By Brendan O’Meara
What a treat, CNFers, look who’s back? It’s Mirin Fader (@mirinfader)! She’s the author of Dream: The Life and Legacy of Hakeem Olajuwon (Hatchette Books).
The book is a study in transformation on a micro and macro level. Micro, in how Hakeem changes from a materialistic hot head to then leaning into his Islamic faith to be force of calm and positivity. And macro in that Hakeem fundamentally changed the game of basketball in the NBA as a mobile center, and also ushering in a greater sense of visibility to players born on the African continent.
Mirin is a staff writer for The Ringer where she specializes in long profiles. She spent a good deal of time at Bleacher Report and the Orange County Register. Her work has been anthologized in Year’s Best Sports Writing and she also appears in the late Matt Tullis’s collection of interviews Stories Can Save Us. She’s also the author of Giannis: The Improbable Rise of NBA Champion.
TL;DL: The Emotional-Support Notebook
Brendan: I just caught a cut a video on YouTube of James Hetfield, lead singer, guitarist, of my favorite band. And he’s just talking about his guitars, and it just what he likes of his guitars, ones he uses for certain songs versus others. And I was like, ‘oh, what would be the equivalent in the writing world, the kind of tools that we use,’ and the first thing that came to mind was notebooks, and what kind of notebooks we like. I love geeking out on notebooks. So what’s, what’s your go-to notebook?
Mirin: It’s right next to me. It’s the standard red steno book. I got like, a million of them off of Amazon, I’m ashamed to say, but I am Team Write Things Down like I still have a paper planner, which my friends make fun of me for all the time, because I’ll be like, I don’t know if I can make it. I’ll let you know when I have my planner at home. They’re like what is wrong with you? So you know, for me, the notebooks, I just think of random things. Like, when I’m at the gym, I’m like, oh, I should have led with this. Or, like, maybe we can circle back to that motif at the end and I’ll just write it in my notebook. So wherever I go, I always have this notebook, and I don’t know why. It just has to be the red one.
I think it’s because when I started my career at the Orange County Register, those were the ones they had. And I met one of my best friends when she showed me the supplies closet, like she opened it, and it was like, you could kind of hear the Oh, like the heaven, you know. And so now I now, I’m obsessed.
Brendan: I know the feeling. My favorite one — I like the steno size a six by nine. And I really like the the Field Notes one, mainly because the chipboard on either side is very, very sturdy, almost as sturdy as a clipboard, and I really like that degree of sturdiness. And, you know, it’s good enough size, it’s bigger than your classic reporter notebook, but it, it’s got okay paper. But I love that chipboard, and that’s really important when you’re out in the field, if you’re lucky enough to do face to face stuff and get actually get out in the world and get out from behind the desk.
Mirin: Right, right? Oh my god, yeah, the things I have to have: the blue pens. I don’t really like black pens. I mean, I have both, but I have red as well. But something about the blue pen, I don’t know. We have these stupid idiosyncrasies about us.
Brendan: Well, idiosyncrasies are so are so cool to unpack and very fun to talk about, because so much of this game is mental, and you need, you just need those things to click into place, to make you feel the part, look the part. I imagine, how does, how do those help you feel the part so you can turn yourself loose.
Mirin: Well, number one, it makes the person, because my work involves interviewing people. It makes the person sitting across from me less anxious, because there’s not, you know, four cameramen, and there’s not all this gear. It’s like, so simple. There’s literally me, my notebook and recorder. It just allows us to really have a conversation, instead of feeling like, Oh, it’s a capital I interview, and we’ve got to set up an hour before and, it’s just so simple. We’re just talking and so and personally, when you’re interviewing somebody, it’s so hard to listen to what they’re saying. Come up with the next question. Process it all at the same time. What is their face looking like? Writing down observations, not just about their face and how they’re saying things, but setting. Is there something happening in the setting? Oh, let’s note the time stamp that they started to cry, or there’s just so many things going on. It’s my emotional support notebook.
Brendan: You’re alluding to it already. But I how do you navigate and balance the recorder versus the notebook?
