s door, and, after a conversation in which she described receiving electric transmissions through a filling in her tooth, she was admitted to Mount Sinai Beth Israel hospital, in Manhattan.

Psychiatrists there petitioned a judge for permission to hospitalize her for a month and treat her with antipsychotics, over her objections. “I believe that she has no judgment concerning the nature of her illness,” one of them wrote. On an evaluation form, another psychiatrist initially wrote that Mary had an “unspecified psychotic disorder.” Then, perhaps uncomfortable with such a vague diagnosis, she crossed out the phrase and wrote, “Schizophrenia.” [annotation q="This detail that really illustrates the uncertainty surrounding Mary's illness. Can you talk about how you happened upon this detail, and why you knew it needed to be in the piece?" a="I think I saw it upon second or third read of her medical records. The first time I didn't quite grasp how interesting it was that the psychiatrists needed to get her committed against her will, so they were looking for a diagnosis that was serious and concrete enough that, from a judicial perspective, they could justify committing her. And then they had given her this diagnosis, and it seemed like no one had re-evaluated it. Once she had that diagnosis, it just stuck, and that seemed really tragic. It stuck for a decade."]

[annotation a="There is this sense that you're being told schizophrenia is somehow part of your essence, when actually it's part of this arbitrary bureaucratic process where a psychiatrist has to come up with something in the spur of the moment, and schizophrenia feels like the least worst match."] Mary was fifty-five years old, and her symptoms had begun in her early forties, which is unusual for schizophrenia. Most people are diagnosed in their twenties or early thirties.

Christine moved into her mother’s apartment and filed a petition for joint custody of Angie. Their father, who was living in California, did not contest the petition. “I make breakfast in the morning,” Christine wrote in her journal, describing her new routine with Angie. “I wash the dishes. I lock the door at night. I have established, kicking and screaming, my own rightful place as an active agent in the universe.” [annotation q="You effectively used journal entries here, and I've seen you do it in other stories as well. When you read Christine's journal, what were you looking for as a journalist? And why do you think journal entries can be so effective in stories?" a="We discussed it fairly early. Over the course of a few conversations, Christine sent installments. Some of her journals were written for a class at Columbia, and I felt like I was looking for the less ‘written’ parts."]

[annotation a="There was a way in which, for her class, she was seeing herself as a writer seeking meaning from a hard situation. And in some ways, I was more interested in the rawer, less processed moments that she could not convert into meaning right away. Retrospective writing or talking can't capture that immediacy."]

[annotation a="I did tell her that I would check to make sure she felt comfortable with what I decided to quote, because obviously it's a very vulnerable thing to just hand over your journal."]

When Mary was released from the hospital, she stopped taking her medications. Neither she nor her daughters thought they had helped her. For about a third of people with schizophrenia, antipsychotics do not work. “I wish my mother’s delusions and paranoia were treatable,” Angie wrote, in a college-application essay. “However, she has lived with them for 12 years, and her institutionalization last year had no effect.”

Mary’s admission to Beth Israel was the beginning of a nine-year cycle in which she was sent to psychiatric hospitals for weeks at a time before being released, unchanged. Mary said that each time she was admitted to a hospital the staff “kept asking the same questions, and it never made anybody have a different outlook on the situation. Everyone stayed with the same thing. It was schizophrenia.” [annotation q="This is the first time we directly hear the words ‘Mary said.’ Was it a deliberate choice on your part to initially tell her story through her daughter's voices before introducing us to Mary's voice?" a="Somewhat, and I think there was also the issue of Mary actually not remembering. I was telling their perspective, and if I had told it from Mary's perspective during those years, it would have been very different and more confusing because her memories of that time were jumbled. I felt like it was more coherent to just start with the daughters' perspective and then bring in Mary's perspective once she's chronologically in a state where she is more lucid and able to acknowledge the difference in her daughters' experiences."]

[annotation a="In that way the structure reflects the experience of the daughters: they had a mother who was unreachable in some way, and then with this sort of accidental cure, she becomes reachable. That's the moment at which Mary enters the story and has more of a speaking presence."]

After five hospital stays, including one in which the police led her to an ambulance in handcuffs because she wouldn’t leave her apartment, Mary was transferred to the Bronx Psychiatric Center, a state facility that provides long-term care. She observed that when patients refused medications staff would sometimes call security, and the patients would be injected with drugs, a prospect that terrified her. “I would take the medication without any question, because I’m not risking fighting with security,” she told me. “These people are very sensitive to what they call ‘challenging authority.’ ” She spent her days dreading the moment when she’d be forced to swallow her pills.

Mary sometimes imagined that God had a reason for keeping her in the hospital, but, she said, “I did not even want to go there, because the reasoning mind makes you feel very nervous and uncertain.” Her daily life became so narrow that she stopped noticing the weather. “They don’t remind you about the changing season—that spring is coming into summer or the winter is coming into spring,” she said. “You just pass the days as quickly as possible.”

Christine, who spoke to her mother every week, said that Mary never articulated her sorrow at the time. “I would have wanted to engage on the level of ‘I’m sorry you’re there, do you feel sad?’ And I’m sure she was having those emotions, but she wasn’t able to express them. It was always ‘I’m being attacked. I’m being held like a prisoner here.’ ” Christine felt that her mother was safer at the Bronx Psychiatric Center than she would be anywhere else, but she felt guilty for hoping that Mary would stay there for the rest of her life.

Mary was discharged in September, 2023, after a year. [annotation q="Reading this made me wonder: Did you create a timeline of events when working on this story? And can you talk more about the structural challenges you faced?" a="Any time I write a story, I'm always writing down the dates that are relevant and creating a timeline. I had originally started the piece with Mary's cure and then had gone backwards into her daughters' childhood. But then the cure felt less meaningful without the context of understanding what they'd been through in their childhood. But if I started with their childhood, the reader had to wait a long time to discover what this story was actually about — so that was the dilemma, and I basically emailed my editor, Willing Davidson, asking him if it was OK to try switching it up last minute, and he encouraged me to try."]

[annotation a="Usually when I'm writing a piece, it's the structure that I figure out first. I had to rework it all at the last minute, and that was an uncomfortable experience."] A week later, she collapsed in her bathroom and struggled to move. She was taken to a hospital in Brooklyn, where the doctors told her to stop taking antipsychotics, because they thought her condition may have been a side effect of the drugs. Then they discovered that she actually had lymphoma, a sometimes fatal form of cancer. She began seven cycles of a treatment that combined chemotherapy with rituximab, a medication that targets antibodies involved in the body’s immune response.

When Christine and Angie visited her at the hospital, Mary responded to their questions with one-word answers. Her face had a vacant expression. Christine and Angie thought she was dying. Mary did, too. She dreamed about being a child, playing with her sister and four brothers, in Kolkata, where she grew up. “I told myself, ‘This must be the end of it,’ ” Mary said.

Angie, who was now twenty-two and had recently graduated from Dartmouth, prepared in therapy for her mother’s death. She said, “I had multiple sessions where I was just crying about the fundamental things I wish she had given me, like ‘I wish she could have told me what was going on in her head,’ or ‘I wish she could have told me she was sorry for what she did.’ ”

By Christmas, two months after beginning chemotherapy, Mary was moving a little more freely, and she had begun to carry on conversations. Christine and Angie noticed that her personality seemed different: she was calm, outgoing, and polite, and she often expressed gratitude. Angie texted Christine that Mary seemed peaceful, as if maybe she was “getting some post-life or death clarity?”

Christine, who was twenty-nine and had settled in London, having moved there for a master’s degree in psychology, was struck by her mother’s ability to watch the news and absorb the information on its own terms. For years, the television had been a source of agitation; Mary had said that people were using her ideas and repeating her lines.

One day, when Christine was visiting the hospital, Mary asked for a phone. “I sort of teased her, ‘Now you’re asking for a phone?’ ” Christine said. “I wasn’t really making much of it, but then afterward I thought, Why has she asked for a phone? That’s quite unusual.” Mary already had a phone, but it was in storage because she’d told Christine that it contained spyware.

Angie gave her a flip phone and, to be safe, covered the camera with a piece of tape. “She seemed fine using it, which was odd,” Angie said.

In May, a month after Mary finished chemotherapy, Christine and Angie asked a psychiatrist at the hospital to examine her. Christine said, “The psychiatrist was, like, ‘Why have you called me here? I don’t understand. She has no symptoms.’ And we were, like, ‘Yeah, that’s the reason we’ve called you here.’ ”

Christine had the same feeling in her body that she’d had when her mother first became ill—the sense that something at Mary’s core had changed. She tried to get the doctors to grasp the scale of her mother’s recovery. By the summer, her cancer was in remission. She hadn’t taken antipsychotics for months, and yet “her psychotic symptoms are gone,” a doctor wrote. Christine told the doctors, “She had a twenty-year psychiatric history. Have you heard of this? Could any of her medications have caused this?” She spoke with a neurologist at the hospital, but he didn’t have an answer. Omid Heravi, one of Mary’s oncologists, didn’t understand what had happened, either. “Medicine is very specialized—we don’t get involved in other fields,” he said. He guessed only that one of the cancer drugs she’d been given had had collateral benefits. “In medicine, all side effects are not bad,” he offered.

When a person recovers from an illness, it is usually seen as the end of the story. [annotation q="This line made me think about one of my favorite lines from your book ‘Strangers to Ourselves’: ‘There are stories that save us, and stories that trap us, and in the midst of an illness it can be very hard to know which is which.’ What compels you to want to explore the narrative aspects of illness and recovery?" a="I think I had to justify why the story wasn't ending with this unlikely recovery, but why it kept going. I had to explain that what I was interested in was not just, 'here we have this amazing new way of seeing mental illness,' but also, 'here's an opportunity to understand what recovery means.'"]

[annotation a="We don't often get to see recovery from psychosis in this way, and, at my editor's suggestion, I was trying to alert the reader that there was still a third part coming — that there is real work to be done, after you've recovered from a long illness, to make sense of what has just happened and to integrate it into your sense of identity."] But becoming sane also causes a kind of narrative collapse, a confrontation with a personal history that is no longer recognizable. Christine encouraged her mother’s friends and siblings, whom she’d been estranged from for years, to get back in touch. She wanted to restore her mother’s sense of connection, but, she said, “I also wanted them to be able to tell me—outside of my childhood memories—if this is the person she used to be.”

For years, Christine’s friends had known little about her mother beyond the details of her mental illness. “Suddenly, I was, like, ‘Hey, my mom’s better now. Would you like to call her up and talk to her?’ And that was a shocking concept for them,” she said. “I mean, there are a lot of people who wouldn’t necessarily be open to jumping on a call without planning, but my mom was now the type of person who is quite flexible and responsive and conversationally fluid.” Christine described her as a “psychological débutante.”

Angie, who was living in Queens and working at a firm where she analyzed data on sexual violence, felt skeptical that their mother’s transformation was real. Christine said, “I felt like, If Mom can disappear, then she can come back.” But Angie didn’t have memories of Mary from before the illness, and it felt to her like she was being asked to believe that her mother had become a new person. “I tend to choose security over the process of discovery,” Angie told me. “I didn’t have a curiosity that felt worth the emotional risks.” Angie had always felt that, on some level, her mother had “chosen her delusions” over her children. She didn’t want to experience that choice being made again.

Christine searched for medical papers that might explain her mother’s recovery and allow Angie to believe in it. She read about each of the medications that her mother had taken and concluded that the key drug may have been rituximab, the immunosuppressant. “I have a new working theory,” she texted Angie, in May, 2024. “Theoretically her chemo could have incidentally cured” her.

Christine found a handful of recent case studies that documented drastic psychiatric recoveries after people were treated with drugs that dampen immune activity. A 2017 study in Frontiers in Psychiatry described a woman with a twenty-five-year history of schizophrenia. She also had a skin disease, for which she was given drugs that reduced inflammation and suppressed her immune response. Her doctors noticed a pattern: when they treated her skin lesions, her psychosis went away. They hypothesized that the rash and the psychosis had been caused by a single autoimmune disorder, and were cured by the same drugs. Another paper in Frontiers in Psychiatry described a man with “treatment-resistant schizophrenia” who developed leukemia. After a bone-marrow transplant, which reconstituted his immune system, he startled his doctors by suddenly becoming sane. Eight years later, the authors wrote, “the patient is very well and there are no residual psychiatric symptoms.”

Christine also discovered a Washington Post article from 2023 about a woman named April, who had fallen into a catatonic state at the age of twenty-one and been diagnosed with schizophrenia. Sander Markx, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia, first encountered April at a psychiatric hospital on Long Island when he was a medical student; twenty years later, he was dismayed to find her at the same hospital, in the same condition. “She has not been outside for twenty years—out of sight,” he said, at a symposium at Weill Cornell’s medical school. He and his colleagues gave her an extensive workup and found that she had lupus, an autoimmune disorder that, in rare cases, can induce inflammation in the brain, causing symptoms that are indistinguishable from those of schizophrenia. After undergoing immunosuppressive therapy, including rituximab, April emerged from, essentially, a “twenty-five-year-long coma, and was able to tell us everything,” Markx said. “We don’t have a script for this. We don’t see patients coming back from this condition.”

