So, you, a journalist, are given this ridiculous, outrageous assignment: Write a story about one of your own, a writer who betrayed your profession on a spectacular scale. It’s the story of Stephen Glass, perhaps the most remarkable fabulist ever to pretend to be a nonfiction writer. Oh, and by the way, Glass won’t talk to you, ever. Neither will anyone in his family (including his brother, who played a part in the fraud). Trying to figure your subject out, you may even be driven (as did happen) to stand in the street in front of his family’s house, seeking clues from the dark-wood façade and tidy lawn. But this is a Vanity Fair assignment, so make this an incredibly good story anyway.

I have a kind of love-hate attitude concerning the writer H.G. “Buzz” Bissinger. Hate’s probably the wrong word here. Love-annoyance. Love-if-you-would-just-quit-spouting-off-and-let- me-appreciate-you-as-a-writer. A “noted curmudgeon” is the way Deadspin describes him. “A professional crank,” says Business Insider. And I do wonder if the rants are just professional provocation. Because in so much of his work, Bissinger writes not just beautifully but with warmth, compassion, insight and a sense of fundamental decency. His portrait of Philadelphia, “A Prayer for the City,” is still one the most haunting tales of urban decay that I’ve ever read.

“Shattered Glass,” the 1998 story he wrote for Vanity Fair, also displays Bissinger at his best, a perfect balance of dogged research, astonishingly well-realized characters, told with a thinker’s narrative voice, one that muses, and ponders, and shares in the struggle to understand how a young writer could go so wrong. That’s undoubtedly one reason the piece fostered an art-house film of the same name.

As Bissinger writes, Stephen Glass, an aspiring writer from the wealthy Chicago suburb of Highland Park, was far from the first journalist to invent a story. Perhaps the previous best-known case is that of Janet Cooke, a one-time Washington Post reporter, who was stripped of her 1980 Pulitzer Prize after it was learned that she’d made up an 8-year-old heroin addict. Reportorial history is scattered with other examples – but no one on the scale of Glass, who wrote 31 stories for The New Republic, of which 27 were at least partly fiction and some entirely so. Or as Bissinger puts it:

But none of these journalists approached the sheer calculation of Glass’s deceptions. He is the perfect expression of his time and place: an era is cresting in Washington; it is a time when fact and fiction are blurred not only by writers eager to score but also by presidents and their attorneys, spinmeisters and special prosecutors. From one perspective, Stephen Glass was a master parodist of his city’s shifting truths.

In that context, it’s probably not surprising that Stephen Glass and his family chose not to talk with Bissinger. A story centered on a wholly uncooperative source presents a storyteller with a distinct challenge. The writer Gay Talese famously overcame this through brilliantly detailed observation of his uncooperative subject in the piece “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold.” Bissinger obviously doesn’t have that option here; Glass’s “crimes” are long past when he approaches the story and Glass himself is in hiding.

He decides instead to focus on another character in the drama, that of Chuck Lane, the New Republic magazine editor who stumbles slowly, reluctantly – and even painfully – into a realization of the problem.

The story begins with Lane forcing Glass to revisit the scene of a recently published story, a hotel conference center. It turns out to have been closed on the day that a reported meeting allegedly took place there. According to Lane’s notes, Glass expressed bafflement, insisting that the events were real. And from that point on the narrative shifts back and forth continually between Lane’s story and the story of Bissinger hunting the elusive Stephen Glass.

This kind of structure is sometimes referred to as a zipper structure – essentially two narratives that interlock throughout a story. It’s a slightly imperfect description because the zipper image suggests that each section is of a very similar length, which is rarely true. But it does give you an idea of how neatly the writer has set up his tale. Lane’s investigation of Glass, Bissinger’s investigation of Glass – both move forward in tandem.

Lane is an entirely sympathetic character in this telling, an editor shocked by his discoveries, a man desperately trying to do the right thing. “As Stephen Glass spun feverishly,” Bissinger writes, “Lane anguished.” But as we follow Lane through his own investigation, we also come to see that despite the cost, the editor is also determined to see this through: He keeps notes, makes recordings, checks facts, meets with his reporter’s critics.

One of my favorite scenes is a moment of realization. The story begins when Lane is trying to verify a recently published tale of a California software company victimized by a hacker and eventually agreeing to pay extortion money. As it turns out, Glass has invented the company, along the way creating a fake website for it. During Lane’s investigation, a man calls him from Palo Alto, claiming to be the company president.

As Bissinger tells it:

He had no doubt the hacker story was trash, but he was still bugged by the calls from George Sims of Jukt Micronics.

At about 11 p.m., Lane spoke on the phone with senior editor [Margaret] Talbot. He filled her in on what had happened, and by chance, Talbot mentioned that Glass had a brother who lived in Palo Alto, California.

The second she uttered it, Lane knew.

You might think that devious and uncooperative Glass would end up simply the evil counterpoint to the dauntless Lane. But Bissinger doesn’t cheapen the tale. One of the things that elevates this above a standard retelling of a sordid story is that the writer shows such a serious, almost nonjudgmental effort to understand what he comes to see as a very troubled child.

Bissinger does indeed end up on a street in Highland Park, pondering the influence of neighborhood and upbringing. He looks at old yearbooks, college newspapers, the history of Glass’s professional career. He talks to friends and former colleagues, (a few actually go on the record). And he puzzles with all of them over the destructive habits of “the sweet and nice boy, the hardworking boy who could never be what he wanted to be, the boy who couldn’t live up to the expectations he had inherited.”