Mirin: I need to be present, and so neither one can really hold my attention. So I am sparse with my writing. I like to show up 30 minutes before an interview and just write down everything I see and feel and hear. So the bulk of the writing is actually done before the interview, and then after, I’ll do a free write, but during it, I try to be really minimal of like, okay, timestamp this and then write a keyword, like emotional or something, or the background something in their face, because you don’t want them to be nervous. Like, I’ll notice that if I write something down, they’re thinking, like, what did I just say that she had to write down? Like, what? Why was that something she wrote down? And really, it could be a thought that I had about something totally unrelated. They just don’t know that.
Brendan: The timestamp thing is key, and often it’s just as they’re in a way, not to interrupt them. The main thing I often write in my notebook will be just like, follow up questions, like, Oh, I’ll write down a word like, Oh, that was really cool, what they said, and I’ll be like, you know, you said a moment ago that, you know? This. You know, what did you mean by that? Can we let’s pull on that thread a little longer, because otherwise my brain just gets so much so full of other stuff that I’ll forget those things and be like, god damn it. Three hours later, I’m like, I forgot to follow up on that. And now it’s that moment’s gone.
Mirin: Yeah, I the most common word I probably write down in my notebook is more so maybe like: mother, talking about their mom, and it’s like, then they go in a different direction. I’m like, No, I want to go back. So I’ll just be like, Mom, more and like that makes sense to no one except for me. But more, more is really the key to our job. It’s getting more, asking the next question, getting another detail, more and more and more, more more into it.
Parting Shot: What of Janet Malcolm?
I’ll make a note that during the conversation I ask her about this idea of exploitation and how journalists tell other people’s stories for personal gain. It’s a thing I’ve wrestled with and still wrestle with during the reporting of the Prefontaine book. Like, who the hell am I to earn attention, or money, by writing about somebody else? I was accused of this during my reporting a few times.
In speaking with Mirin, I think she was offended by the question and you’ll notice a change in the energy. I think she might have thought I was accusing her of being exploitative, which wasn’t my intent. When I’m troubled by something, I often ask my guests about it. Is Jeff Pearlman exploiting Bo Jackson by writing a biography on him? Is Ian O’Connor exploiting Aaron Rogers? David Marannis with Jim Thorpe, Vince Lombardi, or Roberto Clemente. Or Madeleine Blais with Alice Marble. Or Kai Bird with Robert Oppenheimer. Or Robert Caro with Lyndon Johnson. Or me with Prefontaine?
As Howard Bryant, biographer of Hank Aaron and Rickey Henderson, said on this podcast: the stories we remember are the ones that get repeated. So it’s on the journalists to dive into the archives and make hundreds of phone calls to round out a life and keep the heart beating. Journalists are the life support for certain icons. Without the storytellers, life very much goes on and people will forget. As Maddy Blais said, biography is a brazen genre as we seek to resurrect a life.
After I was done in the edit, I emailed Mirin saying I was sorry for offending her and explained why I like to ask smart people about this topic, a topic that Janet Malcolm made famous in her book The Journalist and the Murderer. Her opening graf is a savage indictment of her own trade. Here it is:
Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse. Like the credulous widow who wakes up one day to find the charming young man and all her savings gone, so the consenting subject of a piece of nonfiction writing learns—when the article or book appears—his hard lesson. Journalists justify their treachery in various ways according to their temperaments. The more pompous talk about freedom of speech and “the public’s right to know”; the least talented talk about Art; the seemliest murmur about earning a living.
Call me seemly.
People asked me for money to talk about Steve Prefontaine, or asked if I planned on giving any money I make to the Prefontaine Foundation, and it gives you an idea that many people view journalists as leeches. They don’t see it as a job, they don’t see it as work, they see us reporters as vermin picking through the trash. I’ve been accused of it.
So, as I looked at the waveform of the audio file of my conversation with Mirin, you can tell when the answers start getting shorter and I knew I needed to sunset things. [UPDATE: I heard back from her and she said she wasn’t the least bit offended.] Plus we had a technical glitch at one point, so that might have added to the tension.