April’s case helped give momentum to the founding, in 2023, of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (S.N.F.) Center for Precision Psychiatry and Mental Health, at Columbia, which is working to uncover biologically distinct subtypes of illness that have been obscured by the broad categories in the DSM. Christine sent an e-mail to Markx, a co-director of the S.N.F. Center, with a brief time line of her mother’s life. “Her psychiatric symptoms disappeared and have yet to resurface months later,” she wrote. “But her current clinicians are stumped as to why it has happened.” When Markx didn’t respond, Christine, who was visiting New York, decided that she and Angie should go to Columbia to introduce themselves in person. Markx wasn’t in his office—he had just begun an ongoing medical leave—but they slipped a handwritten card in a pink envelope under his door and used inter-campus mail to send cards to the other directors of the center. They tried to think of this step, Angie said, as “the part in the documentary where the cameras go all shaky and you get the sense that someone is about to break a hole in the case.”

Emil Kraepelin, who developed psychiatry’s first modern diagnostic system, in the eighteen-nineties, defined the disease we now know as schizophrenia largely in terms of its hopelessness. [annotation q="Throughout the piece, you sprinkle in historical context related to the field of psychology. Do you outline your pieces ahead of time to figure out where to include context and research?" a="I go through every single note I have, whether interview, research, whatever other personal documents, and then over the course of several days I go from top to bottom and place each relevant detail or quote or fact into the section that I think it will appear in."]

[annotation a="When I then go to write, I am starting with all the material that I think will go in the first section. So that's how I structure it, and it always changes it, but at least I'm working with more contained material as I move to each new section. I'm always thinking about, when is the moment when the reader in the narrative needs and actively desires some context?"]

[annotation a="With this piece, there was so much research and context that I wanted to put in, and I wanted it to occur at the moment in which the reader actually wanted it, as opposed to too early when they're not ready to do that kind of work without the narrative, or not too late when they needed it earlier to understand something."] The diagnosis allowed hospital administrators to separate patients with “periodic insanities” (like depression and bipolar disorder) from those who were believed to be incurable and belonged in asylums. Kraepelin hoped that schizophrenia would eventually reveal itself to be a disease like neurosyphilis, which was then responsible for a large portion of the cases of insanity in psychiatry wards. In 1913, scientists demonstrated that bacteria had infected the brains of these patients. “The diseases produced by syphilis are an object lesson,” Kraepelin wrote, four years later. “It is logical to assume that we shall succeed in uncovering the causes of many other types of insanity that can be prevented—perhaps even cured—though at present we have not the slightest clue.”

Psychiatry and neurology were originally one medical discipline, but gradually neurologists took responsibility for diseases like neurosyphilis and dementia, in which the pathology could be seen in an autopsied brain, and psychiatrists handled the illnesses that were left behind, their causes still a mystery. [annotation q="I like that your transitions never feel forced or overdone." a="I guess the ideal situation is you do not need a transitional sentence, because you've structured the paragraphs in such a way that it feels fluid. I actually never want to find myself in a situation where I'm like, 'my job right now is to write a transition sentence,' because that sort of means that I'm juxtaposing two things that don't flow together naturally."] Schizophrenia, which affects roughly one per cent of the population, became the disorder through which psychiatry worked out its identity, in part because it seemed to embody the mystery and intractability of madness, presenting basic questions about what it means to have a self. “The history of modern psychiatry is, in fact, practically synonymous with the history of schizophrenia, the quintessential form of madness in our time,” the psychologist Louis Sass has written.

But psychiatrists struggled to pinpoint a single feature that unified the diagnosis. “The great question is what is this ‘something’ that underlies the symptoms,” Karl Jaspers wrote, in 1963. [annotation q="You do such a good job of including research that advances the storyline. Can you pull back the curtain on your process for finding relevant research for this story?" a="I spent a long time just trying to even find the small field that I was looking at and figuring out who the people who specialize in it are. So a lot of that was just searching for any terms related 'autoimmune.' Then I noticed there were a couple of researchers who had honed in on this area, and then I called them and asked them for reading recommendations."]

[annotation a="And then there's historical context, which in a way is more fun, because it's like, 'OK, now that I know what the current research is, what sort of lines can I trace in terms of the history of psychiatry?' There are certain thinkers (Karl Jaspers is one of them), and I'll think: What would they say about whatever issue I might be thinking about? I'll often look up and see if they have ever written about the issue."]

[annotation a="For this piece, because the research area was so new, a lot of it did come from interviews with researchers and then asking them to point me to whatever the most relevant recent specific research was. It often involved a very small sample size."] Three decades later, the psychiatrist Ian Brockington warned that the obsession with schizophrenia had stifled clinical curiosity. “Smaller, more homogeneous entities have been sucked in by the gravity of the big idea, and annihilated,” he wrote. For decades, scientists have been searching in vain for a biological marker that would confirm whether someone has schizophrenia. Last year, in a paper in Schizophrenia Research, seventeen international experts concluded that schizophrenia was defined by no single etiology, symptom, or biological mechanism. “It is prudent to wonder if the construct around which we are organizing this information is fundamentally flawed,” the authors wrote.

Perhaps the most vivid disruption to the idea of schizophrenia as a monolithic concept began in 2007, when Josep Dalmau, a neurologist at the University of Barcelona, started publishing papers with his colleagues which described young patients with delusions, hallucinations, and sudden changes in their behavior, like agitation and inappropriate giggling. Within days or weeks, they deteriorated, developing seizures, losing consciousness, or struggling to breathe. Dalmau discovered that they had a form of encephalitis, inflammation of the brain. Their immune systems had misidentified the NMDA receptor—a protein in the brain that affects mood and memory—as foreign and produced antibodies that attacked it. When these patients were treated with immunotherapy, the majority of them recovered completely, sometimes within a month.

Thomas Pollak, a neuropsychiatrist at King’s College London and the Maudsley Hospital, told me that treating patients with the condition was “revelatory and disquieting, because some of them looked exactly like the people I’d been seeing in the psychiatry ward. It was uncanny to see that a presumably totally different pathway could lead to this.” Their illness, which was named anti-NMDA-receptor encephalitis, usually began in their early twenties, just as schizophrenia often does. The discovery of the illness put pressure on the artificial division between psychiatry and neurology—the only two fields of medicine that focus on the same organ. “Many of the symptoms are shared, but we are using different words,” Pollak said.

In “Brain on Fire,” a memoir from 2012, the journalist Susannah Cahalan—the two hundred and seventeenth person in the world to be diagnosed with anti-NMDA-receptor encephalitis—describes how for a month, in which she swung between paranoid aggression and euphoria, some doctors treated her as if she were just a difficult psychiatric patient who drank too much. “If it took so long for one of the best hospitals in the world to get to this step,” she wrote, “how many other people were going untreated, diagnosed with a mental illness or condemned to a life in a nursing home or a psychiatric ward?”

Since Dalmau’s discovery, scientists have identified more than twenty new antibodies linked to psychiatric symptoms. In 2020, in a paper in The Lancet Psychiatry, some two dozen researchers proposed a new category of illness called “autoimmune psychosis,” which may look like a milder or incomplete form of encephalitis, the illness never progressing beyond psychiatric symptoms. Christopher Bartley, the chief of a unit at the National Institute of Mental Health which investigates the role of immune dysfunction in mental illness, said that the twenty known antibodies may be a “drop in the bucket.” There could be countless targets in the brain that antibodies attack, some subset of which may alter people’s perceptions and behavior. “We have to have epistemic humility and accept that there are alternative models of disease,” Bartley said.

To find psychiatric patients who might benefit from immunotherapy, researchers have set up centers, roughly similar to the one at Columbia, at Baylor College of Medicine, in Texas; King’s College London; Uppsala University, in Sweden; and the University of Freiburg, in Germany, among other places. Some of the best research into the phenomenon has been conducted in Germany, where it’s more common for patients in a first episode of psychosis to have lumbar punctures to access their spinal fluid, which can reveal the presence of antibodies. Bartley estimates that between one and five per cent of people who have been diagnosed with schizophrenia actually have an autoimmune condition—a figure he based on his own lab’s research, which has not yet been published, and also on a German study of a thousand patients, the most extensive study of autoimmune psychosis so far. “Even one percent ends up being almost a million people in the world who should be treated with a different kind of medicine,” he said. [annotation q="I found this quote really helpful because it contextualizes a statistic and helps put it in perspective. As a journalist, what are you looking for when determining which quotes to include in your stories?" a="I really did want to make it clear that there were real stakes — that yes, this is very, very rare, but the worldwide implications are quite significant."]

[annotation a="With quotes, it's often question of, ‘What is someone else able to say that I couldn't say myself?’ either because it lends credibility or authority, or because there's a level of specificity or vividness, or emotional immediacy that just straight narration wouldn't achieve."]

The pharmaceutical treatment for schizophrenia has not meaningfully changed in three-quarters of a century. Many pharmaceutical companies have left the field entirely. To get approved for the market, a medicine that works for one schizophrenic patient must have a reasonable chance of working for another. But only blunt instruments have been effective in treating an illness that takes such varied forms. Newer antipsychotics are more refined than earlier ones, with fewer side effects, but almost all of them work in the same broad way, alleviating some symptoms, like hallucinations and delusions, but not other common ones, like lack of motivation and an inability to experience pleasure. Andrew Miller, the vice-chair for research in the psychiatry department at the Emory University School of Medicine, said that the field is haunted by the early success of antipsychotics, which were discovered by serendipity, in the nineteen-fifties. “You get lulled into this sense that, because the drugs are one-size-fits-all, the disease is also one-size-fits-all,” he said. “With autoimmune psychosis, it’s so clear that there is something different. And then you start to say, ‘Hey, is it possible that there are other clear-cut mechanisms to pathology that we’re missing because we’re lumping everyone together and saying they all have the same illness?’ ”

The S.N.F. Center is embarking on a project, beginning this fall, to screen all the patients hospitalized in the New York State mental-health system for autoimmune, metabolic, and genetic disorders, to see if there are people whose symptoms can be traced to a distinct biological mechanism. “I’ve always been aware of the possibility that there are treatable causes for psychosis lurking in chronic long-term patients,” Joshua Gordon, the executive director of the New York State Psychiatric Institute and a former director of the N.I.M.H., told me. “But the notion that we could make this work practically—that we could test for it—has really only become apparent in the last few years.” The S.N.F. Center will do blood work for everyone in the state’s psychiatric institutions, offering follow-up testing, such as lumbar punctures, to those with unusual results. Gordon said that, if the S.N.F. Center identifies a few dozen patients who can be treated effectively enough to leave the hospital, “we will be able to start answering the question of whether this is worth trying across the whole population of people with schizophrenia.”

Psychiatry has a legacy of implementing drastic procedures, like lobotomies, that later come to seem like folly. But it also has a history of proffering psychological theories for illnesses that are not yet understood on a biological level. Several psychiatrists told me that they’d found themselves rereading the history of the discipline, wondering, for instance, if some of those patients of Emil Kraepelin’s whose symptoms helped define schizophrenia might actually have had encephalitis or autoimmune conditions—specifically, a subset he described as having “spasmodic phenomena in the musculature of the face” and an inability to walk without falling. There were also questions about whether these diseases could explain a condition called “lethal catatonia,” which was frequently described as a manifestation of schizophrenia: these patients became extremely agitated, and then slipped into a stupor. In 1986, in a study that inadvertently revealed the dangers of conceptual inertia, the American Journal of Psychiatry reviewed nearly three hundred cases of lethal catatonia. Nearly all the patients in the study had been treated with antipsychotics, and more than half of them died.

After reading Christine’s description of her mother’s case, Steven Kushner, a co-director of the S.N.F. Center, arranged a meeting with her and Mary and Angie. Mary was living at a rehabilitation center in the Bronx while she regained her muscle strength. She was reluctant to meet another psychiatrist, she told me, but she felt she needed to “rise up to the level of my daughters’ studiousness.” In October, 2024, Kushner and three colleagues came to the rehabilitation center and spoke with Mary for three hours. “Her psychosis was gone,” Kushner said. “There was no other conclusion. There was no way that she could have the quality of the conversation that we had and willfully suppress psychotic symptoms.”

In the conversation, Mary recounted intimate details about her daughters’ pasts—what they would eat for breakfast, their arguments at recess—but she made no reference to the delusional beliefs that had dominated their lives. When Angie told the doctors that her mother had sometimes prevented her from going outside, even to do homework with classmates, Mary offered a practical explanation: there was crime in the Bronx, and she worried about Angie’s safety. To explain why she put a sock over the showerhead in her bathroom, she said that she’d hoped to filter sediment from the water. She seemed to have filled in gaps in her memory in a way that was consistent with her current identity, as a sane person. [annotation q="I noticed you've used the words ‘sane’ and ‘sanity’ at various points throughout. It seems these words used to be more commonplace than they are now. Why did they feel appropriate to use in this story?" a="I felt it was the plainest word to use in this context. I like that it does have a bit of an old-fashioned feel; I also like that it isn’t clinical. It describes a particular way of relating to and being seen in the world."]