But he never forgets that whatever the excuses and explanations, the result was damage to people who trusted Glass, to people wronged by the stories and to Bissinger’s own profession. Thus the story ends on a pitch-perfect note with an ironic tribute to Glass’ improbable career: just a damning list of stories, published as nonfiction but real only in the inventive mind of Stephen Glass.

Deborah Blum (@deborahblum) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and the author of “The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York.”

For more from this collaboration with Longreads and Alexis Madrigal, check out the previous posts in the series. And stay tuned for a new shot of inspiration and insight every week.

The post “Why’s this so good?” No. 34: Buzz Bissinger trails a fabulist appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

On a bright autumn morning, a man drives into the wilderness of the Utah mountains. As he arrives, the sun glows, the clouds float, the aspens glimmer in a passing breeze, “humming a faint prayer.” In the front seat of his pickup, the man’s toddler son dozes happily in the warm light.

A golden moment, you might think, in which nothing can go wrong. Or, in the tradition of classic literature, a sucker-punch moment after which all will go wrong. And in Barry Siegel’s 2002 Pulitzer-Prize winning piece for the Los Angeles Times, “A Father’s Pain, A Judge’s Duty and a Justice Beyond Their Reach,” everything does go wrong.

This is not, though, a tale of the Fates idly spinning out mortal threads. Siegel’s story is one of human decisions and their consequences. It is, in fact, the story of a single choice that ripples, stone into water, into a widening circle of lives. And it’s within that ever-expanding circle that this story of a local tragedy – the too-familiar tale of a careless moment and a dead child – becomes something bigger.

I’ll confess that as the mother of two sons, this is not the kind of story that I necessarily look to read. But I’ve come back to it repeatedly, partly because it’s so compelling, partly to figure out what makes it so compelling. I especially admire the way Siegel structures his narrative. He doesn’t follow people as much as he follows decisions, and the consequences of those decisions continue to unfold until the very last line of the story.

Siegel makes his vision of the story clear from the start, beginning not in that humming moment in the wilderness but later in the chambers of the presiding judge in the case of little Gage Wayment. The judge is waiting for the father, Paul Wayment, to begin a brief jail sentence. And as he waits, as the day lengthens, Judge Robert Hilder begins to worry about Wayment.

He’d sentenced Wayment to jail even though the prosecutor didn’t want this distraught father to serve time. Hilder felt he had to. Wayment’s negligence caused his young son’s death. There must be consequences, the judge ruled.

The story moves forward, exploring the reasoning behind decisions, from police to prosecutor to judge. As it does so, a haunting question emerges: What defines the limits on our ability to live with consequences, to bear up under the results of the choices we make?

“The first choice, though,” as Siegel notes, “had been Paul Wayment’s.” As 2-year-old Gage slept in the truck on that shining morning, a trio of deer drifted past into the forest. Wayment decided to follow them, just for a little bit. And then another a little bit. By all accounts, he then lost track of time. It was one or two miles later when he realized how long he’d been gone. When he hurried back to the truck, Gage was gone, apparently off looking for his father.

It took five days to find the child, and in that time period an autumn squall swept through the mountains, leaving almost half a foot of snow behind it. When a searcher found the little boy huddled under the scant shelter of a tree, he was long dead. His father had anticipated it, feared it from the moment he reported Gage missing:

“I’m responsible for his death if he is dead,” Wayment said. “I’m responsible for his death. I don’t think you can put it any other way ... I had custody of him. I was supposed to look out for him. He was under my care.”

Siegel places that story, the judge’s story, the story of the criminal investigation, the decision of the prosecutor to charge the grief-stricken father, and the community uproar surrounding the death all within the suspended time period in which Judge Hilder waits for news of Wayment. There’s an astonishingly good section in which the members of the prosecutor’s office debate whether charges should be filed at all – what could be worse punishment, after all, than the death of a beloved child? When they decide to move forward, it’s with resignation: “If they didn’t, they'd be saying it was OK, or at least not criminal, to leave children alone in a remote area.”

By this point, Siegel has clearly established Hilder as the narrative focus for the story. He’s told the judge’s life story, built a thoughtful portrait of the man who must decide the unhappy father’s future. He’s also used the judge’s story as something of a narrative device: Hilder expects the Wayment case to come to him, dreads it, follows it, and as he does, so do we. Eventually, inevitably, the story reaches the point where Hilder learns of Wayment’s fate.

What I love about this story is that it’s an entirely compassionate look at a world, our world, in which decisions – careless decisions, carefully thought-out decisions – can and do go wrong. Wayment is never anything less than a father who loves his child. Hilder is never anything but a judge trying to make the best decision possible in the midst of a genuine tragedy. Both of them are forced to live with terrible consequences.

In the end, this is a story that looks for resolution. Hilder tries again to make the best possible decision, not just to live with his choice but also to learn from it. “It’s not a bad thing,” he says, “to have Paul Wayment’s face forever part of my life.”

Deborah Blum is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and the author of “The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York.”

For more from this collaboration with Longreads and Alexis Madrigal, check out the previous posts in the series. And stay tuned for a new shot of inspiration and insight every week.

The post “Why’s this so good?” No. 7: Barry Siegel and the weight of consequences appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.