In 1911, the psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler described how schizophrenic patients are capable of a kind of “double bookkeeping”: they may simultaneously live in two “disjoint” worlds, one grounded in shared reality, the other in private delusions. They might believe that they are the center of a conspiracy involving nearly everyone they see but also make small talk at a deli and remember to give the correct change. [annotation q="I appreciate how, throughout the piece, you introduce us to complicated concepts and then explain them comprehensibly. One of the ways you do this is by providing related examples that ground the concepts in everyday life. Do you have any tips for other journalists who want to take a similar approach in their own work?" a="I just found 'double bookkeeping,' to be a very beautiful idea. I've been drawn to it in a lot of different ways, but it's hard to understand."]

[annotation a="In general, I don't like examples that much because it takes you away from the narrative. But here, it's such a profound phenomenon that I thought a sentence would illuminate the strange contradiction in which people can live in two modes of reality, which I think all of us do in some way — but not with such starkness."] It’s as if the delusions occupy their own ontological category, sealed off from the logic used to move through the world. Now, when Mary recalls her decades of illness, it is as if she is accessing only the shared-reality side of the ledger. When she talks about her time at the Bronx Psychiatric Center, her memories sound like those of a person trapped in an environment where she doesn’t belong. “Angie and I treat it as if she had two selves,” Christine said. “But Mom describes her self as continuous.”

The S.N.F. Center arranged for Mary to have a lumbar puncture, to see if she had any antibodies associated with known neuropsychiatric conditions. During the procedure, Kushner said, he could sense that Mary had once had a “fantastic professional identity: she was holding court, telling stories about the lumbar punctures she used to perform, how many patients she used to see in a day.” The test came back negative. Kushner tried to recover a frozen sample of Mary’s cerebral-spinal fluid from when she was ill—a test done on that fluid would have been more revealing—but the fluid had been discarded. He believed that the most likely explanation was that she’d had a form of autoimmune psychosis for which the associated antibody has yet to be discovered. “I think the consensus is that we are probably only aware of the tip of the iceberg of different kinds of antibodies that can produce autoimmune diseases, and certainly that holds for autoimmune psychosis,” he said.

Some people, when they recover from psychosis, understand that the strange enemies who plagued them never actually existed. Others say that they are relieved their enemies stopped pursuing them, but do not disavow the reality of the experience. “We don’t know what happens for someone who was in a psychosis for twenty years and then they are—let’s call it ‘cured,’ ” Kushner told me. “And I hesitate to use that word, because the idea that this word is ever used in psychiatry is so exceptional.” But, he said, “the treatment modified Mary’s biology such that the disease is basically gone.”

Kushner began meeting with Mary and her daughters every few weeks, in part to help monitor for possible signs of relapse. At the meetings, they mostly avoided talking about Mary’s delusions. When the subject came up, Mary was quiet, or responded in a tangential way, changing the subject. “She has this extraordinarily pleasant way of disarming the situation,” Kushner told me. The thought of having caused her daughters suffering seemed too painful to allow into her conscious awareness. “There’s not an appointment that goes by where she doesn’t remark, spontaneously, that her daughters are doing well,” he said. “I don’t think that’s by accident.”

Kushner did not believe that Mary’s memory gaps reflected cognitive impairment—on a neuropsychological exam, her memory was better than average—but he also didn’t believe that she was purposely not remembering. “To look back and say, basically, ‘Twenty years of my life were out of reality’—that would be a fundamental blow to her identity as a physician and mom,” he said, a challenge to “one of our most primitive instincts, that we can discern what is real.” When I expressed concern about how to present the disparity in memories sensitively, he told me, “I think that is the story. How do you reconcile with, and compensate for, all those missing years?” [annotation q="This passage is striking, both because you're giving us a first-person, behind-the-scenes look at your conversation with Kushner and you're revealing the heart of the story (at least according to Kushner). I'm curious, did this conversation change or crystallize your thoughts about the deeper meaning and/or focus of the story?" a="I felt like I needed to know from him that it was OK to ask these questions of Mary, and I think Christine and Angie also needed to know that. We wanted to make sure it was safe for us to be thinking about this with someone who had been so vulnerable. And so it was very helpful to hear that Kushner, too, felt this was an integral part of the story, if not THE story."]

[annotation a="There was a lot of concern that it was this taboo subject, and that talking about it would do something harmful to their mother's mind. He really was like: No, it's OK, she can handle it; she's strong."]

When people emerge from chronic delusional states, the work of psychiatry is considered complete. They are largely left on their own, with two irreconcilable views of reality. “We need to really start thinking about what happens the morning after these disorders are treated,” Kushner said.

Christine wasn’t sure if she could call her mother “cured” simply because she lacked her previous symptoms. “She’s not fixated on things like contamination and surveillance, but at no point has she said she’s left those beliefs behind,” she said. Christine felt that it was taboo to talk to her mother about who she had once been. She suffered from the intrusive thought that if she confronted her mother with destructive things she had done, Mary would somehow revert back to the patterns from that time and become psychotic again. “It is quite a traumatized-kid thing to say, but I sort of feel like, How greedy can you get? Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth,” she told me.

Christine didn’t know how to have an ordinary conversation with her mother. For twenty years, Mary had been suspicious when Christine asked her questions about her life. Christine now felt like an adopted child “meeting my biological mom for the first time,” she said. She bought a book by an anthropologist called “The Essential Questions: Interview Your Family to Uncover Stories and Bridge Generations” to help guide their conversations. “It says, ‘Allow them to talk about what’s important,’ ” Christine said, reading from the book, during a visit to her mother’s rehabilitation center. “If no one has ever let you speak about yourself, it can be hard,” Christine went on. “You have to kind of—”

“Think,” Mary said.

“Maybe practice—gain your voice,” Christine said.

Christine, who recorded the conversation, began with warmup questions: “When you were a kid, what was your favorite activity?”

“Running,” Mary answered immediately.

“What did you like about running?”

“It makes you feel you have wings.”

“What is your favorite TV show?” Christine asked.

“ ‘Seinfeld.’ ”

“ ‘Seinfeld’!” Christine said. “What did you like about ‘Seinfeld’?”

“The absurdity.”

Every few weeks, they tackled a new theme outlined in the book: time, identity, body, belief, possessions, memory, fear. Initially, Mary answered in few words, but eventually she became much more expansive. During one session, she offered that her views on physical discipline had evolved: she no longer thought that smacking was acceptable. Christine said, “Without relating it to me or Angie, she sort of said, ‘That’s what we were taught when we were younger, but I don’t think that’s the right way to raise a kid.’ ” Christine felt that her mother may have been reflecting, obliquely, on what had happened in their home. “The ability to say, ‘I’ve changed my mind’ felt like as much as I could ask for,” Christine said.

For years, Christine had been documenting her life—keeping a journal, saving records, recording important conversations—to compensate for the fact that she, too, had blank periods in her memories, coinciding with traumatic events. [annotation q="Prior to picking Christine as one of your main sources, did you know that she had been documenting her life so meticulously? I'm curious as to whether you ever select sources based on the kinds of access you'll have to source materials like this." a="When she told me about the records she kept, that solidified my feeling that I could write a piece about her. Sometimes it's just not possible because there just aren't enough records or material, or you're relying so heavily on someone's memory that it becomes very hard. So that is definitely a large factor."]

[annotation a="With the piece I'm writing right now, for instance, there were many different subjects I could have chosen who had gone through a similar experience, but it was the person who had kept journals who I decided to focus on — and also the person who felt he had a story to tell and wanted to tell it."] She wasn’t sure if her mother’s breaks in memory—what she and Angie called “the missing years”—were different from her own. Recently, she had come across a proverb: “The axe forgets, but the tree remembers.” She felt that maybe she and her mother had reached an impasse that was actually universal—children have always formed their identities around blows that their parents don’t even realize they inflicted.

Angie felt less accommodating: “I’m happy that my mom is normal now, that we can have a deep connection and I can share my life with her. And, at the same time, I want justice for the child who was hurt by that other mother.”

Mary’s sister, Nima, told me that before her illness Mary was “very enduring, very patient.” Mary’s recommendations from professors at medical school describe her as “kind and sympathetic,” always “willing to shoulder any extra work.” When she came out of her psychosis, Mary returned to this dutiful version of herself. She and her husband, Chris, began speaking on the phone every day. Chris told me that he felt as if he were re-meeting the woman he had known in the early years of their marriage. “How come I lived all these years of darkness, and she suddenly looks normal to me?” he said. “She gives me comfort. She gives me emotional support.”

He asked her to do things, like travel to India to resolve a family financial dispute, that Christine and Angie found inappropriate. They encouraged Mary not to comply with the request. Mary had let go of her paranoia that everyone was targeting her, but they wished she could retain a wariness about people who had hurt her in the past. “Now that she’s better, you can see how the delusions protected her from people stepping on her boundaries—and she doesn’t have a replacement strategy,” Christine said.

Mary readily agreed to speak with me for this story, but she struggled to imagine that she could be anything more than a marginal presence in it. For years, she had described how people on TV were lifting ideas and plots from her life story. “It was like she was saying, ‘I’m important,’ ” Christine said. “ ‘I have value. I have things to say.’ And now we’re saying, ‘You’re important. You have value. You have things to say.’ And she can’t access that sense of deserving to be the main character.”

When I first met Mary, on a Zoom call with her and Christine and Angie, I asked if I could read her psychiatric records. [annotation q="This paragraph, and the two that follow, are so telling — in part because they reveal how trust evolved over the course of your reporting process. Why did you think it was important to 1.) highlight Mary's ambivalence and 2.) to insert yourself in the story while doing so?" a="I think because the ambivalence felt like it was so much a part of the experience — the experience of reckoning with one's life, and reckoning with the profound impact an illness has had on a person."]

[annotation a="I also felt it was expressive of Mary's love for her children — that even though she had these conflicted feelings about it, she really wanted to do it for her children. And I did feel like she cared about the scientific record and had an altruistic desire to help others. So I thought that working through the various dynamics that were both keeping her from wanting to look at those records, and then ultimately allowing her to share them, was part of the story."] She said yes but warned that they would be very boring, adding that she couldn’t remember any of her psychiatrists. “I left the memories long before I left the place,” she said. Christine suggested that we interpret this as her mother’s gentle way of saying no.

A few weeks later, Christine told me, Mary found a pile of psychiatric records in her room: “She was, like, ‘I don’t want to see them anymore, so Rachel can have them and can get rid of them.’ And I was, like, ‘Yes, Mom, but Rachel is a journalist. She’s not just a professional shredder.’ ” She said that her mom responded, “I just don’t want to see them myself.”

Mary seemed to be working out her ambivalence about her memories through this pile of papers. After speaking on Zoom every week for two months, Mary and I met at her rehabilitation center, along with Christine and Angie. [annotation q="How long did it take you to report this story?" a="I think my first conversation with Christine was maybe in late March, and then the piece was published mid-July. We were all talking (on Zoom and in person) regularly throughout that period."] Toward the end of our conversation, she stood up without explanation, walked to a cabinet, retrieved the psychiatric records, and gave them to me. “I felt like what happened was a miracle,” she told me. “If it will give anyone else confidence, I’ll go with it.”

There is almost no medical literature about the afterlife of madness, the experience of letting go of what Jaspers called the “definite idea.” Autoimmune psychosis raises the possibility of a swift, full recovery—a trajectory not typically seen in schizophrenia—and in doing so supplies a new category of witness: a person who can describe what it feels like to look back on a self that is, in some sense, defunct. And yet sanity does not mean that a person views the past without defensiveness or distortion. (To see too clearly can lead to a different kind of insanity, depression.) One of Christine’s fears was that, in talking with her mother about what she and Angie had been through, she would “rob her of the human capacity for denial.”

During one of my visits to the rehabilitation center, I asked Mary if she’d like to know how I was writing about her daughters’ memories of her illness, or if she’d prefer not to listen to that part of the story. Christine and I sat in chairs, and Mary sat on the edge of her bed, beside a wooden table on wheels that she used both for eating and as a desk. Mary quickly responded that she wanted to know what her children recalled. “I’ll go with that, because that way it will help me to remember,” she said.

“You remember things very differently, and it might be painful,” Christine said, gently. “Do you feel comfortable emotionally with that?”

“Yeah, go ahead!” Mary said. “I’ll remember like a mother. I won’t remember from your point of view.” She told her, “This is the best time for me to relate to these memories and make amends.”

Christine shared her first memory of the illness: sitting on the couch as her mother told her that the professor from medical school was in love with her.

Mary sat straight up on the bed, holding her arms over her stomach, staring intently at Christine. She had the bearing of a diligent student determined to pass a difficult test.

“You asked if they had ever put things in my hair so that”—

“Microphones,” Mary said quickly. “Microphones.” She said that the professor and his friends kept urging her to leave her husband: “They said, ‘Don’t worry about the in-laws and all—just move away and begin on your own.’ ” The friends were trying to help, but they were also harassing her, and she had no one to confide in. “I felt like she was supposed to be there for me,” Mary said, gesturing toward Christine. “But she was talking on behalf of my friends.” [annotation q="The dialogue here and in the next few grafs helps us to better understand how Mary and Christine interact. Dialogue can be a powerful tool, but only if it reveals something about the sources. How did you decide which lines of dialogue to include in this story?" a="I initially included a lot of dialogue because when I was there, I was amazed by the experience of Mary remembering and addressing directly these memories. It was so profound to sit there, and I felt so personally invested, that I initially included too much. My editor cut some of it, which was helpful because it made me realize I was spending too many sentences sort of reinforcing, layering onto, ideas or moments that could be revealed in one or two sentences."]

“You would think that I was repeating phrases that were said to me by other people.”

“I remember that very well,” Mary said.

“As a kid, I found it very hurtful.”

“I never blamed you,” Mary said. “But my classmates—I trusted them so much.”

“I was not in contact with your classmates,” Christine said, in a measured tone. “I would explain that to you, but it felt like you didn’t believe me at that time.” She asked, “Now that I’m older, do you trust me when I say they weren’t talking to me?”

Mary said it was possible that Christine had been reading her e-mails, rather than talking directly to the classmates, or that Christine’s father was the one telling Christine what to say. “She was very articulate,” Mary said. “She would do everything he would tell her.”

Mary explained that the feeling of being harassed—sometimes by people from her past, sometimes by strangers—continued until several weeks after her cancer diagnosis. “I felt like they were working through the doctors, and I had to take the chemotherapy just to hurt me and make me bald and make me lose weight and humiliate me,” she said.

But then, a few weeks into her treatment, her dreams became uncharacteristically pleasant. She kept dreaming of her sister and brothers, and they were so sensitive and loving that she thought maybe this was the prelude to a kind of heavenly afterlife. In time, the dreams began to feel more conscious, as if she were guiding the scenes herself. Lying in her hospital bed, she tried to recall details about her childhood home which she hadn’t thought about in years. “Whatever I could catch on to, I would collect,” she said.

Her reëmergence seemed to have occurred weeks before her daughters grasped what was happening. Her muscles were so weak that she couldn’t say more than a word at a time, and she wished she could communicate to her daughters, “I’m smiling. I’m all right with this.”

The thought that people were secretly trying to punish her hadn’t completely disappeared, but it felt distant, a relic of a different era. When the thought resurfaced, she said, “I take myself out of it, and I say, ‘It’s not my burden.’ I put the whole thing, like a gift basket, to God.” She’d been taught this coping mechanism as a schoolgirl, but until recently it hadn’t worked.

Christine felt both validated and disoriented by the idea that, between her and her mother, the facts were never really in question. “It is painful to hear that she still thinks I was spying on her all those years, but now she says, ‘I am so proud of my daughters—they take care of me,’ ” she said. “Maybe her interpretation is that through the power of forgiveness she can now interact with me as her loving daughter. So can I make do with that?”

For a year, Christine and Angie had been speaking on Zoom with a family therapist, to help process the changes in their mother. Recently, Mary had begun participating in the conversations, too. During a session, Christine suggested that the three of them begin a process of sharing grievances, each taking a turn. “There were different times when each of us was a flawed caretaker,” Christine said. She knew that her mother must have felt betrayed when she called the mobile crisis unit. Mary agreed: “I felt very let down because nobody trusted me enough to share that information.” Christine began by telling her, “I did my best, and yet I’m sorry I hurt you.”

Although Christine and Angie felt they had already worked out the conflicts in their own relationship, they tried “performing a kind of play,” as Christine put it: they shared resentments—Angie’s feelings of abandonment, Christine’s sense that Angie didn’t want her help—and then apologized, “so that at some point she can say the words to us.” Each emphasized that she didn’t think the other was a bad person, and that it was O.K. that they remembered things differently. They tried any exonerating phrase they could think of, “in case these might be the mental blocks for her,” Christine said.

Mary was enthusiastic about the process, but Christine sensed that she didn’t quite know what to say when it was her turn. A lifelong student of her mother’s mind, Christine had several justifications for her mother’s failure to respond in kind: she had not grown up in a culture where regrets were aired in this way; the inability to see her daughters’ perspective was a lingering cognitive symptom; in her fragile state, apologizing required a level of confidence she didn’t yet have. “At this stage of my life, I need to feel like my mother is back,” Christine told me. Later on, maybe in a few years, she said, “I’ll deal with the fact that it was an imperfect mother who was returned to me.” [annotation q="I found this quote so striking because it's both familiar and unfamiliar; many of us know what it's like to have an imperfect mother, but fewer of us can relate to the experience of having our mother ‘returned’ to us. I'm curious to hear your thoughts about this quote and why you decided to end with it." a="A few days before the piece closed, I still felt discontent with the way the piece ended, and I decided to call Christine and talk through some lingering questions. It was in that final conversation that she said the thing about having an imperfect mother returned to her. By that point I had a much clearer sense of the tension and uncertainty that the ending seemed to point to—I'd had a friend read the piece and she left it with certain questions, and I basically relayed those questions to Christine in that last conversation."]

***

Mallary Tenore Tarpley is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and the award-winning author of the new memoir SLIP: Life in the Middle of Eating Disorder Recovery. She publishes a weekly newsletter, Write at the Edge, featuring writing tips and best practices.

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***

Dear Storyboard community: 

Our summer reading list keeps growing. First came the Pulitzer Prizes, and this week the American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME) handed out its 2026 National Magazine Awards in New York City. You can get links to the full list of winners here, but let's dive into a few moments from the winning stories. 

In the Reporting category, “‘There Will Be No Mercy,’” by Drew Philp, earned The Atavist Magazine its second consecutive National Magazine Award, for a story about hospital workers helping victims during a two-year war in Ethiopia's Tigray region — a conflict, and potentially a genocide, that was not widely covered in Western media. Philp traveled to Ethiopia for the story and met with doctors, nurses, and other staff — he interviewed “two or three dozen people” who worked at the hospital, searching for people to serve as the main characters in the story, he told the Creative Nonfiction Podcast. “We wanted to put faces on what was happening here,” he said. One of the doctors featured was Hale Teka, an OB-GYN at Ayder Comprehensive Specialized Hospital, who Philp brought to life in the story:   

Hale had long believed that people were inherently good and that the world tended toward progress. But as more and more civilians assailed by war arrived at Ayder, he lost faith in his fellow man. In more optimistic moments, Hale clung to a sliver of hope. If individuals couldn’t stop this, surely institutions would. Once word about what was happening in Tigray reached the wider world, the international community would respond. Powerful countries would step in and demand that the atrocities stop. Abiy’s government would be forced to yield.

In the Lifestyle Journalism category, Storyboard contributor Kim Cross won for a Food & Wine feature that took her to Alaska to trace the path of the Pacific's wild salmon, all the way from Bristol Bay to the world's kitchen tables. During a trip on a commercial fishing boat, Cross replays the moment she catches a five-pound salmon: 

“Your first fish!” a crewmate chirps. I smile, fighting tears. Quietly, so the crew won’t hear, I whisper the thing I say to every trout I land on a fly rod: “Thank you, fish!”

This is one moment of truth on my yearlong quest: to learn the provenance of my salmon. The searing revelation of this moment? Whatever I pay in the store ... it’s worth it! Salmon fishing is hard.

The ASME award also highlights an Instagram video that Cross shot and narrated to go with the story. She says it wasn't part of her original pitch: “I had done some GoPro and video footage as part of my reporting and in anticipation of promoting the story and doing presentations after publication. I was asked to write the script and do the voiceover, which the F&W team then edited.”

As for the written piece, Cross documents two journeys — one for the 50 million salmon swimming through Bristol Bay, and one for herself. Read to the end to see how Cross wraps up her trip with a satisfying callback.

Links of note 

• Two new cautionary tales this week about AI slop infecting the publishing world (and everything else around us). First, a short story by Jamir Nazir published in Granta magazine, which won the Commonwealth Foundation Short Story Prize, was accused of being at least partially AI-generated. Author Lincoln Michel and Literary Hub's Brittany Allen break down the red flags within the story itself. (The Commonwealth Foundation, for its part, is investigating the accusations.) And The New York Times discovered that a new book about AI, “The Future of Truth: How AI Reshapes Reality,” by Steven Rosenbaum, contained “more than a half-dozen misattributed or fake quotes” as a result of the author relying on AI tools for research. “As I disclosed in the book’s acknowledgments, I used A.I. tools ChatGPT and Claude during the research, writing and editing process,” Rosenbaum said in a statement. “That does not excuse these errors, of which I take full responsibility.”
• Manil Suri, author of the new memoir “A Room in Bombay,” shares how he resolved challenges with the narrative structure of his book by creating “a book X-ray” to zoom out and view the different threads as color-coded storylines, to see where there might be a disconnect. “Try this yourself on a book. The strands will generally be the storylines of the main characters. You’ll be able to see how these interact, whether there’s enough continuity, whether a character’s been ignored for too long a stretch.” (Via Carly Stern)
• Let's end with Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and 2021 Nieman Fellow Sarah L. Kaufman, who offers her own advice for fighting off AI, from her new book on writing, “Verb Your Enthusiasm: How to Master the Art of the Verb and Transform Your Writing”: “No bot — so far — can craft poetic physical language that makes us feel something. That is your territory. You can surprise and move your reader with your own irreplaceable sensitivity, your necessary nervous system, and your deliberate, intentional, refreshing verbs to connect it all.” (Hat-tip: Henry Chu)

Keep leaning in to your humanity, and keep sharing your stories, 

Mark Armstrong
Editor
Nieman Storyboard
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***

Dear Storyboard community: 

Recently, I was chatting with Storyboard contributor Kim Cross, and we got to talking about freelance assignments and work projects. She shared a goal for her current work, which was to, essentially, close the laptop and get out in the world. Her reason? The stories are outside. 

Yes, there are millions of stories on the internet — troves of data, leads, information, and contacts that can be found online and on social media. But for a narrative journalist who is looking for real-life moments, the strategy of getting offline and getting face-to-face with friends and strangers seems like a brilliant approach, not to mention one that is also good for mental and physical health.  

Our conversation came to mind as I read Emilia Wisniewski's latest Power of Narrative recap, in which author and journalist Keith O’Brien discovers that in order to get the untold origin story of NBA legend Larry Bird, he needed to travel to Bird's hometown of French Lick, Indiana, to find connections and build trust in a way that emails, phone calls, and the internet simply couldn't match. He showed up in the town (population: 2,000). The result is O’Brien's new book, the New York Times bestseller “Heartland.”

Finding the narrative in small-town libraries and bars: How Keith O’Brien told the origin story of Larry Bird

“I need to invest in the story. If people aren’t calling me back, maybe what I need to do is just go to French Lick. And so that’s what I did: bought a plane ticket, got a rental car and booked a room at the Best Western on the edge of town. And then before I left with those numbers and those addresses that I knew were right, I reached out again … and it was then that people started getting back in touch with me.”

[ Read the story ]

Question of the week: Tell us your favorite graduation speech

It's cap-and-gown season, which seems like a good moment to share storytelling lessons from our favorite graduation speeches. 

Like wedding toasts, this is a tough genre to do well, complete with a tricky audience to keep happy. Ira Glass recently dismissed the entire category as a “doomed form” (though he's still given many of them). But these short, punchy addresses can be memorable and life-affirming — you might remember when Chicago Tribune columnist Mary Schmich redefined the entire genre with the following words: "Wear sunscreen." 

So I’m curious: what are your favorite graduation speeches, and what storytelling lessons can we take from them? Email me your picks and why you love them: editor@niemanstoryboard.org

Links of note 

• ProPublica has launched a new podcast, “Paper Trail,” hosted by investigative journalist Jessica Lussenhop. The first episode, released Thursday, digs into the gaps in the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's approach to vetting the safety and efficacy of generic prescription drugs. “It turns out the FDA doesn’t regularly test generic drugs that are coming into the U.S. to make sure they are safe and effective. It just lets the companies do the tests themselves. But the inspectors found serious issues with some of these tests, too.”
• At Brendan O’Meara's Pitch Club newsletter, freelance journalist Shawna Kenney shares the story behind a successful pitch to her local public radio station, WHQR in Wilmington, N.C., to produce “Wild Things,” a limited-run podcast series “focusing on the creatures and critters of Coastal Carolina — and the people who care for them.” Kenney discovered the station's Fourth Estate Fund as a way into her pitch, and leads with her connection to the community. “Normally I would open with a dramatic scene in pitching longform stories, and that is what I look for as an editor with Narratively. But here I was pitching a public radio station, an NPR affiliate who just lost their NEA funding. I felt it was more important to establish my long-term relationship with this region and community. I didn’t want to come off as some parachute journalist who just moved back from L.A. and knew what this little town needed.”
• It's easy to get depressed about the internet and our social media platforms being inundated with AI slop — content that, due to the gaming of algorithms, can outperform carefully reported, fact-checked journalism. But it's important to remind ourselves that in a toxic media ecosystem, credibility and trust are more important than ever. It takes years to build credibility, and just minutes to burn it all down. This Kate Davies essay, “Knitting Bullshit,” (hat-tip: Today in Tabs) takes us through the dystopian world of AI knitting podcasts, which are hosted by AI “personalities.” The AI podcasting company that created these series — publishing 3,000 different podcast episodes per week — chose knitting (among other points of interest) because “most of our content sits squarely in topics that aren’t life or death necessarily. So gardening, for example, knitting, cooking, these things we can afford to be wrong.” But for many people like Davies, knitting is incredibly important. There is always a cost to cutting corners, being cynical, and being wrong. Despite what the slop will have you believe, there are still no shortcuts. 

Keep doing your best, and keep sharing your stories,

Mark Armstrong
Editor
Nieman Storyboard
Follow the Nieman Storyboard Podcast 
On Bluesky: @niemanstoryboard.org

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The post Your next story is outside appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

Larry Bird versus Magic Johnson. March 26, 1979. The NCAA Men’s National Championship was the final college game for the two rising basketball stars, and everyone in the country watched. The rivalry narrative built up over days leading up to the game, and it was quite a compelling one. 

In reality, the men hardly knew each other, only meeting once before the game and barely speaking to one another. Author and journalist Keith O’Brien called this a “disingenuous narrative” and set out to tell the story in a different way: starting with the Boston Celtics legend’s origin story from high school to early college.

“When you change that perspective, what you get is a really, completely different story,” O’Brien said. “And maybe more important than that, you get a completely different cast of characters.”

O’Brien, an award-winning author and journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, and Rolling Stone, spoke at Boston University’s Power of Narrative conference in March about his bestselling book “Heartland” and shared lessons from his reporting process about the importance of showing up.

1. Investing in the story

At first, O’Brien tried to reach Bird through his agent. It was no surprise, though, that Bird did not want to participate; he is a notoriously private person, rarely doing interviews or projects unless he has some control over it. But — as Patrick Radden Keefe pointed out in his keynote earlier that day — access to the person centered in your story shouldn’t make or break the narrative.

O’Brien didn’t necessarily need Bird’s participation for the story. He wanted to tell a “compelling human narrative.” Perhaps Bird would have told a completely different story about those early years than the people around him that shaped his future career. To get those outside voices, he collected phone numbers and started calling around. 

In the first few rounds, nobody answered him.

“I need to invest in the story,” O’Brien said. “If people aren’t calling me back, maybe what I need to do is just go to French Lick. And so that’s what I did: bought a plane ticket, got a rental car and booked a room at the Best Western on the edge of town. And then before I left with those numbers and those addresses that I knew were right, I reached out again … and it was then that people started getting back in touch with me.”

He interviewed Bird’s childhood best friends, mentors, and family friends, meeting them everywhere from the local McDonald’s to people’s kitchens. O’Brien’s decision to travel to French Lick was pivotal for his story, gaining the trust and respect from residents who wouldn’t otherwise bother to return his phone calls.

2. Interviewing every witness to a scene

Reporting on scenes that you didn't witness firsthand can require a lot of research and specific type of reporting and interviewing. O’Brien makes it a point to talk to every person who was in the scene he wants to write about. If he knows that five people were in the room, he will speak to every person who was there, even if they don’t ultimately end up in the story.

Since he reported on events between 1973 and 1979, he understood memories can erode over time or someone could have a clear memory of events that never happened. That is precisely why he talks to every witness: to get the fullest sense of the truth in the commonalities.

“If you talk to all five people, you're going to get different details, different memories, and somewhere in the overlap of those memories, you know the truth likely resides,” he said.

For this story, he had to track down witnesses and relied on relationships he already built in town to access those people. In one instance, he was trying to track down one of the owners of a bar that Bird’s father, Joey Bird, frequented in the 1970s. The bar was long gone, but the owner could often be found in the town’s American Legion Bar.

O’Brien stepped into the bar on a weekday afternoon and 40 pairs of eyes turned to him straight away. He had to introduce himself and his intentions immediately.

“There was no slow rolling this: sit down quietly at the bar, order a drink, start to mingle. Between the door and the bar, I’m almost defensively saying who I am and why I’m here,” he said. “Within a couple minutes, everybody wanted to talk to me.”

The person O’Brien wanted to reach was not there, but he got in touch with him through the phone behind the bar and interviewed him right then and there.

3. Searching physical records

One of the important figures in Bird’s life that O’Brien identified was his father. Joey Bird was a well-known person in town but struggled a lot; a few months after his son graduated high school, he took his own life. 

O’Brien heard that his long battle with drinking came as a result of his time in the military during World War II and the Korean War. But he had to verify the claims himself. It took months to find the eldest Bird’s military records, and O’Brien said he learned a lot about Joey and Larry Bird in these records that he likely couldn’t find anywhere else.

He learned that Joey Bird enlisted in the Navy for World War II at 17 years old with a seventh grade education. He was a messman who likely didn’t go into battle and got in trouble for going AWOL during basic training and drinking on a ship. But he did see fighting a few years later in Korea, where he was an Army soldier and engaged in combat during one of the bloodiest battles of the conflict.

“Joey Bird has seen things and maybe done things that would shape him later,” O’Brien said. “I’ve learned something about my subject from these records. I’ve learned something that I think my subject himself might not even know about his own father. All of this is informative to my narrative.”

Once O’Brien was in French Lick, he stopped at the public library frequently, going through town records, yearbooks, and newspaper clippings. O’Brien said there are records in libraries that can’t be found anywhere else — not through interviews and not online. In the French Lick library, there was an entire section dedicated to Larry Bird. 

The library’s records went as far back as when Joey Bird was growing up and in the war. He was looking for letters or notes soldiers often submitted at the time. Just when O’Brien’s patience was waning after looking in the archives for hours upon hours, he finally found something in March 1951.

“This wasn't a note in a little notes column, it was on the front page, and it was a first person account that Joey Bird had written back to home about that winter in Korea. I mean, an incredible thing, right?” he said. “Libraries are critical to the work that we do.”

4. Risking time and resources for important material

O’Brien had embedded himself in the small town of French Lick (population: 2,000), interviewing multiple people every day and becoming a regular at the American Legion Bar. But there was one person he still couldn’t get a hold of who was essential for the story: Bird’s high school coach, Jim Jones.

Jones coached most young basketball players in town during the ’60s and ’70s. He taught Bird how to hold a basketball and shoot layups. He would come to Bird’s home to wake him up and take him to practice before school. “Were it not for Jim Jones, Larry Bird … might not have become the person he became,” O’Brien said.

In the weeks he was in French Lick, he could not get a hold of Jones. He thought about taking a gamble during the final days of his trip: Should he drive to Jones’s home an hour outside of French Lick and risk losing time if he didn’t answer? O’Brien believed Jones was so crucial for the story, he decided to make the drive.

He pulled into Jones’s driveway, prepared with a handwritten note card in case no one was home, and was relieved when he saw cars in the driveway. He knocked on the door and his wife answered. After a few moments, Jones came to the door and wordlessly let O’Brien through.

They talked for the next three hours in Jones’s kitchen about Larry Bird and the 1970s. When O’Brien thought they were finishing up, Jones showed him a custom Larry Bird championship-style ring and a letter from Bird to Jones, thanking him for all he’d done.

“I knew two things for certain,” O’Brien said. “First was, I had this story, whether Larry Bird was talking to me or not. I had it. And number two, I knew that I was not a stranger in this place anymore. I belonged here.”

***
Emilia Wisniewski is a general assignment reporter and engagement editor at the Concord Monitor in New Hampshire. She previously worked at Boston.com and The Boston Globe as a correspondent where she covered local politics, business, health, and environment.

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***

Dear Storyboard community: 

This week the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing was awarded to Texas Monthly senior editor Aaron Parsley for his harrowing and heart-wrenching first-person account of the 2025 Guadalupe River floods in Texas, written just days after the tragedy swept away his house and plunged his family into the waters. Parsley lost his 20-month-old nephew Clay in the flood. 

As Parsley wrote on Bluesky this week: “Being recognized for a story that honors my nephew Clay and the strength of my family means the world to me. I’m grateful to the Pulitzer Prizes committee, my dear friends, and incredibly talented colleagues at Texas Monthly.”

Former Storyboard editor and New Yorker staff writer Paige Williams chose the story for our Best of 2025 compilation, saying the story “can only contribute to our shared understanding of how the unthinkable unfolds, and, let’s hope, of how to spare others the same measure of suffering.”

With so many significant pieces published each year, how do the Pulitzers get chosen in the first place? I asked two of this year's Pulitzer Prize jurors, Storyboard contributors Erika Hayasaki and Minda Honey for insight. Hayasaki, who first served as a Pulitzer juror for Feature Writing last year (when the award went to Esquire's Mark Warren for “A Death in Alabama”), said: “We are actually jurors, not judges — which means we select the finalists, which then go to the Pulitzer Board to select a winner. The winner is a surprise to us until the announcements.” She added: 

I can’t speak specifically to what we looked for or deliberated on, but I can say that one of our jurors sent a note after thanking all of us that said: “It was like being in the world’s greatest college seminar.” 

Three of the jurors had won Pulitzers themselves, and everyone at the table brought another layer of brilliance and perceptiveness to our discussion. It did at times feel like an unparalleled craft workshop, as we dissected what makes feature stories feel immersive, closely observed, rigorously reported, or profound beyond simply the arrangement of facts. It was also invigorating to be reminded that so many excellent pieces are still being published regularly, despite all of the challenges in media.

Minda Honey added: 

The invitation to serve as a Pulitzer Prize juror came at a much needed moment. This past year — like many years, as of late — was a hard year for media workers. Similar to the journalists who experienced the mass layoffs at The Washington Post, I was part of a newsroom that was dismantled, and I've been a bit adrift professionally since being laid off last July. So it was an immense honor to learn that the leaders of our industry respect me and my writing enough to request that I serve as a Feature Writing juror for the most prestigious prize in Journalism. It was a timely reminder that who I am and the caliber of my writing has never been dependent on any single job or title. 

Of all the high points of this experience, I will never forget how well taken care of I felt throughout the entire process by the Pulitzer Prize's Joseph O. Legaspi, the leadership and warmth of our committee chair Erika, and the master class in dissecting a piece of writing I received from my fellow committee members. (And shoutout to everyone who let me believe that snow boots are business casual because there was no way I was trudging around the slushy streets of NYC in anything else!)

You can see the full list of Pulitzer Prize winners here. 

With so much great reporting and storytelling across the categories, Storyboard will bring you more from this year's winners and finalists in the weeks and months to come. 

Links of note

• Congrats to the incoming 2027 Nieman Fellows: The Nieman Foundation has announced its latest class of 22 talented journalists from around the world who will spend the next year at Harvard. “These accomplished new fellows have shown through their work why journalism still matters — how it illuminates the forces shaping our lives, uncovers hidden stories, and holds the powerful to account,” said Nieman Interim Curator Henry Chu. “The year they’ll spend at Harvard will strengthen them as leaders in the field at a time when press freedom has become increasingly precarious worldwide.”
• Another spotlight on watchdog journalism: Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) has announced the winners of its 2025 IRE Awards, honoring work from large and small newsrooms across 23 categories. 
• Audio Flux, the podcast dedicated to showcasing great audio storytelling in 3 minutes or less, announced finalists for their latest “circuit,” or season. You can listen to the finalists here until May 19. 
• Curious about how a deep investigation unfolds? The Journalist’s Resource at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy is hosting a free webinar on May 12 at 1 p.m. ET with New York Times reporter Hannah Dreier, winner of the 2026 Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting for the series, “Exposed and Expendable,” about wildfire fighters getting sick and dying young from exposure to poisonous smoke. You can register here.
• Just announced: I'll be in Phoenix Oct. 22-24 for the Society for Features Journalism's national conference at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. I'm excited to be interviewing New York Times national correspondent Kurt Streeter, whose work has been featured on Storyboard many times over the years. 

Keep showing up, and keep sharing your stories, 

Mark Armstrong
Editor
Nieman Storyboard
Follow the Nieman Storyboard Podcast 
On Bluesky: @niemanstoryboard.org

***

Photo from behind the scenes at this year's Pulitzer judging by Jose R. Lopez.

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***

Dear Storyboard community: 

It's journalism awards season — last week were the Peabodys, this week it's the Poynter Institute and the National Headliner Awards, and on Monday we'll have the Pulitzer Prizes (announced via livestream at 3 p.m. ET).

One thing to remember amid all the accolades is that every award-winning story starts with a germ of an idea. How can we know where a story might take us unless we look for ourselves? 

This thought struck me as I read Storyboard contributor Emilia Wisniewski's latest roundup of highlights from Boston University's Power of Narrative conference. From Ken Burns to Boston Globe journalist Giulia McDonnell Nieto del Rio, journalists are constantly pulling on threads and following their curiosity, seeing if one phone call or a day in the archives might lead to a new discovery. 

But then, once armed with an idea, comes other matters: What form will this reporting and storytelling take? How can we get these stories in front of an audience? And who will help fund it? 

These are the critical questions writers and journalists are asking right now, as I learned during a Zoom conversation this week with journalists from the San Francisco Writers Grotto (thanks to Storyboard contributor Carly Stern for the invite). We pondered the state of nonfiction publishing, the pros and cons of building a social media following to promote your work, and whether the written longform feature is still a viable pathway to a book proposal. 

My mission with Storyboard has always been to focus on the elements that we can control — the craft, the reporting. But I'd like to hear from you: How are you thinking about your work in this current moment? Whose work is inspiring you? And what advice would you share with fellow journalists on how to keep moving forward? 

Email me at editor@niemanstoryboard.org. I'd like to feature your answers in a future newsletter. 

Look beyond the headlines — and five other lessons for journalists from Power of Narrative 2026

Storytelling advice from Ken Burns, the Boston Globe, The New Yorker's Sarah Stillman, The Atavist, Jabari Asim, and Keith O’Brien

[ Read the story ]

Links of note 

• Storyboard contributor Erika Hayasaki has compiled an outstanding guide to crafting reported and braided essays, as well as “hybrid memoirs,” from her recent panel discussion for the American Society of Journalists and Authors. Hayasaki defines the reported essay as “a first-person nonfiction story grounded in reflection and reporting. These pieces weave facts, scenes, interviews, and research with personal observations and narrative storytelling.” A braided essay can also include traditional reporting, but not always. As Hayasaki quotes fellow Storyboard contributor Kim Cross: “Think of each strand of the braid as its own journey, with its own beginning, middle, and end.”   
• At New York magazine's Dinner Party newsletter, Emily Gould is collecting submissions of readers' favorite “load-bearing” blog posts from the internet's glory days — that is, pieces of writing or reporting that still stand the test of time. Gould's personal list brings back some memories for me (featuring The Awl, Jia Tolentino at Jezebel, and one of the earliest pieces we published at Longreads). Two pieces that immediately came to my mind are this 2011 essay that introduced me to Maria Bustillos's writing, and Allie Brosh's illustrated memoir, “Depression Part 2” from 2013.
• Naomi Kanakia's newsletter, Woman of Letters, shares a history of short fiction in The New Yorker, which gives us insight into the changing nature of storytelling. In the 1920s the magazine began publishing “casuals” — “short humorous pieces that were meant to convey an attitude of urbane sophistication” — with the formula, length, and style evolving from there. Kanakia herself uses her newsletter to experiment with different forms of storytelling, raising the question: what type of story works best on Substack? How might that change in the years to come?

Keep experimenting, and keep sharing your stories, 

Mark Armstrong
Editor
Nieman Storyboard
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The 28th Power of Narrative conference returned to Boston University on March 27 and 28. Journalists, authors, podcast producers, and filmmakers came to the second floor of the George Sherman Union to share the lessons they’ve learned from their work. 

We've already shared a few notes from this year's conference, including Nieman Storyboard editor Mark Armstrong's Power of Narrative conversation with “London Falling” author and New Yorker staff writer Patrick Radden Keefe. Now, here are six more takeaways from a weekend full of inspiration and education: 

1. Find the narrative, don't build it: Ken Burns

Ken Burns, whose latest PBS documentary series was 2025's “The American Revolution,” created a history of the colonies before, during, and after gaining independence from the British — fitting it all into six episodes, or 12 hours. 

Burns said the material often spoke for itself. The desire to seek out the truth is central to his work, but he’s often dealing with “grades of imperfection” since there is no such thing as objectivity, he said. But the story will tell you if it’s important to include.

“The greatest thing I love to hear is what I left out,” he said. “Bring it on … I know exactly the thing, I made a decision to leave that out. We’re not an encyclopedia.”

What also tends to speak for itself is the narrative. Burns gives an example of a mother named Rebecca Tanner of the Mohegan tribe from Connecticut who lost five sons fighting for the Patriot cause. There were many women, children, and enslaved people that fought on either side of the conflict. It's Burns's job to collect those lost or hidden stories.

“You find [narratives]. You never tried to build it. It’s there, and it’s inherent,” he said.

Burns acknowledged that current times are fraught, divided, and unpredictable. But so were the times during the Revolution, Civil War, and Vietnam War. He said there are “features of right now that are hugely terrifying and ought to be talked about.”

While Burns feels confident in telling these complex historical narratives, he said it took decades to get to that point. He realized that he knew how to do the work, even if something goes awry. And he leans into the unknown, working out the problem and coming out the other side having learned something.

“You have to first know that you have something to say, and that has to do with an incredible amount of introspection about what you want and who you are and what your capabilities are,” he said. 

2. Telling someone's story without a ‘perfect interview’: Giulia McDonnell Nieto del Rio and Jazmin Aguilera, The Boston Globe

The detention of Tufts University student Rümeysa Öztürk in March 2025 was one of the earliest moments in Trump's second term that the nation witnessed increased aggression by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers on the streets across the country.

The Boston Globe followed the story since Öztürk's arrest and detainment, publishing dozens of articles. Behind the scenes, Globe team members including senior audio producer Jazmin Aguilera and immigration reporter Giulia McDonnell Nieto del Rio worked to bring Öztürk’s story even closer to readers and listeners, creating the two-part podcast series, “Rümeysa Öztürk: An American Story.”

The central question the team sought to answer was, “Why had the Trump administration chosen Rümeysa to arrest?”

“We very quickly started learning that she wasn’t a protester or an activist that you would usually think of using those words on campus. She’s a very quiet, soft-spoken student. She loves children, she was simply passionate about the rights of children,” McDonnell Nieto del Rio said. “We wondered how the Trump administration had even found her, and those were answers we didn’t think we were going to get directly from officials, and so we had to figure out basically other ways to do that.”

McDonnell Nieto del Rio saw that professors were suing the Trump administration over an ideological deportation policy, and she started attending hearings in Boston. She saw ICE agents take the stand to testify, and she learned that they had most likely discovered Öztürk through a website that doxed protesters.

The team then went on to acquire hundreds of pages of court documents and hours of video footage to tell a bigger story. It also helped add context to Trump’s immigration enforcement crackdown, a story that was “touching everyone,” McDonnell Nieto del Rio said.

One challenge for the team: how to tell a great narrative without a “perfect interview” with the central character. They were able to get written answers from Öztürk during the reporting process, but it wasn’t quite what they expected. They largely turned to other characters around Öztürk, such as her lawyer, a woman who was detained with her in Louisiana, and even the man who got the viral video footage of Öztürk being taken off the street by ICE officers.

“We all think the dream is to have the perfect interview with the person at the center of the piece. But I think there are a lot of other ways to go about these stories too,” McDonnell Nieto del Rio said. “And what's great about having restrictions on a story is that it forces you to be creative and find workarounds, and sometimes you'll get things from those workarounds that you wouldn't have already gotten.”

3. Look beyond the headlines for the hidden stories: The New Yorker's Sarah Stillman

The first story New Yorker staff writer Sarah Stillman ever reported was during her senior year in college. She saw a Fox News report while at the gym with the headline “Body Found in Lake Is Not Missing Fla. Girl,” about the 2005 search  for the missing 9-year-old Jessica Lunsford.

When Stillman saw the report, she wondered about the woman whose body was found in the lake. She went back to her dorm room and called the sheriff’s office in Florida and asked for the woman’s name, revealed to be Donna Cooke. Once she got it, she did a background check on her and found her last known address. Stillman traveled to Florida and learned about Cooke’s story — about her prostitution charges, and being brought on as a confidential informant for police, which led to her death. Stillman later wrote about confidential informants for The New Yorker, 2012's “The Throwaways.”

“One of my very first reporting experiences then became the story, not just of telling who Donna was, but also of telling how she wound up there, which had to do a lot with current U.S. drug enforcement policies around how we use confidential informants,” Stillman said. “It’s been incredibly guiding to me as a journalist, learning to watch news headlines and seeing where is something not adding up for me.”

Stillman also learned that the best stories come from learning one’s strengths. After joining The New Yorker, she went to cover Iraq and Afghanistan during the Iraq war. She didn’t know the nuanced history of the Middle East and certainly didn’t know the language, but she sought out stories using her background.

Stillman, whose family included labor workers, always thought about how labor fit into a bigger story. Through that lens, she reported on thousands of international workers being sent to Iraq to do menial jobs on military bases. She spoke with hundreds of these workers and found they had been sent to the bases under false pretenses and also found cases of sexual assault.

“So much of what I think is the most compelling kind of narrative journalism is thinking about, ‘Where are people encountering black holes, whether it’s policy or whether it’s of the existing narratives?’” Stillman said. “How do we create narratives that push back on that and actually fill in the blanks and ask for accountability?”

4. Showing the true humanity of a bombing victim: Rhana Natour and Seyward Darby, The Atavist Magazine

Over 1,000 children in Gaza lost a limb in the first two months of the war. That statistic stuck with freelance journalist Rhana Natour as she considered covering a conflict that has produced the largest number of child amputees in history. Natour spoke with photojournalist Eman Mohammed and learned that some organizations had been helping young children from Gaza come to the U.S.

She said finding stories from the Israel-Hamas war proved difficult, as international journalists could not access the region directly. But children were “coming to us” and could shed light on the war and their experience. Natour's National Magazine Award-winning story, “Coming to America,” featuring photos by Mohammed, was published in The Atavist Magazine in July 2024. It tells the story of a 14-year-old girl named Layan Albaz who lost her legs in an Israeli airstrike that also killed many of her family members. 

Natour learned she needed to equip herself with the right reporting tools to handle the story with sensitivity. She understood she was talking to a child that had gone through significant trauma in the last month. She consulted experts in childhood trauma ahead of speaking with Layan and other children. She also had Mohammed, who’s fluent in Arabic and has a deep understanding of Middle Eastern culture, to translate for Natour.

Some of these practices included “asking them frequently if you want to take a break, or the way that you approach a child,” Natour said. “The underlying suggestion is … that child doesn't want to feel obligated to tell you anything. You don't want to exhaust them through the interview process. You don’t want to do harm.”

But before Natour met Layan, she was described as “angry,” “moody,” “furious,” and “mean.” She wasn’t the sad and gracious “perfect victim” that Natour may have expected. Natour leaned heavily into writing about that anger.

“If in a story you come up against an obstacle, don't think of it as something, ‘Oh gosh, I need to somehow tuck this under the narrative.’ Maybe it’s actually part of the narrative. Maybe it makes for a richer story,” said Seyward Darby, Natour's editor on the story and editor in chief of The Atavist. “She is trying to assert agency. She's trying to process trauma. She is trying to regain a sense of control in her life. She’s furious that so many people and institutions failed her. So maybe her anger is part of the story. Maybe it is the story.”

5. Building a literary toolbox: Jabari Asim

Jabari Asim, a professor at Emerson College who has published 23 books including fiction, nonfiction, poetry, essays, and children’s books, likes to visualize his audience before beginning a project. He thinks of three different readers: himself (and his appetite for something he’s interested in or hasn’t seen anywhere else), someone who isn’t attracted to the subject matter at first but would read something that is well written, and someone who is adversarial to the topic he writes about.

Asim, who was previously an editor at The Washington Post and editor in chief at the NAACP’s magazine The Crisis, also visualizes the finished product. “I see the book on the shelf. I see the spine. I see my name. I see the title. I see the color scheme. So I convinced myself that on some level, somewhere, my book already exists, and now it’s just a matter of working backwards.”

He's a big believer in the “ass to chair” theory of writing — and letting every idea spill onto the pages of the notebook with little distraction. He also encouraged finding a routine or habit that unlocks a creative flow state, whether it’s a regimented routine like that of Haruki Murakami or just some good beer and pizza. Either way, “Consistency is the operating principle. Find what works for you and stick to it.”

Asim keeps a “commonplace book” that contains profound phrases, observations or ideas that convey an element of style or prose that informs his own work. The book reminds him that he is entering into a collective discussion, and his ideas may only add onto what has already been expressed, keeping him grounded. The quotes in his book include the likes of Toni Morrison, Mary Oliver, Robert Frost, Andrei Tarkovsky, and many others.

Asim said he creates rough outlines, and it evolves as he goes through multiple drafts. After having a comprehensive outline, he can shuffle parts around and jump from place to place when writing (he said this is an antidote to writer’s block for him). In his drafts, he often highlights a “golden paragraph” that showcases everything he was trying to achieve and compares that paragraph to the rest of his paragraphs to see how he can strengthen the others.

Cleanliness, precision, ease and force are Asim’s four elements for writing. For cleanliness, “Don’t give [publishers] a chance to dismiss you easily. Get rid of all typos, grammatical errors and misspellings.” For precision, quoting E. B. White, “omit needless words.” For ease, “Never let your readers see you sweat. Successful writing tends to be a fingerprints-free exercise.” For force, “Your conclusion presents the final opportunity to close the sale, to gather your narrative momentum and drive home the full eloquence and fury of your prose.”

6. Becoming less of a stranger in a small town: Keith O’Brien

Keith O’Brien, an award-winning author and journalist whose work has appeared in New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, and Rolling Stone, wanted to dig into the early years of Boston Celtics legend Larry Bird. But Bird is a notoriously private person, rarely doing interviews or projects unless he has some control over it. So it came as no surprise when Bird couldn’t be reached for O’Brien’s recently published book, “Heartland,” covering his high school career in his hometown of French Lick, Indiana.

O’Brien didn’t necessarily need Bird’s participation for the story. He wanted to tell a “compelling human narrative.” Perhaps Bird would have told a completely different story about those early years than the people around him that shaped his future career. To get those outside voices, he collected phone numbers and started calling around. Nobody answered him.

“I need to invest in the story,” O’Brien said. “If people aren’t calling me back, maybe what I need to do is just go to French Lick. And so that’s what I did: bought a plane ticket, got a rental car and booked a room at the Best Western on the edge of town. And then before I left with those numbers and those addresses that I knew were right, I reached out again … and it was then that people started getting back in touch with me.”

One of the important figures in Bird’s life that O’Brien identified was his father Joey Bird. He was a well-known person in town but struggled a lot; a few months after his son graduated high school, he took his own life. Since neither of the Birds could — or would — speak to him, O’Brien learned about Joey Bird through military records, newspaper clippings in the public library, and at the local bar in town.

O’Brien could feel that he was out of place, especially at the bar where he had to immediately introduce himself and his intentions. But he quickly started to acquaint himself with Bird’s high school friends, college teammates, and mentors. There was one person he still couldn’t get a hold of who was essential for the story: Bird’s high school coach, Jim Jones.

In a last-ditch effort, O’Brien decided to drive to Jones’s home an hour outside of French Lick. He knocked on the door and his wife answered. After a few moments, Jones came to the door and wordlessly let O’Brien through. They talked for the next three hours in Jones’s kitchen, where Jones showed O’Brien a custom Larry Bird championship-style ring and a letter from Bird to Jones, thanking him for all he’d done.

“I knew two things for certain,” O’Brien said. “First was, I had this story, whether Larry Bird was talking to me or not. I had it. And number two, I knew that I was not a stranger in this place anymore. I belonged here.”

***

Emilia Wisniewski is a general assignment reporter and engagement editor at the Concord Monitor in New Hampshire. She previously worked at Boston.com and The Boston Globe as a correspondent where she covered local politics, business, health, and environment.

The post Look beyond the headlines — and five other lessons for journalists from Power of Narrative 2026 appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

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***

Dear Storyboard community: 

What are the ingredients that make a memorable podcast?

This week I'm excited to welcome back Storyboard contributor — and 2024 Nieman fellow — Julia Barton, who guides us through an annotation of a podcast script from one of 2025's most acclaimed narrative podcasts, “Fela Kuti: Fear No Man.” The series, hosted by “Radiolab” creator Jad Abumrad, explores the life, music, and legacy of Fela Kuti, the Nigerian musician, political activist, and pioneer of Afrobeat. On Thursday, the series was honored with a Peabody Award. 

We talk a lot in this newsletter about how reporting, research, and proximity to the right materials can dictate the shape of a story, or whether we even have a story to tell. I'm fascinated by the constraints Abumrad and his editor, Ben Adair, had to navigate to create this series — including limited access to Kuti in his own words (he died in 1997) — but also by the unusual amount of freedom they had to use, and even remix, some of his music. It can be very difficult to clear music rights for a podcast, and as Barton tells me, “their access to Fela’s music really made the whole series work.” The goal for the podcast, Adair said, was "making a documentary you could dance to.” 

It's been a precarious time for narrative nonfiction podcasts, which are facing the same financial, political, and audience challenges affecting other forms of journalism. But “Fear No Man” reminds us what's possible. 

Barton's advice for storytellers who want to explore audio narrative? “Think about why your story is best told in audio, and try to collaborate with an experienced producer on your pitch. Or if you are already an experienced producer, collaborate with a story editor. Most of the pitches I've seen that make it to production have either a strong audio component already figured out, or they have a strong team behind them. Ideally both.”

How Jad Abumrad transports listeners to a legendary club in Lagos for the acclaimed podcast, ‘Fela Kuti: Fear No Man’

“The music has to be the guiding force. Jad talks in a bunch of different moments in the podcast about this torrent of music that Fela was creating, that was just streaming out of him and around Lagos and around the world. So why not have that be the guiding principle?”

[ Read the story ]

Links of note 

• At her Notes from a Small Press newsletter, Belt Publishing founder Anne Trubek considers the current challenges in nonfiction book publishing — in which fewer non-memoir titles are being published, and advances are not always substantial enough to justify the reporting and research required to write the books. Trubek suggests some changes, including making book proposals less demanding and for imprints to publish shorter books: “Our ‘signature’ series of researched nonfiction are called (internally) ‘Notches’ and they max out at 60,000 words, with an average of 45,000, and some as few as 30,000. This makes book writing much less onerous for the writer (and the resultant volume, 5 x 7” trim size, less intimidating to readers, plus: cute!). Writers are more likely to be able to complete a manuscript without leaving their day job, or any of the other obstacles.”
• The Sidney Hillman Foundation has announced the winners of the 76th annual Hillman Prizes for “journalism in service of the common good.” The full list, including categories for books, documentaries, magazines, newspapers, and broadcast, is available here.
• “Access is nice. Access is alluring. Access is also dangerous. It is a drug prone to causing grandiosity, narcissism, and delusion.” Ahead of this weekend’s White House Correspondents Association Dinner, in his newsletter, How Things Work, Hamilton Nolan writes about the temptation of access in journalism. “It is a way to make the people you write about happy, and to make your job as a journalist much easier. Unfortunately it also eliminates much of the value of journalism.”

Keep sharing your stories (on your own terms),

Mark Armstrong
Editor
Nieman Storyboard
Follow the Nieman Storyboard Podcast 
On Bluesky: @niemanstoryboard.org

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When “Fela Kuti: Fear No Man” came out in the fall of 2025, I knew I would need to dedicate real time to listen. Produced by Western Sound and Talkhouse for Audible and Barack and Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground Productions, the series — which just won a Peabody Award — is a musical biography of the prolific inventor of Afrobeat, the Nigerian Fela Kuti, who died in 1997. It’s also a history of the tumultuous, often violent post-colonial powers he challenged, and what it takes for art to change minds.

The series was reported and hosted by Jad Abumrad, the creator of WNYC’s Radiolab who’s now an independent producer. Long ago, I got to report and help produce a piece with him and his team, so I know that Abumrad’s approach to narrative audio is like no one else’s. He doesn’t work from written scripts, but rather builds stories from interview tape and sound, working the connective tissue of narration around the more musical logic of characters, emotions, and ideas.

So when I finally started listening to this new series, I expected something good. What I didn’t expect was something you rarely hear much anymore in narrative podcasts: something daring and groundbreaking.

The sequence that lit up my brain occupies much of the third episode, “Enter the Shrine.” By this point in the series, we’ve learned a lot about Fela Kuti’s impact on Nigeria, and particularly on the musicians who played with him for years. We’ve learned some about his childhood in Abeokuta, in a Yoruba-speaking region north of Lagos. We’ve learned that he studied piano in London at Trinity College, before coming to Los Angeles in the late 1960s and getting exposed to the writing of Malcolm X and the Black Power movement. And we’ve learned how he returned to Nigeria in 1970 determined to bring these ideas home, setting up a housing compound and club called the Shrine that he declared to be an independent state within Lagos.

The episode “Enter the Shrine” broadens out — and slows down the plot. For more than 10 minutes in the middle of the episode, all narration falls away and we hear only a blend of voices, music and sound design that tries to replicate the “trance” that people say came over them listening to Fela Kuti’s live performances in his club. All this happens against an extended mix of his song “Army Arrangement,” a 1985 critique of Nigeria’s military junta. 

We do not hear the names of most of the people whose voices we hear swirling around us — rather they appear as a chorus, sometimes only repeating one word, at other times entire phrases. The longer this goes on, the more it infringes on a very old taboo in radio: that speakers must be identified whenever possible.

Yes, on radio we do hear the occasional “man on the street” interviews, and there are artistic “non-narrated” documentaries that flirt with unidentified speakers. Trailers and promotional clips might contain a flurry of voices to show off what a series has to offer. But generally in nonfiction audio, it’s considered rude not to identify who is speaking. That’s both for reasons of ethics, but also to avoid disorienting the listener. 

There’s one more thing to add about montages: they are labor intensive. You have to comb through a ton of tape to find the clips that “pop.” Then you have to juxtapose them against one another, trimming and rearranging clips until everything sounds right. You may add music, you may subtract it. You probably should play each version of the sequence for others to make sure you’re not deluded about whether it works. All told, building an effective montage — especially a long montage — requires a lot alchemy, and acceptance that many of your attempts will fail.

I had to know how the montage sequence in "Enter the Shrine" came about — and more importantly, all the editorial arguments that surely went into its construction. So I called up Jad Abumrad and his editor, Ben Adair. (Full disclosure: in addition to reporting an episode of “Radiolab,” I once worked with Ben Adair at American Public Media and later gave notes on a series he produced with Pushkin Industries, “Lost Hills.” I’m also one of the editors on a forthcoming narrative series with Pushkin, Audible, and Higher Ground Productions).

Right away, Abumrad and Adair told me something I’d suspected — that the elaborate, sound-rich montage sequence that’s now in their third episode was originally intended as the start of the series.

“One of the big questions of the series was like, what is the first episode? Even as I say that question out loud, my stomach gets a certain layer of acid to it,” Abumrad said. “Because we lived with that question for so long.”

He built the montage set in the Shrine, but then the notes came back: this material was too confusing without context. Who was everybody? Why were they there? And where was Fela Kuti?

Abumrad and Adair took that feedback and moved the sequence further into the series. 

Even within the episode itself, we get about ten minutes of preparation: we hear a sonic tour of Lagos, we hear where Fela’s Shrine was situated and how it’s spoken of today, and we hear about Fela’s elaborate preparations to go on stage each night — followed by a procession to the club, sometimes on a donkey.

What follows is a transcript of the montage sequence from “Enter the Shrine,” annotated with parts of our conversation. I’d advise listening to the episode (and ideally the two that come before it), and/or reading along as you listen. This transcript starts after the first ad break in the episode, approximately at the 11:25 mark.

***

Script Annotation: Episode 3, ‘Enter the Shrine’

[~11:25] Jad Abumrad: This is Fela Kuti: Fear No Man.

Before we go back into the Shrine — well first, let me give you a picture. 

[annotation a="Jad Abumrad: I do remember we had an edit. We were sitting at my kitchen table downstairs and we had the script, and I think we had, at that point, decided this was the third episode. And Ben was like, ‘You need to talk about where (the Shrine) is in Lagos and the importance of the location.’ Ben always had a really good ability to think on the level of the series. And (about) what people need to experience at any given point of the series, so that they can go where you want them to go. This particular episode finally made sense (when) we put in context that people needed."]

It is an open-air club, fits about 500 people. There’s this tin roof over the stage, but no roof over the dance floor.

And to either side of the stage are four Studio 54-ish “cages” where dancers dance. 

[annotation a="Ben Adair: We went to Nigeria for three weeks and interviewed so many people there. We interviewed three of (Fela’s) — as far as we know — four remaining wives. Two of them had never spoken to the press before."]

Also to one side there is an altar, where Fela had a picture of his mother, a picture of Malcolm X, and a picture of Kwame Nkrumah, first president of Ghana.

But I’ll be honest, what’s most interesting to me is not so much the Shrine itself — I mean, it was a club — but rather what happened to people when they went inside of it.

[annotation a="Jad Abumrad: This episode was born from recognizing a pattern. Which was that people talk about being at the Shrine, and the experience of falling into a kind of hail of music. We just kept hearing that, and so it felt important. That (insight) came after we had really finished reporting."]

Because — do you know how people talk about psilocybin now? Right, like we all have one of those friends who did some mushrooms and it changed their life and they can't stop talking about it. And there is a way to explain those experiences — you can say, neurochemistry, right? There’s something about these drugs, they rewire your brain. Fine.

We ran into so many people who described listening to Fela's music, at the Shrine, in the same way! That it had the same effect on them. Which is a little harder to explain. Though, I will try in a moment.

But first, let's reenter the Shrine from their perspective. 

(crowd noises)

[annotation q="Julia Barton: How many hours of tape did you have for this series?" a="Jad Abumrad: At least 200… We used (the audio and video editing app) Descript to make very, very low-res builds, just string-outs of tape. Just to hear how the voices talk to each other, and if they like the order that you've put them in. Then there was a lot of ‘Ctrl+Fing’ as we zeroed in on certain keywords that people would use. It was really easy to figure out who in our many, many interviews had said what."] 

[annotation a="Once (you are mixing) in ProTools, then you close that part of your brain and you just try to respond to the music and align the tape, so it feels like it's also music."]

[annotation a="Ben Adair: Jad is also a composer. And so there's a lot happening with the music in terms of looping and tuning the voices, tuning other sorts of sound around the sound beds that are in it."]

And as you're listening, see if you can let yourself notice: What are you paying attention to? How does that change over time?

[annotation q="Julia Barton: Was this line about noticing part of the framing?" a="Jad Abumrad: That (came from) my therapist! Because we had a whole conversation where he was like, ‘I think what you're doing is a guided fantasy. And if you're going to give people a guided fantasy, you need to instruct them about how and what to notice as they're going through it.’"]

At one AM, Fela arrives on his donkey, takes the stage with 35 other musicians and he begins a riff … that will last most of the night.

Woman 1 (Marilyn Nance):

My experience in being in the Shrine was like, like the music was like inside of me. It was all around, it was just like, you know, being hypnotized. Like you are all inside the music.

Woman 2 (Nina Darnton):

A kind of hypnotic dancing.

Man 1 (Duro Ikujenyo):

React to music, dancing and listening. (repeats under)

Woman 3 (Lorraine Animashaun):

I remember being lost in music. All the people are smoking around me and they were in a mist. So you're in a different world.

(Keyboard, chorus sings)

[annotation q="Julia: You go hard on the whole chorus, man-on-the-street approach." a="Ben: (At one point) everyone was going to be introduced during this dance party — (sarcastically) ‘Let's interrupt the party to make sure that everybody's introduced to everybody else.’"]

[annotation q="Julia: So did you do anything before the sequence to help alleviate that anxiety?" a="Ben: Yeah (we added) two episodes before it."]

Woman 4 (Rosa Cuoto):

This idea of the spiral (spiral, spiral). And circles (circles, circles). It's another way to deal with time.

Man 2 (Dele Sosimi):

I would describe it as in a swirl. You know, when, when you have a cyclone, it starts off as this little thing that builds up and it builds up. The more you allow it to circulate, it just starts to get bigger.

(Vocal montage mix begins, repeating elements from voices above)

[annotation a="Ben: We had permission to use some (of Fela Kuti's) music very liberally. We could use it to remix. Or we could remix it, and we could edit it however we wanted. A lot of artists would never allow that."]

VOICES:

(Spiral, spiral, spiral)

(Get bigger. Get bigger, get bigger, get bigger)

(Circle)

(Get bigger, get bigger, get bigger)

(Circle)

(Get, get bigger, get bigger, get bigger)

(music fades under)

[annotation a="Jad: It was really just trying to get into the internal mindscape of the people who would be lost in the trance. Like the way in which the building could start to breathe, you know, and everything could start to spiral and spin around your head. You lose track of where you end and someone else begins, which was an idea everyone kept talking about."]

Man 3 (Bode Omojola):

Fela starts his music to enchant. This repetitive pattern, the power of the musical ostinato. It's part of that enchanting strategy. You've been captured.

(Enter horn section, vocal montage interspersed)

Man 4 (Brian Eno):

I thought this is really an amazing new form of music. It was, it was almost like a field of sound that sits there for a long time. And you explore it. You kind of enter it, and live in it. This is a place, this isn't a song.

[annotation a="Ben: In the case of this episode, I do think that the audience missed a few people (in the montage) who were really important. There's a great quote from Brian Eno that comes right in the middle of it. Knowing that's Brian Eno, I think it has a little more weight to it. In the bonus episode (Episode 13), he expands on that, and it's super interesting to hear the huge effect that Fela's music had on him as a musician and as a producer."]

Man 5 (John Darnton):

And meanwhile the rhythm section’s keeping going (going, going, going).

(horn section reenters)

Man 4:

This is a place. And when you start listening to it, you are entering into that place.

Woman 1:

Hypnotized. Like the music was like inside of me, it was all around. And it was just like being hypnotized.

(Montage of multiple voices)

Man 6 (Michael Veal):

And so with Fela, you could tell that there was a different kind of intention behind this paradigm of groove. The music is so nasty, you have to dance. But that's just the ground level. 'Cause why would you play a song for 30 minutes or 40 minutes unless you really have something to say?

(horn section mixed with full vocal montage)

[annotation a="Jad: One of the members of our team, Ruby Walsh, had made a draft where she had ‘Army Arrangement’ and a couple of people (speaking) on top of it. The moment that we both heard it, we were like, is this the first episode? It had a sparkle to it, an energy that felt inviting in a way. She really fought for us to make it the first episode and that spark was us recognizing that she was right."]

Man 5:

And then suddenly —

(vocal montage repeats, begins to fade under)

Man 5:

After half an hour, 40 minutes…he starts singing.

[annotation a="Jad: The danger in this kind of thing would be to simply talk about the music, right? But the music itself is so pregnant with all of the ideas. You have to put people in it. So we had this idea of: the series was like a river, and each of the episodes was a little eddy in the river. The river was the music, right?"]

[annotation a="Ben: The producer in me was like, what? How? How is this gonna work? But we kept coming back to it, because it is exactly right: the music has to be the guiding force. Jad talks in a bunch of different moments in the podcast about this torrent of music that Fela was creating, that was just streaming out of him and around Lagos and around the world. So why not have that be the guiding principle?"]

(vocal section of “Army Arrangement” featuring Fela Kuti begins)

Whether you like or you don’t like
After you hear this true talk
Whether you like or you don't like
After you hear this true talk
If you like it good (Ge ge)
If you no like it you hang (Ge ge)
If you like it good (Ge ge)
If you no like it you hang (Ge ge)
If you hang you go die (Ge ge)
You go die for nothing (Ge ge)
We go carry your body, go police station
You die wrongfully

(song pauses)

Man 7 (Saul Williams):

When his voice came in, I was like, what the hell? There are words too?

(Fela sings):

All of them Kirikiri
Ten to fifteen years in jail
After one year inside jail
Civilian government take over

(music continues under, partly blurred)

Man 7 (Saul Williams):

Hold up, hold up. What is this?

Man 5 (John Darnton):

He sings in a gravelly, low pitched voice — and sings about things that no one else ever even mentioned. Any newspaper, any columnist.

Woman 5 (Stephanie Shonekan):

He talks about the United Nations, he talks about Thatcher, he talks about Reagan. It’s really, everything is like a history lesson.

Man 5 (John Darnton):

You see it sinking in. You could see ideas in the air floating from the stage, like thought balloons, and then sinking into somebody's skull.

(Music transition to celeste-like notes)

Woman 5:

I just felt, Where has my mind been all, you know, all, all my life? Complete surprise. Like —

Man 8 (Moses Ochonu):

I, I was immediately captivated.

Woman 5:

— why did we not know this? Why aren't we thinking about this stuff?

Man 9 (Lemi Ghariokwu):

When Fela sang into a microphone, I saw the — the light.

Woman 5:

I was just like, you know, like —

Man 8:

It sucks you in. And then it has that lightbulb effect on you. You come into yourself, and you know, it's a moment of, uh, introspection too, because you, you realize that you haven't been as attuned as you probably should have.

Woman 5:

All the stuff he was singing was just new to me. You know, I was just learning so much about Nigerian history through Fela, that I had not learned in school.

(music, celeste-like to an ad break)

[annotation q="Julia: Can you talk about how little tape there is of Fela in the series?" a="Jad: He’s not one of those guys that you get to know by listening to him talk."]

[annotation a="Ben: Even when he's recorded, he's usually giving a lecture or giving an interview. He is reciting political points. Even the tape that exists is not really, like Jad’s saying, tape where he reveals himself."]

[annotation a="Jad: It was a real frustration through the process. I felt like we were circling, and we couldn't get close enough. We couldn't get in his head. (After building the first episode) I realized I should stop thinking of Fela as a psyche that I need to get inside of. He's an energy source that is flowing through people. And this series is about watching the energy."]

[ad break]

This is Fela Kuti: Fear No Man. Before we go on, the voices you just heard before the break, in addition to Michael Veal and John Darnton, were Stephanie Shonekan and Bode Omojola, both professors of ethnomusicology at the University of Maryland and Mount Holyoke, respectively. Afrobeat musicians Dele Sosimi, and Duro Ikujenyo. Activist, filmmaker, musician Saul Williams. Musician and producer, Brian Eno. Artist Lemi Ghariokwu. Photographer Marilyn Nance. Designer Lorraine Animashaun, and our advisor, Moses Ochonu, who's a professor of history and my colleague at Vanderbilt University. 

[annotation a="Ben: There's that whole section, I don't know how long — a minute and a half? — of just saying the names of all the people that you heard. And that irked some people. And (at one point) they wanted us to bring that up (into the montage)."]

He was one of the last voices you heard, and I asked him –

Jad [in tape]: You said that the music made you feel like you needed to tune into things you hadn't been tuning into. Like what?

Moses Ochonu: Uh, you know, when I was growing up in Nigeria, you know, we would hear about corruption, about thousands of naira being embezzled by some politician or government officials. And we would open our mouths in shock because our brains couldn't compute how one person would make off with thousands of naira. How would the person carry this money? What, what would they put it in? In some boxes and in some cars? You know, physically, how would they move this money? You know, we just couldn't fathom it.

And then over time we started hearing about millions, not thousands anymore, then billions. And now, as we speak, the corruption numbers have entered the trillions.

That over time has had a numbing effect, a dulling effect. The shock value, the kind of shock that I felt as a child growing up in Nigeria, the moral outrage that I felt, that's gone, that's long gone.

Jad: And that is what would come back when you heard his songs.

Moses: Right. Exactly.

Moses said that Fela's music would remind him of the insanity that he had been sane-washed into believing was normal. And I think there's something really interesting about how the music can move him to that thought. 

Music is all about structure, right? Structuring the relationship between notes and chords and melodies. But here, you have structure on an entirely different level, almost like a phenomenological structure. 

[annotation a="Jad: I was talking to my therapist and I was trying to tell him the story of this episode — and he was like, ‘So why? What did they all experience?’ We ended up getting into a whole thing about that, and I was like, ‘Oh, I need to put this in.’ … This sort of music lecture, about the ostinato, that sort of unpacks what you've just experienced."]

For the first 15 minutes, it's just loops, ostinatos going round and round.

Bode Omojola (Man 3): The power of the musical ostinato.

“Ostinato”in Italian by the way, means basically “stubborn.” The loops stubbornly repeat, and at first it's not so bad. It's kind of grounding, actually. But then, the natural response is then to want some change. Like, “can we go to the next section now? Please. Please? No?”

This is what the Buddhists call our monkey mind. Our monkey mind wants distraction. It wants anything to keep us from having to live with our own thoughts. But the music doesn't give us that. It doesn't change. It only builds. 

Layers get added, piece by piece, instrument by instrument. And at some point, a few minutes in, 

(repeating music resumes)

You arrive at this mysterious moment where you stop wanting it to change. This is phase two. Now that part of you that wants novelty starts to notice things like, “Whoa, listen to all the interlocking parts of this groove.”

[annotation a="Ben: One of the first very first conversations that we had about making this show, Jad had this desire he expressed about wanting to do something that sounded just so different. And the way he put that, even in the early meetings, was: Making a documentary that you could dance to. I think that becomes the most palpable in this episode, Episode 3."]

Dele Sosimi (Man 2): Whoa, the ostinatos — they're like machine gears. They don't grind. The gears are timed in between each other, so they just subtly lift fit into the little gaps and holes like Tetris.

The way that the conga plays off the shaker, call and response, the way that the three guitar lines spin around endlessly like gears in a higher-level clock. My God, this groove is a whole world.

(musical transition, celeste re-enters)

This is the trance state. Usually when we talk about trance, we mean a kind of dulling of our senses, but actually it's the opposite. It's the state of hyper focus.

You are noticing things. You're hearing things you've never heard before, because your neurons are rewired. You are open. And it is at this very moment that Fela begins to sing.

Saul Williams (Man 7): I was like, what the hell? There are words too?

In comes his voice booming like the voice of God. This is phase three. And because you are open, you really hear what he is saying.

John Darnton (Man 5): You see it sinking in. You could see ideas in the air floating from the stage like thought balloons and then sinking into somebody's skull.

And in that way, as the final piece of this progression, he gives you a new conception of what your life can be —

Lemi Ghariokwu (Man 9): I saw the light.

That you can now dance to.

[annotation a="Ben: I remember like at one of our last meetings, you know, just laughing out of nowhere. And Jad's like, ‘What are you laughing at?’ I'm like, ‘Dude, you did it. You made a documentary that we could dance to.’"]

(“Army Arrangement”/vocal montage up for several beats, then running under low)

Fela Kuti: My music, my main… my main preoccupation right now, music is a small part of it.

This is a clip from an interview Fela gave in 1988 where he describes his musical form, almost as this vehicle designed to move people, step by step by step, so that they can hear what he has to say.

Interviewer: Is your music kind of a tool?

Fela: It’s a weapon. It’s a weapon to say, so I can talk when I have the chance to. consider music to be effective like a weapon, to inform people. My music is like an attraction to inform people. It is the information side of the music that is important.

[annotation a="Jad: That was one of the best moments, where you really feel like he was philosophically addressing the thing that we had just built with music. Where he's extremely insightful is when he talks about the ‘musical contraption,’ as he called it — the thing built with his music. He knew what he was doing, you know?"] 

(Music out, replaced by a swirling sound)

In that same interview, he suggested there’s something else going on here too. That has to do with time itself.

(voice: Circle, circle, circle…)

Fela: If anyone tells me 20 years is a long time, I would tell them no. Time is meaningless unless you want to understand what time is about. There is time for everything.

***

Julia Barton is a longtime audio story editor and author of a newsletter about broadcast history, Continuous Wave. She's worked with nonfiction authors including Malcolm Gladwell, Michael Lewis, Jill Lepore, and Michael Spector to create original podcasts and audiobooks. Barton completed a Nieman Fellowship in 2024. Her work can be found at RadioWright.com.

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